Happiness in Time

Abstract Chapter 5 considers the broader significance of unremembered pleasure across Wordsworth’s authorship by reassessing the commonly observed decline and dissatisfaction of the so-called ‘late’ Wordsworth. From the 1817 odes to some of Wordsworth’s last poems, it explores non-narrative forms of lateness in Wordsworthian lyric. By refusing a narrative account, these poems can see the pleasures of youth as something other than a rival to satisfaction in old age. The chapter argues that a number of Wordsworth’s later odes add up to an ambitious attempt to re-think happiness itself, an attempt that depends on the possibility of separating the significance of pleasure from the satisfaction of possessing it. Drawing on Anahid Nersessian’s account on ‘adjusted’ utopian thinking, it shows how at its most quietly ambitious moments, Wordsworth’s writing on happiness delaminates pleasure from the exhausting drive to have and retain it, so that pleasure might survive memory.