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115 4 Britannia’s Pastorals William Wordsworth’s Thanksgiving Ode of 1816 is a notoriously martial poem.1 Presented as an effusion dating from the morning of the national festival celebrating Napoleon’s final defeat, it was mocked in its time for declaring to its addressee “Almighty God” that “thy most dreaded instrument,/In Working out a pure intent,/Is Man—arrayed for mutual slaughter,— /Yea, Carnage is thy daughter!” (SP 188). Lord Byron would slyly observe of Wordsworth and “Carnage” that “if he speak truth, she is Christ’s sister” (PW 5:367).2 With this quip in Don Juan, Byron sought to deflate Wordsworth’s grandiloquent personification and, more subtly, to highlight how Wordsworth’s fervent patriotism in his later verse might seem to clash with his no less committed pastoralism there. Yet Wordsworth had long sought to balance those qualities, taking up and transforming a long tradition of articulating a broadly pastoral poetics with British nationalism on one hand and spiritual pastoral care on the other. Britannia on the battlefield and Christ the good shepherd were for Wordsworth (if not for his readers) supposed to be wholly compatible. In his “Advertisement” to the Thanksgiving Ode volume, in fact, Wordsworth argues exactly that British “culture” integrates epic and georgic matters with pastoral solicitude and natural freedom, and that it does so by grace of Britain’s insular situation. Wordsworth opens this advertisement on a self-avowedly “anxious” note (SP 177). He worries that readers will expect an Ode of Thanksgiving to celebrate national wealth and success and thus to be out of tune with the economic crisis precipitated by the soldiers returning to Britain after Napoleon’s final defeat—with “the present distresses,” in Wordsworth’s euphemistic phrase, “under which this kingdom labours.” To allay this anxiety, he justifies his “encourage[ment]” of “a martial spirit” by associating that spirit with a “rational patriotism” capable of “replenish[ing]” “the cup of our wealth” (SP 178). Then, having allied British military prowess with georgic abundance, Wordsworth cites the nation’s intrinsic pastoral liberties as the ultimate guarantor of both. While noting that “no people 116 Modes of Insular Empire ever was, or can be, independent, free, or . . . great . . . without . . . an assiduous cultivation of military virtues,” Wordsworth emphasizes that “the benefits derivable from these sources, are placed within the reach of Great Britain, under conditions peculiarly favourable”—by which he means in a state in which they can safely be indulged. Updating standard republican arguments against standing armies, Wordsworth argues that Britain can afford to cultivate its martial spirit because the same insular position which, by rendering territorial incorporation impossible , utterly precludes the desire of conquest under the most seductive shape it can assume, enables her to rely, for her defence against foreign foes, chiefly upon a species of armed force from which her own liberties have nothing to fear. Such are the blessed privileges of her situation; and by permitting, they invite her to give way to the courageous instincts of human nature, and to strengthen and to refine them by culture. This“strengthen[ing]andrefin[ing]”regimeof“culture”thatWordsworth describes consists of rewards and honors, schools of military science, “athletic exercises and manly sports among the peasantry of the country,” and, presumably, the reading and writing of poetry like his own. Behind Britain’s ocean moat, the “courageous instincts” of its people can be enfolded in song, rural sport, war games, and ceremony. The “blessed privileges ” of island life preserve the integrity of “human nature” in Britain, no matter how warlike and cultivated its people may become (SP 179). The surrounding sea, it seems, graces the life of the nation with a strong pastoral aspect. Here at the end of the conflict that defined his adult life, Wordsworth reforms the lines of what had been for him an ongoing struggle to uphold a pastoral ethos amid patriotic war. In so doing, he upholds an ongoing state of emergency and yet represents this state as free, if not otiose. He fuses a certain liberalism with a certain conservatism, creating a composite well captured in the faintly oxymoronic phrase “pastoral culture.” This innovation has been seen as his greatest accomplishment. Geoffrey Hartman, the foremost interpreter of Wordsworth since World War II, has declared Wordsworth “the only writer to carry forward a pastoral culture as a fully modern poet,” arguing that he thereby helped save “English politics from the virulence of a nostalgic political ideal centering on rural virtue , which led...

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