"Hauntings from the Infirmity of Love": Wordsworth and the Illusion of Pastoral‪.‬

1 IN 1815 WORDSWORTH PUBLISHED A REVISED TEXT OF "ELEGIAC STANZAS Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle, in a Storm" in which he commemorated the "fond illusion" (29) of his youthful faith in the invulnerable calm that he had shared with the silent breathing life of the landscape. In the first version of the poem, published in 1807, he had described that faith more severely; it had been, he wrote, a "fond delusion." The distinction between illusion and delusion, invoked here by Wordsworth, is not always easy to clarify, since the two words so often overlap in meaning. It is, however, a distinction to which psychoanalysis has paid particular attention, and in The Future of an Illusion Freud offered some typically clear definitions that may serve as our starting-point. Both illusions and delusions, he wrote, are characterized by the prominence of wish-fulfilment in their motivation; it is this that distinguishes them from errors, although, he adds, an illusion is not necessarily an error. Otherwise, he concludes, the difference between a delusion and an illusion has to do with our point of view: when we call a belief a delusion we are considering it primarily in terms of its objective relation to reality, whilst when we call it an illusion we are considering it primarily in terms of its subjective elements of wish-fulfilment. (1)