Wordsworth’s great Ode imitation, to mimesis in the Aristotelian sense Moreover, the reference to “endless imitation” sums up a passage in which the child’s play is cast in Shakespearean terms The child mimics the character types from all those stages of life that the misanthrope surveys in As You Like It, a passage in the Ode that quotes the Shakespearean source outright: The little Actor cons another part; Filling from time to time his “humorous” stage With all the Persons, down to palsied Age, That Life brings with her in her equipage; As if his whole vocation Were endless imitation (ll 103–8) Jaques had allegorized the human trajectory as a cycle in which our end – “sans teeth, sans eye, sans taste, sans everything” (2.vii.166) – spells a return to our infantile beginnings.16 In Wordsworth’s extraordinary lines, Jaques’s anti-progress is reframed within the larger narrative of progress that constitutes this second movement of the Ode This reframing is achieved first by virtue of the narrative of the child’s ontogenetic development, and secondly by virtue of the larger allusive structure of this second movement, which suggests not only an ontogenetic development but a phylogenetic one as well The entire allusive structure of this middle movement of the Ode, in other words, confirms that we are being offered an account – albeit in allegorical form – of the progress of poetry It now becomes crucial to recognize that the Ode signally echoes such eighteenth-century progress poems as James Beattie’s “The Minstrel: Or, the Progress of Genius” or Thomas Gray’s “The Progress of Poesie: A Pindaric Ode.” In Gray, for example, after poesie progresses from Greece to Latium and then finally arrives in England, we are treated to a brief biography of the childhood of Shakespeare, a narrative addressed to mother England This narrative is introduced in the following terms: Far from the sun and summer-gale, In thy green lap was Nature’s Darling laid The dauntless Child Stretched forth his little arms, and smiled (ll 83–8)17 Beattie’s “Minstrel” seems already to be refitting Gray’s lines to Wordsworth’s purposes.18 In a mood of interrogative bewilderment which 145 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008