Where, then, have we arrived? If this is really philosophic song, to what philosophical, rather than merely lyrical, results (if any) has it led?

This book has been tracing, not the doxa of a philosophical system happening to have been subsequently clothed in verse, but rather a peculiar kind of thinking which happens to have happened in verse. Accordingly its focus has been not upon the many and well-documented aspects of Wordsworth's writing which repeat or work within some pre-existing ontological lexicon, but rather with moments at which, under the pressure of steady attention to some particular subject, such vocabularies break down, and the possibility of new thinking is glimpsed. For this reason, the truth-contents of Wordsworth's poetry do not provide us a philosophical system, a machinery of propositions standing in a mutually supportive and finally non-contradictory relation to each other. Indeed, the readings in this book have tended to locate poetic thinking just at those points where some contradiction is openly exposed and felt in its full force as the trace of a real antagonism.

Yet it is possible at this point to gather together thoughts which have so far been pursued mainly in isolation from each other. Wordsworth's response to the enlightenment critique of religion is not primarily restorationist. Instead it dwells on the way in which that very critique continues to bear a religious character. This paradox can be figured either comically, as a kind of Quixotism, or tragically, as a kind of Rivers-ism.