Romantic Aversions: Aftermaths of Classicism in Wordsworth and Coleridge 9780773567566

Table of contents :
Contents
Abbreviations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Turns of Phrase: Aversion, Effusion, Expression
1 Apostrophe Reconsidered: Wordsworth's "There Was a Boy"
2 "Between Poetry and Oratory": Coleridge's Romantic Effusions
3 "Thou one dear Vale!": Wordsworth and the Sympathies of Rhetoric
4 Coleridge's Emergent Occasion: "To the Autumnal Moon"
5 Transport and Persuasion in Longinus and Wordsworth
6 Wordsworth in the Isle of Man
7 Symptom and Scene in Freud and Wordsworth
8 Gentle Hearts and Hands: Reading Wordsworth after Geoffrey Hartman
Notes
Works Cited
Index
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
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Citation preview

Romantic Aversions

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Romantic Aversions Aftermaths of Classicism in Wordsworth and Coleridge J. DOUGLAS KNEALE

McGill-Queen's University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca

McGill-Queen's University Press 1999 ISBN 0-7735-1804-5 Legal Deposit first quater 1999 Bibliotheque nationale du qUEBEC Printed in Canada on acid-free paper Published simultaneously in the European Union by Liverpool University Press. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. McGill-Queen's University Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for its activities. We also acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program.

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Kneale, John Douglas, 1955Romantic aversions: aftermaths of Classicism in Wordsworth and Coleridge Includes bibliographical references and index. iSBN 07735-1804-5 ISBN 0-7735-1804-51.Wordsworth, Wi interpretation. 2. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 1772-1834 • Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. PR595-C67K541998 82'.709 098-900860-6 Typeset in Palatino 10/12 by Caractera inc., Quebec City

for Helen and Anne small but mighty prophets

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Contents

Abbreviations

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction: Turns of Phrase: Aversion, Effusion, Expression 3 1 Apostrophe Reconsidered: Wordsworth's "There Was a Boy" 11 2 "Between Poetry and Oratory": Coleridge's Romantic Effusions 28 3 "Thou one dear Vale!": Wordsworth and the Sympathies of Rhetoric 50 4 Coleridge's Emergent Occasion: "To the Autumnal Moon" 71 5 Transport and Persuasion in Longinus and Wordsworth 94 6 Wordsworth in the Isle of Man 104 7 Symptom and Scene in Freud and Wordsworth 115 8 Gentle Hearts and Hands: Reading Wordsworth after Geoffrey Hartman 135 Notes 155 Works Cited 193 Index 213

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Abbreviations

BL Biogmphia Literaria. By Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. CL Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Ed. Earl Leslie Griggs. 6 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1956-71. CPW

The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1912.

Norton The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850. By William Wordsworth. Prelude Ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M.H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill. New York: Norton, 1979. Unless otherwise noted, references are to the 1850 version. Prose The Prose Works of William Wordsworth. Ed. W.J.B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser. 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1974. PW The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth. Ed. Ernest de Selincourt. Rev. Helen Darbishire. 5 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1952-63. SE The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans, and ed. James Strachey. 24 vols. London: Hogarth, 1953-76.

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Acknowledgments

There is a scene in Alan Parker's film The Commitments in which Dublin musicians auditioning for a soul band are asked one question to determine their suitability: "Who're your influences?" It is a question I here put to myself, and with some chastening, since I expect the poems of Wordsworth and Coleridge to stand and unfold themselves when similarly challenged. My answer is that if there is a genius loci in this book, his name is Geoffrey Hartman. I approve no canonization, though what reader would not do well to beg from above a pattern of his love of interpretation? My earlier critical style shows the competing effects of a different methodological commitment - that of Paul de Man, the fissure king, with his hallmark "rigour" and "precision" - and while I still respect his model of interpretive relentlessness, I am naturally drawn toward other examples, to the call of other voices. If I may alter Dryden's Neander, I would have to say that, from the point of view of interpretation, I admire de Man, but I love Hartman. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I gratefully acknowledge the support of the Federation, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, and the Department of English and the Faculty of Arts at the University of Western Ontario. Research for this book was carried out in a number of places, and I thank in particular the following: Wordsworth Library, Grasmere; Manx National Heritage (formerly Manx Museum and National

xii Acknowledgments

Trust), Isle of Man; Huntington Library; Perkins Library, Duke University; Davis and Wilson libraries, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; and D.B. Weldon Library, University of Western Ontario. Some chapters have appeared in earlier versions: chapter 1 was originally published in ELH 58 (1991): 141-65; chapter 5, in Canadian Journal of Rhetorical Studies 6 (1996): 109-17 © J. Douglas Kneale; chapter 7, in New Romanticisms: Theory and Critical Practice, ed. David L. Clark and Donald C. Goellnicht (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 135-63; and chapter 8, in Studies in Romanticism 35 (1996): 579-607. I thank the Johns Hopkins University Press, the University of Toronto Press, and the Trustees of Boston University for permission to reprint. I am grateful to Philip J. Cercone, Executive Director of McGill-Queen's University Press, for his continued support, and to Joan McGilvray and Judy Williams for their valuable editorial assistance. I wish also to thank my colleagues and students for offering their responses to earlier versions of these essays given as seminars and conference papers in Canada, the United States, England, Scotland, and Wales. My deepest gratitude is to my wife Cynthia, for her constant encouragement, and to our daughters, two children of nature, for their eternal light and grace.

glory then to words, Honour to word-preserving Arts, and hail Ye kindred local influences that still, If Hope's familiar whispers merit faith, Await my steps ... Wordsworth, "Musings near Aquapendente"

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Introduction: Turns of Phrase: Aversion, Effusion, Expression

When Freud writes that "the essence of repression lies simply in turning something away, and keeping it at a distance, from the conscious," he resorts to a rhetoric that not only territorializes the mind but makes it energetically self-contesting ("Repression," SE 14: 147; italics in original). As one of Jung's patients put it, repression declares: "Je 1'ai mis de cote" (Jung 93). The trope of being "mis de cote," like the action of "turning something away, and keeping it at a distance," speaks to a movement of aversion at the heart of repression. And aversion, as I use it here, is not only a psychic defence mechanism but a figure of rhetoric, actually called aversio in Latin (the equivalent of the Greek apostrophe) by the Tudor rhetoricians, and extensively employed for forensic as well as aesthetic purposes. Aversio participates in the dialectic of "putting aside," but it does so precisely by "putting in place" something whose otherness lies in "keeping it at a distance." The rhetorical name for this latter manoeuvre is occupatio, or preterition, a dwelling on the very thing that it claims to pass by unalarmed: "Mr Speaker, I will not even mention my opponent's lengthy criminal record ..." Repression, therefore, is an aversio that is also an occupatio, a turning away that is also a dwelling. The Romantics are often seen as being averse to many things: eighteenth-century poetic diction, the shadow of Milton, the contagion of history. But while "aversion" literally means a turning away from someone or something, it also implies a simultaneous turning toward something else: the Romantics may have turned away from eighteenth-century style, or satirical subject matter, or gross and

4 Romantic Aversions

violent genres, and toward a "high argument" whose expression favoured sublimity and power over point or elegance, but they nevertheless in their turning found - or rediscovered, as in Freud's diphasic onset of knowledge - something else. One good rhetorical turn deserves an other, and the "other" that Romanticism at once turns to and away from is what I designate as the classical rhetorical tradition. This book explores the literary after-effects of that tradition in selected works by Wordsworth and Coleridge. The polarization of classicism and Romanticism has been surveyed by numerous earlier critics (including, in its various inflections, A.O. Lovejoy, Jacques Barzun, and Walter Jackson Bate), and I do not intend to recover their ground. My interest instead lies in reading specific moments in the fate of a classical rhetorical tradition carried on into the literary style and topoi of the first-generation Romantics. Interpretation has always been a quest-romance, as critics as different as Northrop Frye and Paul de Man have noted, and what intrigues me partly, I confess, is the thrill of the chase, the tracking of intertextual nodes from poem to poem. I take heart from Frye's self-described methodology: "I think I have found a trail, and all I can do is to keep sniffing along it until either scent or nose fails me" ("Expanding" 200). Thus the habitual, implicit questions I ask of Romantic poems are not "What is this text about?" or "What does this text do?" but "What else is this poem like? What is that a repetition-with-a-difference of? Where have I seen or heard this before?" "Reason respects the differences, and imagination the similitudes of things," as Shelley said (480); but close readers also know the "lucky words" in a text, the ones that, when the critical imagination double-clicks on them, open an interpretive window or "magic casement" onto literary history. "What leaf-fring'd legend haunts about thy shape ... ?" Such interrogations I have found to be helpful in considerations of genre, especially with Wordsworth, whose "first / Poetic spirit" of classicism was never wholly "abated or suppressed" (Prelude 2.260-1, 263). But what does it mean to speak of the repression of the classical in Romanticism? If we are to follow the tropological dynamics set out by psychoanalysis, we should expect Romanticism to be a "building, dwelling, thinking" upon classicism that seeks to defend itself against such an occupation, and a sustained "expense of spirit" that foregrounds its difference over repetition. In most quarters, classicism is seen as the abject of first-generation Romantic poets, the anti-environment against which Wordsworth and Coleridge pushed, or from which they variously swerved. From another viewpoint, it is a non-issue: J.A.K. Thomson, in The Classical Background of English Literature, puts the entire field to one side in this way:

5 Introduction: Turns of Phrase Now it would be possible to say a good deal about the classical background of Wordsworth and Coleridge and even Scott, whom we may take as the three leaders of the Romantic movement. But the really important fact for us is that it scarcely entered into their most characteristic work. They felt the classical influence, but were not penetrated by it. Wordsworth's conviction, which is the source of nearly all his best poetry, that natural objects have a life and almost a personality of their own, has an odd resemblance to the feelings which must have inspired Greek mythology, but never found clear expression in Greek or in any other literature known to him before he gave it expression in English. (225)

While this tactic itself follows the duplicity of aversion, making the problem there but not-there, scholars generally agree that in the later Wordsworth there is a "return" to the very thing from which he professedly and anxiously had recoiled earlier: "Laodamia," "Dion," the passages on myth in The Excursion, and the translation of Virgil's Aeneid all seem to point to a more "classical" poet than the author of Lyrical Ballads (see, e.g., Vance 226-7 for the "dormancy" of Ovid in Wordsworth's imagination). By contrast, while Coleridge is not always up-front about his influences, he does not exhibit the tendentiousness or betray the anxiety that Wordsworth does when it comes to classical sources. I argue that there is a deep strain of classicism in Romanticism, not just in the second-generation poets such as Keats and Shelley - who, according to one view, thought it safe to return to classical myth, topos, and genre after the first generation had cleared off - but in the very origins of Romanticism itself. Let me be clear that what I am talking about is not the cultural phenomenon of a "Romantic Hellenism" that Timothy Webb has outlined in the second-generation writers, or the Augustan-Romantic dissonance that F.W. Bateson has psychologized as the aetiology of Wordsworth's "two voices" (1-40, 178), but a textual attitude toward classicism and neoclassicism that at once incorporates repetition and difference, occupation and aversion, in a mutually assured contestation. As I suggest in my last chapter, once we peer beneath the disarmingly simple, natural, Romantic Lyrical Ballads - and what could be more home-grown than that volume? - we discover another tradition whose silent presence gives rise to surprising textual symptoms on the level of both rhetoric and genre. A few critics, mainly those of an older generation but also a handful of more recent theoreticians, share this view. Joseph Warren Beach, in the introductory note to his major work The Concept of Nature in Nineteenth-Century English Poetry, represents this position in the first half of the twentieth century. Referring to his 1940 article

6 Romantic Aversions

"Reason and Nature in Wordsworth" in the Journal of the History of Ideas, he writes: "This article was written mainly as a reply to numerous critics of the New Humanist school, who had attacked Wordsworth's 'romanticism' for the 'unsoundness' of his ethical position; my aim was to indicate how well the poet fitted in to an older and more 'classical' humanist tradition" (v). And Robert J. Griffin's 1995 book Wordsworth's Pope reflects a similar view at the end of the century, as Griffin reads Romanticism through penetrating neoclassical lenses, and puts forward "the revisionist thesis that Romantic literary history, hence Romantic ideology, is founded on its view of Pope" (133). Against prevailing thought, then, a number of critics have addressed the repression of the classical and the neoclassical in Romanticism, persuading modern readers to reconsider the origins, influences, and literary or rhetorical practices of the period (see, e.g., Bialostosky and Needham; Matlak; Harding; and the various essays in Heinzelman, "Romans and Romantics"). Certain recurrent terms in this book - aversion, effusion, expression - define specific features of genre and rhetoric in the work of Wordsworth and Coleridge, and help to open up their texts to the combined forces of literary history and interpretation. The balance between Wordsworth and Coleridge is unequal, alas, as it was in their lifetime, and my own emphases inevitably reflect my personal interests as well as my critical sense of what is going on in a given text. While each chapter positions its subject in a larger context, whether that of the history of style or the development of an ceuvre, my individual readings tend to zero in on certain tropes and figures, rhetorical moments that raise interpretive questions about genre and intertext. As "turns of phrase," rhetorical tropes and figures often call attention to the role of voice in a text - its direction and redirection, as in apostrophe; its discharge of affect, as in the effusion; or its expressive self-display, as in epideictic. But other figures that I consider, such as prosopopoeia or personification, raise questions about Wordsworth's or Coleridge's relation to a textualized nature, a part of their eighteenth-century inheritance but radically refigured by them. My readings of Freud and Longinus, by comparison, disclose their underlying rhetoric of unreadability and its symptoms, or persuasion as the "other" of the sublime, as a means of illustrating homology and difference in Wordsworth's rhetorical practice. While I am interested in the major, canonical poems by Wordsworth and Coleridge, I also choose lesser-known passages and texts, such as Coleridge's early effusions or Wordsworth's Manx poems, to represent a particular rhetorical style.

7 Introduction: Turns of Phrase

Let me give you a foretaste, an hors-d'oeuvre, of aversion and occupation. Here is Wordsworth's note to the first of his two poems entitled "Ode to Lycoris." The note arguably belongs in the same company as the better-known passage on Wordsworth's supposed rejection of prosopopoeia in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads: No doubt the hackneyed and lifeless use into which mythology fell towards the end of the 17th century, and which continued through the 18th, disgusted the general reader with all allusion to it in modern verse; and though, in deference to this disgust, and also in a measure participating in it, I abstained in my earlier writings from all introduction of pagan fable, surely, even in its humble form, it may ally itself with real sentiment, as I can truly affirm it did in the present case. (PW 4: 423)

Douglas Bush, writing over sixty years ago, quotes this note and says that, "strange as it may sound," Wordsworth is "the fountain-head from which flowed much of the great stream of nineteenth-century poetry on classical themes." Bush continues: "It was he [Wordsworth] more than anyone else ... who revived the classical genre and prescribed its manner and moral tone" (360). In 1933 this was clearly a minority opinion, but Bush's interest in moral and thematic issues, and his focus on Wordsworth's poetry after 1807, set a critical agenda that "contained" the problem of Wordsworth's classicism. More recently, Bryan Crockett, in discussing this same note by Wordsworth, has made the point that "It is ... an aversion to the abuse of classical references, a denial of the 'real sentiment' that underlies mythology, that motivates Wordsworth to refer to the classics sparingly, not an aversion to the classics themselves" (111). While both these readers remain within the realm of reference and theme, even as Wordsworth himself limits his discussion to "pagan fable" and "mythology," there is another kind of engagement to be considered, in the province of rhetoric. As with the question of prosopopoeia (Wordsworth's repudiation of which being greatly exaggerated), so here: the hiddenness of the classical tradition is particularly exposed with a poet such as Wordsworth, whose originality and power often depend on certain publicly declared aversions, or rejections of diction and figure. Readers have always had the odd feeling that there is more to Wordsworth than meets the ear - an otherness, an innerness, a sense that, as Rimbaud says, "la vraie vie est ailleurs." Geoffrey Hartman puts it this way: "The life of Wordsworth's lines is often uneasy and as if somewhere else" ("Words, Wish, Worth," Unremarkable Wordsworth

8 Romantic Aversions

116). That "somewhere," that place which is also a figure, the topos a topos, participates in the "double gesture" associated with repression: there and not-there, in place but also kept to one side. Wordsworth's note to "Lycoris" dwells on its distance from the question, its arm's-length perspective on a poet's relation to tradition: in his own words, there is "surely" "no doubt" that Wordsworth's earlier abstaining from pagan fable and myth, his swerving from those aspects of classicism, legitimizes his allying them now with "real sentiment." A former aversion now defends a current occupation, or preoccupation. The draining of the Zuyder Zee comes to mind: where aversio was, there occupatio shall be. The well-known climax of Coleridge's "Dejection: An Ode" will serve here as a second brief locus classicus of aversion and occupation: Hence, viper thoughts, that coil around my mind, Reality's dark dream! I turn from you, and listen to the wind, Which long has raved unnoticed. What a scream Of agony by torture lengthened out That lute sent forth! Thou Wind, that rav'st without, Bare crag, or mountain-tairn, or blasted tree ... (CPW 1: 367)

This constitutes a "turn" in more than one sense. At the level of genre, it is a splendid example of the classical "transitions" of the ode; and if schoolmaster Bowyer taught Coleridge "that Poetry, even that of the loftiest, and, seemingly, that of the wildest odes, had a logic of its own" (BL 1: 9), it must have a rhetoric too. This turn in the discourse of "Dejection" - a diversion of address from the "viper thoughts" to the "Wind" - is an intrinsic part of the conventional rhetorical structure of the ode. Paul de Man refers to this aversiveness when he notes the shifting direction of discourse in the genre of "the ode (which can, in its turn, be seen as paradigmatic for poetry in general)" ("Hypogram" 47). "In its turn": the ode is the exemplary text of apostrophe because of the way it formalizes its turns - from strophe to antistrophe to epode, in varying patterns. Coleridge, who knew his rhetoric and genre so well, calls attention to his manoeuvre at this crucial point in the poem by adding a curious gloss on the word "mountain-tairn": Tairn is a small lake, generally if not always applied to the lakes up in the mountains and which are the feeders of those in the valleys. This address to

9 Introduction: Turns of Phrase the Storm-wind will not appear extravagant to those who have heard it at night and in a mountainous country. (CPW1:367)

The gloss on "tairn" is of a piece with the gloss on the "stranger" in "Frost at Midnight" (see Jan Plug): dialectal, locodescriptive, verging on folklore. But the very fact that Coleridge feels obliged to gloss his own diction, to turn aside to define or explain a particular term to a less than ideal reader, shows that the gloss itself participates in the structure of aversion - that is, in the digression of discourse, in this case from text to footnote. There are, it appears, at least two classes of readers in this poem, those who know what "tairn" means, and those who don't. But this turning aside of address in the form of the gloss occurs within the larger aversion from "viper thoughts" to "Wind"; the first apostrophe, from mind to nature, self to other, is motivated by the extreme pathos of the text, while the second detour has the feel of an ex machina construction: We interrupt this discourse to bring you the following gloss. But the footnote goes even further. It contains a self-conscious, supplementary explanation, and a justification, for the exorbitant rhetorical manoeuvre that Coleridge has just made and will amplify over the next twenty-five lines. Fearing that his apostrophe to the wind might appear "extravagant" to some readers, Coleridge's second sentence invokes and preempts that response: "This address to the Storm-wind will not appear extravagant to those who have heard it at night and in a mountainous country." A diphasic epistemology yokes the two sentences of the footnote together: the first addresses unknowing readers, while the second addresses knowing readers, or listeners - "those who have heard." But the very preemptiveness of the latter sentence necessarily conjures up "those who have not heard," and while it seeks to forestall their opinion it cannot do so without ironically acknowledging the very response it wants to deny. Aversio becomes occupatio, and an "extravagant" wandering-beyond-the-limits becomes a dwelling upon. It's a bit like explaining a joke by stopping explanation itself and simply stating: you just had to be there. "Those who have heard" will know what I mean. Thus the doubleness or tripleness of address in the footnote makes me a little uncomfortable; it is as if the explanation of "tairn" is a "screen footnote" to cover Coleridge's rhetorical anxiety over apostrophe: a marginal gloss shadows an "extravagant" figure of rhetoric. Wordsworth's note and Coleridge's gloss represent two instances of the "after-pressure" (Nachdrängen) of the classical rhetorical tradition. But turning away, turning outside, is never enough, never an

10 Romantic Aversions

end, because if there's going to be an instinct in the margins, there has to be an "expenditure of force" to keep it there (Freud, "Repression," SE 14: 151). The rhetorical defences against the classical tradition make for some haunted figures. Romanticism plots an extravagant detour from the high road of classicism, building and dwelling in the crooked paths of genius that go out of their way to double back to Main Street. As with repression, the "essence" of Romanticism lies in its "difference," in its "turning something away, and keeping it at a distance," if only an "interior distance." Romanticism says of its classical other: "Je 1'ai mis de cote."

1 Apostrophe Reconsidered: Wordsworth's 'There Was a Boy" This is a figure which less than any other would bear abuse. Wordsworth, 5 May 1814 Yet whence this strange aversion? Wordsworth, The Borderers

According to certain recent publications, the figure of apostrophe or aversio has become something of an "embarrassment." Jonathan Culler, in an essay entitled "Apostrophe," claims that whatever else apostrophes may be, "above all they are embarrassing: embarrassing to me and to you" (Pursuit 135).1 Because it is allegedly so embarrassing, the figure, Culler asserts, has been "systematically repressed or excluded by critics" (Pursuit 137); more specifically, Mary Jacobus argues, it has been "regularly ignored by writers on the ode" ("Apostrophe and Lyric Voice" 171). In another essay Culler repeats his thesis: "[A]postrophes are awkward and embarrassing ... Critics either ignore them or transform apostrophe into description" ("Changes" 39, 50). And once more, in the Yale French Studies memorial volume The Lesson of Paul de Man, Culler restates his case: "Apostrophes are embarrassing, and criticism of the lyric has systematically avoided both the topic of apostrophe and actual apostrophes" (99). The reason given for such regular or systematic avoidance is that apostrophe represents something "which critical discourse cannot comfortably assimilate" - that is, Culler suggests, "some innate hostility to voice" (Pursuit 137, 136).2 Perhaps it comes as a surprise nowadays to be told that discourse has an "innate hostility to voice." Voice, as Jacques Derrida has shown, has always been privileged in Western culture as a guarantor of truth, consciousness, and being - while writing has been repressed as secondary and derivative (Gmmmatology 3-26). To resolve this confusion we need to rehabilitate our historical understanding of

12 Romantic Aversions

apostrophe by demonstrating that, far from being "systematically" or "regularly" avoided by critics, the figure has a distinguished tradition of commentary, beginning with the classical writers Cicero and Quintilian, and moving through the Renaissance and eighteenthcentury rhetoricians.3 For example, Sherry, Peacham, Fenner, Fraunce, Puttenham, Day, Hoskins, Blount, Smith, and Blair - to name more than a few - all regularly and systematically discuss apostrophe. In addition, we need to reconsider apostrophe in relation to the figures of prosopopoeia and ecphonesis in order to view its particular function within a larger oratorical structure of address. What we discover when we pursue this sort of aversion therapy is that apostrophe does indeed represent something which discourse cannot comfortably assimilate: not voice as such, however, but the passing of voice, its want or lack, even its sudden removal. My position may be stated briefly. The current problem with apostrophe stems from associating it with voice rather than with a movement of voice, and the reason for this error, I think, lies in a misunderstanding of rhetoric. Classical rhetoric is fundamentally a vocative form of discourse, always explicitly or implicitly involving a second-person "thou" or "ye" - what Roman Jakobson calls the "conative" function of language (67-8). Thus classical rhetoric has no trope or scheme of address as such because, being derived from forensic oratory, it is intrinsically vocative. It does not, therefore, see its own essence as a trope or deviation. Erich Auerbach, writing on apostrophe and address, puts it this way: The theorists have never described or listed the address to the reader as a special figure of speech. That is quite understandable. Since the ancient orator always addresses a definite public - either a political body or the judges in a trial - the problem arises only in certain special cases, if, with an extraordinary rhetorical movement, he should address someone else, a persona iudicis auersus, as Quintilian says.4

Rhetoric does, however, distinguish types and conditions of address - such as, in the Tudor rhetoricians' terminology, the "outcrie" or the "exclamation," and the "turne tale" or the "aversion." I shall attempt to distinguish this latter figure, apostrophe or aversio, from its related forms of address, including exclamation or ecphonesis, and then demonstrate its operation through a close reading of Wordsworth's text "There Was a Boy." By doing so, I hope to show that the central problem with Culler's argument lies in his failure to distinguish, on either historical or theoretical grounds, between apostrophe and

13 Apostrophe Reconsidered

address. To put that claim a different way, I mean to show that what Culler's essay is really about is not apostrophe, but prosopopoeia. I

Quintilian discusses the figure of apostrophe at some length in book 4 (1.63-70) and again in book 9 (2.38-40; 3.26-8) of the Institutio Omtoria. In the first of these instances he argues against certain "cautious and pedantic teachers of rhetoric" (4.1.70) who forbid the use of apostrophe in the exordium, or introduction to an oration, not "because they regard [apostrophe] as illicit, but because they think it useless" (4.1.65). Quintilian's counter-argument pragmatically seeks to demonstrate the utility of the figure through a series of examples from Cicero and Demosthenes. But what interests the reader more is Quintilian's first definition of apostrophe: "The figure which the Greeks call apostrophe, by which is meant the diversion of our words to address some person other than the judge, is entirely banned by some rhetoricians as far as the exordium is concerned" (4.1.63). Two aspects of this definition require comment, since they reappear in nearly all discussions of apostrophe down to the nineteenth century. The first is the notion of apostrophe as a "diversion" of speech (sermonem a persona iudicis aversum). The second point, necessarily related to the first, is that this diversion redirects the speech to someone other than the original hearer - in this case, since Quintilian is dealing with forensic oratory, someone other than the judge. The positing of what later rhetoricians would call the "proper" or intended hearer, and the oratorical diversion from that person to another person, constitute the two chief characteristics of the figure. In book 9 Quintilian offers a more elaborate definition, still within a forensic context: "Apostrophe also, which consists in the diversion of our address from the judge, is wonderfully stirring, whether we attack our adversary ... or turn to make some invocation ... or to entreaty that will bring odium on our opponents" (9.2.38). Quintilian reminds us of the pragmatic, as distinct from ornamental, function of apostrophe in judicial rhetoric: like all figures, its effect is supposed to persuade. Once again the two key points of a "proper" listener and a diversion from that listener are present. That is not the case, however, in the pseudo-Ciceronian Rhetorica ad Herennium, where the following definition of apostrophe appears in Caplan's translation: "Apostrophe is the figure which expresses grief or indignation by means of an address to some man or city or place or object" (4.15.22). While this definition intimates the close relation between apostrophe and prosopopoeia - by addressing

14 Romantic Aversions

"man or city or place or object" the orator implicitly or explicitly invests the addressee with the animate faculty of hearing - there is a confusion of terminology because in the original Latin text the word translated by Caplan as "apostrophe" is actually "exclamatio."5 As future rhetoricians would insist, exclamation is not the same as apostrophe, though they are indeed similar, both being motivated by passion and having the potential to address people or objects either present or absent, alive or dead. Since Longinus, the prerequisite for a sublime apostrophe or prosopopoeia has been passion or elevated emotion in the speaker or writer; without this rhetorical sine qua non both figures are in danger of falling from the sublime to the ridiculous. "How ridiculous," Coleridge is reported as saying, "would it seem in a state of comparative insensibility to employ a figure used only by a person under the highest emotion, such as the impersonation of an abstract being, and an apostrophe to it" (Shakespearean Criticism 2: 103). Wordsworth, who is frequently thought of as dismissing prosopopoeia altogether in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads, makes an important yet traditional qualification: personifications, he writes, "are, indeed, a figure of speech occasionally prompted by passion, and I have made use of them as such" (Prose 1: 131). Hence it goes without saying that Culler's deliberately corny example of apostrophe ("O mysterious apostrophe ...!" [Pursuit 135]) fails precisely because it lacks this one prerequisite. The point is that no figure is inherently embarrassing; only bad figures are so. The difference between aversio and exclamatio, however, is that exclamation does not necessarily contain a turn or diversion from the original hearer; a text may be a consistent exclamation to a reader, and yet still not an apostrophe. By contrast, apostrophe always depends on a pre-text. II

Apostrophe is literally a turning away, an aversion, as both Richard Sherry and Henry Peacham call it. It is, Peacham says, "a forme of speech by which the Orator turneth suddenly from the former frame of his speech to another ... which is no other thing then a sudden removing from the third person to the second" (116). "The most usual forme of this figure," he continues, "is in turning our speech from the third person to the second" (116). But Sherry locates the turning elsewhere. "Aversio, aversion," he says, "[is] when we turne our speche from them to whom we dyd speake to another personne, eyther present or absent" (60). It is for Sherry thus a turning from one second person to another second person, in an intersubjective or intertextual movement between vocatives. Of the three traditional

15 Apostrophe Reconsidered divisions of rhetoric - forensic, epideictic, and deliberative - forensic rhetoric illustrates this intersubjective movement most clearly, as when the orator turns aside occasionally, as Hoskins put it in 1599, "to some new person, as, to the people when your speech before was to the judge, to the def[endan]t, to the adversary, to the witnesses" (48). At first glance, Peacham does not seem to agree with Sherry's intervocative definition, as he suggests that the shift of address is from third- to second-person discourse, from "it" to "you." This is not really a disagreement, however, for what Peacham assumes but does not make explicit here is the intrinsic second-person form of address in rhetoric, always involving a "proper" listener from whom the speaker can turn to confront an invoked listener.6 Other Renaissance rhetoricians concur in these definitions. George Puttenham, in his Arte of English Poesie (1589), has an entry on "Apostrophe, or the turne tale," in which we "either speake or exclaime at some other person or thing" (198-9). "The Greekes," he says, "call such figure (as we do) the turnway or turnetale" (199). In The Aries of Logike and Rhetorike (1584) Dudley Fenner writes: "Apostrophe or turning to the person, is when the speach is turned to another person, then the speach appointed did intend or require. And this Apostrophe or turning is diversely scene, according to the diversitie of persons. Sometimes it turneth to a mans person ... Sometimes from a man to God ... Sometimes to unreasonable creatures without sense" (chapter 8).7 Angel Day, in the list of tropes, figures, and schemes added to the 1592 and later editions of his English Secretary, has the following entry: Apostrophe, or Aversio, when wee turne our speeches from one person or thing to another, as if having spoken much of the vanitie of the worlde shoulde thereupon turne and saie unto the world, O world, how sweete and pleasant are the shewes of those things which thou producest: but in taste, how full of too much bitternes? Or in speaking of the certaintie of death, and the little respect thereof had, to turn a mans speach to death it selfe and saie, O death, how bitter is thy remembrance to a man having peace and plenty on his riches, &c. (go)8 Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century rhetorical treatises are similarly consistent in their definitions of apostrophe. Thomas Gibbons, in Rhetoric; Or a View of Its Principal Tropes and Figures (1767), writes: "Apostrophe is a Figure in which we interrupt the current of our discourse, and turn to another person, or to some other object, different from that to which our address was first directed" (213). Citing

16 Romantic Aversions Quintilian, Gibbons claims that "This Figure is of admirable service to diversify our discourses, as we direct ourselves to different objects from those we first addressed" (221). Other rhetorical handbooks and treatises follow suit - for example, John Holmes's The Art of Rhetoric Made Easy (1766), Hugh Blair's Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783), and John Walker's A Rhetorical Grammar (1822), partly cribbed from Gibbons's Rhetoric.9 A number of twentieth-century critics and theorists have discussed apostrophe - for example, Sister Miriam Joseph in her exhaustive catalogue of tropes and schemes in Shakespeare (246-7, 390), Paul Fry in his splendid study of the English ode (11), Annabel Patterson in her work on Hermogenes and Renaissance style (64,107, 126-8), Paul de Man on Michael Riffaterre ("Hypogram"), and Riffaterre on de Man.10 Here, however, is Jacques Derrida in The Post Card, offering a thoroughly historical and conventional definition of apostrophe. Derrida writes: The word - apostrophizes - speaks of the words addressed to the singular one, a live interpellation (the man of discourse or writing interrupts the continuous development of the sequence, abruptly turns toward someone, that is, something, addresses himself to you), but the word also speaks of the address to be detoured. (4) Taken together, these texts from the sixteenth to the twentieth century represent a tradition of definition, example, and commentary on the figure of apostrophe or aversio. A similar tradition could be mapped out here for the figure of exclamation - or exclamatio, or ecphonesis, the outcry, as it is variously called. Significantly, the rhetoricians do not include a diversion of speech as part of their understanding of the figure. Peacham once again offers a useful, representative definition: Ecphonesis of the La tines called Exclamatio, is a forme of speech by which the Orator through some vehement affection, as either of love, hatred, gladnesse, sorrow, anger, marvelling, admiration, feare, or such like, bursteth forth into an exclamation or outcrie, signifying thereby the vehement affection or passion of his mind. (62)11 The motive for exclamation must always be passion - it is "not lawful but in extremity of motion," Hoskins says (33) - though this passion must be "simulated and artfully designed," else the outcry is not a figure, as Quintilian stipulates (9.2.27). One of the most common rhetorical signposts for exclamation is the word "O."

17 Apostrophe Reconsidered

Thomas Wilson, in his Arte of Rhetorique (1560), gives the following instances: "Oh Lord, O God, O worlde, O life, O maners of men? O Death, where is thy sting? O Hell, where is thy victorie?" (205). In The Mysterie of Rhetorique unvail'd (1657) John Smith says that exclamation "is expresst or understood by an Adverb of crying out, as Oh, alas, behold; which are the signs of this figure" (140). It is important to cite these definitions of apostrophe and exclamation more to distinguish their rhetorical differences than to demonstrate their syntactical affinities. We no longer can say, for example, that Wordsworth's line "O there is blessing in this gentle breeze" is an apostrophe automatically because of the telltale "O." Only if it were a "turne tale" O, one depending on a rhetorical pre-text or prior discourse, would we be correct in making such a statement. But I wish to turn back to Jonathan Culler's text before going on to Wordsworth's, to develop some of the larger implications of my brief survey. 1ll

What is at stake in such a reconsideration of apostrophe? One concern is obviously historical: we discover, as Paul de Man once said of allegory, "a historical scheme that differs entirely from the customary picture" (Blindness 208). But another interest is theoretical. By describing apostrophe as a turning from an original (implicit or explicit) addressee to a different addressee, from the proper or intended hearer to another, we emphasize the figure as a movement of voice, a translation or carrying over of address. This understanding is crucial if we are to distinguish simple direct address from the turning aside of address, from the rhetorical and temporal movement of apostrophe. In Culler's essay "Apostrophe," however, this distinction is missing; curiously, no definition of apostrophe is given there, despite Culler's admission that a study of apostrophe should require it: [I]f we would know something of the poetics of the lyric we should study apostrophe, its forms and meanings. Such a project would confront at the outset complex problems of definition and delimitation, which I here leave aside in order to focus on cases which will be apostrophic by any definition ... (Pursuit 137)

"Which I here leave aside": yet whence this strange aversion? Culler seems to assume the straightforwardness of apostrophe. But in fact his choice of texts "apostrophic by any definition" is problematic: "O Rose, thou art sick!"; "O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's

18 Romantic Aversions

being!"; "Thou still unravished bride of quietness"; and "Sois sage, 6 ma douleur!" (Pursuit 137). While doubtless many teachers, myself included, have called these examples apostrophes, not one of them, by definition, qualifies because there is no vocal turn involved, no "sudden removing," in Peacham's phrase (116): they are all direct exclamations, or ecphoneses, occurring in the first line of their respective poems, with no preceding speech, no pre-textual basis from which to turn, no discourse to "interrupt," as Gibbons (213) and Derrida (Post Card 4) put it.12 Blake's lyric is addressed to the rose; Shelley's ode is addressed to the west wind; Keats's text is addressed to a Grecian urn as much as an ode written "on" it; and Baudelaire's meditation is spoken uniformly to the single addressee Sorrow. It might be argued that if language is originally figurative, always already tropological, these examples do contain a turn, a trope that animates each of the non-human subjects addressed - a rose, a wind, an urn, sorrow. But such a figure is not apostrophe but prosopopoeia, which does not depend on a rhetorical aversion. My interest, however, is in the turn of voice, not the turn or deviation of another figure within voice. Simply put, the problem is a confusion of apostrophe and address. In his analysis of de Man's essay on Riffaterre's poetics (de Man, "Hypogram"), Culler repeats his error. He misses the turn. Renewing his argument about the systematic exclusion of apostrophe in criticism, Culler attempts to bring de Man on-side by noting that he "takes a considerable interest in apostrophe and some interest in other critics' inclination to avoid and ignore it" ("Reading Lyric" 99). This seems to me to be a crucial misreading of de Man, for what Riffaterre avoids and de Man takes an interest in is not in fact apostrophe. Indeed, the passage from de Man that Culler cites to substantiate his point about apostrophe is actually about something else. Culler quotes: "'Now it is certainly beyond question,' de Man writes ... 'that the figure of address is recurrent in lyric poetry, to the point of constituting the generic definition of, at the very least, the ode (which can, in its turn, be seen as paradigmatic for poetry in general)'" ("Reading Lyric" 100). The "figure of address," not of apostrophe, is de Man's concern here. And de Man is surely right to claim that this rhetorical structure "'in its turn'" defines a paradigm for poetry. Yet why does he single out the ode with respect to the structure of address? Assuredly because of all poems, the ode is the type that frequently is explicitly addressed to someone: Psyche, Autumn, a skylark, the Confederate dead.13 Of course, other genres do this too, addressing Penshurst, a coy mistress, Peele Castle, or intellectual beauty.14 But we need to emphasize that this structure of address,

19 Apostrophe Reconsidered

this explicit directing of voice, is crucially different from the movement of apostrophe, the redirecting of voice. This distinction should help to dispel Culler's perplexity over the lack of discussion of apostrophe in many critics, especially in George N. Shuster's The English Ode from Milton to Keats, one work Culler singles out to prove his allegation of a systematic scholarly neglect of apostrophe. "The problem of apostrophe ought to lie right at the heart of this book," Culler writes, "but from the outset Shuster engages in instructive maneuvers to exclude apostrophe from his domain" (Pursuit 136). Yet the theoretical and definitional error exhibited in his analysis of de Man is present here: the passage Culler goes on to quote is not about apostrophe. Here is Shuster's "maneuver," as quoted by Culler: "The element of address," [Shuster] notes in the introduction, "is of no especial significance, being merely a reflection of the classical influence. All the verse of antiquity was addressed to somebody, primarily because it was either sung or read and the traditions of song and recitation required that there be a recipient." (Pursuit 136; my emphasis)

"Thus," concludes Culler, "apostrophe is insignificant because conventional" (Pursuit 136; my emphasis).15 Apostrophe? Could the confusion of terminology, the commentary at cross-purposes, be any plainer? No wonder, then, that Culler says "that one can read vast amounts of criticism without learning that poetry uses apostrophe repeatedly and intensely" (Pursuit 136) - especially when what a reader thinks is apostrophe is not apostrophe, when the standard "element of address" is mistaken for the tropological diversion of address. Shuster's argument, perhaps a manoeuvre nonetheless, is that since classical verse - his focus, like de Man's, is the ode, the text "to" someone - is intrinsically vocative, its essence need not be taken as a deviation, the fundamental taken as "especial." What really is de Man's interest in his reading of Riffaterre? Plainly, not apostrophe as such, but prosopopoeia, "the master trope of poetic discourse" ("Hypogram" 48). And when Riffaterre answers de Man's charges concerning his poetics of reading, he entitles his response simply "Prosopopeia." Apostrophe is related to prosopopoeia, as ecphonesis is, but it is not a necessary relation: one can apostrophize someone (e.g., a defendant in a courtroom) without using prosopopoeia; and conversely one can, as Riffaterre points out, conceive of a text in which, for example, a "besieged city speaks its mournful dirge without having been apostrophized" ("Prosopopeia" 108). Prosopopoeia, Riffaterre writes, "merely lends a voice to a

2O Romantic Aversions

voiceless ... entity" ("Prosopopeia" 108). Or even less: sometimes it merely lends an ear, in the way that Wordsworth lends an ear to nature in book 1 of The Prelude:16 "to the open fields I told / A prophecy" (50-1) - a passage that anticipates in book 5 those other "open fields, which, shaped like ears, / Make green peninsulas on Esthwaite's Lake" (5.433-4).17 IV

Apostrophe is not a figure, that like Janus, carries two faces with a good grace. Wordsworth, 5 May 1814

What are the consequences of such a theory of apostrophe for reading Wordsworth? By understanding the figure as a "trope," as an arche-trope that enacts the "turn" of all figural language, we open up the concept of voice to the force of its differential structure and therefore to its deconstruction.18 We also begin to perceive the relation between rhetoric and form in a poem such as "Tintern Abbey," which Wordsworth regarded as affiliated with the ode through what he called its "transitions" (Brett and Jones 296), or turns or strophes, which turn out to be apo-strophes or aversios invoking first the "sylvan Wye" (56) and then the "dear, dear Sister" (121).19 Milton's "Lycidas," as pastoral elegy rather than ode, organizes its three-part structure around a similar series of aversions that foreground the movement of voice: "Return, Alpheus, the dread voice is past ..." (132). And Coleridge typically structures his "Effusions" and conversation poems using apostrophes to create the present-past-future, or "out-in-out," transitions that M. H. Abrams has identified as a feature of the "greater Romantic lyric" ("Structure and Style" 202). Some Wordsworthian texts, such as the "Poem ... Addressed to S.T. Coleridge," posit a larger structure of rhetorical address and its aversions. The Prelude has been called Wordsworth's best conversation poem, but at what point does apostrophe become conversation? Where does trope shade into genre? Or to put the question more directly: how many aversions does it take to make a conversation poem? Let me consider some of these issues in a brief close reading. The case of Wordsworth is exemplary. As "a man speaking to men" (Prose 1: 138), the Wordworthian poet by definition finds himself in situations of rhetorical address which are potentially apostrophic. I take as the locus classicus the text "There Was a Boy," in which the interruptive pause after the opening statement suggests a turning away:20

21 Apostrophe Reconsidered There was a Boy: ye knew him well, ye cliffs And islands of Winander! (Prelude 5.364-5)21

As an example of forensic rhetoric, Wordsworth's text illustrates the "sudden removing" of voice, as both relocation and deletion. Indeed, there may have been a boy, but the speaker (non habeas corpus) turns from his initial auditor to invoke the corroboration of witnesses: "Ye knew him well, ye cliffs / And islands of Winander!" The vocative itself does not signal apostrophe so much as does the movement from the third-person formula "There was" to the second-person pronoun "ye." This turn or trope, at once apostrophic and prosopopoeic, swerves passionately from an epitaphic statement about the Boy's death to an immediate address to a personified Nature. In doing so it anticipates the subsequent rhetorical and thematic reversals in the episode, and implies an intertextual question: Who would not testify for the Boy of Winander? Who would not sing for him? Seeking Nature's corroboration is not unusual for Wordsworth. In book 1 of The Prelude a similar moment occurs, with the important difference that no apostrophe is used: The sands of Westmoreland, the creeks and bays Of Cumbria's rocky limits, they can tell How, when the Sea threw off his evening shade, And to the shepherd's hut on distant hills Sent welcome notice of the rising moon, How I have stood, to fancies such as these A stranger ... (1.567-73)

No aversion here, not even in the appositional construction, but the powerful prosopopoeia still obtains. The assurance that the sands and creeks and bays "can tell" implies that the poet could turn to invoke their testimony, to call on these natural objects that they might answer him.22 Their statements as witnesses would be to corroborate the poet's description of his response ("How I have stood ... ") to the action of Nature ("when the Sea threw off his evening shade ... "). There is a dialogue between addresser and addressee, between nature and humanity, carried in the "welcome notice" sent by the sea to the "shepherd's hut." "The earth / And common face of Nature," Wordsworth writes following this incident, "spake to me / Rememberable things" (1.586-8). In such a collaborative speech act the poet seeks for no trophies, not even apos-trophes.

22 Romantic Aversions

Though he does not use aversio here, Wordsworth achieves a rhetorical effect remarkably similar to that in the first passage: here Nature is personified by being charged with a voice that "can tell"; in the Boy of Winander text Nature is attributed with consciousness, or knowledge: "Ye knew him well!" But it is, Wordsworth fears, a knowledge purchased by the loss of power, which is to say, by the loss of voice: a power is gone, which nothing can restore. The apostrophic turning to Nature evokes "rememberable things," but also a guilty consciousness: Nature's response implies responsibility. For one can anticipate Wordsworth asking here the accusing question: "Where were ye nymphs ...?"- even as he had done some thirteen years earlier in another poem: Where were ye, nymphs, when the remorseless deep Clos'd o'er your little favourite's hapless head? For neither did ye mark with solemn dream In Derwent's rocky woods the white Moonbeam Pace like a Druid o'er the haunted steep; Nor in Winander's stream. ("The Dog - An Idyllium"; PW 1. 2.64}23

The conventional elegiac topos of the invocation to nature is described also by the Wanderer in book 1 of The Excursion (475-81): - The Poets, in their elegies and songs Lamenting the departed, call the groves, They call upon the hills and streams to mourn, And senseless rocks; nor idly; for they speak, In these their invocations, with a voice Obedient to the strong creative power Of human passion. (PW 5: 24)

"Nor idly": this is no mere pathetic fallacy.24 The voice that speaks or calls to Nature obeys the "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" (Prose 1. 127, 149), resulting in apostrophe or exclamation, the voice by "human passion" moved. The sudden removing of voice is related to a silencing of voice, an overdetermined muteness that is "redoubled and redoubled" (5.378) in "There Was a Boy." First there are the "silent owls" (5.373), then the "pauses of deep silence" (1805: 5.405) that baffle the child, and finally the poet's "mute" address to the grave (5.397). Alternating with these silences is a succession of voices, sometimes choric, sometimes univocal, but always "responsive" (5.376) in their own answerable

23 Apostrophe Reconsidered style. The text follows a sequence of aversions that thematize the adversarial aspect of forensic rhetoric: here, the boy is stationed visa-vis nature in a way that reminds us of a subject-object dialectic, the mind versus the world. But the colloquy in the text troubles this opposition by textualizing it, making "The Boy of Winander" into a type of conversation poem, intersubjective rather than dialectical. Intersubjective dialogue or familiar colloquy is implied also in the naturalized apostrophe near the origin of The Prelude. The sudden beginning in MS. JJ shows a rhetorical aversion from a third-person form of address to an immediate "thou": Was it for this That one, the fairest of all rivers, loved To blend his murmurs with my nurse's song ... 1 ... For this didst thou, O Derwent ... ? (Norton Prelude 1) Recall Angel Day's example of aversio, "as if having spoken much of the vanitie of the worlde [one] shoulde thereupon turne and saie unto the world, O world" (90) - or, in this case, as if having spoken much of the River Derwent, Wordsworth should turn and speak to it. The 1798 passage continues the apostrophe, with additional notices of "thy silent pools" and "thy streams" (Norton Prelude 1), and then just as naturally returns to the original discourse.25 The opening of the 1805 Prelude uses apostrophe in a similar way, turning from a "there is" clause - "O there is blessing in this gentle breeze" (1.1) - to a series of apostrophes to Nature: "O welcome messenger! O welcome friend! / A captive greets thee" (1.5-6). In the 1850 edition Wordsworth removes these apostrophes, while his literary executors go one step farther, replacing the personal pronouns "he" and "his," referring to the breeze, by "it" and "its," as if to localize the differential movement of voice, or to curb its animating power. W.J.B. Owen, editor of the Cornell fourteen-book Prelude, gives a stark reason for the unauthorized revision: "The personification of the breeze must have offended the editors" (27). But voice in Wordsworth cannot be put aside so easily, or halted in one place for long; it is always on the move, even when engraved, like an epitaph, in rocks and stones and trees.26 I suggest that the Boy of Winander is a poet "sown / By Nature" and therefore lacking "the accomplishment of verse" (Excursion 1.778, 80). Yet he engages Nature in what De Quincey was the first to see as a "contest" (Recollections 160) or challenge to nature, in the tradition, as Geoffrey Hartman has suggested, of the singing contest of

24 Romantic Aversions classical pastoral (Fate 183, 290). In his recollections, De Quincey recounts how Wordsworth once described his imaginative processes, using as illustration his own text "There Was a Boy" - "that exquisit poem in which he describes a mountain boy planting himself at twilight on the margin of some solitary bay of Windermere, and provoking the owls to a contest with himself" (Recollections 160). "Provoking" is just the word; as syllepsis it conflates literal voicing and figural confrontation. The Boy is not quite an agent provocateur, but he does like to set the cat among the pigeons. Yet why should Wordsworth vex his own creation? "Like the innocent bird," he writes, the poet's mind "hath goadings on / That drive her as in trouble through the groves" (Prelude 1.142-3). But to provoke the birds in such a way is going far to seek disquiet. In book 1 the poet steals birds' eggs, even steals the birds themselves, now tries to appropriate their voice. But repeatedly critics claim that the Boy is in a harmonious "communion" with nature.27 Given the recurrent pattern in Wordsworth's poetry of an external act of violence followed by an inner sense of guilt, might we not read the Boy of Winander episode not as an example of an exquisite harmony with nature but as yet another muted or transmuted act of aggression against it? Even Wordsworth's phrase "redoubled and redoubled" (5.378) has intertextual overtones of battle, as in the war in heaven in Paradise Lost 6.370: "The Atheist crew, but with redoubl'd blow" (a line which Wordsworth explicitly echoes in The Prelude 10.502: "Wielded the sceptre of the Atheist crew"); or as in Richard II 1.3.802: "And let thy blows, doubly redoubled, / Fall like amazing thunder on the casque / Of thy adverse pernicious enemy." The Boy of Winander's "blows" surely belong here too. Still, other echoes trouble: when Eve says to the serpent, "Redouble then this miracle, and say, / How cam'st thou speakable of mute?" (Paradise Lost 9.5623), we glimpse an intersection of battle, voice, nature, and muteness that operates in Wordsworth's text too. Challenge, tumult, and battle lead to bafflement, silence, and death, and show us just how high the stakes in this singing contest really are.28 Francis Jeffrey missed the pastoral conventions of the text when, in his review of Crabbe's Poems in 1808, he took Wordsworth's topos to be the "untimely death of promising youth" (135), rather than of a promising poet. The linguistic or "poetic" aspect, however, is difficult to avoid, for the opening apostrophe advertises its own intertextuality. The Boy stands with his hands pressed "palm to palm" (5.371) over his mouth in an attitude of devotion or nature-worship, but also in imitation of Juliet's "holy palmers' kiss." Let lips do what hands do! Or does he not rather play the swan and die in music?

25 Apostrophe Reconsidered

Mouth and voice seem linked to hands and writing by their very contiguity. The intervocative exchange begins, significantly, with the Boy: he, as through an instrument, Blew mimic hootings to the silent owls, That they might answer him; and they would shout Across the watery vale, and shout again, Responsive to his call, with quivering peals, And long halloos and screams, and echoes loud, Redoubled and redoubled, concourse wild Of jocund din ... (5.372-9)

There is a turn here so large as to be a complete reversal. We often think of Wordsworth as borrowing a voice from Nature to inform his poetry, to "naturalize" it as a language of things rather than of words. "Oh! that I had a music and a voice / Harmonious as your own," he says to the breezes and groves in book 12 (29-30). In this scene as well, the Boy's "mimic hootings" seem borrowed from nature: their mimesis, we naturally assume, is imitative of the owls' song. But the rhetorical structure of the passage creates interference with this reading, because here the direction is reversed: the Boy seems to confer the power of utterance on the owls; he gives away his voice to Nature, and is silenced. The sudden removing of voice comes as a blow, a "shock of mild surprise" that insinuates a deeper, usurping voice: "the voice / Of mountain torrents" (5.382, 383-4). There is a prosopopoeia within prosopopoeia here, in the double conferring of "voice" on Nature: Words worth turns to apostrophize/ personify the cliffs and islands, and then recounts the story of the Boy of Winander; within that story the animating power of voice again is used to personify Nature through the "mimic hootings." Though no apostrophe is explicit with the Boy, there is nevertheless a strange "diversion" of discourse when the owls stop answering and "the voice / Of mountain torrents" responds instead. The effect is as if the speaker had turned from his "proper" listener to an invoked listener "unawares" (5.385). As such, the narrative in the Boy of Winander passage may be read as a repetition-with-a-difference of the narrative of the Boy of Winander episode. The text establishes a series of acoustical oppositions between the Boy and Nature sound/silence, source/echo, stimulus/response - in which the Bo appears to have the priority implied in the first term of each of these pairings. The owls "echo" the Boy: they "answer" him; they are "responsive" to his prior vocal stimulus. But is not this stimulus also

26 Romantic Aversions

a response? The word "mimic" carries not only a temporal reference, alluding to recurrent, pre-textual encounters between the Boy and the owls ("many a time / At evening ... would he stand" [5.365-6, 368]), but also a proleptic force, anticipating the present and future exchanges. The Boy of Winander is a Boy Wonder: he is a source that is already an echo, a repetition of recurrence in a finer tone. Robert Frost's poem "The Most of It" provides an intertextual gloss on the Boy's sound effects, with a poet-figure seeking an "original response" or "counter-love" through his speech act: He thought he kept the universe alone; For all the voice in answer he could wake Was but the mocking echo of his own From some tree-hidden cliff across the lake. (368)

As "original response," the Boy of Winander's calls foreground their textual self-reflexiveness, their difference from themselves. Whether we read the Boy's hootings as the call of the wild or "the call of the supplement" (Derrida, Writing 211), we are faced with a text redoubled with traces of other voices, other faces.29 The earliest version of the text, MS. JJ, with its wavering balance between first-person autobiography and third-person narration, contains a similar mimetic repetition in its description of the "pauses of deep silence" that "mocked" the Boy's skill (Norton Prelude 492; 1805 Prelude 5.405). "Mocked" becomes "baffled" by 1850, suggesting ridicule and usurpation, but "mocked" also repeats "mimic": silence imitates the Boy's song. To "answer" is not to mimic, unless the answer is echolalic, compulsively or automatically repetitive. The Boy's hootings, as onomatopoeic mimicry, are motivated. But they are also motivating: they stimulate both sound and silence. If we give linguistic and temporal priority to the Boy, however, we construct a hierarchy which is quickly undone by Nature; his voice is removed, suddenly deleted or overpowered by the silence of the grave. But even silence can be repeated: near his grave, Wordsworth writes, "A long half hour together I have stood / Mute" (5.396-7). The image of Wordsworth silently confronting a grave recurs throughout his poetry (for example, in both "spots of time," in the drowned man episode, even in the blind Beggar passage), and tells us what is different about this elegiac moment. Why is the poet mute? Is he "struck dumb," as Paul de Man would say, because the poet is "frozen in [his] own death" (Rhetoric 78) as a result of being apostrophized by the Boy? Yet how would this explain the animating power of the trope? The Boy experiences the ultimate aversion, being "rolled round in earth's diurnal course" (PW 2: 216), while the poet

27 Apostrophe Reconsidered

completes the circuit of address through his "mute dialogue" (2.268) with the grave. Instead of reading the Boy's epitaph, as we might expect him to do, he appears as if he were listening to it, quietly awaiting the Boy's call, like the silent owls earlier. The Boy's death is not the death of voice, but only a sleep and a forgetting of it: the personified church near which he "slumbers" is described as "forgetful" (5.402) Of all her silent neighbourhood of graves, And listening only to the gladsome sounds That, from the rural school ascending, play Beneath her and about her. (5.403-6)

"Listening only to the gladsome sounds": that is, not listening to the Boy, who nevertheless yet speaks? The "sounds" that "play," like music, about the "silent neighbourhood of graves" repeat the "jocund din" of the Boy's earlier colloquy. Death is not the end of voice for Wordsworth, but only another turning of voice - into stone or "speaking monument" (Prelude 8.172), or the epitaphic "speaking face of earth" (Prelude 5.13). The conferring of speech on nature, anticipated in the personifying apostrophe to the cliffs and islands, implies that the poet calls on these natural objects to have them testify, to make them "responsive to his call" or invocation. Reiterating this movement, the Boy plays Narcissus to the owls' Echo, giving them a voice but half their own. The poet, through his poem, mutely "answers" the Boy, whose hootings are now "the ghostly language of the ancient earth" (Prelude 2.309), de profundis. Gray's "Elegy," with another mute inglorious poet in another country churchyard, reverberates in the mind: "Ev'n from the tomb the voice of Nature cries" (37). The turning aside of address, even to the point of its turning around, carries us far into the interplay of voice in Wordsworth. In these "turnings intricate of verse" (Prelude 5.603), directional shifts from cause to effect, or from expostulation to reply, become redoubled when we discover that the source is already an echo, self-mimicking in its repetition. Like the "dear Sister" in book 14 of The Prelude (265), the Boy of Winander "teach[es] the little birds to build their nests / And warble in [their] chambers" (14.255-6). Even more, like Eve in another of Frost's poems, the Boy teaches the birds to sing: "Never again would birds' song be the same. / And to do that to birds was why [he] came" (369).

2 "Between Poetry and Oratory": Coleridge's Romantic Effusions Please confine your effusions to the large chalkboard provided on the fourth floor at the stacks elevators. Notice in university library carrel I refuse to effuse in public. Graffiti on above notice

In 1796 Samuel Taylor Coleridge published his first volume of poetry, entitled Poems on Various Subjects, which included three dozen poems designated as "Effusions."1 At least one of what we now regard as Coleridge's best poems, namely "The Eolian Harp," originally belonged to this genre of the effusion, and was first published in Coleridge's volume simply under the title of "Effusion xxxv." What exactly is an "effusion"? Where does it fit into preRomantic and Romantic literary history? And what predecessors might the young Coleridge have been thinking of when he composed his effusions? Can we legitimately talk about the effusion as a distinct genre or subgenre? While a considerable amount of work has been done on eighteenth-century and pre-Romantic lyric forms (M.H. Abrams's The Mirror and the Lamp and Marshall Brown's Preromanticism are two different examples), and their relation to the "emotion recollected in tranquillity" of high Romanticism, no study has looked at the genre of the effusion separately; when considered at all, the effusion is an emotional Romantic fragment, usually subsumed under the rubric of Coleridge's conversation poems, despite the fact that a number of effusions pre-date by up to eight years the composition of "The Nightingale," the one text Coleridge actually called "a conversation poem."2 Yet Coleridge himself suggests that these thirty-six poems of 1796 are to be considered separately: in the volume they are given a separate half-title page - simply "Effusions" - and an epigraph from William Lisle Bowles's Monody, Written at Matlock, October 1791,

29 Coleridge's Romantic Effusions

a poem that Coleridge singles out for praise in chapter 1 of his Biographia Literaria (1: 24). The poems are numbered in series, with one exception, from "Effusion 1" to "Effusion 36" in the table of contents; thirty poems have additional titles, such as "To Schiller," "To the Autumnal Moon," and "Complaint of Ninathoma," while six poems have no further title beyond "Effusion —."3 All these details suggest that the poems are to be considered as a unit - or, as I will suggest, as a genre in which Coleridge was experimenting from 1788 to 1796. I

It may seem like an invention of literary history to talk about the genre of the effusion; an effusion, as Abrams has written, merely connotes "a spontaneous expression of personal circumstances and feelings" (Correspondent Breeze 160). It is, as Paul Magnuson has said, "a separate expression of a moment, a lyric utterance of strong feeling, playful speculation, or political observation and not an ordered body of poetic thought" (5).4 Yet the terms in which Coleridge thought about his "Effusions" have as much to do with questions of genre as with emotional content and tone. In his preface to Poems on Various Subjects, he attempts to position the volume in contemporary literary tradition by referring the reader to related works. "Of the following Poems," Coleridge writes, a considerable number are styled "Effusions," in defiance of Churchill's line "Effusion on Effusion pour away." I could recollect no title more descriptive of the manner and matter of the Poems - I might indeed have called the majority of them Sonnets - but they do not possess that oneness of thought which I deem indispensible (sic) in a Sonnet - and (not a very honorable motive perhaps) I was fearful that the title "Sonnet" might have reminded my reader of the Poems of the Rev. W.L. Bowles - a comparison with whom would have sunk me below that mediocrity, on the surface of which I am at present enabled to float. (CPW 2: 1136-7)

I read this statement as confirming that the twenty-three-year-old Coleridge knew what he was doing in publishing his "Effusions": the topos of affected modesty at the end of this passage balances the earlier "defiance" of convention; the invocation of both Churchill and Bowles creates, as it were, the negative and positive poles framing Coleridge's own work; even the formulaic phrase "manner and

30 Romantic Aversions

matter" shows familiarity with traditional rhetorical theory. Coleridge's assumption that his readers immediately would have associated the title Sonnets with the recent work of Bowles instead of, say, Shakespeare may be at first curious, but it reinforces the view that Coleridge is not only responding to the contemporary eighteenthcentury literary scene more than to a great tradition, but aggressively defining the terms of reference by which his work is to be measured. Such aggressiveness, surpassing the milder convention of affected modesty, can be seen in Coleridge's contradictory publication of his sonnets along with Bowles's later the same year. In spring 1796 Coleridge professes that any comparison with Bowles would sink Poems on Various Subjects "below that mediocrity, on the surface of which I am at present enabled to float," yet by autumn he forces precisely such a comparison by binding his sonnets with Bowles's and several other contemporary poets', and adding a preface on the theory of the sonnet.5 Coleridge's term "effusions," however, appears to have been unfamiliar to contemporary reviewers of Poems on Various Subjects. For example, the anonymous reviewer in the Analytical Review (June 1796) writes: "To a collection of small pieces the author has chosen to give the name of Effusions: some of these are political, others descriptive, and others sentimental. A very small number of these effusions are devoted to love." The reviewer in the Critical Review (June 1796) praises Coleridge's poems: "They consist of sonnets, which, however, Mr. Coleridge chooses to call Effusions." John Aikin, in the Monthly Review (June 1796), notes Coleridge's originality, and especially "a principal division of the volume, styled 'Effusions.' These are short poems, many of them regular sonnets, others in a different form, but generally like them turning on a single thought, the topics of which are various; some breathing the high notes of freedom or fancy, some the softer strains of love and pity."6 The fact that the reviewers say that Coleridge "chooses" to call certain poems "effusions" suggests their response to the apparent arbitrariness or novelty of such a term; in the first and last examples, the brief definitions of what the effusions consist of confirm the unfamiliarity of Coleridge's choice of label. The reviewers nowhere identify any literary tradition in which an "effusion" might stand defined. Then what are we to make of the allusion to Churchill - "Effusion on Effusion pour away"? The line is taken from Charles Churchill's political satire The Candidate, published in 1764, in which the poet John Langhorne (1735-1779) comes under fire for his works The Effusions of Friendship and Fancy and The Enlargement of the Mind ... Written at Belvidere, both published in 1763. The immediate context

31 Coleridge's Romantic Effusions concerns a catalogue of "Scribblers" (25) who are mocked and dismissed by Churchill: Why may not LANGHORNE, simple in his lay, Effusion on Effusion pour away, With Friendship, and with Fancy trifle here, Or sleep in Pastoral at BELVIDERE? Sleep let them all, with DULLNESS on her throne, Secure from any malice, but their own. (The Candidate 41-6) Coleridge's citation of the line "Effusion on Effusion pour away" does not engage the literary politics of Churchill's attack on Langhorne so much as it seems to declare, "in defiance" of certain literary opinion, Coleridge's intent to redeem the genre of the effusion from disrepute by clearing it of the charge of what he calls "querulous egotism" (CPW 2: 1135). While Coleridge may not have been concerned exactly to vindicate Langhorne, we know that he did have more than a passing acquaintance with his work: he owned a copy of Langhorne's well-known edition of Collins, and in that edition in 1793 he wrote two poems which he called "Effusions."7 But before we can pursue what Coleridge meant by the term effusion, and how it is related to egotism, we need to consider briefly Langhorne's Effusions. The first characteristic to notice is that Langhorne's work, whose full title is The Effusions of Friendship and Fancy. In Several Letters to and from Select Friends, is not a book of poetry at all, but rather two volumes of (in the first edition) sixty-two prose letters, some containing poetic extracts, written mainly on topics of literary criticism, theology, philosophy, and society.8 Letter 10 from volume 2, for example, claims that "Milton's Comus is, beyond all comparison, the finest poem in the English language"; letter 16 in the same volume disagrees with Quintilian over what a proper hyperbole should be. In volume 1, letter 23, Langhorne discusses pastoral poetry, and in the next letter he attacks the three unities of drama as "petty tyrants" that create only "a dull regularity, an insipid consistency." One letter that deserves attention is number 37 of volume 1, addressed to an unnamed male correspondent: If I had not received so many interesting proofs of the sincerity of your friendship, I should now begin to doubt it. You will wonder how this should come into my head, and possibly you may laugh at me, when I tell you that my suspicion arises only from the different style of your letters. It is very true, my friend, your letters, which were once so easy and degagee, the careless effusions of the heart, are now, to my great mortification, polished

32 Romantic Aversions and smoothed off like the modulated periods of the Rambler. You know you have already so much of my affection that it is scarce possible for you to increase it, and perhaps, therefore, you send me these elegant compositions to add to my esteem - well then, you have gained your end. I now know and esteem your elegant talent very highly, and desire that I may have no more proofs of it. Relapse into that unstudied negligence, those natural, friendly, genuine overflowings of the heart, which I have heretofore so much admired in your letters, and which delighted me more than the most finished periods. What have you and I to do with accuracy and elegance, who never intend that our letters shall be printed? Let those write like Seneca or Balsac, who like them design to publish their letters, as memorials of their friendship. Be it enough that our friendship last as long as we live; for, believe me, those that come after us will not care whether we loved or hated each other. Come then, my friend, let us unbend a little, and talk in our old strain What have you been doing this season ... ? (1: 163-6)9

What is "effusive" about this letter? One feature is its "easy" style - chatty and witty on the surface, yet revealing a formal, selfconscious rhetoric in its deliberate structure. The letter thematizes letter-writing precisely on the question of style. Acknowledging the fact of friendship in the first sentence ("proofs of the sincerity of your friendship"), the letter-writer reciprocates that point in the fourth sentence ("so much of my affection"), and finally mockingly rejects it ("no more proofs of it" [i.e., "esteem" inspired by literary talent]). Alternating with these statements of friendship is the commentary on style, in which Langhorne openly asks his correspondent to return to the "easy and degagee" style of writing and abandon his more recent "polished and smoothed off" manner. The ideal is to write letters that are "the careless effusions of the heart" and not "the modulated periods of the Rambler." Langhorne reiterates the point by asking his correspondent to "[r] elapse into that unstudied negligence, those natural, friendly, genuine overflowings of the heart" and leave behind "the most finished periods." A genuine style argues a genuine friendship, while an artificial style raises doubts: Langhorne's "suspicion" over the correspondent's ingenuousness "arises only from the different style of [his] letters." Where there is leisure for elegance there can be little sincerity. Yet what is the reason given for thinking that a polished style implies insincerity? The answer is audience: writing with "accuracy and elegance" instead of "unstudied negligence" suggests that one writes for an audience other than the immediate one - for a public audience rather than a private one. This rhetorical strategy is not an

33 Coleridge's Romantic Effusions

aversion of discourse, obviously not apostrophic, yet it does raise the question of who is the proper or intended reader. Such style, Langhorne implies, smacks of serving two masters at once: I am writing to you, but I am not really writing to you because ultimately I am writing for publication or for posterity. "What have you and I to do with accuracy and elegance, who never intend that our letters shall be printed?" he asks, 1: 60-1)."10 The argument presented in this letter implicitly defines an effusion as a spontaneous overflow - a literal definition, since effusion etymologically means a pouring out. Thus Churchill's line "Effusion on Effusion pour away" manages to pun on Langhorne's title while conveying a sense of the gushing quality and quantity of his writings. To effuse, or to effude, usually connotes the act of pouring forth a liquid, often blood or tears. In figurative usage, what effuses is the "overflowings of the heart," as Langhorne puts it. But in the classical topos of effusis habenis, or the loosening of the reins, we find the trope of effusion applied to discourse, to what Cicero and Quintilian call the genus sermonis, the art of speaking and conversing. To let go the reins of language means to give in to passion, to "the careless effusions of the heart." "Slackened reins" is a recurrent Virgilian figure.11 Coleridge taps into this tradition through a particular source, Petrarch's Epistola Barbato Sulmonensi, which he quotes first in chapter 1 of the Biographia Literaria in the context of Bowles's sonnets (1: 13-14), then in chapter 10 in Coleridge's self-characterization as a frustrated poet (1: 221-2), and thirdly in chapter 14 in his definition of a poet. As well, in 1813 he copied a passage from Petrarch's Epistola into a notebook (BL 2: 16n6). In chapter 14 of the Biographia, Coleridge outlines how the poet's imagination, "first put in action by the will and understanding, and retained under their irremissive, though gentle and unnoticed, controul (laxis effertur habenis) reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities" (2: 16). The tag "laxis effertur habenis," meaning "carried on with slackened reins" (2: 16n6), is from Petrarch's Epistola.12 "Effertur" is cognate with effusion; imagination flows, but the will and the understanding rein it in. There is a deep intertextual thread running through this passage: Coleridge's previous sentence states that the poet "diffuses a tone, and spirit of unity, that blends, and (as it were) fuses, each into each, by that synthetic and magical power, to which we have exclusively appropriated the name of imagination" (Coleridge's emphasis). I am alerted by the figural disclaimer of "(as it were)," which calls attention to Coleridge's rhetoric more than his logic, and specifically the figure of polyptoton: the poet "diffuses" as well as "fuses"; what

34 Romantic Aversions

goes without saying, except in the Petrarchan intertext, is that the poet also effuses. Petrarch's Epistola is again invoked in chapter 10 when Coleridge quotes the line "Quas humilis tenero stylus olim effudit in aevo" - "that once, in tender youth, my humble pen poured forth" (1: 222, 222n2). The Petrarchan intertext is both a literary topos and a lived experience for the young Coleridge. We begin to see the disguised but recognizable presence of the genus sermonis in Coleridge's early "Effusions." His numerous texts entitled and addressed "To X" obviously adopt a style that we would now designate as "conversational," albeit anachronistically. In the context of the rhetorical definitions laid down in chapter 1, we may offer a clearer definition. The effusion is defined by its rhetorical structure of address and aversion. It depends on the directing and the redirecting of discourse. If we trace the trajectory of one line of Coleridge's poetic career through such poems as "The Eolian Harp," "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison," "Frost at Midnight," "The Nightingale," "Dejection: An Ode," and "To William Wordsworth," we see that they all depend on an explicit, formal structure of address: a clearly delineated speaker, a message, and a specific, often specifically named, recipient. Against certain notions of the private nature of Romantic discourse, we have to say that this is not poetry to be "overheard"; this is poetry to be received loud and clear. Coleridge is always at pains to ensure that the reader gets the message; like Wordsworth, he assumes that the poet is "a man speaking to men" (Wordsworth, Prose 1: 138), although in a decidedly different rhetoric from Wordsworth's. Contrary to John Stuart Mill's distinction (12), Coleridge's poetry partakes of the nature, not of soliloquy, but of oratory. Or it partakes, as Coleridge himself described it in a manuscript note, of "a sort of middle thing between Poetry and Oratory" (CPW 1: 257n). This notion of a sort of poetry that is not poetry, or is "between" poetry and something else, can be found throughout Coleridge's work. The best-known example is the note to "Kubla Khan," in which Coleridge says that the fragmentary text is published "rather as a psychological curiosity, than on the ground of any supposed poetic merits" (CPW 1: 295). In a similar self-cancelling manner, the subtitle of his "Address to a Young Jack-Ass," as published in the Morning Chronicle, 30 December 1794, indicates that the poem is written "in familiar verse" (CPW 1: 74). In a note to his sonnet "On Receiving a Letter Informing Me of the Birth of a Son," Coleridge writes that "This sonnet puts in no claim to poetry ... but it is a most faithful picture of my feelings on a very interesting event" (CPW 1 153). Coleridge's "Reflections On Having Left A Place of Retirement,"

35 Coleridge's Romantic Effusions

whose original subtitle was "A Poem which affects not to be Poetry/' makes a similar rhetorical gesture by opening the Romantic text to other discourses. Even more significant, though, is the Horatian motto that Coleridge added in 1797 to replace the subtitle of "Reflections": "Sermoni propriora," which may be translated as "more suitable to prose/conversation," but which Coleridge himself facetiously translated as "Properer for a Sermon."13 This epigraph is all the more interesting when we consider that it is taken from Horace's first book, commonly called Satires, but actually entitled Sermones, or conversations.14 And when Coleridge described his 1798 poem "Fears in Solitude" he again echoed his Horatian intertext: "N.B. The above ["Fears in Solitude"] is perhaps not Poetry, - but rather a sort of middle thing between Poetry and Oratory - sermoni propriora. Some parts are, I am conscious, too tame even for animated prose" (CPW 1: 257).15 What is this "middle thing between Poetry and Oratory"? To position Coleridge's "Effusions" we need to know the relative status of their framing discourses, but can we even be sure which term, poetry or oratory, is the privileged one? And where does the last element, "animated prose," fit in? Does a literary genre that is "properer for a sermon" belong to the same tradition as Milton's poetry, which is "of power beside the office of a pulpit" (Milton, Complete 669), or does it settle for some "middle flight" (Paradise Lost 1.14)?16 Coleridge considers some of these questions at length in his Biographia Literaria, partly in the context of his analysis of Wordsworth, but here in the early poems of the 1790s the answers are not so easily reached. I suggest that for the younger Coleridge these terms are all interinvolved, overlapping; they define not discrete discourses, but rather tendencies within his different rhetorical voices.17 The genre in which Coleridge was experimenting in the 1790s, the genus sermonis that combines aspects of poetry, oratory, and animated prose, partakes of the rhetoric of "correspondence." This is the intertextual after-effect of Langhorne's Effusions: effusions, whether in prose or poetry, share the nature of epistolary writing, not least the genres of the eighteenth-century familiar letter and the literary epistle.18 As the precursor of the conversation poem, the effusion assumes as its rhetorical ground a literary structure of address and aversion. At once familiar, spontaneous, personal, immediate, and conversational, Coleridge's effusions exploit the rhetorical possibilities of verse epistles, yet they also adapt the formalities of other poetic styles of address, such as the ode or the "Address to X." Coleridge's effusions are both public - that is, formal, political, and oratorical - and private - easy, intimate, self-referring. As such, they

36 Romantic Aversions

conform to the very paradoxes of correspondence itself, which, as Charles Lamb suggests in his essay on letter-writing, must be both formal and informal.19 Wordsworth, known for his "aversion from writing" (Early Years 407), is forever the "man speaking to men"; Coleridge, famous for his sublime table-talk, is a preeminent conversationalist, yet at the same time the poet of the letter, of the written word. His "Effusions," with all their outpouring of feeling, inhabit that middle ground so deliberately staked out by the young Coleridge - a discourse somewhere "between": between negligence and elegance, between naturalness and polish, between the most finished and, alas for Coleridge, the mostly unfinished periods. II

The notion that Coleridge's "Effusions" lie partway "between Poetry and Oratory" is corroborated by his 1796 preface to Poems on Various Subjects, in which he addresses the problems raised by a poetic discourse that is both public and private - that is, personal and familiar in its content, but public in its literally being published. Coleridge fears being "condemned for [the] querulous egotism" (CPW 2: 1135) of a genre that, in an uncanny way, brings forth into the open those things which properly should have remained hidden. He writes: The communicativeness of our nature leads us to describe our own sorrows; in the endeavor to describe them intellectual activity is exerted; and by a benevolent law of our nature from intellectual activity a pleasure results which is gradually associated and mingles as a corrective with the painful subject of the description. True! it may be answered, but how are the PUBLIC interested in your sorrows or your description? We are for ever attributing a personal unity to imaginary aggregates. What is the PUBLIC but a term for a number of scattered individuals of whom as many will be interested in these sorrows as have experienced the same or similar? (CPW 2: 1136)

By focusing on the "communicativeness" - that is, the expressiveness - of human nature and the poetic spirit, Coleridge affirms the possibility of a "correspondence" between poet and reader, between the person describing the sorrow and the person reading about it. This one-on-one correspondence is undoubtedly what motivates Coleridge's fracturing of an alleged monolithic "PUBLIC" (unity in multeity) into "scattered individuals" (multeity in unity). Even Coleridge's phrasing suggests a grammar of deconstruction in the opposition between, on the one hand, "imaginary aggregates" and, on the other, "scattered individuals" defined by difference rather than by "personal unity": in a simple shift from plural to singular number,

37 Coleridge's Romantic Effusions

"How are the PUBLIC" becomes "What is the PUBLIC." Coleridge makes a similar point in chapter 3 of the Biogmphia Literaria, where he traces the rise of the despotic reading audience from '"learned readers'" to "'the candid reader'" to "THE TOWN" and finally to "the multitudinous PUBLIC, shaped into personal unity by the magic of abstraction" (1: 59). In this context, no poet can say "I refuse to effuse in public"; every effusion, no matter how private and personal its content, is by definition a public act, an outpouring or outering or uttering of feeling. Here, then, is where the "egotism" of the effusion may be found: in Coleridge's polemic against contemporary convention we see him arguing for the speaking "I" as a privileged voice: With what anxiety every fashionable author avoids the word I! - now he transforms himself into a third person, - "the present writer" - now multiplies himself and swells into "we" - and all this is the watchfulness of guilt. Conscious that this said I is perpetually intruding on his mind and that it monopolizes his heart, he is prudishly solicitous that it may not escape from his lips. (CPW 2: 1136)

"Men old and hackneyed in the ways of the world," Coleridge continues, "are scrupulous avoiders of Egotism" (CPW 2: 1136). But obviously not young poets, publishing their first volume of poems. Again we hear the "defiance" of young Coleridge, taking on "every fashionable author" and staking his own claim against theirs. "Compositions resembling those of the present volume [Poems on Various Subjects]," he writes, somewhat defensively, are not unfrequently condemned for their querulous egotism. But egotism is to be condemned then only when it offends against time and place, as in an History or an Epic Poem. To censure it in a Monody or a Sonnet is almost as absurd as to dislike a circle for being round. Why then write Sonnets or Monodies? Because they give me pleasure when perhaps nothing else could. (CPW 2: 1135-6)

Coleridge may be egotistical in his attack on the anti-egotists, but his polemical preface also offers the more traditional grounds of literary decorum and genre as support for his argument. By freeing up the "said I," that is, the speaking I, Coleridge is able to stake out the rhetorical territory that properly belongs to the effusion. But at the same time he also stakes out the territory of the said ear, that group of "imaginary aggregates" called the PUBLIC. Arguing for acceptance of a passionate, "egotistical" speaker, Coleridge implies

38 Romantic Aversions

a correspondent listener who is fit to share the "communicativeness" of the poet's feelings. And because such a correspondence necessarily means a rhetoric of address, the fundamental structure of any speech act, Coleridge's curious defence of egotism in poetry thus is a displaced strategy for securing his audience. What looks like a justification for "I" turns out to be a pretext for "You." These questions of audience might well be called Horatian, for they are the same difficulties that Horace faced when he began writing his Epistulae. Having published his Sermones, or "talks" on literature and life at least a decade earlier,20 Horace turned to the verse letter, where he explored the convention of a rhetorical structure similar to that of a sermo in its formal use of apostrophe and address. In a similar cross-genre shift, Coleridge included five "Epistles" after his thirty-six "Effusions," along with a separate epigraph: Good verse most good, and bad verse then seems better Receiv'd from absent friend by way of Letter. For what so sweet can labor'd lays impart As one rude rhyme warm from a friendly heart?

As this motto suggests, there is considerable similarity and generic overlap between an effusion and an epistle. Like Langhorne, Coleridge prefers "one rude rhyme warm from a friendly heart" over "labor'd lays." The fact that this last line, Coleridge's own enactment of a "rude rhyme," is itself deliberately "labor'd" is a fully ironic and relevant issue. Langhorne's influence presents itself here in Coleridge's "Epistles," as much as in his "Effusions," to the extent that the "careless effusions of the heart" again surpass the "most finished periods." But Coleridge makes the distinction between "labor'd lays" and "one rude rhyme" specifically in the context of a particular structure of address, or correspondence, "receiv'd from absent friend by way of Letter." What makes possible the favouring of negligence over polish is the personal aspect of the correspondent speech act. Coleridge seems to say, after Langhorne, "What have you and I to do with accuracy and elegance, who never intend that our letters shall be printed"? In a predictably paradoxical way, however, he publishes verse letters in 1796 written in the "easy and dégagée" style; but no convention of affected modesty can cover up the palpable evidence of labour used to hide labour. Epistles, by definition, assume primarily a direct rhetoric of address, though secondary or oblique addressees may also be aimed at through variations or aversions in style and voice. Similarly, Cole-

39 Coleridge's Romantic Effusions

ridge's Horatian effusions depend on rhetorical address. Of the thirty-six poems called "Effusions" in 1796, at least twenty-seven explicitly use either simple direct address or an aversion of address. The table of contents even claims that Effusion VIII is addressed "To Kosciusco" when, in fact, the poem is about him, not written to him. Everywhere, even in places where it doesn't belong, the structure of address is present. Consider, for example, "Effusion xxxiv," entitled "To an Infant." The opening line immediately establishes the rhetoric of address: "Ah! cease thy tears and sobs, my little Life!" (CPW 1: 91). As I showed in chapter 1, the introductory "Ah!" should not produce the reaction: "Here is an apostrophe to an infant." The title already tells the reader that this text is directed to the babe; apostrophe plays no role. But curiously, in a manuscript version the poem begins in a different mode: How yon sweet Child my Bosom's grief beguiles With soul-subduing Eloquence of smiles! Ah lovely Babe! in thee myself I scan Thou weepest! sure those Tears proclaim thee Man! (MS. E; CPW 1: 91)

Here we do have an aversion, from "yon sweet Child" to "thou." This text does not begin by speaking to the babe: the initial line obviously distances him as an object of contemplation; the apostrophic turn occurs with the same "Ah" as in the final version. Why should Coleridge remove these opening lines, thus turning an apostrophe into an address? I suggest that it is because of the conceit that he will develop in the poem as a whole, the simple reflexive analogy between the babe and the man: "in thee myself I scan." In the finished version, Coleridge has the first verse paragraph deal primarily with the child; the analogy that the babe is a man and the man a babe does not come until line 15, and then is elaborated in the second verse paragraph. If the babe is "Man's breathing Miniature" (15) compare "my little Life" in line 1 - then the converse is true: "A Babe art thou - and such a Thing am I!" (16). The man, however, is not a child vis-a-vis his babe, but vis-a-vis his "Faith." Hence the motivation in the second paragraph for him to turn to apostrophize it: O thou that rearest with celestial aim The future Seraph in my mortal frame, Thrice holy Faith! whatever thorns I meet

40 Romantic Aversions As on I totter with unpractis'd feet, Still let me stretch my arms and cling to thee, Meek nurse of souls through their long Infancy! (21-6)

The analogy between the physically immature baby and the spiritually infantile poet is complete in its rhetorical balance within the poem. Coleridge was surely right to cut the first two lines in the manuscript version because they spoil the symmetry between the address to the babe and the aversio invoking "Faith." By directing the discourse first to his child and then, through that build-up of spiritual anguish so frequently found in Coleridge, redirecting it to a "thrice holy" auditor, Coleridge positions himself squarely between two polarized audiences, neither of whom necessarily understands what he is saying. The apostrophe to faith, with its obvious prayerlike qualities, does not end with a benediction for the child, in the way that "Frost at Midnight," for example, does; rather, it completes the conceit by showing Coleridge in relation to a heavenly father in precisely the same way that the babe is in relation to Coleridge. The apostrophe to faith is effective in turning the poem from infantile subjects to the higher stakes implicit in such matter, and for introducing the note of pathos into Coleridge's self-characterization, a recurrent trope in his ceuvre. As in forensic oratory, so here: Coleridge seeks confirmation - in this case, spiritual witness - in his passionate turn to faith. Not that his turning is successful, however: throughout his career Coleridge anxiously looks for a saving grace, some healing faith that would redeem him as a miserrimus, most miserable man, yet the reader can never be sure that the turn to a spiritual or supernatural auditor is efficacious. Did you get my message? The disquieting possibility that needs to be considered is that Coleridge's salvation works precisely to the extent that his rhetorical aversions succeed. Even in Coleridge's self-composed "Epitaph," there is a doubleness in that the speaker of the poem is constructed as someone other than Coleridge, since he is referred to in the third person. The opening exclamations - "Stop, Christian passer-by! - Stop, child of God" (1) - the request to the traveller-reader to "lift one thought in prayer for S.T.C.," and the final injunction, "Do thou the same," constitute a dialogue between speaker and audience that is complicated by the unavoidable knowledge that Coleridge has effected a ventriloquistic turn from his own voice to that of a persona. To write one's own epitaph in the third person is a curious, though not unprecedented, act of removal. It is not exaggeration to say that in Coleridge faith depends on figure, or that an inward and spiritual grace depends on an adequate external and rhetorical expression of

41 Coleridge's Romantic Effusions it. The paradigm reminds us of the pattern of repeated frustrations in "Lycidas,'' in which apostrophe ("Where were ye Nymphs?") does not always produce the anticipated effect ("Had ye been there - for what could that have done?"). The scheme of failed aversions haunts Coleridge's poetry to the end.

1ll The section of Poems on Various Subjects designated as "Effusions" has, on the reverse of its separate title page, an epigraph from William Lisle Bowles's Monody, Written at Matlock, October 1791. The epigraph reads: Content, as random Fancies might inspire If his weak harp at times or lonely lyre He struck with desultory hand, and drew Some soften'd tones to Nature not untrue. These lines are, especially in the context of "Effusion xxxv" ("The Eolian Harp"), an appropriate epigraph in imagery and sentiment. They are also a fitting introduction to "Effusion 1" (an earlier version of which appeared in the Morning Chronicle of 26 December 1794), which begins, "My heart has thank'd thee, BOWLES! for those soft strains / Whose sadness soothes me." The "soft strains" can be read as referring to Bowles's poetry generally - which had a limited, but formative effect on the young poet Coleridge (see chapter 4 below) - and also as echoing specifically the "soften'd tones" of the motto. But oddly, the verses in the epigraph as given by Coleridge are not the actual words that Bowles wrote. By contrast, the original lines in Bowles's Monody read: Content, as random fancies might inspire, If his weak reed, at times, or lonely lyre He touch'd with desultory hand, and drew Some soften'd tones, to nature not untrue.21 Coleridge's changing of Bowles's "reed" to "harp," and his "touch'd" to "struck," is curious, all the more for the fact that no commentator has noted Coleridge's arbitrary revisions.22 It may be that Coleridge was simply quoting from memory, yet, as with any parapraxis, a deeper, unconscious motivation is likely responsible for this overdetermination of harp and lyre. The "weak reed" of Bowles becomes the "weak harp" of Coleridge, in an ironic misprision that proves Coleridge to be anything but a weak reader, rather a strong misreader

42 Romantic Aversions

of texts. The corresponding change from "touch'd" to "struck" follows a certain logic, musically speaking: one can imagine what touching a reed means - doing the fingering, or playing the oaten stops - but one is hard pressed to conceive what striking a reed would do. The revisions remind one of the difference between Milton's "Crop your young" and his later "Shatter your leaves" at the beginning of "Lycidas":23 it is again the difference between a strong and a weak "read." The context of the passage in Bowles is part of a dramatic surmise - what "some lov'd companion" visiting the grave of a bard "might say." Conventionally, the two classical metonymies of the bard are the reed and the lyre, as in "Lycidas,"24 yet here Coleridge replaces the wind instrument with a stringed instrument which is "struck" by either human hand or natural breeze. Following this epitaphic moment, Bowles's Monody, like Milton's "monody," continues with an apostrophe, in Bowles's case to the river Derwent. This is not the sole instance of Coleridge's unauthorized and unacknowledged tampering with other people's words. As Paul M. Zall has shown in detail, Coleridge arbitrarily edited, without acknowledgment, sonnets by other poets compiled in his 1796 Sonnets from Various Authors. What interests me here is not the ethics of such editorial revisions but rather their rhetorical and psychological motivation. What might Coleridge have been thinking when he altered Bowles? Was Milton's "Lycidas" as present intertextually as I have been suggesting? Inasmuch as an effusion is an expression of passion, could Coleridge have been recalling Samuel Johnson's judgment that "Lycidas" is "not to be considered as the effusion of real passion"? "Where there is leisure for fiction there is little grief," Johnson said, and proceeded to dismiss pastoral poetry as "easy, vulgar, and therefore disgusting" (Patrides 60-1). The overdetermination of harp and lyre in Coleridge's epigraph involves the intersection of both Milton and music, an overdetermined crossing in itself. A close-up of a few passages will demonstrate what is at stake in Coleridge's intertextuality, and how it relates to a concern with rhetoric and genre. The epigraph anticipates the themes and images of effusiveness. Coleridge has harps on the brain. In the epigraph the harp and lyre are actively struck by human hands - albeit weakly and desultorily, as part of Coleridge's signature of conventional modesty - but by the time we reach "Effusion xxxv," almost the end of the "Effusions" as a group, the harp has become not just a literal instrument acted on by human fingers or by a natural wind but a figural harp played on by an "intellectual breeze" ("Eolian Harp" 47). Even at the beginning, in "Effusion 1," Coleridge introduces certain aeolian overtones

43 Coleridge's Romantic Effusions

that resonate throughout the texts as a whole. In the first poem, addressed to Bowles, Coleridge thanks him for the soothing power of his "soft strains" that have caused "a strange mysterious PLEASURE" to "brood / Over the wavy and tumultuous mind, / As the great SPIRIT erst with plastic sweep / Mov'd on the darkness of the unform'd deep" (CPW 1: 85). Compare these lines to the well-known climax of "Effusion xxxv": And what if all of animated nature Be but organic Harps diversly fram'd, That tremble into thought, as o'er them sweeps, Plastic and vast, one intellectual Breeze, At once the Soul of each, and God of all?

The trope of a harp played by a divine, creative maestro unites the two passages, along with specific echoes of "sweeps," "plastic," and other verbal repetitions - for example, in "Effusion i," Coleridge is a "thought-bewilder'd man"; in "Effusion xxxv," he is "Wilder'd and dark." Whether the spirit of creation sweeps across the waters, as in the sonnet to Bowles, or moves over "all of animated nature," it is sufficiently clear that Coleridge has in mind an aeolian figure whose rhetorical provenance includes both Genesis and Paradise Lost. Thus the image of the harp recurs throughout the "Effusions" in both muted and explicit ways: in "Effusion xxiii" ("To the Nightingale"), Coleridge has to tell the bird that its voice, "Tho' sweeter far than the delicious airs / That vibrate from a white-arm'd Lady's harp," is "not so sweet as is the voice of her, / My Sara." More subtly, even a trope such as "thrills" - Sara "thrills me with the Husband's promis'd name" ("Effusion xxiii") - contains overtones of a vibrating string or heart-string. When Coleridge changed the title of "Effusion xxxv" to "The Eolian Harp" in 1797, he was only raising to the level of explicit theme what had been an underlying trope of the effusions as a whole. But he also introduced new resonances. Through its revised title, "The Eolian Harp" suggests that it might be read, on some level at least, as a poem about music, in the way that Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale," in its original publication in Annals of the Fine Arts in 1819, implies that it too might be read as a poem about the art of music. But such has not been the case with Coleridge's text. Commentary has generally focused on the figural aspects of the poem's title, and not on its literal concerns, or on the intertextuality of its musical conceit.25 Yet there is justification for reading Coleridge's "Eolian Harp" as a poem about music. The topos of the harp, of

44 Romantic Aversions

course, is both ancient and modern, whether it is hung up on the willows as a political gesture, a refusal to sing the Lord's song in a foreign land, or whether it is connected with some more familiar lay, as in Hector MacNeill's The Harp (1789), in which the hero's lament is based on the burden "I'll never burn my harp for a woman!" (1: 7-25). Coleridge does not quite burn his harp for Sara, though more than one reader has noted how "The Eolian Harp" dissolves in a "failure of imaginative nerve" (Mileur 40) that can be read as a trope for the same thing.26 The Bowles motto sounds the keynote for the lyrical effusions to follow, and many of the themes running through the poems culminate in "The Eolian Harp," the penultimate effusion of the group, and also Coleridge's favourite.27 In tracing connections between rhetoric and genre, in this case between harps and effusions, I wish to consider a passage immediately following the poet's well-known description of the music of the lute itself - how its sweet moans sound "like some coy maid half yielding to her Lover" (15): And that simplest Lute Plac'd length-ways in the clasping casement, hark! How by the desultory breeze caress'd, Like some coy Maid half-yielding to her Lover, It pours such sweet upbraiding, as must needs Tempt to repeat the wrong!

Here again we have a "desultory" sweeping of the strings, as in the Bowles epigraph, but with the difference that the touching has turned to sexual caressing. The "sweet upbraiding," or protestation of the "coy Maid," which seems to elicit the wrong response in the lover, is in effect a reprise of similar tempting and attempted wrongs in "Effusion xxviii" ("The Kiss"): In tender accents, faint and low, Well-pleas'd I hear the whisper'd "No!" The whisper'd "No" - how little meant! Sweet Falsehood that endears Consent! For on those lovely lips the while Dawns the soft relenting smile, And tempts with feign'd dissuasion coy The gentle violence of loy.

In this effusion, apparently, no does not mean no. Here is a new way to characterize the conversation poem: it belongs to the genre of "he

45 Coleridge's Romantic Effusions

said, she said." This text, one of Coleridge's more sexually explicit, shares several details with the better-known "Eolian Harp," including the coyness of the woman, the tempting of the male, and the impending wrong or "violence." "The Kiss" is Coleridge's equivalent of Donne's "The Flea," in that both operate on a simple metaphysical or Romantic conceit designed to convince a woman to consent sexually. Coleridge's poem is rhetoric with a purpose. He uses erotesis, or the rhetorical question, for erotic ends: "Ah why refuse the blameless bliss? / Can danger lurk within a kiss?" From the poet's point of view, of course, the answer is implied, even as the woman's later answer is denied: "The whisper'd 'No' - how little meant!" By comparison, the "sweet upbraiding" in "The Eolian Harp," oxymoronic in its rhetorical form, tempts the interpreter to a double entendre, acknowledging "wrong" but disregarding it in search of more sweetness and "Joy." This disregard, or wilful misprision - how little meant! - has clear associations with an allegory of reading within the text: Coleridge inserts scenes of interpretation or misinterpretation into his poetry, as if to underscore his own anxiety over a "dream of communication" and to foreground reading and its differences.28 Coleridge is, to some extent, following certain pre-Romantic guides. Thomson's Castle of Indolence, with its descriptions of the aeolian harp (1.40) of the wizard Indolence, and the "British harp" (2.46) of the Knight's Bard, dramatizes the competition between different ethical powers of music - that which puts to sleep, and that which awakens. Coleridge's allegedly "indolent and passive brain" in "The Eolian Harp" (41) is active at least in its echoes of Thomson. The symbolic power of music to draw or entrance its listeners has its provenance in the myth of Orpheus, a text which subtly informs Coleridge's poem. But if we want a more immediate eighteenthcentury hintertext linking a harp and an erotic undersong, we need look no further than William Collins's "The Passions: An Ode for Music," in which the poet's "flying Fingers kiss'd the Strings" (89). Now while the initial music of Coleridge's harp is distinctly erotic, the speaker goes on to describe the changing sounds emitted by the wind-caressed lute: And now, its strings Boldlier swept, the long sequacious notes Over delicious surges sink and rise ... (17-19)

There is much here, and in the succeeding descriptive passage, that deserves notice, but I want to spotlight only two things: the verbal phrase "boldlier swept," and the adjective "sequacious."

46 Romantic Aversions

"Boldlier swept" calls attention to itself as a somewhat unusual grammatical construction: the use of the comparative adverb "boldlier" instead of the phrase "more boldly" was not common in Coleridge's day.29 The comparative "boldlier" throws into relief the contrast between the soft or "coy" music of the harp produced by a "desultory breeze" and the bolder music produced by a wind that more loudly sweeps the strings. More loudly? More boldly, the poet says. Yet to sweep a stringed instrument more boldly, that is, more forcefully - a Pete Townsend windmill, not a pizzicato - is also to sweep it more loudly, thus transforming the musical coy excuse of the maid into something different - a "witchery of sound" (20). The first intertext of this passage I have already insinuated into my reading so far by my quoting words and phrases from a poem troped by Coleridge here in "The Eolian Harp." That poem, I suggest, is "Lycidas," and the relevant passage occurs, coincidentally, at the precisely corresponding point in Milton's poem. The second verse paragraph of "Lycidas" opens: Begin, then, Sisters of the sacred well, That from beneath the seat of Jove doth spring, Begin, and somewhat loudly sweep the string. Hence with denial vain, and coy excuse ... (15-18)

The similarities in diction and phrasing between these lines and those from "The Eolian Harp" are unmistakable. Milton's command to the muses to "begin, and somewhat loudly sweep the string" of the poetic harp becomes a fait accompli in Coleridge: "its strings / Boldlier swept," Coleridge's lute yields up its music. And in both poems this yielding up by a harp that is more loudly or more boldly played transforms a coyness already asserted in the texts: Milton's "coy excuse," or affected modesty, for sweeping the harp so timidly, and Coleridge's "coy maid," who is usually read as a trope for the timidly played lute itself. Both Milton and Coleridge ask a female to yield, to give it up. Whether "it" is chaste inspiration, as in Milton's invocation of the muses (but recall his lingering desire "to sport with Amaryllis in the shade, / Or with the tangles of Neaera's hair"), or whether "it" means mischief in Coleridge's projected honeymoon vision, the analogous relation between poems remains clear. At the same time, however, we hear the familiar conceit, no less Miltonic than it is Romantic, that the harp or lute is a trope for the poet himself. Camille Paglia is right to suggest that readers have been mistaken in identifying the harp solely with Sara. Sara, she argues,

47 Coleridge's Romantic Effusions

"is imaginatively peripheral. Coleridge addresses her only to remind himself who or what he should be" (319). What about the word "sequacious"? K.M. Wheeler writes that "the form as adjective is rarely met with and acts to distance the semantic content and to add a strangeness in the midst of familiarity" (74); Jill Rubenstein argues that "sequacious" is "a vaguely pejorative term suggesting servility and lack of individuality" (55). It is by no means a frequent word in Coleridge's poetry but it is a significant one significant enough that Thomas De Quincey, writing in 1851, felt obliged to acknowledge Coleridge's use of it. In one of his essays on Pope, De Quincey draws a comparison to Dryden. "Dryden had within him," De Quincey writes, "a principle of continuity which was not satisfied without lingering upon his own thoughts, brooding over them and oftentimes pursuing them through their unlinkings with the sequaciousness (pardon a Coleridgian word) that belongs to some process of creative nature, such as the unfolding of a flower" (Collected Writings 11: 119). "Sequaciousness" reminded De Quincey of Coleridge, undoubtedly of this very passage from "The Eolian Harp," in which "the long sequacious notes / Over delicious surges sink and rise," their musical pitch climbing and falling like waves. The word "sequacious" in this context means simply that the notes follow one another in a regular or wavelike pattern; "sequel" and "sequence" are two cognate words. Though the adjective "sequacious," according to the Oxford English Dictionary, was common in the seventeenth century, especially in scientific discourse (and therefore in a context that Coleridge possibly would have known), there is one instance of its use in a musical context that is significant for us. It is Dryden's 1687 "Song for St Cecilia's Day," in which Dryden writes: Orpheus could lead the savage race; And trees unrooted left their place, Sequacious of the lyre ... (Dryden 3: 48-50)

Here, the power of Orpheus's music causes animals, not to mention rocks and stones and trees, to follow the poet. Nature becomes sequacious of art. With Coleridge, the musical notes themselves are sequacious, and what they follow is one another in continuous melody. Is it not highly significant that De Quincey, speaking of Dryden, should think of and acknowledge Coleridge on the word "sequaciousness"? "Sequacious," it is fair to say, is Dryden's word; yet Coleridge's appropriation of it is so complete as to screen out in De Quincey's memory (and what a memory!) the original intertext.

48 Romantic Aversions

Why should Milton and Dryden be compressed in one line of Coleridge's like this? What is the connection between Milton's strings being "boldlier swept" and Dryden's music being sequacious of itself? How do we read this rhetorical, intertextual confluence? One association has already been suggested: Orpheus, the dead poet, whose life is associated with both Lycidas, the drowned poet, and St Cecilia, the martyred musician. Orpheus figures prominently in both Milton's poem and Dryden's, emblematizing the archetypal fate of aspiring poets, and he uncannily resurfaces here. As the Orphic music of Coleridge's harp is drowned out by Sara, the poet becomes identified with Orpheus himself, and imports the fatal ironies of his myth into the text. We know that Coleridge would eventually make explicit the Orphic intertext that lurks here, for in his later poem "To William Wordsworth" he characterizes The Prelude as An Orphic song indeed, A song divine of high and passionate thoughts To their own music chaunted! (CPW1:406)

and he casts himself, as Reeve Parker has argued (221-40), in the role of the drowned poet. "The Eolian Harp" has been read as Coleridge's first real poem as a Romantic poet, but a poem across whose imaginative centre a shadow falls. Harold Bloom has said that the poem "collapses in a self-surrender that augurs badly for the Imagination ... The Imagination wishes to be indulged, and Coleridge feared the moral consequences of such indulgence" (Visionary Company 202). The rhetoric of "The Eolian Harp" betrays Coleridge's anxieties about his own death as a poet, and in his intertextual confirmation of such anxiety he repeats the thematic collapse by revealing the end already implicit in his beginning. IV

Between poetry and oratory stands rhetoric. I have attempted to show that Coleridge's effusions take up residence in a middle ground criss-crossed by other literary practices. While they arguably have an identifiable character, formed in part by a Horatian tradition, Coleridge defines his effusions less by their positive identity than by their self-conscious difference from the other genres and figures (sermo, epistle, address, aversion, conversation) that impinge on and cohabit their poetic space. Coleridge's assertiveness in naming thirty-six of the poems in his first volume as "Effusions," and his defence of his practice in the preface, speak not only to his

49 Coleridge's Romantic Effusions

concern with genre and audience, but also to his ambition to clear literary space for himself by setting up shop at a main intersection. As a distinct genre, however, the effusion was relatively short-lived, becoming more common as a "lady's" genre, suitable for the expression of delicate feelings and sensibilities, though also occasionally lending itself to more "heroic" sentiments by military men.30 Effusions of the heart, the poets discovered, can be both literal and figurative, erotic and patriotic, tender and polemical. The examples of Langhorne and Churchill gave Coleridge a sense of one trajectory within the tradition, and also his difference from it. Later, indeed, there would be a few noteworthy instances of the genre, such as Wordsworth's 1835 "Extempore Effusion upon the Death of James Hogg," in which Coleridge is remembered by name in a catalogue of dead poets. But no one approaches the theoretical or practical accomplishment of Coleridge in a genre so carefully positioned between poetry and non-poetry The very "betweenness" of Coleridge's effusions discloses an intrinsic "variousness" which, in style, emotion, and range of public and private occasion, is implicit in Coleridge's title of 1796. Poems on Various Subjects arises "in defiance" of set convention, with a rhetorical flourish "As wild and various as the random gales / That swell and flutter on this subject lute!" ("Eolian" 42-3).

3 "Thou one dear Vale!": Wordsworth and the Sympathies of Rhetoric And O, ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves, Forbode not any severing of our loves! Wordsworth, "Ode: Intimations of Immortality'

It is sometimes thought that Wordsworth categorically dismissed the figure of prosopopoeia or personification when, in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads, he wrote: The Reader will find that personifications of abstract ideas rarely occur in these volumes; and are utterly rejected, as an ordinary device to elevate the style, and raise it above prose. (Prose 1: 131) But rather than reject personification absolutely, Wordsworth goes on to make it clear that he repudiates only certain kinds of personification - those "of abstract ideas," as well as "ordinary," "mechanical" uses - while he adopts other types of the figure: My purpose was to imitate, and, as far as is possible, to adopt the very language of men; and assuredly such personifications do not make any natural or regular part of that language. They are, indeed, a figure of speech occasionally prompted by passion, and I have made use of them as such; but have endeavoured utterly to reject them as a mechanical device of style, or as a family language which Writers in metre seem to lay claim to by prescription. I have wished to keep the Reader in the company of flesh and blood, persuaded that by so doing I shall interest him. (Prose 1: 131) As a micro-history of the figure of prosopopoeia, this passage shows that Wordsworth knows his rhetoric. Like apostrophe, with which it is often associated, personification is "a figure of speech occasionally

51 Wordsworth and the Sympathies of Rhetoric

prompted by passion." Passionate expression is not an "ordinary device," a "mechanical device" of language; there is nothing "natural or regular" about it. By the time that Wordsworth writes his Preface, we may say - in a sense that Jonathan Culler never considers with respect to apostrophe - that prosopopoeia has become an embarrassment. That is, what Wordsworth rejects are all those examples of bad rhetoric and worse poetry in which "abstract ideas" such as Pity, Virtue, Honour, or Beauty are simply capitalized and thus given a pseudo-agency or life of their own.1 Here is a sample of the kind of personification that Wordsworth may have been renouncing: With panting breast, now pale as winter snows, Now flushed as Hebe, Emulation rose; Shame followed after with reverted eye, And hue far deeper than the Tyrian dye; Last Industry appeared with steady pace, A smile sat beaming on her pensive face.

That is Wordsworth himself, at age fourteen, writing conventional or somewhat better than conventional school verses (PW 1: 259). The abstractions Emulation, Shame, and Industry are not "prompted by passion"; they are, it is fair to say, merely mechanical devices. In another poem, "Brook! whose society the Poet seeks," Wordsworth directly takes up the question of prosopopoeia, not in connection with neoclassical style but ancient classical rhetoric and poetics. Addressing a familiar "Brook" that has been his "solace days and weeks / And months," he writes: If I some type of thee did wish to view, Thee, and not thee thyself, I would not do Like Grecian Poets, give thee human cheeks, Channels for tears! no Naiad shouldst thou be; Have neither wings, feet, feathers, joints, nor hairs; It seems, the Eternal Soul is clothed in thee With purer robes than those of flesh and blood; And hath bestow'd on thee a better good; The joy of fleshly life, without it's cares. (MS. L; Poems of 1807 142)2

The negation in this sonnet, the rejection of a type of prosopopoeia that Wordsworth would not use, cannot escape the figuring of personification in other ways; while Wordsworth claims to have an aversion to a troping of "flesh and blood," his language of apparelling

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necessarily evokes related incarnational images, though more sublime: "The joy of fleshly life, without its cares." Yet since the "very language of men" is, for the most part of daily communication (at the end of the eighteenth as at the end of the twentieth century), assuredly not full of passion, and since Wordsworth professes to be imitating and adopting that language, it is logical for him not to have certain types of personification in his poetry. Wordsworth describes this logic in the familiar terms of a literary contract: It is supposed, that by the act of writing in verse an Author makes a formal engagement that he will gratify certain known habits of association; that he not only thus apprises the Reader that certain classes of ideas and expressions will be found in his book, but that others will be carefully excluded. (Prose 1: 123)

The language of exclusion and inclusion is conventional enough; what makes Wordsworth's Preface different is the inversion of the terms of reference of this contract: what was in is now out, and vice versa. But this is where it becomes interesting. As in the sonnet above, Wordsworth here leaves the door open for other kinds of prosopopoeia - those that are indeed occasioned by passion - "and I have made use of them as such," Wordsworth writes. And then, in a remarkable statement, he concludes, "I have wished to keep the Reader in the company of flesh and blood, persuaded that by so doing I shall interest him." What a clever critic, trying to put one over on the reader! "The company of flesh and blood" is a personification. Wordsworth's figure silently marks the difference between the old style and the new wave of prosopopoeia. Yet how does it fit with the above poem addressed to the brook, in which Wordsworth appears to reject this incarnational impulse? "It seems," he writes there, "the Eternal Soul is clothed in thee / With purer robes than those of flesh and blood." Is Wordsworth trying to have it both ways with his rhetoric, seeking "the joy of fleshly life, [but] without its cares"? His seeming rejection of a rhetoric of "flesh and blood" is itself embodied in a personification. Thus there is motivation for hearing an undertext in the statement "I have wished to keep the Reader in the company of flesh and blood, persuaded that by so doing I shall interest him." Not only is Wordsworth self-persuaded that he is doing the right thing, but another persuasion is going on at the same time: "I have wished to keep the Reader ... persuaded." Now that's rhetoric. In order to pursue the question of prosopopoeia and apostrophe in Wordsworth's poetry, let me begin with a close-up of a text by Wordsworth and then proceed to larger perspectives on Romantic

53 Wordsworth and the Sympathies of Rhetoric rhetoric. I take an extraordinarily rich passage, though not one of Wordsworth's better-known selections and not frequently commented upon, from book 2 of The Prelude.3 I quote the version of the 1850 Prelude, though the passage exists in both the 1799 two-book and 1805 thirteen-book versions, in slightly different forms (Norton Prelude 18-19, 72-6). Here is the lengthy passage in its entirety: Midway on long Winander's eastern shore, Within the crescent of a pleasant bay, A tavern stood; no homely-featured house, Primeval like its neighbouring cottages, But 'twas a splendid place, the door beset With chaises, grooms, and liveries, and within Decanters, glasses, and the blood-red wine. In ancient times, or ere the Hall was built On the large island, had this dwelling been More worthy of a poet's love, a hut Proud of its one bright fire and sycamore shade. But - though the rhymes were gone that once inscribed The threshold, and large golden characters, Spread o'er the spangled sign-board, had dislodged The old Lion and usurped his place, in slight And mockery of the rustic painter's hand Yet, to this hour, the spot to me is dear With all its foolish pomp. The garden lay Upon a slope surmounted by the plain Of a small bowling-green; beneath us stood A grove, with gleams of water through the trees And over the tree-tops; nor did we want Refreshment, strawberries and mellow cream. There, while through half an afternoon we played On the smooth platform, whether skill prevailed Or happy blunder triumphed, bursts of glee Made all the mountains ring. But, ere night-fall, When in our pinnace we returned at leisure Over the shadowy lake, and to the beach Of some small island steered our course with one, The Minstrel of the Troop, and left him there, And rowed off gently, while he blew his flute Alone upon the rock - oh, then, the calm And dead still water lay upon my mind Even with a weight of pleasure, and the sky, Never before so beautiful, sank down

54 Romantic Aversions Into my heart, and held me like a dream! Thus were my sympathies enlarged, and thus Daily the common range of visible things Grew dear to me: already I began To love the sun; a boy I loved the sun, Not as I since have loved him, as a pledge And surety of our earthly life, a light Which we behold and feel we are alive; Nor for his bounty to so many worlds But for this cause, that I had seen him lay His beauty on the morning hills, had seen The western mountains touch his setting orb, In many a thoughtless hour, when, from excess Of happiness, my blood appeared to flow For its own pleasure, and I breathed with joy. And, from like feelings, humble though intense, To patriotic and domestic love Analogous, the moon to me was dear; For I would dream away my purposes, Standing to gaze upon her while she hung Midway between the hills, as if she knew No other region, but belonged to thee, Yea, appertained by a peculiar right To thee and thy grey huts, thou one dear Vale! (2.138-97) No one would deny that this appears to be a referential text or that, more generally, Wordsworth is a referential poet. As evidence, I submit the use of the proper name "Winander" in the first line (138), and the reference to the "tavern" (140), which, as editors are quick to note (see Norton Prelude 72n2; Maxwell 543; de Selincourt 521), refers to the old White Lion Inn at Bowness, now called the Royal Hotel. Then there is the "Hall" (145). What Hall? Coleridge would have known. The commentators tell us that it is the Hall on Belle Isle on Windermere, built in the 17705 and 17805 and still standing today. And as a final instance, we have the "Minstrel of the Troop," identified by critics as Robert Greenwood, friend of Wordsworth's and later Senior Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. What these examples add up to is the effect that the text assumes a world "out there" which it describes and to which it refers. No one would have difficulty with this evidence of apparent referentiality, although on the precise mechanism of reference we might find ourselves at variance. What is striking, however, is the way that this world "out there" tends not to behave in the way we might expect it to do, and the

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reason for this lies in the functioning of certain tropes and figures in the passage, chiefly prosopopoeia and apostrophe. For example, in the lines "a hut / Proud of its one bright fire and sycamore shade" (147-8), we might be apt to miss the personification, but by line 179, where the sun is characterized as "him," or by line 191, where the moon is a "she," the prosopopoeia is obvious. Then in the last three lines we end with an apostrophe or aversio, a turning from that thirdperson "she" to a second-person "thee," "thy," and "thou": "No other region, but belonged to thee, / Yea, appertained by a peculiar right / To thee and thy grey huts, thou one dear Vale!" (195-7). In other words, there is a movement in this passage from an obvious referentiality in the proper name "Winander" to something improper, in a referential sense, in the personifying apostrophe to the Vale at the end. To put this a different way, if we take the capitalized word Winander in the first line and the capitalized word Vale in the last line as proper names - or if we will not grant the Vale the status of a proper name, it at least has the status of an epithet - then we begin to discern the commensurability of these two places, or of the naming of these two places. Indeed, this "one dear Vale," this place which is also a person, a personified being, suggests to us that we should go back and question our initial assumption - that is, question whether the referentiality of Winander is really so obvious after all: the crux is the prosopopoeia hidden in the possessive construction "Winander's," which I'll return to later. At this point, at least, we might say that the movement of the text is from "apostrophe S" to apostrophe. The passage contains a high degree of rhetorical qualification: I count five buts, two thoughs, and one yet in about sixty lines. This sort of revisioning is typical of Wordsworth's style; it has the effect of allowing us to see the poet construct the interpretation of his experience. Lines 149-54 are particularly corrective in their syntax: "But - though the rhymes were gone ... / ... Yet, to this hour, the spot to me is dear." But, though, yet: the sentence bobs and weaves in and around its meaning, reminding the reader of similar rhetorical windings in "Tintern Abbey": "For I have learned / To look on nature, not as in the hour / Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes ..." (88-90). Wordsworth certainly doesn't tell it straight; he doesn't even tell it slant; he prefers to follow the fluxes and refluxes of the mind in the act of interpretation. Nevertheless, the passage as a whole is built on a deliberate structure of experience and the reading of experience; in fact, in the 1799 version (Norton Prelude 19), and some other versions, a new verse paragraph begins partway through ("Thus day by day my sympathies increased"), so that the passage

56 Romantic Aversions as a whole has the effect of a rhetorical demonstration: evidence followed by conclusion.4 This rhetorical and hermeneutical structure, which reminds one of T.S. Eliot - "We had the experience but missed the meaning" - is everywhere present in Wordsworth's poetry in the fit between experience and meaning, between experience and the reading of experience, and sometimes the reading of the reading of experience. Now whether it is from an eighteenth-century sense of symmetry or from some other cause, the rhetorical balance between experience and its interpretation is maintained throughout the passage in its binary or reflexive structures, especially halves and doubles. A mediating principle operates in a mediated text. We begin with "Midway on long Winander's eastern shore" (138). The midway point, or halfway place, seems arbitrary, maybe even corny (think of Coleridge's "Kubla Khan": "The shadow of the dome of pleasure / Floated midway on the waves" [CPW 1: 298]), but it is repeated and doubled in the second line: "Within the crescent of a pleasant bay," in which the ear picks up the circular echo in the circling image of crescent/ pleasant. Another half occurs at line 161, where Wordsworth says that "through half an afternoon" the children played - even as he writes in book 5 that he would stand "A long half hour" (5.396; 1805: 5.421 reads "A full half-hour") staring at the Boy of Winander's grave. (The Winander connection motivates other echoes between the two episodes, not least in the image of sky being "received / Into the bosom of the steady lake" [5.387-8], and vocal and visual images entering "into his heart" and "into his mind" [5.383, 385]). The passage ends with a final reprise of the half and double theme: the moon appears hanging "Midway between the hills" (194). Everything is geographically stationed, exactly placed, in this landscape. Geographical positioning is important to Wordsworth. In particular, the locus of "midway" has resonances in his Guide through the District of the Lakes, in which another kind of halfway stationing occurs: [L]et us suppose our station to be a cloud hanging midway between those two mountains, at not more than half a mile's distance from the summit of each, and not many yards above their highest elevation; we shall then see stretched at our feet a number of vallies, not fewer than eight, diverging from the point, on which we are supposed to stand, like spokes from the nave of a wheel. (Prose 2: 171) Two mountains, half a mile, and a cloud hanging midway: the landscape again is exactly balanced, with the guide, of course, poised in

57 Wordsworth and the Sympathies of Rhetoric the centre. As Wordsworth would go on to write in his 1815 Preface, the metaphor of "hanging" evokes Virgilian and Shakespearean contexts, with the latter also containing midway and halfway images: "The crows and choughs that wing the midway air / Show scarce so gross as beetles. Half way down / Hangs one who gathers samphire" (King Lear 4.6.13-15). The verb "hangs" shows "a slight exertion of the faculty which I denominate imagination, in the use of one word" (Prose 3: 31). A more elaborate example comes from an epic simile describing Satan in Paradise Lost: "As when far off at Sea a Fleet descried / Hangs in the clouds ... so seemed / Far off the flying Fiend" (2.636-43). "Here," writes Wordsworth, "is the full strength of the imagination involved in the word hangs" (Prose 3:31). But how different the Guide is compared to the poetry! In the tourist book we have a hanging cloud that is supposed to offer the reader a vantagepoint; in the passage from The Prelude the perspective is reversed, with the poet standing to gaze upon the moon "while she hung / Midway between the hills." It is worth recalling another moon in The Prelude, over Mount Snowdon, which Wordsworth describes with the same trope: "And lo! as I looked up, / The Moon hung naked in a firmament / Of azure without cloud" (14.39-41). There is more to these figures of "Midway" and "crescent" than appears in these first two lines. For Wordsworth, the word "crescent" is associated with the image of a crescent moon as well as with the medieval, heraldic image of a crescent shield. Both of these connections are present here; the tavern is no homely-featured house, Primeval like its neighbouring cottages, But 'twas a splendid place, the door beset With chaises, grooms, and liveries, and within Decanters, glasses, and the blood-red wine. In ancient times, or ere the Hall was built On the large island, had this dwelling been More worthy of a poet's love ... The phrase "blood-red wine," part of the description of the tavern as it was in Wordsworth's day, calls forth the reference to "ancient times"; critics have glossed the image as an echo of The Ballad of Sir Patrick Spens: "The king sits in Dumferling toune, / Drinking the blude-reid wine" (Kinsley 311). The Ballad of Sir Patrick Spens, a poem about drowning, is the text that Coleridge uses for the moony epigraph to his ode "Dejection" - though he misquotes it by conflating two stanzas: "Late, late yestreen I saw the new Moon, / With the old

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Moon in her arms; / And I fear, I fear, my Master dear! / We shall have a deadly storm" (CPW 1: 362). What Wordsworth does with the crescent is rhetorically canny: he insinuates the trope of the moon early on, but suspends the completion of the figure until the end of the passage, so that the final image of the moon in effect circles round to the opening lines and thus acquires the echoic force of an after-image. "Midway between the hills" looks back to "Midway on long Winander's eastern shore." To overdetermine the connection of the tavern, the moon, and a midway position, there is a fourfold verbal repetition: Wordsworth says of the tavern, "the spot to me is dear" (154), even as he says "the moon to me was dear" (191). A dear spot, and a moon, personified as a "dear she" - these too are doubled by another pair of dear things: "the common range of visible things / Grew dear to me" (176-7), Wordsworth writes; and then, climactically, he turns to apostrophize "thou one dear Vale!" (197). Yet one more doubling, midway through the passage: the Minstrel of the Troop -I want to call him the minstrel of the trope - is a singer within a song, a mise en abyme of the poetic text. He also bears intertextual relation to the minstrels alluded to in Wordsworth's Guide, in which Charles Parish's 1811 poem The Minstrels of Winandermere is quoted (Prose 2: 161, 383-4). Like the figure of the English balladsinger in book 7.179-80, or like the Boy of Winander, to whom he is more clearly related, the minstrel is a double of Wordsworth himself. The minstrel's flute, like the Boy of Winander's "fingers interwoven ... as through an instrument" (5.370, 372), transposes a classical pastoral topos into an English key. We cannot go very far in Wordsworth's poetry without running into doubles, projections, reflections, echoes of the poet himself - usually, but not always, in solitude, "alone upon a rock." These halves and doublings underscore the binary structure of the passage, with its division into the two parts of the poet's rhetorical argument - evidence and conclusion, linked by the pivotal "Thus." They also, as I have suggested, repeat, or thematize, the reflexive structure of experience and the reading of experience in Wordsworth's poetry. Crucial to that reading are Wordsworth's explicit figures of language in the text, beginning with the subtle linguistic reference in Wordsworth's curious phrase "More worthy of a poet's love" (147). Because of its present splendidness, what Wordsworth calls its "foolish pomp" (155), the tavern "in ancient times" - that is, prior to the architectural renovations that have spoiled its original character - would have been more deserving of the poetic pains Wordsworth takes to describe the place. Yet despite its decline into grandiosity, Wordsworth still finds the spot "dear." Is dearness less

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than love? What is "a poet's love," anyway? It is a self-conscious topos: love is a trope for the poem. The poet gives only words. In ancient times the tavern would have been more worthy of a poet's words, or more words-worthy. Love, as much as belatedness, is the point: in a passage that says it is about the "sympathies" (175), we expect a Wordsworthian "excess / Of happiness" (186-7) or a "weight of pleasure" (172) descending. Thus, balancing the four instances of "dear," we have four cases of love: the "poet's love," the boy's love ("I began / To love the sun; a boy I loved the sun" [177-8]), and "patriotic and domestic love" (190). But what's love got to do with apostrophe and prosopopoeia? How do we make the connection between rhetoric and passion? Ernest de Selincourt notes that at the end of book 2, MS. B adds three drafts expanding the lines on the sympathies. Claiming that through his childhood experiences "The daring instincts and the brooding Powers / Were mutually upheld, the senses trained / To nice observance and the mind to thought" (de Selincourt 52), Wordsworth adds a natural description to support the claim: Already I began To follow with my eyes the sailing clouds In conscious admiration; loved to watch Their shifting colours and their changeful forms, And with a curious patience of regard Laboured the subtile process to detect By which, like thoughts within the mind itself, They rose as if from nothing, and dissolved Insensibly; see with the lofty winds These hurrying out of sight in troops, while that, A lonely One upon the mountain top, Resteth in sedentary quietness, Faint answers yielding as my thoughts inquired By what subjection he was fix'd, what law Stay'd him, and why alone he linger'd there Crowning that regal hill, or like a spirit Whispering angelic tidings ... (de Selincourt 53)

"Like thoughts within the mind itself," the external appearances of Nature are made to function as mental analogues, in a way similar to Shelley's claim in Prometheus Unbound: "The imagery which I have employed will be found in many instances to have been drawn from the operations of the human mind, or from those external actions by which they are expressed" (133). Wordsworth offers us

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"correspondent" clouds, exquisitely fitted to the human mind's imaginings. Their rising "as if from nothing," and their dissolving "insensibly," map the workings of the spirit. But while Wordsworth did not ultimately include this analogy in book 2, the draft nevertheless contains details that appear toward the end of the passage specifically, the "fixing" or "linger[ing]" of a lonely personified natural object above a hill, and the poet's questioning of the "law" that keeps him there. The difference, however, is that it turns out to be not a male cloud, but a female moon that hovers over the poet's beloved Vale. Wordsworth's language of love is suggestively impassioned in its description of the poet's feelings as he floated upon Winander at dusk: oh, then, the calm And dead still water lay upon my mind Even with a weight of pleasure, and the sky, Never before so beautiful, sank down Into my heart, and held me like a dream!

Oh happy poet, to bear the weight of nature! The not-so-muted eroticism is highly charged precisely because the intangible or metaphorical ("my mind," "my heart") is merged with the sensual and the physical. "Tintern Abbey" again arguably stands behind this passage, with its spatialization of the heart and mind: "Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart; / And passing even into my purer mind" (28-9). Water lies upon Wordsworth's mind, sky sinks down into his heart - and all with a "weight of pleasure." The "pleasant bay" at the beginning of the passage is still here, though the pleasure Winander provides has matured from a merely locodescriptive rapture to something more fully human. That pleasure, Wordsworth suggests, echoing "Tintern Abbey" once more, comes from "many a thoughtless hour, when, from excess / Of happiness, my blood appeared to flow / For its own pleasure, and I breathed with joy." The fact that the sky has been "never before so beautiful" recalls a similar claim made for the sun in the sonnet on "Westminster Bridge": Never did sun more beautifully steep In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill; Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep! The river glideth at his own sweet will: Dear God! the very houses seem asleep; And all that mighty heart is lying still! (PW 3: 38)

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In this epitaphic celebration of the city, as David Ferry (14) and J. Hillis Miller (307) have called it, we glimpse a feminized erotic body lying open to a masculine force enjoying "his own sweet will." As soon as Wordsworth engages in prosopopoeia, sexual personae seem necessarily to emerge. Wordsworth's diction in book 2 emphasizes a downward pressure, suggestively but not oppressively containing: "lay," "weight," "sank," "down," "into," and "held." If there is a sexual content in these lines, it is surely based on a deep fantasy: what nature is described as doing to the poet is in turn what the poet is doing to Winander by floating upon it. The inevitable but unconscious connection with drowning does not surface here, but will be made explicit repeatedly in book 5 in the dream of the Arab, the episode of the drowned man, and the Boy of Winander - or, as I prefer to call him in this connection, the Buoy of Winander, who turns out to be Wordsworth's floating and unsinkable signifier, bobbing up long after his submergence and being anchored for immortality in the epitaphic imagination. The fact that Wordsworth says that the sky "held me" is consistent with the theme of the passage, and simultaneously looks back to the possessive form of "Winander's" in the first line and forward to other aspects of possession and possessiveness at the end. What it means for one to be held by nature is what book 2 recounts at length. A number of these details are repeated in Wordsworth's Guide, even down to the inclusion of a reference to a "Pleasure-house" on Windermere (Prose 2: 157). Wordsworth begins his directions with Windermere, noting that Bowness, the starting place for most lake tourists, as for this passage from book 2, "is situated upon its eastern side, and at equal distance from each extremity of the Lake of Windermere" (Prose 2: 157) - that is, it is "midway on long Winander's eastern shore." He continues: Windermere ought to be seen both from its shores and from its surface. None of the other Lakes unfold so many fresh beauties to him who sails upon them. This is owing to its greater size, to the islands, and to its having two vales at the head, with their accompanying mountains of nearly equal dignity. Nor can the grandeur of these two terminations be seen at once from any point, except from the bosom of the Lake. The Islands may be explored at any time of the day; but one bright unruffled evening must, if possible, be set apart for the splendour, the stillness, and solemnity of a three hour's voyage ... (Prose 2: 158)

As a prose translation of our passage from book 2, this description recovers a similar perspective, despite not being "prompted by

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passion," or given the highly subjective and personal cast of its Prelude counterpart. The floating upon the bosom of the lake (echoing "the breast / Of a still water" and "the bosom of the steady lake" in the boating and Boy of Winander episodes [4.257-8, 5.388], the multiplying of positions and of times for viewing the spectacle, and the alliterative evocation of "the splendour, the stillness, and solemnity" of the scene - all these seem unarguably to hark back to a memory, deeply impassioned, of the earlier rapture of the poet. Central to this business of "a poet's love" is the image of language itself. Consider the tavern sign: But - though the rhymes were gone that once inscribed The threshold, and large golden characters, Spread o'er the spangled sign-board, had dislodged The old Lion and usurped his place, in slight And mockery of the rustic painter's hand Yet, to this hour, the spot to me is dear With all its foolish pomp.

One text has replaced another text. To be more accurate, we should speak of two separate texts - the rhymes over the threshold, and the characters on the sign-board. We aren't told much about the rhymes - what they were or how they disappeared - but we have a bit more information about the sign-board: originally there was painting; now there is writing. Where there used to be a picture of a lion, now there are large golden characters. This usurpation of writing over painting - or of unmotivated, arbitrary characters over a motivated, representational icon - Wordsworth sees as a "slight / And mockery" of the painter's crude skill.5 But the "slight" goes beyond aesthetics, when we hear also the political overtones of "usurped" in the context of the king of beasts. There is more than one style of mockery here; Wordsworth's deliberately mock-heroic language is all of a piece with the "foolish pomp" of the place he fondly celebrates. The sign is a palimpsest, a layered text. We cannot read it, though, any more than we can interpret the words on the threshold: all we have is a mediated text, or a metatext. The lion is there and not there; it has been overwritten. This is a scene of reading, but one in which the reader never gets the message; all we get is the code - "characters," "rhymes." Is there the suggestion, in this usurpation, of an equivalence between the characters and the lion, as though it were an act of semiotic substitution? Compare William Carlos Williams's substitution of words on a page for plums in the icebox: can words substitute for things so easily? Here, the substitution is not between

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words and things, but between two kinds of semiotic systems, between "icons" and "symbols," in C.S. Peirce's terminology, or between signifiers and signifieds, in Saussure's terms. If we assume that the golden characters spelled the words "The Old Lion," then the signifier Lion (L-I-O-N) displaces - or dislodges, as Wordsworth says - the icon of a lion. But the icon is not a signified: it is another signifier. The signified of "the Old Lion" is less a thing than a place, an inn; therefore the sign is less a symbol than an index, in Peirce's terms, to the extent that it is contiguous with its signified. What we are left with, in an oblique way, is a text that is related to the genre that Wordsworth called "poems on the naming of places" - except that here only the naming, not the name, is given. We have a text more about displacement than placement: time, as much as language, has "dislodged / The old Lion and usurped his place," and the nostalgic layering of memory in this passage - both the young Wordsworth's and those of more "ancient times" - creates a doubled consciousness of recollection, a reflective sense of presence and change, and dearness in spite of change. Let me return to the connection between "apostrophe S" and the figure of personification in this passage. I noted that there were several examples of prosopopoeia in the text, from the male sun and the female moon, to the hut that was "proud," the vale that was "dear," and, even more subtly, the lake that was - literally and figurally possessive: "Winander's." In the earlier versions of this passage Wordsworth avoids the last possessive construction by beginning with the line, "Upon the eastern shore of Windermere" (Norton Prelude 18, 72). Two significant revisions push the passage in the direction of personification: first, the change in name from "Windermere" to "Winander"; and second, the addition of the apostrophe S. Some readers will perhaps remember from early grammar lessons the prohibition against making a possessive with an inanimate object. For example, to say "whose" with respect to a stone - the stone whose moss is green - used to be technically unacceptable; likewise, to say "the stone's moss" was also incorrect. The preferred form of the possessive required the phrase "of which": the stone of which the moss is green. Today, of course, these grammatical niceties have been altogether lost, and to use "of which" as a possessive in this context sounds pedantic.6 But the prohibition, like most grammatical rules, has its own logic; in this case it prevents a blurring of the lines between literal and figural discourse: students simply can't go around personifying inanimate objects through possessive constructions! What will it lead to? Thus Wordsworth's use of the phrase "Winander's shore" contains within it a personification, at the very

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least, in the grammar of possessiveness. At the same time, his choice of the name Winander suggests something mythic and personified with a trace of masculine identity (Win-ander, suggesting andros, male), as in the Boy of Winander episode.7 Winander, rather than Windermere, keeps the reader in the company of flesh and blood by giving to a geographical place not just a proper name, but in effect a nickname, and thus the very form and pressure of an animate figure. In the phrase "Winander's eastern shore," Winander becomes a type of genius loci or, as Milton's "Lycidas" would have it, a "genius of the shore." There is a double prosopopoeia in this line, then, determined by the choice of name, and overdetermined by the possessive construction. To jump to the end of the passage, where the other main personification occurs - "thou one dear Vale!" - we can see how Wordsworth experiments with a series of epithets in the evolution of the text, from "my native vale" in the 1799 version, to "my darling vale" in the 1805 text, to the final "thou one dear Vale!" (Norton Prelude 19, 76, 77). Whatever emotional investment is lost through the removal of the possessive "my" is reclaimed through the addition of the direct "thou" and also through the naming of the Vale by means of its capitalization, which matches the other namings in the passage Winander, the Hall, the old Lion, and the Minstrel of the Troop. Wordsworth's final exclamation point is sufficient to confirm that this apostrophe, this prosopopoeia, is indeed "prompted by passion." But it is also prompted by possessiveness itself. The entire passage, I said earlier, is a rhetorical demonstration of the claim "Thus were my sympathies enlarged, and thus / Daily the common range of visible things / Grew dear to me." Sympathies, common or shared things, growing dear: the themes of having and holding, of imaginative possession, of spiritual belonging and the sense of place, are all working here. What was involved in the dislodging of the Lion was a question of place, of one's proper place in a semiotic scheme of things. Here, with the Vale, the issues of place, possession, ownership, and belonging are undeniably present, if mysteriously so; speaking of the moon, Wordsworth writes that he would gaze upon her while she hung Midway between the hills, as if she knew No other region, but belonged to thee, Yea, appertained by a peculiar right To thee and thy grey huts, thou one dear Vale!

I once read these lines as if the moon knew no other region but what belonged to the Vale; now I am persuaded that "belonged" and

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"appertained" (a legalistic, Shakespearean term) could be read as simple intransitive preterites, signifying that the moon herself belonged to the Vale; the moon herself appertained to it. In legal terminology, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, to appertain means "to belong as a possession to ... to belong as a right or privilege to"; even the adjective "peculiar," in the context of a "peculiar right," has legal connotations, indicating "one's own private property; that belongs or pertains to, or characterizes, an individual person, place, or thing." "To appertain by a peculiar right" is a somewhat foreign expression in the midst of all this natural description, though not, perhaps, as technical as all that for the son of a law agent. In this peculiar case of ownership, there is a special dispensation operating that permits the Vale to own the moon. In a biblical sense, confirmed partly by Wordsworth's consciously archaic "yea," the chaste moon "knows" no region other than this one; she belongs to it alone. Unlike Juliet's "inconstant moon," which threatens to make Romeo's love prove variable, this moon is unchanging in its affections. Is this then the sense of "patriotic and domestic love" that Wordsworth speaks of in the lines just preceding? "From like feelings, humble though intense, / To patriotic and domestic love / Analogous, the moon to me was dear." The feminine moon is faithful to her possessor, just as a patriot should be to his or her country, or a husband and wife to each other. The analogy or, as Wordsworth calls it in the 1799 version, "sense of dim similitude which links / Our moral feelings with external forms" (Norton Prelude 18), receives support from the repeated phrase "to thee ... to thee," which echoes with a difference the statement a few lines earlier, "the moon to me was dear." What we have, in effect, is a transformation of the Endymion myth: the poet, like the shepherd-boy, "would dream away [his] purposes, / Standing to gaze" upon the beloved moon, while she hovered over the Vale as if she cared for no other. I emphasize the grammatical and rhetorical possessiveness in this extraordinary passage because it both frames and focuses the content. Stepping back from the stylistic details, I suggest that the function of personification and apostrophe here has everything to do with what Wordsworth calls "sympathies," in the pivotal line "Thus were my sympathies enlarged." But how thus? - Through words, "a poet's love," through the imaginative and passionate figures of rhetoric. Personification implies love. To animate a landscape, to attribute human qualities to non-human things is an act of love through the creative imagination. Perhaps this sounds more like Shelley than Wordsworth, but there is so much in Shelley that derives, positively and antithetically, from his great precursor:

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"Familiar acts are beautiful through love" (Shelley 205). Early on in his aeuvre, Wordsworth had told us that he was "a lover of the meadows and the woods, / And mountains" ("Tintern Abbey" 103-4) and not just in any naive sense, but in peculiar figurative ways. Thus Wordsworth claims in Petrarchan or courtly accents that "Nature never did betray / The heart that loved her" ("Tintern Abbey" 1223); and here, in The Prelude, he expands his loving relation with Nature to include analogies with the love of one's country and with wedded love. Some of these themes he had canvassed in the Prospectus to The Recluse, written perhaps as early as 1798-1800, in which he tropes his relation to Nature in explicitly marital imagery: For the discerning intellect of Man, When wedded to this goodly universe In love and holy passion, shall find these A simple produce of the common day. - I, long before the blissful hour arrives, Would chant, in lonely peace, the spousal verse Of this great consummation ... (PW5: 4-5)

It would be possible to speak of the Winander passage in book 2 as the wedding of the mind to the "one dear Vale." But it is important to note how this wedding, or enlargement of sympathy, depends on the figures of apostrophe and prosopopoeia. In the Boy of Winander passage discussed in chapter 1, I showed how the function of apostrophe and prosopopoeia is that of witness, confirmation, or corroboration; now we may add to this list of the figures' uses the offices of love and sympathy. Wordsworth's addresses to Coleridge in The Prelude also fall into this category, as they embrace a "beloved Friend" (6.754) "invoked by anxious love" (11.422). Wordsworth has never been accused of being a love poet. Yet Josephine Miles, following F.B. Snyder, long ago drew our attentio to the fact that "love" is one of the most frequently used words in Wordsworth's poetry (18,171), and Margery Sabin more recently has made the same observation with respect to The Prelude (33-47).8 Book 2 opens with his claim that he has been retracing "The simple ways in which my childhood walked; / Those chiefly that first led me to the love / Of rivers, woods, and fields" (2.3-5). Following the "dear Vale" section is the celebration of the mother-child relationship in the powerful "Blest the infant Babe" passage (2.232-65), which argues for the "filial bond / Of nature" (2.243-4) connecting the child with the world. "Is there a flower," Wordsworth writes, "already love / Drawn from love's purest earthly fount for him /

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Hath beautified that flower" (2.245-8). And book 2 ends with another apostrophe to nature, in which Wordsworth recapitulates the themes of the book as a whole, not least the theme of love. I quote the entire turning aside to nature: If this be error, and another faith Find easier access to the pious mind, Yet were I grossly destitute of all Those human sentiments that make this earth So dear, if I should fail with grateful voice To speak of you, ye mountains, and ye lakes And sounding cataracts, ye mists and winds That dwell among the hills where I was born. If in my youth I have been pure in heart, If, mingling with the world, I am content With my own modest pleasures, and have lived With God and Nature communing, removed From little enmities and low desires, The gift is yours; if in these times of fear, This melancholy waste of hopes o'erthrown, If, 'mid indifference and apathy And wicked exultation, when good men On every side fall off we know not how, To selfishness, disguised in gentle names Of peace and quiet and domestic love, Yet mingled not unwillingly with sneers On visionary minds; if, in this time Of dereliction and dismay, I yet Despair not of our nature, but retain A more than Roman confidence, a faith That fails not, in all sorrow my support, The blessing of my life; the gift is yours, Ye winds and sounding cataracts! 'tis yours, Ye mountains! thine, O Nature! Thou hast fed My lofty speculations; and in thee, For this uneasy heart of ours, I find A never-failing principle of joy And purest passion. (2.419-51)

Readers will hear the measured echoes of certain words that were so important in the earlier passage: "dear," "heart," "pleasures," and even the phrase "domestic love." The rhetorical structure of this passage operates according to a clearly announced pattern of "If ...

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[then]." The anaphora or repetition of "if" seven times sets up the expectation of a comparably dramatic conclusion.9 Corresponding to the conditional "if" constructions is the epiphora, with variation, of "the gift is yours ... the gift is yours .. .'tis yours ... thine, O Nature!" This deliberate repetition at once stresses the intensity of the invocation and enumerates the different personified witnesses who are thus given life through the poet's impassioned turn to them: "ye mountains, and ye lakes / And sounding cataracts, ye mists and winds ... Ye winds and sounding cataracts ... Ye mountains! thine, O Nature!" This catalogue, which is hinged in the middle in a chiasmic or palindromic mirroring (mountains-cataracts-winds / winds-cataracts-mountains), ends with the apostrophe to a fully personified, capitalized "Nature" that collectively subsumes its individually apostrophized members. Wordsworth's claim that the "support" and "blessing" of his life are a "gift" from nature is noteworthy for its intratextual echoing of two passages earlier in book 2. The first passage is the description, already mentioned, of the blessed babe - "Blest the infant Babe ... blest the Babe, / Nursed in his Mother's arms, who sinks to sleep / Rocked on his Mother's breast; who with his soul / Drinks in the feelings of his Mother's eye!" (2.235-7). As I have said elsewhere (Monumental Writing 182), Wordsworth places paradigmatic emphasis on this relationship, calling it "the first / Poetic spirit of our human life" (2.260-1). By turning to "Nature" at the end of the book, and attributing "the blessing of [his] life" to the winds and waters, Wordsworth effects a displacement or projection of a profoundly human relation onto the external world: this is the very definition of prosopopoeia. Another definition is found in the 1799 version, in the lines just preceding the "sympathy" passage: prosopopoeia and apostrophe are founded on a "sense of dim similitude which links / Our moral feelings with external forms" (Norton Prelude 18). The personification is overdetermined in the succession of apostrophes to the different aspects of landscape, which are humanized in their feelings and their power of language. But as always with rhetoric, there must be a need or motivation for figure, whether metaphor, or apostrophe, or prosopopoeia - the Boy of Winander, for example, needs the cliffs and islands to corroborate his story - and so too, in this turning, one senses a particular need, a compensation in the "gift" of nature that blesses and is "in all sorrow my support." "Support" evokes, in the context of mother and child, its negative version for Wordsworth, the memory of the removal of his personal foundation: For now a trouble came into my mind From unknown causes. I was left alone

69 Wordsworth and the Sympathies of Rhetoric Seeking the visible world, nor knowing why. The props of my affections were removed, And yet the building stood, as if sustained By its own spirit! All that I beheld Was dear ... (2.276-82)

There's that word "dear" again, running like an intertextual filament between episodes in book 2. We do not need to repeat the argument that Wordsworth's early loss of his mother played a role in his love of nature - it is a wholly persuasive argument, and one whose imaginative or affective impact is still underestimated10 - but we do need to emphasize how apostrophe and prosopopoeia act in this all-toohuman drama. They are responsible for "those human sentiments that make this earth / So dear." In the "if" passage at the end of book 2, Wordsworth contrasts his human potential for failure - "if I should fail with grateful voice" - with nature's "never-failing principle of joy" that sustains his "faith / That fails not." As Richard J. Onorato has shown in detail (29-87), the experience of loss in human life seeks compensation in the faith that nature is "never-failing": "Nature never did betray / The heart that loved her" ("Tintern Abbey" 122-3) – not in the way that humans betray one another's love. Later, in book 5, Wordsworth writes, "Early died / My honoured Mother, she who was the heart / And hinge of all our learnings and our loves: / She left us destitute" (5.256-9). Nothing, perhaps, could express better the emptiness, anger, and guilt felt after the death of his mother than the accusatory, hurting flatness of "She left us destitute." "Yet were I grossly destitute," Wordsworth says back in book 2, "if I should fail with grateful voice / To speak of you, ye mountains and ye lakes." The loss of the mother is one thing; the rhetorical turning to nature for compensation, for "support," even for restoring the lost "blessing" that he received as an infant, is not just another thing; it is a repetition of an already given. The gift is yours, Nature! - yet, as Wordsworth would say in his meditation on the death of his father, "thou must give, / Else never canst receive" (12.276-7). Nature's gift returns what was always already bestowed through language: a poet's love, given in words worthy of their object-choice. Humanizing the world has nothing to do with "personifications of abstract ideas," but with the desire, "prompted by passion," to remain "in the company of flesh and -blood." A muted epitaphic sense hovers over Wordsworth's use of apostrophe and prosopopoeia, and rhetoric may be the best intimation of immortality we have.11 Pitched against an eighteenth-century literary fashion, Wordsworth's style of personification gives a human shape to a rhetoric, and not just an abstraction, that had become

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mechanical. Through prosopopoeia and apostrophe, both nature and humanity become "more worthy of a poet's love." This is both the high argument and the undersong of Wordsworth's text, which keeps returning to and overdetermining the themes of love and poetry. A final, powerful intertext confirms the explicit theme of "a poet's love" with an allusive turning aside to invoke the great precursor of love poetry. "If this be error," Wordsworth's closing aversion begins - but we finish the unspoken line ahead of him - "and upon me prov'd, / I never writ, nor no man ever lov'd."

4 Coleridge's Emergent Occasion: "To the Autumnal Moon" How ridiculous would it seem in a state of comparative insensibility to employ a figure used only by a person under the highest emotion, such as the impersonation of an abstract being, and an apostrophe to it. Coleridge, Shakespearean Criticism

Any study of Coleridge's early poetry must sooner or later take account of his rhetorical enthusiasm. Despite the influence of his schoolmaster James Bowyer, who abominated "bloated and puffing lines" in his students' work (CP W 1: 3n1), Coleridge's early verse often exhibits the very expressiveness that his rhetorical training sought to purge. Bowyer, for his part, seems to have known his rhetorical theory, even if he did not always succeed in translating that knowledge into his pupils' practice. In a note to a poem written at Christ's Hospital, Coleridge recalls one particular censure by his master: "Coleridge! the connections of a Declamation are not the transitions of Poetry - bad, however, as they are, they are better than 'Apostrophes' and 'O thou's,' for at the worst they are something like common sense. The others are the grimaces of Lunacy." (CPW 1: 3n1)

While in chapter 2 I explored the interface "between Poetry and Oratory" in Coleridge's writings (CPW 1: 257n) - or, as Bowyer would have it, between a rhetoric of "Declamation" and that of "Poetry" - I would now like to shift interpretive ground from "Declamation" to exclamation - that is, to Coleridge's "'Apostrophes' and 'O thou's'" and, indeed, to something of "the grimaces of Lunacy." Coleridge, it will not be denied, is a very exclamatory poet, as this cento of his early poems will show: "Hail!" "Oh!" "Sweet Muse!"

72 Romantic Aversions "Maid of my Love, sweet Genevieve!" "I too a sister had! too cruel Death!" "Farewell parental scenes! a sad farewell!" "Lo!" "Hence!"1

Such effusive, even proto-Spasmodic rhetoric, excessive when highlighted this way, might be excused on the grounds of poetic immaturity or the vicious effect of eighteenth-century sublime style, were it not for the fact that Coleridge continued to use exclamatory rhetoric throughout his career: even his "Epitaph," composed not long before his death, begins with "Stop, Christian passer-by!" and ends with "Do thou the same!" (CPW 1: 491-2). Literally from beginning to end, then, Coleridge's poetry raises the interpretive challenge of how to read his expressive displays of enthusiasm, in their reach from rapture to dejection.2 The question of what is at stake in such a challenge may be answered in a preliminary way by establishing the connection between rhetoric and genre, between the rhetorical figures of apostrophe and exclamatio, specifically, and the genre of address. As I noted in chapter i, there is a genre or mode of "address" as such, which includes poems implicitly or explicitly composed "To X" (ode, verse epistle, conversation poem, hymn, and others). The exclamation, like the apostrophe, is a figure with recognizable characteristic and uses. Recall Puttenham's definition of exclamation, which he calls "ecphonesis" or the "outcrie": The figure of exclamation, I call him [the outcrie] because it utters our minde by all such words as do shew any extreme passion, whether it be by way of exclamation or crying out, admiration or wondering, imprecation or cursing, obtestation or taking God and the world to witnes, or any such like as declare an impotent affection. (177)

Peacham agrees: Ecphonesis of the Latines called Exclamatio, is a forme of speech by which the Orator through some vehement affection, as either of love, hatred, gladnesse, sorrow, .anger, marvelling, admiration, feare, or such like, bursteth forth into an exclamation or outcrie, signifying thereby the vehement affection or passion of his mind. (62)

In each of Coleridge's exclamations cited above, the outcrie is part of an address to someone or something; it may be an interpellative attention-getter, fulfilling the "phatic" function of Jakobson's speech-

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act by initiating communication (68), or it may be an emotional ecphonesis in the midst of an already established circuit of address. In all cases, however, exclamation is "not lawful but in extremity of motion," as Hoskins says (33); hence the great number of badly contrived exclamations that are more mechanical than motivated, as my above epigraph attests.3 In chapter 1 of the Biogmphia Literaria, Coleridge responds to his early reviewers' complaints of "obscurity, a general turgidness of diction, and a profusion of new coined double epithets" (1: 6) in the Poems on Various Subjects (1796) by claiming that he subsequently "pruned the double epithets with no sparing hand, and used [his] best efforts to tame the swell and glitter both of thought and diction" (1: 7).4 The reviewers' feeling was that Coleridge's effusive language resulted in an excessive expressive style. Certainly the formulaic "Hail!" and "O thou!" get a lot of use in the verse of this period, especially in poems that adapt or naturalize the convention of an address to a god. Yet far from drawing merely on eighteenth-century enthusiastic lyrics, the address to a deity who has now become an abstract personification or a natural object also has its roots in a convention of epic poetry, both classical and Christian: Hail holy Light, offspring of Heav'n first-born, Or of th'Eternal Coeternal beam May I express thee unblam'd?

Milton's invocatio in book 3 of Paradise Lost (1-3) self-consciously aims to steer clear of errors in rhetoric and expression as much as in theology, amending outright exclamation ("Hail") with entreaty ("May I express thee unblam'd?"). Coleridge's first poem in Ernest Hartley Coleridge's edition begins conventionally enough with "Hail! festal Easter" ("Easter Holidays" 1), while his later "Hymn before Sun-rise, in the Vale of Chamouni" naturalizes the habit of mechanical abstraction, and hails the mountain itself as "O sovran BLANC" (3). Even in "Dejection: An Ode," where the direction of address turns variously from "O Lady!" to "O pure of heart!" to "O simple spirit, guided from above, / Dear Lady!" the text is punctuated by other rhetorical aversions: "Thou Wind ... Thou Actor ... Thou mighty Poet, e'en to frenzy bold!" Bowyer was right: there is no shortage of "'Apostrophes' and 'O thou's'" throughout Coleridge's ceuvre, and the reader, when confronted with a choice between "'something like common sense'" and "'Lunacy,'" does not foresee particularly attractive possibilities for interpretation. But there are occasions in Coleridge's early poetry when what appears at first to be "bloated and puffing" turns out to be something

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quite original, a moment of rhetorical invention or heuresis, when the reader has the sense of poetic genius breaking through the "swell and glitter" of conventional rhetoric to wonder at itself and itself be wondered at. In such a discovery, or self-discovery, in which invention becomes its own topos, we watch as Coleridge "bares the device" and shows us a mind in the act of finding what rhetoric will suffice. And the style that emerges is Coleridge's master rhetoric, what Aristotle calls epideictic (48), the language of show or demonstration (epideixis), in which display often becomes self-display.5 The early Coleridge's language demonstrates not only rhetorical virtuosity but also interpretive power, an ability to invent and disclose the rhetorical subject in one breath that is assuredly neither bloated nor puffing. To illustrate, let me attempt a close reading of one of Coleridge's "Effusions," dating from 1788 but first published in his 1796 Poems on Various Subjects as "Effusion xviii," and retitled "To the Autumnal Moon" for Poems (1803).6 I give the full text, which remained unchanged throughout Coleridge's life: Mild Splendour of the various-vested Night! Mother of wildly-working visions! hail! I watch thy gliding, while with watery light Thy weak eye glimmers through a fleecy veil; And when thou lovest thy pale orb to shroud Behind the gather'd blackness lost on high; And when thou dartest from the wind-rent cloud Thy placid lightning o'er the a waken'd sky. Ah such is Hope! as changeful and as fair! Now dimly peering on the wistful sight; Now hid behind the dragon-wing'd Despair: But soon emerging in her radiant might She o'er the sorrow-clouded breast of Care Sails, like a meteor kindling in its flight. (CPW 1: 5)

This sonnet, which combines aspects of English and Italian models,7 takes the form of an address, a poem "to" someone, in this case a lunar body which, by virtue of its being hailed, is animated and personified as a "Splendour" and a "Mother." This kind of interpellation is in the classical tradition of hymns to the gods, an important category within epideictic, though Coleridge's text introduces a Romantic sensibility that fundamentally transforms that tradition.8 In addition to using five double epithets in the poem, Coleridge follows

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eighteenth-century precedent in making the octave of the sonnet deal with the natural description of the moon, and the sestet take on the burden of moralizing the skiey landscape.9 It is a procedure that he would later criticize, especially in the work of William Lisle Bowles, one of his early influences - as Coleridge himself declares in his preface to Poems on Various Subjects and chapter 1 of the Biogmphia Literaria10 - but it is also a method that Coleridge celebrates at some length in the preface to the collection of sonnets by various authors Tht he put together and dirculatee in late 1796 11 that he put together and circulated in lthe sonnet coleridge writes: s: In a Sonnet then we require a developement [sic] of some lonely feeling, by whatever cause it may have been excited; but those Sonnets appear to me the most exquisite, in which moral Sentiments, Affections, or Feelings, are deduced from, and associated with, the scenery of Nature. Such compositions generate a habit of thought highly favourable to delicacy of character. They create a sweet and indissoluble union between the intellectual and the material world. (CPW 2: 1139)

This passage, though published some eight years after the composition of "To the Autumnal Moon," exactly describes the structure of the poem, "in which moral Sentiments, Affections, or Feelings, are deduced from, and associated with, the scenery of Nature."12 William K. Wimsatt, Jr many years ago identified this imaginative perception "of sameness, correspondence, and analogy" (81) between the human and the natural realms as the model of much Romantic poetry, even as Earl Wasserman earlier had traced the "divine analogy" between nature and God in eighteenth-century literature.13 Comparing the sonnet "To the River Otter" by Coleridge with "To the River Itchin" by Bowles, Wimsatt argues that Coleridge's more detailed attention to natural objects is new and different for the way it "invest[s] them with significance" (82). "Here," Wimsatt concludes, "is a special perception, 'invention' if one prefers, 'imagination,' or even 'wit'" (82). M.H. Abrams draws our attention to the same process, giving it the name of "the greater Romantic lyric" and calling it "the earliest Romantic formal invention" ("Structure and Style" 203): "The speaker begins with a description of the landscape; an aspect or change of aspect in the landscape evokes a varied but integral process of memory, thought, anticipation, and feeling which remains closely interinvolved with the outer scene. In the course of this meditation the lyric speaker achieves an insight, faces up to a tragic loss, comes to a moral decision, or resolves an emotional problem" ("Structure and Style" 201). Abrams's description, intended to

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explicate such poems as "The Eolian Harp," "Tintern Abbey," and "Ode to a Nightingale," fits our sonnet perhaps in meaning but not in form or genre. The reason is twofold: while Abrams solidly establishes the literary context for Coleridge's emergence as a Romantic poet, he is interested primarily in longer blank-verse lyrics, and also in poems composed after 1795 (the date of "The Eolian Harp").14 But "To the Autumnal Moon," written in 1788, stands significantly as an earlier poem on the way toward the greater Romantic lyric, as a text in the process of emerging both historically and formally from the genre of the "effusion" into the conversation poems. Thus what Coleridge counts as "invention" or rhetorical discovery in 1788 turns into something quite commonplace a few years later. On 10 September 1802, commenting on some of Bowles's poetry, Coleridge writes to William Sotheby: There reigns thro' all the blank verse poems such a perpetual trick of moralizing every thing - which is very well, occasionally - but never to see or describe any interesting appearance in nature, without connecting it by dim analogies with the moral world, proves faintness of Impression. (CL 2: 864)

Going on to speak of a poet's necessary participation in the "one Life," Coleridge discounts the rhetoric of "formal Similies [sic]" that mechanically connect humans with nature as being "'Sermoni propiora' which I once translated - Troperer for a Sermon'" (CL 2: 864 This letter, though written in 1802, takes us back several years in Coleridge's development to the issues raised in chapter 2 concerning the genus sermonis, the genre of the effusion as "a sort of middle thing between Poetry and Oratory" (CPW 1: 257n). And while Coleridge in 1802 faults the rhetorical "trick of moralizing every thing ... by dim analogies," in 1788 he manipulates it quite skilfully. In conventional fashion'Coleridge gives nature a moral meaning, just as Wordsworth in The Prelude, describing his Cambridge days, says that "to every natural form ... I gave a moral life" (3.130,132). The movement from nature to moralization, however, goes beyond the conventional view that natural objects are the handiwork of God: if you look closely enough, this topos claims, God's fingerprints are still on the clay. But what makes this early poem by Coleridge original and noteworthy is the way that he turns conventional eighteenth-century verse into Romantic, self-conscious epideictic. "To the Autumnal Moon" represents Coleridge's rhetorical demonstration of the "sweet and indissoluble union between the intellectual and the material world" (CPW 2: 1139), an invention that, if our present dating of manuscripts is

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correct, actually predates Bowles with his "dim analogies" and "formal Similies."15 Begin with the basics. Surely the most conspicuous feature of the poem is its light imagery, or the "accidents of light and shade" that Coleridge in chapter 14 of the Biographia Literaria sees as combining the "colours of imagination" with the "truth of nature" (2: 5).16 In the octave we find a range of diction evoking both light and sight: "Splendour," "visions," "I watch," "light," "eye," "glimmers," "lightning." The sestet continues this train of imagery: "sight," "radiant," "meteor kindling." But these chiar effects are counterbalanced by oscuro variations: "veil," "shroud," "gather'd blackness," "dimly peering," "hid," "sorrow-clouded." Even the eye and light images in the octave are qualified by being "weak," "watery," or "pale." The text has no colour but the colours of rhetoric. At this point the sonnet perhaps seems in danger of being paralysed by an oppressively binary structure: octave/sestet, light imagery/dark imagery, locodescription/moralization. What saves the poem from such stasis, and from its consequent interpretive dreariness, is the way that Coleridge shakes the structure, puts it into movement - not once or twice, but three times in the text as a whole. The first time he does this is in the octave, whose main subject and verb are simply "I watch." Rhetorically this observant stance evokes Aristotle's distinction between two types of audience, theoros and krites, the spectator and the judge (47): the judge belongs to deliberative and forensic rhetoric, while the witness or spectator belongs to epideictic. As a spectator ab extra of the night sky, Coleridge comes not to exhort or dissuade, or to accuse or defend, but to praise ("Hail!") and to show ("Ah such is ... !"). As readers we too are placed in, the position of theoroi, or witnesses: we also see, and we marvel at the sight. Coleridge elaborates his watching by giving the reader three moments, and three different objects, of seeing: "I watch," he says, "while ... And when ... And when." These conjunctions, while and when, naturally call attention to the temporality of the act of watching, as they anaphorically suspend the poet's gaze in a sequence of visual "shots" or locodescriptive moments. The temporal suspension directs our interest away from the speaker of the flat statement "I watch" toward the thing watched, toward the activity or agency of the moon itself. And just what, exactly, is the moon doing in this regard? First, its "weak eye glimmers through a fleecy veil"; then it "loves" "to shroud" its "pale orb" "Behind the gather'd blackness lost on high"; and finally it "darts" its "placid lightning o'er the awaken'd sky." Compared to the stationary prospect of the

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speaker, the moon is active in a process that in each shot involves a veiling and an unveiling, an epideixis of the night sky. But this exhibition by nature prompts us to recognize another display: the show-piece of the poem itself. Coleridge's observation "I watch thy gliding" is, according to the available evidence, the first instance in his aeuvre of the attributive effect of imagination, by which motion is transferred from one thing to another, as in the wellknown image in "Dejection: An Ode": And those thin clouds above, in flakes and bars, That give away their motion to the stars; Those stars, that glide behind them or between, Now sparkling, now bedimmed, but always seen: Yon crescent Moon, as fixed as if it grew In its own cloudless, starless lake of blue; I see them all so excellently fair, I see, not feel, how beautiful they are! (CPW 1: 364)

Here, in one of Coleridge's finest pieces of poetry, we have the same constellation of perceiver and perceived as in "To the Autumnal Moon": cloud, moon, gliding, change ("Now sparkling, now bedimmed"), and the anaphorically foregrounded gaze of the speaker ("I see ... I see"); plus we have the crucial element of the stars, along with, of course, the outcrie against the triumph of imaginative passivity over active creation, an affected modesty topos contradicted by the very imagery and rhetoric of the text. The usual critical comment on this passage has been, "Tut, tut, Coleridge; your active imagination belies your pretence of a 'passive and indolent brain' because you have succeeded in imagining and representing an active, selfless nature 'that gives itself away,' both as revelation and as wedding dower. Enough already." The precedent for this moment in "Dejection" occurs in "To the Autumnal Moon" when the fixed moon is troped as "gliding" or "darting" because the clouds have given away their motion to it. But observe also that Coleridge links this transfer of movement to certain effects of light, the chiaroscuro dynamics noted earlier, so that a play of sight (the variable light of the moon) expresses itself as a play of movement (now seen, now lost). In his combination of light and motion, Coleridge is able even to convey a sense of tempo in the moon's movements, from a slowpaced "gliding" associated with a "glimmer" of light, to arrested motion altogether in the fixed or "gather'd blackness," to the quick "darting" of the moon's "lightning." If this description really is an epideixis of nature, exhibiting the glory of creation, we must

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understand this creation to include the invention of the poem too. The heavens declare the glory of God, but what if, in this case, God and the poet are one? From its beginnings, epideictic, while distinguished from panegyric and encomium, has often been associated with the demonstration of virtuosity: display reflexively becomes self-display. Thus the personified showing-forth of the moon becomes an occasion for a rhetorical showing-off, an exhibition of what Aristotle calls energeia, a "bringing-before-the-eyes": "[The poet] makes everything move and live, and energeia is motion" (248-9).17 The dynamic movement of the octave is outlined in the active verbs associated with the rhetorical pattern of "while ... And when ... And when": "glimmers through ... lovest ... to shroud / Behind ... dartest from." "Through," "behind," "from": the three prepositions map out the spatial movement of the moon - even as the three conjunctions "while ... when ... when" map out its temporal progress - necessarily implying an alternation of inside and outside, back and front, there and here. What was once hidden is now revealed; what is revealed is now hidden; what is hidden is soon revealed again. This three-part process of vision, in which the "various-vested Night" alternately unclothes, clothes, and again unclothes itself, stems from the rhetorical structure of the octave, with its parallel yet sequential moments of watching. This pattern is repeated in the sestet, with a difference, constituting the second time that Coleridge shakes the structural stasis or passivity of a sonnet about watching. The three-part movement this time stands out all the more clearly for our foregrounding it in the octave: instead of "while ... And when ... And when," we have "Now ... Now ... But soon." The rhetorical schemes are analogous in that the text moves from illumination to obscurity and back again. Here in the sestet, which is the moralized supplement of the physical moon, the personified abstraction "Hope" is described as "Now dimly peering ... Now hid behind ... But soon emerging." The separate stages are exactly similar to those in the octave, from "peering," to being "hid," to appearing yet once more. The text is indeed an "emergent occasion," as Donne might have said. But it is by no means the first time or the last that such a baroque image appears in Coleridge's work. His early poem "Dura Navis," written in 1787, contains lines that can be read as a rehearsal for the same imagery in "To the Autumnal Moon" a year later: Whilst total darkness overspreads the skies; Save when the lightnings darting winged Fate

8o Romantic Aversions Quick bursting from the pitchy clouds between In forked Terror ... (CP W 1: 2)

That may be a bit overwrought, but a decade later, Coleridge draws on this same emergent figure of the moon in a passage near the end of "The Nightingale": and oft, a moment's space, What time the moon was lost behind a cloud, Hath heard a pause of silence; till the moon Emerging, hath awakened earth and sky With one sensation, and those wakeful birds Have all burst forth in choral minstrelsy ... (CPW 1: 266)

We perhaps think of another "choral minstrelsy," when a certain Boy of Winander gets hung up by a similar "lengthened pause / Of silence," and the mute wakeful owls send "a gentle shock of mild surprise" into his heart (Prelude 5.379-80, 382).l8 But on a lower note, contrast Coleridge's moon imagery here with a rather different kind of "mooning" in a mock sonnet that he published in 1797 under the name Nehemiah Higginbottom. "On a Ruined House in a Romantic Country," a take-off of "The House that Jack Built," parodies Coleridge's earlier "indiscriminate use of elaborate and swelling language and imagery" (BL 1: 27) and reduces them, as Erdman has noted, to "scatological absurdity" (579): And aye beside her stalks her amorous knight! Still on his thighs their wonted brogues are worn, And thro' those brogues, still tatter'd and betorn, His hindward charms gleam an unearthly white; As when thro' broken clouds at night's high noon Peeps in fair fragments forth the full-orb'd harvest-moon! (CPW 1: 211)19

I said that Coleridge performs a not-so-secret ministry of alternating revealing and concealing movements three times in "To the Autumnal Moon," but before I examine the third instance, let me pull back from close-up analysis for a moment to consider the question of genre as it applies to this text.20 Geoffrey Hartman has written about the "evening star" genre in both its pre-Romantic and Romantic forms.21 We can point similarly to a "moon poem" genre that would, in its English literary context, stretch at least from Sidney's "With how sad steps, 6 Moone, thou climb'st the skies" (180), through Wordsworth's imitation of Sidney in 1807 (PW 3: 31-2), to

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Samuel Beckett's unacknowledged quoting of Shelley's "To the Moon" in Waiting for Godot, to Philip Larkin's "Sad Steps" (32). Along with such texts as Collins's "Ode to Evening," we have poems that are set a little later in the diurnal round, less serenade and more nocturne, "as pensive Evening deepens into night," as Wordsworth writes (PW3: 46-7) - or, as Coleridge would have it, as "Eve saddens into Night."22 Wordsworth takes this subgenre of moon poems and amplifies it in numerous compositions on or addresssed to the moon, including his poem "A Night-Piece," which Kenneth Johnston has taken as an example of Wordsworth's "idiom of vision." But consider Wordsworth's late collection "Evening Voluntaries," in which, in the last number in the sequence, he also plays with the on-again, offagain moon imagery: Who but is pleased to watch the moon on high Travelling where she from time to time enshrouds Her head, and nothing loth her Majesty Renounces, till among the scattered clouds One with its kindling edge declares that soon Will reappear before the uplifted eye A Form as bright, as beautiful a moon To glide in open prospect through clear sky. Pity that such a promise e'er should prove False in the issue, that yon seeming space Of sky should be in truth the steadfast face Of a cloud flat and dense, through which must move (By transit not unlike man's frequent doom) The Wanderer lost in more determined gloom. (PW 4: 18)

Composed in 1846, and published in the year of his death, this poem of Wordsworth's stands in analogous relation to the end of his career as Coleridge's does to his beginning. Look at their similar strategies. Wordsworth's enshrouded moon (the phrase "nothing loth" curiously echoing Eve after the fall [Paradise Lost 9.1039]) is troped as "such a promise" - recall "Such is Hope!" - because of the anticipated reemergence of the moon at a cloud's "kindling edge" - compare the "meteor kindling in its flight." But what is different in Wordsworth's poem is the frustration of the viewer's (and reader's) expectations: the moon does not reappear, and the "Wanderer" whether human figure or moon itself - is left in darkness. "Behold an emblem of 'man's frequent doom!'" saith the poet. Coleridge often invokes moon imagery in his poetry - the old moon/new moon and "silver thread" images in "Dejection" are perhaps the best known, along with the role the moon plays in the

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"Ancient Mariner" and the reciprocal illumination of moon and icicles in "Frost at Midnight."23 Compare also the veiled moon imagery in Christabel: "The thin gray cloud is spread on high, / It covers but not hides the sky. / The moon is behind, and at the full; / And yet she looks both small and dull" (CPW 1: 216). "To the Autumnal Moon" certainly taps into a long-standing convention of address to a lunar body, but what strikes the reader is not so much the sonnet's relation to a tradition of moon poems as its depiction of an on-again, off-again illumination, an apocalyptic now-you-see-it-now-you-don't rhetoric that is responsible for structuring the entire poem. In its relation to eighteenth-century poems addressed to classical deities, Coleridge's text plays with the figure of a dea abscondita, a lost and found mother-goddess. But in another sense, his sonnet is closer to an earlier hintertext that employs similar dynamics, though not with moons. I juxtapose two passages from that text that comment on each other: Yet herein will I imitate the sun, Who doth permit the base contagious clouds To smother up his beauty from the world, That, when he please again to be himself, Being wanted, he may be more wonder'd at, By breaking through the foul and ugly mists Of vapours that did seem to strangle him.

Now compare: By being seldom seen, I could not stir But like a comet I was wonder'd at ... Thus did I keep my person fresh and new; My presence, like a robe pontifical, Ne'er seen but wonder'd at ... (emphasis added)

The first passage is Prince Hal at the end of the tavern scene in 1 Henry iv (1.2.220-6) soliloquizing on the theme of redemption; and the second is King Henry applying his experience of the law of supply and demand to the case of Hal's popularity (3.2.46-7, 55-7). What interests me, naturally, is Shakespeare's repetition of "wonder'd at" in both son's and father's speeches: the emergence of the sun and the comet - conventional images for royalty - elicits a response of awe from the viewers, like the twentieth-century paparazzi's blaze of cameras surrounding a "star," whose dazzle

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resides in the constellating reflection of the photo-flashes. Coleridge in "To William Wordsworth" has something to say about this, about the difference between a "light reflected" and a "light bestowed" (19), which in turn is relevant to the optics of moon-gazing, with all its associations of falseness, mutability, derivativeness - indeed, a heavenly body of light reflected, not bestowed. Shakespeare's dramatic context emphasizes the politically strategic advantage of being "wonder'd at" - and wonder, as Wordsworth would say, "is the natural product of Ignorance" (Essay, Supplementary 1815; Prose 3: 74). The point is to dazzle but not necessarily to illuminate. It is crucial to note, however, that this Shakespearean effect of wonder (whatever its application) depends on an epideictic process exactly similar to Coleridge's: a gone-returned method whose very movement - like the sun's "breaking through the foul and ugly mists" - produces rhetorical awe and praise, not blame. Even the images chosen to represent this process are similar: "like a comet I was wonder'd at" (Shakespeare); "like a meteor kindling in its flight" (Coleridge). While both images give the suggestion that this splendour is only temporary, that this heavenly radiance will soon burn out, Shakespeare plays down the transitoriness, while Coleridge emphasizes it: "Ah such is Hope! as changeful and as fair!" Coleridge knew what burnout was, and even in this early poem he demonstrates his recognition of what it means for "Hope" to be a flash in the pan. Wordsworth would call this effect a "usurpation" "when the light of sense / Goes out, but with a flash that has revealed / The invisible world" (Prelude 6.600-2). Hope is hope precisely because it is "changeful": its shifting, emerging, on-again, offagain movement makes it a once and future affect, like Wordsworth's "hope that can never die, / Effort, and expectation, and desire, / And something evermore about to be" (Prelude 6.606-8). Awe, to be sustained, requires a play or movement of absence and presence. Difference, not sameness, not stasis, produces awe. But in Coleridge's poem, this awe is rendered as Ah!: "Ah such is Hope! as changeful and as fair!" Here is the third and final time that Coleridge employs his "emergent" strategy: not within octave or within sestet, but across them, in the shift from locodescription to moralization. The moon shines forth - like lightning; Hope shows itself - like a meteor; and now the poet emerges into the light of understanding, with an epideictic display that thematizes the advance from obscurity to revelation and foregrounds the discovery of repetition and difference: Ah! The little outcrie carries a big significance, especially when used in conjunction with the "such" clause.

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"Such" is such a Coleridgean word; it is an essential part of his grammar of analogy and demonstration, his rhetoric of invention. Coleridge uses "such" frequently: Logan's early concordance lists almost seventy instances of the word - and even that number is only a "partial list" (752). (By comparison, Logan lists over fifty uses of the word "ah.") The first entry, interestingly enough, is from "To the Autumnal Moon," but we recall later occasions, including "To an Infant": "A Babe art thou - and such a Thing am I!" (16); "Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement": "Ah! - had none greater! And that all had such!" (69); "To the Rev. George Coleridge": "Such, O my earliest Friend! / Thy lot, and such thy brothers too enjoy" (9-10); "Constancy to an Ideal Object": "And art thou nothing? Such thou art, as when ... "; or his fourfold use of "such" in "The Eolian Harp," a poem grounded in analogy: "(such should Wisdom be)" (8); "such sweet upbraiding" (16); "Such a soft floating witchery of sound" (20); "nor such thoughts / Dim and unhallow'd" (50). Somewhere in the background one hears Milton: "Such, Lycidas, thy loss to shepherd's ear" (49). In each case, the "such," functioning as a demonstrative, points to something earlier in order to analogize it with the present: Coleridge's sestet looks back to the octave to establish the comparison already implicit in the shift from landscape to allegorization: as the changeful moon, such is hope. This is no mere pathetic fallacy, no simple projection of human emotion onto nature, but rather a calling attention to the rhetorical inventiveness linking the separate but juxtaposed likenesses of emotion and nature. Susan J. Wolfson, in an essay on Coleridge's use of simile as a "privileged rhetoric" simultaneously "testing likeness against difference" (44, 32), makes the point that "Coleridge's persistent turns and returns to simile are the signature of an imagination always given to reading its world, in various degrees, in textures of like and as" (45). Wolfson usefully surveys Coleridge's theory and practice of simile, showing how what Reeve Parker sees as Coleridge's deeply analogical imagination (217-44) manifests itself in specific rhetorical figures.24 To the language of "like and as," however, we must clearly now add the complement "such," opening up these "formal Similies" to the epideictic power of a different, but central, trope in Coleridge's poetry - a figure based on no "dim analogies," no "faintness of Impression" (CL 2: 864), but on an enthusiastic, exclaiming rhetoric of discovery that, while maintaining the separation of likeness and difference, crucially displays the invention of the poet. To throw into relief the imaginative process enacted in Coleridge's text, let me juxtapose a poem by Wordsworth that bases itself on a similar rhetorical structure. I quote from the "Inscriptions Supposed to be Found in and near a Hermit's Cell":

85 Coleridge's Emergent Occasion Hast thou seen, with flash incessant, Bubbles gliding under ice, Bodied forth and evanescent, No one knows by what device? Such are thoughts! - A wind-swept meadow Mimicking a troubled sea, Such is life; and death a shadow From the rock eternity! (PW 4: 205)

Here, in abbreviated form, is a rhetorical and hermeneutic movement analogous to that in the "Autumnal Moon": like Coleridge's octave, Wordsworth's first stanza is natural description; and like Coleridge's sestet, the second stanza, through the use of the anaphoric "such" constructions, rises to a moral application of the natural phenomenon described. In this case, the evanescence of the spectacle of bubbles under ice suggests an analogy to mind - as the action of nature, such are thoughts - and then to life and finally to death. Without taking a detour into what makes this poem typically (even epitaphically) Wordsworthian in its movement from perception as such to meditation on the mind in the act of perceiving, we can at least note that the leap from stanza 1 to stanza 2 is not just a deviation from a type of locodescription to moralization, but also, rhetorically speaking, a transport from the literal to the figural. "Such," as a rhetorical demonstrative, raises the discourse to (in this case) a metaphorical level, so that "thoughts" are troped as "bubbles." Having made the hermeneutic vault across stanzas with the first "Such," Wordsworth then repeats the manoeuvre within the second quatrain, troping life (the second "Such) as a "wind-swept meadow" and death (the third "such" is understood) as a shadow of eternity. If we go back now to Wordsworth's sonnet on the moon, we will see how "such a promise" as the anticipated reemergence of the moon sometimes proves false, and the "transit" that Wordsworth speaks of thematizes the "transition" from literal, natural image to figural, moral interpretation. But is such the case in Coleridge's poem? Does the transition from octave to sestet similarly involve a movement from the literal to the figural? At first glance, perhaps, the answer seems obviously affirmative: the natural description of the moon is followed by the abstract, moral prosopopoeia "Hope"; the literally clouded imagery in the octave gives way to the figurally "sorrow-clouded" image of personified Care in the sestet. Hope emerges as the tenor for which the moon is the vehicle. But as soon as we make such a claim, we need to note that this vehicle is itself a figure: personified Hope may be like a changeful moon, but the moon is troped too - as a "Mother"

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with the human attributes of explicit "eye" and (since the poet addresses the moon) implicit ear. What we are facing, then, is not a simple transition from literal to figural levels of discourse, but rather a stationing between two prosopopoeias acting as analogical complements of each other.25 The complementarity is built into the rhetorical structure of the analogy, just as it is in the more familiar figure of the epic simile: As one who hangs down-bending from the side Of a slow-moving boat, upon the breast Of a still water ... Such pleasant office have we long pursued Incumbent o'er the surface of past time ...

That's Wordsworth, under full sail rhetorically in the first epic simile in The Prelude (4.256-72), which I consider in more detail in chapter 7. The conventional "as ... such" or "as ... so" structure, elaborated over several lines, clearly demarcates the splitting of the figure into its constituent parts of vehicle and tenor, respectively, and it distinguishes between the subordinate "as" and the dominant "such." But here is the paradox of epic simile: while the vehicle is meant to be in the service of the tenor - in other words, while the poet temporarily turns from the subject in order to trope it through comparison with something else - the comparison itself becomes foregrounded, amplified, elaborated, its ironies sounded, its potential for foreshadowing explored. The hierarchy implicit in simile is temporarily suspended. Wordsworth, in the example above, isn't really talking about boating as such, but rather "past time" - and yet, curious, isn't it, how he does go on about boating, fifteen lines of vehicle compared to five or so of tenor. Which half of the comparison should take precedence is put in question. "To the Autumnal Moon" thus stands as an elaborate rhetorical analogy, structurally suspended between two personifications, the first of which humanizes a natural object, and the second an abstract emotion.26 Which of these has priority? Coleridge's double rhetorical loop complicates the question, and makes us see that the suspension operates in more than one way: it is part of the locodescriptive stationing that we saw earlier, when Coleridge gives the reader snapshots, or time-lapse pictures, of the moon in its "various-vested" appearances; but the suspension also strikes the interpreter as being somehow related to the exercise of imaginative or aesthetic control in the poem. The appearance-disappearance motif, the gone-but-

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now-returned process that I outlined at the start, may evoke for psychoanalytically minded readers Freud's description of his grandson's game of "fort-da" in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in which the child repeatedly throws his toys under or behind furniture, making a sound that approximates the German word fort ("gone"), and then retrieves them again, saying "da" ("there"). "This, then, was the complete game - disappearance and return," Freud writes. He continues: The interpretation of the game then became obvious. It was related to the child's great cultural achievement - the instinctual renunciation (that is, the renunciation of instinctual satisfaction) which he had made in allowing his mother to go away without protesting. He compensated himself for this, as it were, by himself staging the disappearance and return of the objects within his reach ... How then does his repetition of this distressing experience [i.e., the mother's absence] as a game fit in with the pleasure principle? ... We are therefore left in doubt as to whether the impulse to work over in the mind some overpowering experience so as to make oneself master of it can find expressions as a primary event, and independently of the pleasure principle. (SE 18: 15-16)

Even if we were to try to read Coleridge's sonnet through the psychoanalytic lens that Freud's extraordinary text provides, what "distressing" or "overpowering experience" might we point to as evidence? Sallyings into biography may be tempting, but can they provide much in the end? While it is true that Coleridge's mother was largely absent while he was at Christ's Hospital - Richard Holmes says that Coleridge, after his arrival at school, was not allowed home on holidays "more than three or possibly four times over the next nine years" (24)27 - and while Coleridge does address the moon as "Mother," variously disappearing and returning, I needs must stop short of claiming that "To the Autumnal Moon," in its "renunciation of instinctual satisfaction," is saying: "Da! such is Hope!" Yet there can be no question that Coleridge's poem imagistically repeats the unpleasurable experience of loss or absence. The disappearance-and-return motif of the octave does not yet carry the moral freight of the sestet; at this point in the text, the ever-changing activity of the moon is "all gratulant, if rightly understood" (Prelude 14.389). It is only when such imagery is applied in the sestet that it is given a moralizing spin. But we need to note that Coleridge does end the poem on what might be read as a positive or recuperative note: Hope does break through "in her radiant might" to sail "o'er the sorrow-clouded breast of Care." We glimpse the faint outlines of

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a romance structure here; as in Frye's "monomyth" of literature, involving "the loss and regaining of identity" (Educated Imagination 21), so here Coleridge concludes with the regaining, the return, of the desired object. He does not choose to finish with a loss; even the imagery of Hope temporarily hidden behind "dragon-wing'd Despair" takes on overtones of the apocalyptic battle in romance, with evil being defeated by good "in her radiant might." And yet, while that in itself may be affirmative, there is still the feeling, as I suggested with the simile of "a meteor kindling in its flight," that such hope will be short-lived. Moreover, the fact that Coleridge structures the three-part process of vision so that the moon first unclothes, then clothes, and again unclothes itself, suggests an arbitrariness in the staging of the act of interpretation.28 That is, in any sequence, potentially infinitely repeated, of "disappearance-returndisappearance-return," and so on, the choice of where one breaks into such a stream and, consequently, where one breaks out of it, is an arbitrary act of the will that serves an aesthetic as well as, perhaps, an emotional purpose. As Freud observes, the child compensates "by himself staging the disappearance and return of the objects within his reach." The epideictic staging or ordering is indeed important, as Coleridge's deliberate parallelism emphasizes: "Now dimly peering ... Now hid behind ... But soon emerging." The dea abscondita is now inventa, Found. Or recall the earlier exclamation about Hope, which maps out this same recuperative direction of the poem - "as changeful and as fair!" Not "fair and changeful," not returnedgone, you see, but the other way around. Fort-da. We can return now to the central analogy in the sonnet, with its suspending of the "as-such," vehicle-tenor structure. Coleridge's demonstrative "such," I said, may be read conventionally as the completion of an extended comparison. But when the analogical rhetoric of "such" occurs in the company of "Ah," another light goes on. If "To the Autumnal Moon" really is an act of rhetorical heuresis, or discovery, then one begins to feel that the demonstration is selfregarding, as if Coleridge were discovering discovery itself, inventing inventio. But here we encounter an interpretive difficulty. How do we read the exclamation "Ah"? As merely another "bloated and puffing" outcrie? The Oxford English Dictionary lists half a dozen different uses of the word "Ah," expressing a range of emotions from sorrow or regret through entreaty, contempt, and mockery. But it also lists "surprise, wonder, admiration" and "realization, discovery, inspiration" as other meanings. It would be possible to develop a rhetorical taxonomy of Ah's in Coleridge's poetry. Surely the most

89 Coleridge's Emergent Occasion common for Coleridge would be what I would call the Ah Regretful, as in the following lines from "On receiving an Account that his Only Sister's Death was Inevitable": Ah! how has Disappointment pour'd the tear O'er infant Hope destroy'd by early frost! How are ye gone, whom most my soul held dear! (CPW 1: 20) Or in "Sonnet: On Quitting School for College": Adieu, adieu! ye much-lov'd cloisters pale! Ah! would those happy days return again, When 'neath your arches, free from every stain, I heard of guilt and wonder'd at the tale! (CPW 1: 29) Or in "Absence: A Farewell Ode on Quitting School for Jesus College, Cambridge": Ah me! too mindful of the days Illumed by Passion's orient rays, When Peace, and Cheerfulness and Health Enriched me with the best of wealth. Ah fair Delights! that o'er my soul On Memory's wing, like shadows fly! Ah Flowers! which Joy from Eden stole While Innocence stood smiling by! (CPW 1: 29) And, to choose a final example of this type, the last line of "Sonnet: To the River Otter": "Ah! that once more I were a careless Child!" (CPW 1: 48). It is difficult not to hear Thomas Gray's "Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College": "Ah happy hills, ah pleasing shade, / Ah fields belov'd in vain, / Where once my careless childhood stray'd, / A stranger yet to pain!" (11-14). Now compare an example of the Ah Mock-Regretful, in "Monody on a Tea-Kettle," in which "The tea-kettle is spoilt and Coleridge is undone!" (8): Ah! must I all thy varied sweets resign? Enfolded close in grief thy form I see; No more wilt thou extend thy willing arms, Receive the fervent Jove, and yield him all thy charms! (CPW 1: 18)

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In both the straight and the mock versions, Coleridge depends heavily on exclamation marks to punctuate his verse. The rhetoric requires such punctuation, since Ah! is, after all, an ecphonesis, an expression of passion. Like apostrophe, the exclamation Ah! is a personal intervention of the speaker into the discourse, though not, it will be remembered from chapter 1, necessarily with an accompanying diversion of address from one auditor to another. Ah! is ex-claiming: it is "timely utterance," as Wordsworth would say, spatializing the temporality of voice; its very breathiness physically manifests what Coleridge in his Notebooks calls outness (e.g., entry 1387). Consider now this example of the Ah Aversive from Coleridge's "Progress of Vice": "Ah! close the scene - ah! close - for dreadful is the sight" (CPW 1: 13). This type may owe something to Collins's "Ode to Fear": "Ah Fear! Ah frantic Fear! / I see, I see Thee near" (5-6), but it is different from another instance of the type in Keats: St. Agnes' Eve - Ah, bitter chill it was! The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold ...

(Poems 229)

The phrasing of "Ah, bitter chill" in the first line is echoed in the "a-cold" of the second, as if the rhetorical prosthesis of "a-cold" could become a-bitter. In cases of this type, the Ah! usually denotes a recoiling from something, which is just the opposite of what might be called simply the Ah Expressive, as seen in the following examples from "To William Wordsworth" - "Ah! as I listened with a heart forlorn, / The pulses of my being beat anew" (CPW 1: 406-7) - and from "Dejection: An Ode": "Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth / A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud" (CPW 1: 365). Keats, again, is worth comparing: "Ah, happy, happy boughs!" ("Ode on a Grecian Urn" 21; Poems 282). The Ah! in "To the Autumnal Moon," however, is different again: this time the illumination is intellectual, a Eureka: Ah! - as in Hopkins' "Because the Holy Ghost over the bent / World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings" ("God's Grandeur" 13-14). Ah! is a moment of realization - a discovery of rhetoric, but also a discovery of self, as the reader observes the observer breaking through his own cloud of "visionary dreariness" (Prelude 12.256) to illuminate the act of enlightenment itself. In such an expressive release, invention becomes its own topos, the emerging moon an Ah!-tumnal moon able to raise a dull sublunary consciousness to an original enthusiasm. For Coleridge to make the connection that A is like B, that Hope is "as changeful and as fair" as the autumnal moon,

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is to inaugurate a rhetorical self-consciousness that augurs well for the Romantic imagination, even as Coleridge's retreat from such inventiveness at the end of "The Eolian Harp" augurs badly for it, as Bloom has said (Visionary Company 202). Coleridge's insight, however, through its exclamatory expressiveness, declares itself as a "conceitful" invention, and as such it perhaps recalls the showiness of metaphysical rhetoric, the ingenious display of two dissimilar things being yoked together in surprising ways (Samuel Johnson 1: 18-20). At the same time, though, to illuminate "the before unapprehended relations of things," in Shelley's phrase (482), is to perform what we normally regard as the quintessentially Romantic act of imagination. The imagination, Wordsworth writes in The Prelude, perceives "affinities / In objects where no brotherhood exists / To passive minds" (2.384-6). How, then, are we to explain this doubleness in Coleridge's language, with its feel of epideictic or flashy rhetoric on the one hand, and a "meditative pathos" (BL 2: 150) on the other? Wordsworth perhaps supplies an answer: "To the Autumnal Moon" demonstrates what in the 1815 Preface he calls the "enthusiastic and meditative Imagination" (Prose y. 34) - a formulation verging on paradox, though apt in Coleridge's case. Yet is Coleridge's poem more Fancy than Imagination - "a flash of surprise, and nothing more," as Wordsworth might say (Prose y. 37) - or is it, as De Quincey said of Wordsworth's perception, "a flash of sublime revelation" (Recollections 161)? The hopefulness of the question perhaps helps to explain Coleridge's later dissatisfaction with Bowles's poetry, with its "perpetual trick of moralizing every thing" through "dim analogies" and "formal Similies" (CL 2: 864): Coleridge's criticism can be read as a self-criticism, as a retrospective discovery of the limits of his own poetic form and a desire to invent another form or be enslav'd.29 Yet how is a rhetoric of discovery related to the question of genre? Geoffrey Hartman once defined a genre of "surmise" in the Romantic period (Wordsworth's Poetry 9-12), in which a poet typically questions an experience, or the interpretation of that experience. Hartman's locus classicus in Wordsworth is his poem "The Solitary Reaper," in which rhetorical interrogatives are crucial to the question of meaning; Hartman suggests that for the Romantics the surmise was part of their Miltonic inheritance, drawn from Milton's dallying "with false surmise" (153) in Lycidas, as the poet pretends that the dead shepherd-poet is in his "Laureate Hearse" (151) covered with flowers, instead of "far away" (155) under "the sounding Seas" (154). Hartman usefully relates surmise to the history of rhetoric: "The

92 Romantic Aversions

'surmise' might be thought an ad hoc invention of Milton's, but it is actually a specific rhetorical figure developed by him from Classical sources" (Wordsworth's Poetry 10).3° This is helpful, though for contrastive purposes. For what we have uncovered in this sonnet by Coleridge is really the reverse of surmise: discovery. There are no interrogatives in the poem, only assertions and exclamations. And as we have seen, the expressive rhetoric of "Ah such ... !" functions as the interpretive climax of the poem, the third and final time that Coleridge emerges from darkness into light, from an "obscure sojourn" (Paradise Lost 3.15) into revelation. First the moon leaves its "gather'd blackness" to shed its "placid lightning o'er the awaken'd sky"; then Hope "Sails, like a meteor kindling in its flight"; and now - of course! - the poet reads the analogical connection between the two. This final step, it should be noted, is a hermeneutic breakthrough for Coleridge, a genuinely Romantic reading of nature that he did not learn from Bowles.31 Is there a Romantic genre of "invention" or discovery as such? Hartman notes that "[t] hough the surmise is not a genre originally, it is a specific rhetorical form whose rise and modifications one can trace and which significantly becomes a genre in the Romantic period" (Wordsworth's Poetry 11). Can we say the same of a "genre of discovery"? Is there a recognizable rhetorical form in Romanticism whose chief trope would be a Eureka - not an interrogative or surmise but a figure of exclamation or outcrie? The closest likeness to Coleridge's in this case would have to be Keats's equivalent moment of discovery in a correspondingly early sonnet, "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer," in which the revelation of reading ("looking into") in the octave is troped in the sestet in star-gazer's terms: Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes He star'd at the Pacific - and all his men Look'd at each other with a wild surmise Silent, upon a peak in Darien. (Poems 34)

The rhetorical turn at the volta ("Then") introduces the simile of a sky-reader, as in Coleridge's sonnet, followed by that of a sea-gazer. Keats's reading of Homer for the first time is troped in macrogeographical terms - planet, ocean - expanding the earlier imagery of "realms," "states," "kingdoms," "islands," "expanse," and "demesne." The language of travelling, a metaphor for reading, emphasizes the extent of Keats's previous excursions in contrast to

93 Coleridge's Emergent Occasion his present adventure: "Much have I travell'd ... many goodly states ... many western islands." "I've been around," the poet says, "but I've never seen anything like this." What impresses me about Keats's poem is the way that the theme of discovery, and unexpected discovery at that, is so controlled, its imagery so consistently sustained. I remember as an undergraduate first reading David Perkins's headnote to the poem in his English Romantic Writers anthology, which described the poem as "Keats's first great sonnet" (1126), and wondering to myself what made it so. I now think that the answer has something to do with the fact that Keats's response to his first reading took the form of writing, so that in one sense the real discovery in the poem is the poem, Keats's discovery of himself as a poet. But here we have discovery mixed with "wild surmise." What sort of hybrid genre is this? Both the "watcher of the skies" and Cortez's men make a discovery, but their greater burden is to answer the question "What does it mean?" In Coleridge the "meaning" is not the problem - be Nature not ashamed to show, Coleridge'll not shame to tell you what she means - but rather it is the becoming selfaware of constructing meaning in the first place that marks Coleridge's poem as emergently Romantic. As Reeve Parker has said, "[t]he processes of self-discovery and self-expression were for him identical, or nearly so, and therefore to read his poems as effusions of an unstructured heart ... is to risk misconstruing the self expressed in them" (244). To say "Ah such is ..." is to create an interpretive paradigm, a "great cultural achievement," in Freud's terms, that opens the way for the poet to master his relation to that culture by bringing it before the eyes. This is, to use a later image of Coleridge's, "the emergence of an original poetic genius above the literary horizon" (BL 1: 77). Perhaps the leading trope for this phenomenon is Coleridge's "awaken'd sky," the final image before the volta, in which the implied emergence into consciousness adumbrates the career of the text. To say "Ah such ... ," however, is also to foreground a language of expressive power that runs the risk of bloating and puffing even as it sails toward "awaken'd" discovery. For a teenaged poet at Christ's Hospital, the hazards must have been palpable: Bowyer behind, Bowles ahead, "the grimaces of Lunacy" on one side, and sheer mediocrity on the other. To go for Eureka! would have been to emerge as a poet, with an outcrie of passion but also of awe in his discovery, including the discovery of expression as such. Hail, heavenly light! Well might Coleridge have asked: "May I express thee unblam'd?"

5 Transport and Persuasion in Longinus and Wordsworth Does a firm perswasion that a thing is so, make it so? Blake, Marriage of Heaven and Hell

No one who has ever read Longinus's Peri Hupsous, or On the Sublime, can have failed to notice the importance of certain crucial terms in his argument. One of these is the word "persuasion," by no means a surprising term when one considers the fact that On the Sublime is, after all, a rhetorical treatise and, as such, takes as one of its proper subjects the task of how to persuade or convince an audience. In keeping with such an aim, On the Sublime devotes most of its time to cataloguing and illustrating a number of rhetorical tropes and schemes whose purpose, by any standard of argument, is to persuade - that is, to achieve a desired rhetorical effect by means of specific linguistic devices. Thus Longinus discusses the proper use and effect of amplification, imagery, apostrophe, interrogation, asyndeton, diatyposis, hyperbaton, polyptoton, periphrasis, metaphor, hyperbole, and other rhetorical figures - all of which might be found in any ordinary rhetorical manual. Yet at the same time, Longinus goes out of his way to stress that his real subject, sublime or elevated writing, is in crucial ways different from common rhetorical persuasion and, in fact, ultimately stands in opposition to it. Such an antithesis can be seen in the repeated manoeuvres that Longinus makes to differentiate persuasion from his more favoured term "transport." In chapter 1, for example, he writes: The effect of elevated language upon an audience is not persuasion but transport. At every time and in every way imposing speech, with the spell it throws over us, prevails over that which aims at persuasion and gratification.

95 Transport and Persuasion in Longinus and Wordsworth Our persuasions we can usually control, but the influences of the sublime bring power and irresistible might to bear, and reign supreme over every hearer. (43)

In this distinction, Longinus's argument that the sublime "prevails" over mere persuasion is reinforced by the diction of "power and irresistible might," language that we now, thanks largely to Longinus himself, have come to associate particularly with sublimity. Yet in the same sentence in which Longinus speaks of the supreme power of the sublime he also refers to an ability to "control" persuasion. While persuasion, he implies, can be kept in check - presumably both by the writer through rhetoric and by the audience through self-control - sublimity, by contrast, is uncontrollable, "irresistible" or, as Carol Jacobs would say "uncontainable" (ix). Not only does sublimity not depend on persuasion, Longinus argues, its effect "is not persuasion" either, "but transport." And yet if this is true, then how do we explain the great bulk of Longinus's treatise on sublimity as a "how to" manual listing tropes and figures? If transport is so different from persuasion, why does it appear to depend so heavily on the same resources of language as persuasion, and why does it also appear to obscure this fact? In the history of commentary on Longinus, virtually all attention has been focused either on what he means by sublimity, or on whether the sublime is located in the object or in the subject (Cohn and Miles 295-6). Less has been said about the relation between sublimity and persuasion. At one extreme, sublimity is sometimes thought not to depend on rhetoric at all; indeed, as far as eighteenthcentury theorists of the natural sublime were concerned, sublimity was taken out of the realm of language as such, and introjected into a landscape whose conventional textuality - the liber naturae or book of nature (Curtius 308, 319-26) - was downplayed in favour of its emotional impressiveness, thus making nature more affect than text. At the other end, some readers, including Wordsworth, have questioned the appropriateness of translating hupsous as "the sublime" rather than as "elevated writing" or some similar expression that calls attention to the treatise's primarily verbal emphasis. Boileau, in his 1674 translation of Longinus, was the most influential theorist to separate sublimity from style and rhetoric, and to argue for simplicity of expression as the essence of the sublime (Monk 36-41). One critic has called Boileau a "propagandist" for Longinus (Brody 24); he was at least a popularist, with his threefold rallying slogan on the sublime: "enleve, ravit, transporte" (Boileau 45). All three of these terms, but especially the last, "transport," would become the rhetoric

96 Romantic Aversions

of sublimity in the eighteenth century; but as we have already seen, the terms have their origins in the very figures that Longinus himself uses right from the first chapter of his treatise. Boileau exemplifies the logocentric tradition that sees Longinus as incarnating the very things he describes: "Souvent," Boileau writes, "il fait la figure qu'il enseigne; et en parlant du Sublime, il est lui-meme tres-sublime" (Boileau 40). Longinus himself may be sublime but, according to his own argument, his sublimity feels obliged to disclaim its own reliance on rhetoric. This crucial but curiously hidden interdependence of sublimity and rhetoric, or of transport and persuasion, is developed through Longinus's recurrent language of "control" or what he also calls "enslavement" and "enthralment." In chapter 15, for example, in speaking of imagery, Longinus tries to distinguish, as John Stuart Mill later would also attempt to do, between poetry and oratory: "[Y]ou will be aware of the fact," Longinus says, "that an image has one purpose with the orators and another with the poets, and that the design of the poetical image is enthralment, of the rhetorical vivid description" (85). Whether this "fact" is indeed a fact or not, it nevertheless supports the binary opposition that underwrites the structure of Longinus's treatise - but again we see that the two terms are not so easily separated, as Longinus indicates when he nears the end of the same chapter: "What, then, can oratorical imagery effect? Well, it is able in many ways to infuse vehemence and passion into spoken words, while more particularly when it is combined with the argumentative passages it not only persuades the hearer but actually makes him its slave" (89). The orator, having "passed the bounds of mere persuasion by the boldness of his conception," is able to draw the audience "away from demonstration pure and simple to any startling image within whose dazzling brilliancy the argument lies concealed" (91). I will return to this notion of concealment shortly, since it figures largely in the succeeding chapters of Longinus's text. For now, however, I will simply point out how poetry and oratory, like elements in a chemical equation, intersect with and bond to each other - yet still remain distinct - so that the power of "enthralment," originally attributed to poetry, becomes part of the arsenal of oratory, while "vivid description," formerly the "design" of the rhetorical image, crosses over to poetry. The paradoxical interinvolvement of persuasion and transport is disclosed elsewhere by Longinus - as, for example, in chapter 32, in which he writes "that figurative language possesses great natural power, and that metaphors contribute to the sublime" (125)1 - but

97 Transport and Persuasion in Longinus and Wordsworth

the paradox is also related to the larger historical irony that the notion of the sublime, first discussed by a classical writer and popularized after Boileau into a neoclassical rage, should be the very notion that would, by the end of the eighteenth century, undo classicism and become one of the inaugurating and distinguishing marks of Romanticism. Thus whether we see Longinus as "the first Romantic critic," as Scott-James does (80-94; compare Brody 36), or whether we view Romanticism as more uncannily classical than we thought, the irony remains. For Romanticism to depend so clearly on a classical concept, and yet a concept that subverts the category of classicism itself, is analogous to the "double gesture" already present in Longinus, in which the hierarchical difference between sublimity and persuasion masks their interdependence. And yet masking is itself part of the sublime: concealment of the orator's rhetorical devices is one of those strategies aimed at producing transport. As Longinus says in chapter 17, "a figure is at its best when the very fact that it is a figure escapes attention" (95). This is itself a commonplace - "ars est celare artem," as Dryden's Essay of Dramatic Poesy puts it (17: 66): the function of art is to hide art. Longinus is repeating a convention as old as Aristotle, whose statement in the Rhetoric that "authors should compose without being noticed and should seem to speak not artificially but naturally" (1404^) is, according to George A. Kennedy, "[plerhaps the earliest statement in criticism that the greatest art is to disguise art" (Aristotle 222). Yet what does the sub lime have to hide? Perhaps nothing less than its sensuous reliance on rhetoric, and its blinding usurpation of that fact. I will put it more directly: Sublimity is rhetoric that has convinced itself it is not persuasion. I want now to pursue some of these issues involving persuasion, concealment, and sublimity in a brief close reading of Wordsworth, who, not accidentally, is on record at one point discussing Longinus and sublimity: One is surprized that it should have been supposed for a moment, that Longinus writes upon the Sublime, even in our vague and popular sense of the word - What is there in Sappho's ode that has any affinity with the sublimity of Ezekiel or Isaiah, or even of Homer or Eschylus? Longinus treats of animated, impassioned, energetic or if you will, elevated writing of these, abundant instances are to be found in Eschylus and Homer - but nothing would be easier than to shew, both by positive and negative proof, that his [hypsous] when translated sublimity deceives the english Reader, by substituting an etymology for a translation. Much of what I observe you call

98 Romantic Aversions sublime, I should denominate grand or dignified. But as I wrote before we shall never see clearly into this subject unless we turn from objects to laws ... (6 April 1825; Later Years, Part 1: 335)

By "substituting an etymology for a translation," Wordsworth argues, commentators have led English readers into thinking that Longinus's real subject is sublimity, when in Wordsworth's eyes it is in fact "animated, impassioned, energetic or if you will, elevated writing." Here again we see the influence of the eighteenth-century tendency to separate and hypostatize "the sublime" as a category distinct from any verbal incarnation. A study of Wordsworth's use of the word "sublime" and its related term "transport" in both his poetry and prose, including his fragmentary essay on "The Sublime and the Beautiful" (Prose 2: 349-60), confirms this tendency. Consider a couple of such passages, the first of which particularly reveals the intermixture of a Longinian, textual sublime with its natural analogue. Referring to the opening lines of The Prelude, Wordsworth in book 7 writes: Six changeful years have vanished since I first Poured out (saluted by that quickening breeze Which met me issuing from the City's walls) A glad preamble to this Verse: I sang Aloud, with fervour irresistible Of short-lived transport, like a torrent bursting, From a black thunder-cloud, down Scafell's side To rush and disappear. (7.1-8)

The "fervour irresistible" - called "dithyrambic fervour" in the 1805 version of the poem (7.5) - certainly seems to contain the pathos, the passion "poured out," as Wordsworth says, that had come to be associated with the Longinian sublime. The requisite "transport," "short-lived" though it may be, is linked through the simile to its natural analogue by means of the not unexpected images of the torrent, thunder-cloud, and mountain - all conventional indicators of the sublime in nature. One of Wordsworth's better-known sonnets takes the topos of transport and inflects it epitaphically, turning a sublime carryingaway into the carrying-off by death: Surprised by joy - impatient as the Wind I turned to share the transport - Oh! with whom

99 Transport and Persuasion in Longinus and Wordsworth But Thee, deep buried in the silent tomb, That spot which no vicissitude can find? (PW 3: 16)

The initial movement of surprise, joy, impatience, turning - all summed up in the naturally sublime vicissitude of the wind - is arrested at the still point of the tomb; the turning motion of the apostrophe to the deceased is paradoxically turned into a stand, a spot. The transport of nature, with its inspiring joy, gives way to a more sublime translation through death. Describing his personal myth of childhood invulnerability in the note to his "Ode: Intimations of Immortality," Wordsworth points to another form of sublime translation: I used to brood over the stories of Enoch and Elijah, and almost to persuade myself that, whatever might become of others, I should be translated, in something of the same way, to heaven. With a feeling congenial to this, I was often unable to think of external things as having external existence, and I communed with all that I saw as something not apart from, but inherent in, my own immaterial nature. (PW 4: 463)

What strikes me here is not just the idea of physical and spiritual transport, but its collocation with persuasion: "I used ... almost to persuade myself that ... I should be translated ... to heaven." Yet how, exactly, does one persuade oneself of sublime transport? Does the persuasion make possible the transport? Is it the case that in order to be translated to heaven, all you need is a little convincing? I recall Blake from my epigraph: "Does a firm perswasion that a thing is so, make it so?" One poem by Wordsworth that extends this interplay of transport and persuasion as competing modes of argument is a sonnet that he wrote and published in 1844, six years before his death. As an example of Wordsworth's later lyric poetry, the text demonstrates a mature rhetorical power that is self-conscious of its own place in both historical and literary tradition: Is then no nook of English ground secure From rash assault? Schemes of retirement sown In youth, and 'mid the busy world kept pure As when their earliest flowers of hope were blown, Must perish; - how can they this blight endure? And must he too the ruthless change bemoan Who scorns a false utilitarian lure

1oo Romantic Aversions 'Mid his paternal fields at random thrown? Baffle the threat, bright Scene, from Orrest-head Given to the pausing traveller's rapturous glance: Plead for thy peace, thou beautiful romance Of nature; and, if human hearts be dead, Speak, passing winds; ye torrents, with your strong And constant voice, protest against the wrong. (PW 3: 61-2)

I am interested in this sonnet, not so much for its being an example of "green Romanticism," as we now might say, but rather as a purple patch. I withhold the title of the poem, which some readers may know, until later; suffice it to say that this text seeks to make an argument, to persuade the reader of its own convictions, and that the way in which it does so is through its own imaginative and affecting transport. The irregular (ababababcddcee) rhyme scheme, unusual for Wordsworth, alerts the ear and eye to other daring rhetorical strategies and syntactics, beginning with the introductory erotesis: "Is then no nook of English ground secure / From rash assault?" The adverb "then" implies an intertextual discourse, a response to a previous argument, and as such it functions with conjunctive force: if such and such, then so and so; but at the same time it evokes a grammatically correlative function, calling attention to the immediacy of the question, not "if" and "then" but now: is now no nook of English ground secure? Because of the late date of the poem, it is not surprising that Wordsworth should indulge in some self-quotation, or that this text should gesture toward a pre-text, even though such forms of self-reading or self-echo can be found in Wordsworth's ceuvre from early on. In The Prelude, for example, in one of his extended apostrophes to Coleridge, Wordsworth turns to nature to seek sanctuary for his wretched companion: O flowery field Of Enna! is there not some nook of thine, From the first play-time of the infant world Kept sacred to restorative delight? (11.418-21)

The invocation of a Miltonic "fair field / Of Enna, where Proserpine gathering flow'rs / Herself a fairer flow'r by gloomy Dis / Was gathered" (Paradise Lost 4.268-71) is apt in its associations with Wordsworth's questioning of a locus that is "sacred" or "secure / From rash assault," and it also looks ahead in the sonnet to the "earliest flowers of hope" that are blown and perish. The implied answer to Wordsworth's "rhetorical question" in the sonnet seems to

101 Transport and Persuasion in Longinus and Wordsworth

be no, no nook now is safe. The "rash assault" - the rape of Proserpina, the seduction of Eve - evokes a paradise-topos, like that in Wordsworth's poem "Nutting," with its bower ravaged by a human hand. At the same time, however, the figure of "assault," in the context of specifically English ground - "Is then no nook of English ground secure" - localizes the paradise-topos, nationalizes it, makes the assault sound like a figure for military invasion. In this context, it is not irrelevant to invoke Gaunt's famous set-piece in Richard II on another paradise-topos: This other Eden, demi-paradise, This fortress built by Nature for herself Against infection and the hand of war ... (2.1.42-4)

Continuing the military metaphor, Gaunt laments that "England, that was wont to conquer others / Hath made a shameful conquest of itself" (2.1.65-6). These lines from Shakespeare arguably stand behind Wordsworth's text in their collocation of paradise- and fortress-topoi, and they are repeated in another Wordsworth poem entitled "To M.H.": echoing Gaunt's description of "this fortress built by Nature for herself," Wordsworth writes of a particular "calm recess": "The spot was made by Nature for herself: / The travellers know it not" (PW 2: 118). What has happened in Wordsworth's muted appropriation of these hintertexts is a subtle shift from the heroic language of Shakespeare and Milton, with their emphasis on foreign invasion, on physical or spiritual battle, to a troping of assault as pedestrian trespass. The sonnet thus takes the rhetoric of defence and thematizes it, making the "scanty plot of ground" ("Nuns fret not," PW3: 1) of the sonnet's verbal form repeat with a difference its content. The sonnet itself becomes a rhetorical defence, not just a poem about defence. It is a call to battle stations. Of course, the very notion of a call to arms - the locus classicus being the harangue of the troops in epic poetry - is itself heavily involved with the tradition of deliberative rhetoric, exhorting or dissuading the audience (Aristotle 48). Wordsworth is passionately making a case, seeking to persuade primarily through the use of the two devices of interrogation (the three questions in the octave of the sonnet), and imperative (the four commands given to nature in the sestet). Note, however, that the exhortations of the poet - the figure that Longinus calls "adjuration" in his example of the men of Marathon (93) - are themselves primarily verbal: Wordsworth apostrophizes nature, the winds and the torrents, in order to have them "plead ... speak ... [and] protest." Nature becomes a type

1O2 Romantic Aversions

of sublime persuader charged with "baffl[ing] the threat" of "rash assault." It is time now perhaps to identify the text I have been reading by its proper title, the title Wordsworth gave it when he published it in the Morning Post on 16 October 1844. As some readers will have known, or may have guessed, far from being a poem about literal military invasion, it is about a considerably different inroad: the title is "On the Projected Kendal and Windermere Railway" (Prose 3: 339).2 Wordsworth anticipates murmurs over his perhaps hyper-metaphorical "rash assault" in an appended note to the reader: "Let not the above be considered as merely a poetical effusion," he writes (Prose 3: 339n). The note, and the fact that Wordsworth included this sonnet with two letters to the editor of the Morning Post, tell us something about the seriousness of Wordsworth's argument, and his desire to persuade the reader of its merits in both poetry and prose. Wordsworth opposed the further intrusion of new railway lines into his area of the Lake District in the north of England, and his defence resembles a nineteenth-century version of the "not in my backyard" argument so common in environmental issues today. But something else is going on in this interplay of persuasion and the sublime. The notion of a figurative transport has become literalized in the threat of another transport, or transportation, the railway itself. If this be punning on Wordsworth's part, the reader is certainly carried away by it. The poem seeks to resist transport, to baffle it, and yet it resists precisely through the deployment of sublime rhetoric the speaking, pleading, protesting functions assigned by the poet to a personified nature. What I have identified as a rhetoric of invasion becomes explicit in the sonnet that Wordsworth used to conclude his two letters on the "Kendal and Windermere Railway" in the Morning Post, in which he contrasts the disfigurement of nature in times of war with the present incursions of technological progress: "Proud were ye, Mountains, when, in times of old, / Your patriot sons, to stem invasive war, / Intrenched your brows; ye gloried in each scar" (PW 3: 62; Prose 3: 356). Wordsworth, though he campaigned vigorously against the extension of the railway, was concerned not to be taken as a reactionary merely opposed to technological progress, and so he referred readers of his two Morning Post letters to an earlier sonnet of his which, while lamenting the fact that steamboats and railways "mar / The loveliness of nature," also acknowledges that Time welcomes them "with cheer sublime" ("Steamboats, Viaducts, and Railways," PW 4: 47). "Cheer sublime": one transport greets another, even as they threaten to do battle with each other; and Wordsworth's resistance to the literal (railway transport) produces

1O3 Transport and Persuasion in Longinus and Wordsworth

the figural (imaginative transport). In a sublime prosopopoeia, nature is directed to use rhetoric against the invading power of transport; the recuperation of imaginative and affecting vision is achieved through resistance to its own mode of operation. Call it "the battle of the transports," in which defence and resistance - a sublime diggingin, as it were - work against the force of being rhetorically railroaded. The members of the Board of Trade, however, who were to decide the question, were not convinced by Wordsworth's rhetoric and poetics. In their report, they alluded to Wordsworth's campaign, characterizing it as putting the interests of the individual ahead of the interests of the public, and they finally pronounced it as "an argument wholly untenable" (Prose 3: 334). "We are of opinion," they wrote, "that there are no public grounds" - and, we might insert, no nook of English ground - "which ought to be decisive against the Kendal and Windermere railway receiving the sanction of parliament" (Prose 3: 334). And it did. The line opened two years later. Not even a poet laureate could stand in its way. What had been true in Longinus was repeated in Wordsworth - with a difference: transport once again had prevailed over persuasion.

6 Wordsworth in the Isle of Man Quocunque jeceris stabit. Manx motto

In 1833, when he was sixty-three years old, Wordsworth went on a tour with his son John and his friend Henry Crabb Robinson to the Isle of Man and parts of Scotland, upon which he composed a series of forty-eight poems, mostly sonnets, published in 1835 as "Itinerary Poems" in the volume Yarrow Revisited. While we know a great deal about Wordsworth in France, in Wales, in London, and, of course, in the Lakes, we have considerably less scholarly familiarity with his experiences in the Isle of Man. The local and critical contexts of Wordsworth's Manx poems have not received attention, though scholars have shown considerable interest in reconstructing some of Wordsworth's other walking tours.1 The Manx poems thus raise questions which invite addressing in literal or "pedestrian" ways as much as in figural or interpretive terms. Briefly put, how do these late memorials stand as topoi - that is, both literal places and figural commonplaces - in Wordsworth's imaginative itinerary? To begin with historical curiosities, why, at age sixty-three, did Wordsworth decide to go on this tour? We know the various places he saw Douglas, Ballasalla, Ramsey, Tynwald, Rushen Abbey, and Snaefell and for comparison we have his sister Dorothy's journal of her Manx trip five years earlier, in 1828.2 But what image of "Mona" or the Isle of Man emerges from Wordsworth's literary account of his visit? And how does the notion of physical place fit into Wordsworth's imaginative conception of the tour as a genre? For a poet as peripatetic as Wordsworth, in whose work a sense of place is so closely related to the process of poetry, it is particularly important for our

105 Wordsworth in the Isle of Man

understanding of the Isle of Man poems to relate genre and geography, topos and topos. But let me back up to put things in context. The Isle of Man figures in Wordsworth's life long before the poems of 1833. I will note three anecdotal examples. The biographers have shown how the Wordsworths intersected with different members and branches of the prominent Christian and Christian Curwen families of the Isle of Man and Cumberland (the most famous member of which undoubtedly was the mutineer Fletcher Christian of the Bounty, whom Wordsworth knew from his school-days at Cockermouth, and to whom he was distantly related).3 Edward Christian, Fletcher's brother, was Wordsworth's headmaster at Hawkshead for a period in 1781-2, and later a Cambridge law professor (also a St John's man) who in 1791 successfully represented the Wordsworths in their suit against Lord Lonsdale. Wordsworth reciprocated by helping in the campaign to clear Fletcher Christian's name after the appearance in 1796 of a series of spurious letters attributed to Fletcher Christian that "stained [his] reputation and whitewashed [Captain] Bligh's" (Sanborn 37). Both Edward and Fletcher Christian attended St Bees School, a place which is the subject of another of Wordsworth's "Itinerary Poems."4 Years later, in 1830, Wordsworth's son John would marry into a branch of the same Manx family.5 As a second connection, also related to the Christian family, there was the matter of Sir Walter Scott's 1822 novel Peveril of the Peak, which, in its characterization of certain ancestors of the Christians, caused "a good deal of uneasiness" to the family (Wordsworth, Later Years, Part II, 276). Wordsworth was asked by John Christian to persuade Scott to correct the misrepresentation in the forthcoming (1831) edition, with the result that Scott included an appendix by Christian rectifying the historical errors. Scott, however, gets the last word in a note, where he states that while many "deny [William] Christian's guilt altogether ... there are others ... of a different opinion" (6oo).6 And as a third and final example, Wordsworth's sisterin-law, Joanna Hutchinson, the same Joanna of one of the Poems on the Naming of Places, settled with her brother in the Isle of Man in 1826, and was the prime reason, along with the presence of several other friends, for Dorothy's visit two years later with Wordsworth's son William.7 Even these cursory notices suggest that Wordsworth had indirect Manx contacts and associations for a great part of his lifetime. As early as 1810 we find Dorothy writing to her brother Richard: "William was very sorry he did not know that you were going to the Isle of Mann as he would have contrived to have gone with you, and will

106 Romantic Aversions

contrive it if you should go again" (Middle Years, Part I, 418). But the more one pulls together scattered references to the Isle of Man the more one senses that its interest for Wordsworth was imaginative rather than personal, and that its very distance and deferral - Wordsworth toured it only this once, in his sixties8 - maintained the attraction, in the way that "Yarrow" - unvisited, visited, and revisited did too; and we might add that such an approximation between the Isle of Man and Scotland is strengthened by the fact that when Wordsworth published his Manx poems two years after his trip, they appeared in his volume Yarrow Revisited. To Wordsworth the Isle of Man represented a mythical and exotic place - as exotic, for example, as the mythological Wales in Milton's "Lycidas" - whose landscape compared happily with his own native Lake District, the literal and imaginative source of so much of his poetry, and whose history crossed paths with his family and social connections. "Lycidas" is not an accidental example: I choose it as an analogue and even as a precedent because of a poem that Wordsworth wrote in 1813, entitled "View from the Top of Black Comb," in which he refers in a Miltonic allusion to "Mona," one of the mythical names of the Isle of Man. Surveying the landscape from the top of the mountain, Wordsworth describes the ocean as visibly engirding Mona's Isle That, as we left the plain, before our sight Stood like a lofty mount, uplifting slowly (Above the convex of the watery globe) Into clear view the cultured fields that streak Her habitable shores, but now appears A dwindled object, and submits to lie At the spectator's feet ... ... Look homeward now! (PW 2: 290)

The clear allusion to "Lycidas" in the last line, along with some earlier echoes, raises an interesting question with respect to the name "Mona." When Milton uses the name in "Lycidas" - "Nor on the shaggy top of Mona high" (54) - it is usually glossed as referring to the Isle of Anglesey. Yet the editors of the Milton Variorum point out that the name Mona was "used for both Anglesey and the Isle of Man," though Milton follows William Camden and Michael Drayton in having it refer to Anglesey (656; Camden 35, 540-1, 838; see also discussion in Gilbert, Geographical Dictionary of Milton 23-4). In his commentary on Song 9 (lines 390-412) of Poly-Qlbion, Drayton notes the confusion of the two Monas, which sometimes results, he says,

1O7 Wordsworth in the Isle of Man

in "taking the (now cald) Isle of Man for this Mon (now Anglesey)" (191). The Isle of Man, Drayton continues, "is an Isle lying twixt Cumberland, and the Irish Doun County almost in the mid-Sea, as long since Julius Caesar could affirme, calling it Mona, which being equivalent, as well for this, as for Anglesey, hath with imposture blinded some knowing men" (191; see also 179, 197).9 Yet whenever Wordsworth uses the name Mona in his poetry, it always refers to the Isle of Man. In his 1811 "Epistle to Sir George Howland Beaumont, Bart." (PW 4: 142-50), Wordsworth has a lengthy passage that, while functioning as a negative inventio, or difficulty in choosing a topic, takes the Isle of Man as its subject, the topos for a topos. Seeking a muse to "aid [his] verse, content with local bounds / Of natural beauty and life's daily rounds" (52-3), Wordsworth canvasses potential topoi: What shall I treat of? News from Mona's Isle? Such have we, but unvaried in its style; No tales of Runagates fresh landed, whence And wherefore fugitive or on what pretence; Of feasts, or scandal, eddying like the wind Most restlessly alive when most confined. Ask not of me, whose tongue can best appease The mighty tumults of the HOUSE OF KEYS; The last year's cup whose Ram or Heifer gained, What slopes are planted, or what mosses drained: An eye of fancy only can I cast On that proud pageant now at hand or past, When full five hundred boats in trim array, With nets and sails outspread and streamers gay, And chanted hymns and stiller voice of prayer, For the old Manx-harvest to the Deep repair, Soon as the herring-shoals at distance shine Like beds of moonlight shifting on the brine. Mona from our Abode is daily seen, But with a wilderness of waves between; And by conjecture only can we speak Of aught transacted there in bay or creek; No tidings reach us thence from town or field, Only faint news her mountain-sunbeams yield, And some we gather from the misty air, And some the hovering clouds, our telegraph, declare. But these poetic mysteries I withhold;

1o8 Romantic Aversions For Fancy hath her fits both hot and cold, And should the colder fit with You be on When You might read, my credit would be gone. Let more substantial themes the pen engage ...

(59-89)

The catalogue of common subjects, encompassing the genres of romance, pastoral, and georgic, is superseded by the "more substantial themes" of Wordsworth's locodescriptive tour of the southwestern Cumberland coast in 1811 (see PW4: 433n). We may compare the description of Mona in this poetic epistle with two passages in a letter that Wordsworth wrote to Beaumont during the same visit (28 August 1811; Middle Years, Part I, 5o8).10 The first passage describes his view, taken from the coast of England, of a particular cloud formation over the Isle of Man one afternoon, when a line of clouds immoveably attached themselves to the Island, and manifestly took their shape from the influence of its mountains. There appeared to be just span enough to allow the hand to slide between the top of Snaefell, the highest peak on the Island, and the base of this glorious forest, in which little change was noticeable for more than the space of half an hour. (508)

Wordsworth immediately follows this description with another of a view at sunset, when there appeared a tall sloop-rigged vessel, magnified by the atmosphere through which it was viewed, and seeming rather to hang in the air than to float upon the waters. Milton compares the appearance of Satan to a Fleet descried far off at sea; the visionary grandeur and beautiful form of this single vessel, could words have conveyed to the mind the picture which Nature presented to the eye, would have suited his purpose as well as the largest company of Vessels that ever associated together with the help of a trade wind. (508)

These juxtaposed descriptions are doubly interesting - first, for once more demonstrating the collocation of Mona and Milton in Wordsworth's imagination; and second, for anticipating that well-known passage on imagination, Satan, and the word "hangs" that would appear in Wordsworth's Preface to Poems four years later (Prose 3: 31). The Isle of Man is certainly attached to Wordsworth's imagination in deep and diverse ways, and these very images of sky and land quoted here will return in the Manx itinerary poems. Most of what we know of Wordsworth's tour of 1833 comes from a letter to his family on or around [?17] July 1833 (Later Years, Part II, 629-32), written in Scotland after his arrival there from the Isle of

109 Wordsworth in the Isle of Man

Man. (Another letter, written by John Wordsworth during the trip, has not survived.)11 Lasting less than a fortnight (see Later Years, Part II, 641), the trip was, as Mary Moorman says, "the shortest tour, outside the confines of the Lake District, that Wordsworth ever made" (497).12 "Saturdays being the only days for crossing to the Isle of Man,"13 Wordsworth, Crabb Robinson, and John Wordsworth sailed from Whitehaven on 13 July on a steamer, arriving in Douglas later that day. During the four days spent in the Isle of Man they covered a good deal of it, from Castletown in the south to Ramsey in the north, mostly on foot and sometimes by coach. The poems that directly emerged from this part of the trip are a sequence of ten sonnets (numbers xii to xxi in PW 4: 30-5) whose geographical referents retrace Wordsworth's path: "In A Steamboat off Saint Bees' Heads, on the Coast of Cumberland"; "In the Channel, Between the Coast of Cumberland and the Isle of Man"; "On Entering Douglas Bay"; "Tynwald Hill"; and "In the Frith of Clyde, Ailsa Crag (During an Eclipse of the Sun, July 17)." Not all the sonnets are given their own titles, and one in particular is not written by Wordsworth at all but, as the Fenwick note tells us, by his brother-in-law, Henry Hutchinson (Curtis 52; see also PW 4: 405). I cannot deal in detail with every poem, but let me introduce some significant rhetorical patterns that fit my double theme of topos and topos, place and commonplace.14 The first poem in the sequence, "In the Channel, Between the Coast of Cumberland and the Isle of Man," functions as a kind of reprise of the 1813 Blackcomb poem that views the Isle of Man from the mountain top, but it also returns to the imagery of the 1811 prose and verse epistles to Beaumont: Ranging the heights of Scawfell or Blackcomb, In his lone course the Shepherd oft will pause, And strive to fathom the mysterious laws By which the clouds, arrayed in light or gloom, On Mona settle, and the shapes assume Of all her peaks and ridges, (xii)

Recall Wordsworth's descriptions of "the hovering clouds" of Mona ("Epistle" 84), and the way they "immoveably attached themselves to the Island, and manifestly took their shape from the influence of its mountains" (Middle Years, Part I, 508). But what is of particular interest here is the rhetorical opposition that Wordsworth sets up between the terms "laws" and "faith" - words that he in fact repeats in each of the first three sonnets in the sequence. The lone shepherd

no

Romantic Aversions

may "strive to fathom the mysterious laws" of meteorology in the manner of a Constable Cloud Study, but "[w]hat he draws / From sense, faith, reason, fancy, of the cause, / He will take with him to the silent tomb." In this rather epitaphic approach to the physical island, Wordsworth not only encounters a certain natural phenomenon; he also enters into Manx mythology, even as he will later indulge in Scottish myth-making, with his poems on the ghost of Fingal and the Cave of Staffa (xxvm-xxxi). The explanation of why the clouds look a certain way will not be found in natural law but in fancy, not in "Science" and "conquering Reason" (xiv) but in myth-making, as the next sonnet demonstrates in its invocation of the Manx folk legend that Manannan's cloak would protect the island from hostile approach: Bold words affirmed, in days when faith was strong And doubts and scruples seldom teased the brain, That no adventurer's bark had power to gain These shores if he approached them bent on wrong; For, suddenly up-conjured from the Main, Mists rose to hide the Land ... (xin)

Wordsworth celebrates this popular Manx myth as more than a pretty fiction: "O Fancy, what an age was that for song!" (xin). But rather than simple-mindedly return to the "pious ignorance" (xn) of earlier times, Wordsworth questions: "Desire we past illusions to recal? / To reinstate wild Fancy ... ?" (xiv). His clear answer is no: he welcomes those "Truths whose thick veil Science has drawn aside," yet he boldly affirms that only what he calls "Imaginative Faith" can "overleap" the "gulf of mystery," whereas reason "Can nowhere move uncrossed by some new wall" (xiv). This is assuredly the rhetoric of the later Wordsworth, though not without its flashes of power, both introspective and intertextual. Imagination here, even at this late date, still retains its hint of Satanic strength in the overleaping of walls, as in book 4 of Paradise Lost, or in the closing lines of Home at Grasmere, where Wordsworth celebrates other "Bounds to be leapt, darkness to be explored" (740). The opening sonnets thus establish themselves as an imaginative entree into the Isle of Man, beginning with its natural description, invoking its mythic background, and considering but tempering the power of "self-glorified" reason compared to "Imaginative Faith." The sonnets that follow turn from these philosophical questions to focus more specifically on particular places and situations - the Tower of Refuge in Douglas Bay, the near-drowning of a youth in the

111 Wordsworth in the Isle of Man

sea, the reminiscences of retired mariners. Each of these is associated with a particular spot, but overall they lead in a widening movement toward an increasingly expanded sense of place. For example, one of Wordsworth's first stops on the island was Ballasalla, in the south, where they visited the Cooksons, formerly of Kendal. "Bala Sala," Wordsworth writes, is a little wood-embosomed Village by the side of a stream upon which stands the ruined walls of an old Abbey, a pretty sequestered place thronged with Blackbirds and thrushes of extraordinary size and power of song - the upper part of the old Tower is overgrown with a yellow Lychen which has the appearance of a gleam of perpetual evening sunshine. (Later Years, Part n,

The description of the lichen anticipates Wordsworth's note to a later sonnet on the Cave of Staff a. Commenting on the "large bright flower, the ox-eyed daisy" growing at the entrance to the cave, Wordsworth adds: "I had noticed the same flower growing with profusion among the bold rocks on the western coast of the Isle of Man, making a brilliant contrast with their black and gloomy surfaces" (PW 4: 407). In the corresponding sonnet in the "Itinerary Poems," subtitled "(Supposed to be written by a Friend)" - Wordsworth takes these details and puts them into the mouth of a "grey-haired, pensive, thankful Refugee" (7) who has taken up residence at the Abbey:16 And when I note The old Tower's brow yellowed as with the beams Of sunset ever there, albeit streams Of stormy weather-stains that semblance wrought, I thank the silent Monitor, and say "Shine so, my aged brow, at all hours of the day!" (xx)

The familiar figure of the Wordsworthian Solitary, with his approximation to physical nature ("perpetual evening sunshine" - "sunset ever there" - "old Tower's brow yellowed" - "'my aged brow'"), is still tied to both place and commonplace, that is, to a picturesque ruin that grounds a mutability topos. But by the time we get to the last sonnet in the sequence, on "Tynwald Hill" (xxi), the overall trajectory of Wordsworth's itinerary leads him to place the Isle of Man, as just one leg of the larger tour as a whole, in a national, historical, and intertextual perspective. The sonnet is significant not so much for its description of the place

112 Romantic Aversions

Tynwald, with its ancient historic associations, as for the apostrophe to the mountain Snaefell in the sestet: Off with yon cloud, old Sna[e]fell! that thine eye Over three Realms may take its widest range; And let, for them, thy fountains utter strange Voices, thy winds break forth in prophecy, If the whole State must suffer mortal change, Like Mona's miniature of sovereignty.

Wordsworth provides two matter-of-fact glosses on this poem, in his letter and in the Fenwick note, in which he recounts meeting at Tynwald "an old Gullion [or drunkard] with a telescope in his hand through which he peeped occasionally having the advantage of seeing things double, for as he frankly owned he had got a drop too much" (Later Years, Part II, 631). Wordsworth also describes his encounter there with "eleven cottage children" (Later Years, Part II, 631), "one of whom, upon my request, recited the Lord's prayer to me & I helped her to a clearer understanding of it as well as I could, but I was not at all satisfied with my own part - hers was much better done, & I am persuaded, that like other children, she knew more about it than she was able to express, especially to a Stranger" (Curtis, Fenwick Notes 52; compare Christopher Wordsworth, Memoirs 2: 246-7). But, leaving aside these characters straight out of Lyrical Ballads - namely, "The Thorn" and "We Are Eleven"! - Wordswort adds a third note concerning this sonnet that makes clear how for him this topos is topical: Tynwald is an occasion for political commentary. Wordsworth writes: "The summit of this mountain is well chosen by Cowley as the scene of the 'Vision,' in which the spectral angel discourses with him concerning the government of Oliver Cromwell" (PW4: 406). The literary precedent to which Wordsworth refers is Abraham Cowley's work A Vision, or "A Discourse Concerning the Government of Oliver Cromwell," with its setting of Snaefell. Cowley recounts: I was suddenly transported afar off ... and found myself upon the top of the famous hill in the island Mona, which has the prospect of three great, and not-long-since, most happy, kingdoms. As soon as ever I looked upon them, "the not-long-since" struck upon my memory, and called forth the sad representation of all the sins and all the miseries that had overwhelmed them these twenty years ... I broke forth, as I remember, (looking upon England,) into this complaint ... (2: 295-6; compare Wordsworth, PW4: 4o6n)17

113 Wordsworth in the Isle of Man

Cowley's lament for England is interrupted by a demonic "tutelar angel" (300) who defends Cromwell in a discourse of both prose and verse, but who is finally defeated and driven away. Wordsworth's note continues the topical application of Cowley's political piece: It is not to be denied that the changes now in progress, and the passions, and the way in which they work, strikingly resemble those which led to the disasters the philosophic writer so feelingly bewails. God grant that the resemblance may not become still more striking as months and years advance!

(PW 4:406n)

We can guess which specific "changes" in 1833 Wordsworth was thinking of when he wrote the sonnet - the Reform Bill of 1832, and all its tumult. Yet the closing apostrophe to the mountain, while taking us back to some familiar Wordsworthian rhetoric, also adopts a consciously prophetic voice. The clouds of Snaefell, by now an integral part of Wordsworth's Manx imagery, are followed by the injunction of the "let" clause - "And let, for them, thy fountains utter strange / Voices, thy winds break forth in prophecy" - a rhetorical structure that glances back at least to the closing lines of "Tintern Abbey," where Wordsworth again turns to a specific auditor: "[L]et the moon / Shine on thee in thy solitary walk; / And let the misty mountain-winds be free / To blow against thee" (134-7). The turning aside is structurally similar, from politics to nature: in "Tintern Abbey," the "evil tongues" and "sneers of selfish men" give way to "cheerful faith, that all which we behold / Is full of blessings" (128, 129, 133-4), while in a comparable way the place of Tynwald, the ancient and modern seat of Manx governmental ceremony, is displaced by the personifying apostrophe to the mountain Snaefell. This rhetorical manoeuvre, the aversion of address, charges nature with responsibility: it is as if Wordsworth, addressing Snaefell as an antiBill sympathizer, were saying, "Thou hast a voice, great Mountain, to repeal / Large codes of fraud and woe" (Shelley, "Mont Blanc" 80-1). The intermixture of place and politics, of topos and the topical, culminates in the poem that bridges the crossing from the Isle of Man to Scotland. When Wordsworth invokes Snaefell to intervene in current political events, we observe how the hintertext of Cowley's "complaint," along with the charging of voice and prophecy, motivates the political rhetoric of sonnet xxii. Wordsworth asks for a prophetic voice - and he gets one: "Despond who will - I heard a voice exclaim," he writes; and what follows, delivered by an unnamed

114 Romantic Aversions

speaker who is assuredly not Cowley's "pretended Angel" (Cowley 294), is a visionary statement, not of despair over the political turmoil surrounding the passage of the Reform Bill, but of optimism for the political future of Britain: Despond who will - I heard a voice exclaim, "Though fierce the assault, and shatter'd the defence, It cannot be that Britain's social frame The glorious work of time and providence, Before a flying season's rash pretence Should fall; that She, whose virtue put to shame, When Europe prostrate lay, the Conqueror's aim, Should perish, self-subverted." (xxii)18

The sonnet concludes with another apostrophe which, in its gentleness and cheer, balances the sterner rhetoric of Snaefell: "Then laugh, ye innocent Vales! ye Streams, sweep on ... " And with this poem Wordsworth does sweep on, from the Isle of Man to Scotland, with its own topics of Staffa, lona, Macpherson, and Burns. The visit to the Isle of Man had been brief, but it retained its place in Wordsworth's later reiterations. For one final view, I conclude with a topographical retrospective, taken from a letter Wordsworth wrote to Crabb Robinson the following spring. After visiting his son John in late March-early April 1834, Wordsworth reminisces about the Manx tour and landscape. His literal and imaginative geography encompasses the entire itinerary: One calm and beautiful day John and I took a long and most delightful walk, following from Whitehaven, along the top of the Cliffs the indentings of the Coast, as far as the Monastry of St. Bees. Our last summer's acquaintance the Isle of Man was full in sight - so were the Scotch Hills, - and when we came to a point of the Headlands which shewed the Bay of St. Bees, the whole line of the Cumberland coast, to its extreme Southern point, with Black Comb and Scafell presiding over the view - the effect was magnificent. (Later Years, Part II, 697)

7 Symptom and Scene in Freud and Wordsworth The method of psycho-analysis is to bring the patient back to the idea which he is repressing; a long journey backwards without maps ... Graham Greene, Journey without Maps One can study only what one has first dreamed about. Gaston Bachelard, The Psychoanalysis of Fire

In his 1896 paper "The Aetiology of Hysteria" Freud presented for the first time a fully developed analytic model based on a binary trope of what he calls "symptom" and "scene" (SE 3: 187-221). This archaeological figure, which contains layers upon layers of memories, defences, and repressions, offers both a historical view of the development of the unconscious and a structural design of how the various layers fit together in a model that is at once diachronic and synchronic. At each level of Freud's palimpsestic figure is a "scene of reading," to borrow Paul de Man's phrase (Allegories 162) - a physical or psychological text that demands interpretation. Only by tracing a figural path descending from the surface "symptom" (semeion, or sign) to the psychical ground or "scene," Freud suggests, can a successful reading occur: the effacement of the surface by the depth. Freud's early paper is significant not only for what it achieves and adumbrates for psychoanalysis, but also for the interpretive model it offers literary critics. Freud provides us with a hermeneutic that can be applied to other (non-hysterical) texts. His paired terms "symptom" and "scene" generate analogous couplets that still carry considerable theoretical force in criticism today: manifest/latent, signifier/signified, readable/unreadable. In what follows, I describe the rhetorical operation of these paired terms in Freud and Wordsworth in order to show how their texts use and put in question the binary oppositions on which their analytic model (therapeutic or autobiographical) depends. That rhetorical operation, I suggest, necessarily involves a

116 Romantic Aversions

function of repetition, whereby surface symptoms repeat or reproduce an underlying scene, itself a repetition, and thus challenge the opposition between experience and imagination, or between history and textuality. On my way to Wordsworth, I pause to examine how these ideas of history and texuality operate in a recent study by Alan Liu, which, though not explicitly psychoanalytic, nevertheless is relevant to the questions I pursue. The obvious example in Wordsworth is The Prelude, his autobiographical poem on the "growth of a poet's mind." Crossing the Alps in book 6, Wordsworth encounters what I call The Symptom Pass, in which surface text and deep structure collide in a scene of self-reading crucial to the poet's composition and the reader's understanding of the text. More elaborately in book 4, and even more problematically in a manuscript draft for book 14, Wordsworth's narrative pauses to consider how its own textual self-analysis moves from the readable to the unreadable, or from symptom to scene. How Freud can help us read Wordsworth reading himself, and how Wordsworth, who was there before Freud, can put in question the tropes of symptom and scene, or of history and textuality, are the issues I wish to address. FREUD: THE SENSE OF HYSTERIA And almost make remotest infancy A visible scene The Prelude

Freud's "Aetiology of Hysteria" begins with an elaborate analogy that poses a hermeneutical problem: Imagine that an explorer arrives in a little-known region where his interest is aroused by an expanse of ruins, with remains of walls, fragments of columns, and tablets with half-effaced and unreadable inscriptions. He may content himself with inspecting what lies exposed to view, with questioning the inhabitants - perhaps semi-barbaric people - who live in the vicinity, about what tradition tells them of the history and meaning of these archaeological remains, and with noting down what they tell him - and he may then proceed on his journey. But he may act differently. He may have brought picks, shovels and spades with him, and he may set the inhabitants to work with these implements. Together with them he may start upon the ruins, clear away the rubbish, and, beginning from the visible remains, uncover what is buried. If his work is crowned with success, the discoveries are self-explanatory: the ruined walls are part of the ramparts of a palace or a treasure-house; the fragments of columns can be filled out into a temple;

117 Symptom and Scene in Freud and Wordsworth the numerous inscriptions, which, by good luck, may be bilingual, reveal an alphabet and a language, and, when they have been deciphered and translated, yield undreamed-of information about the events of the remote past, to commemorate which the monuments were built. Saxa loquunturl (SE 3: 192)

This astonishing paragraph, if itself quarried, would yield considerable material to help us understand the psychoanalytic methodology. Freud's rhetorical strategy repeats with a difference his theme, in its deliberate movement from the "superficial" method in the first half of the paragraph to the "deep" method in the second half, in its interest in both "history and meaning," and in its emphasis on language and interpretation. The text even includes an example of the bilingualism Freud describes in his hypothetical scene: the final epigrammatic sentence itself poses an interpretive problem which the Standard Edition feels sufficiently difficult to warrant translation in a footnote. "Saxa loquuntur!": "'Stones talk!'" (SE 3: 192m). While this reading of Freud the rhetorician may be promising and here I refer to a variety of similar work by Peter Brooks, Stanley Fish, Patrick Mahony, and Michel de Certeau - I am for the present more interested in the implications of Freud's rhetoric for reading Romantic poetry. If, as Lionel Trilling said in 1940, "psychoanalysis is one of the culminations of the Romanticist literature of the nineteenth century" (35), then one may legitimately hope to hit interpretive pay dirt at the bottom of Freud's archaeological analogy. Let me consider it briefly. As a self-declared archaeologist of the mind, Freud in the paragraph just quoted is committed to a rhetoric that favours depth over surface, scene over symptom. Yet it is not just Freud who is locked into such a theoretical scheme, but the reader of Freud too: when seeking figurative expressions of value judgments, we necessarily privilege what is "deep" over what is "superficial"; we appreciate profundity over shallowness; we try to get to the "bottom" of things. Yet while this logocentric valorization, in an inescapable tropological structure, implies setting one thing over another, paradoxically what is always placed over is the thing that is under. Thus traditionally, the received scheme of things looks like the following: surface depth

manifest latent

external behaviour internal motivation

symptom scene

- in which the lower or second term of each pair is privileged. We might illustrate this with examples from many different fields, but

118 Romantic Aversions let us choose an instance from the clinical world, to remain close to the terms of Freud's text. A patient comes to a doctor with a complaint, a presenting symptom: headaches, tiredness, nervousness, or, as in the case of Lisa Erdman in D.M. Thomas's The White Hotel, a mysterious pain in the left breast and ovary. We all know that the doctor diagnoses the symptom, that is, reads the semeion, to determine its cause, and then precribes something to treat the cause so as to remove its effect. Kathryn Montgomery Hunter, in her book Doctors' Stories: The Narrative Structure of Medical Knowledge, has explored this aspect of medical semiotics, showing how a "diagnostic circle" operates in medicine analogously to the hermeneutic circle in the interpretation of texts (9). Tracing parallels between medical and textual hermeneutics, Hunter shows how understanding, whether of patients or of literary texts, "is narratively constructed and transmitted" (xvii). To put it in our terms, the scene of reading in medical diagnostics begins with a symptom that is already in medias res: it is a sign wit a past and future history, or an aetiology and a prognosis. Obviously, the doctor does not treat the symptom merely, though there are plenty of products on the market nowadays advertising "symptomatic" relief for certain ailments. Rather, the doctor attempts to treat the illness that is causing the symptom, thereby eliminating both of them at the same time. Now Freud, applying this standard diagnostic technique to the treatment of hysteria, translates it this way: "What we have to do," he writes, is to lead the patient's attention back from his symptom to the scene in which and through which that symptom arose; and, having thus located the scene, we remove the symptom by bringing about, during the reproduction of the traumatic scene, a subsequent correction of the psychical course of events which took place at the time. (SE 3: 193) From symptom to scene: it sounds simple. Yet we've only scratched the surface. Examining the metaphor of psychoanalysis as depth in his book The Writing of History, Michel de Certeau says: Such is the way Freudian therapeutics proceeds: analysis discerns organizations in the words of patients that "betray" a genesis; it refers them to events that they hide and which become - as both absent and present - a past ... Through a study of the text, the analysis will transform the surface of verbal elements into a network of interrelations that organize this surface, that articulate words as a function of lost or effaced things, and that turn the text into a deceptive sign of past events. (292)*

119 Symptom and Scene in Freud and Wordsworth What complicates or makes "deceptive" the apparent directness of Freud's approach is the fact that the path from point A to point B is never a straight line. The backward tracing from symptom to scene always contains detours and retracings, which involve what Freud calls "overdetermination" (SE 3: 216, 2i6ni) and "nodal points" (SE 3: 198, 198n1). He writes: "The path from the symptoms of hysteria to its aetiology is more laborious and leads through other connections than one would have imagined" (SE 3:193). The reason for the analytic journey's tortuousness lies in the two criteria that Freud stipulates in order for the scene to qualify as the "right" scene: (1) "suitability to serve as a determinant"; and (2) sufficient "traumatic force" (SE 3: 193). Specifying these two requirements, Freud argues that what may appear as a ground or scene oftens turns out to be a false bottom, insufficient to explain or explain away the surface symptom. Hysterical vomiting, to use Freud's example, might be traced back to a scene in which the patient ate a rotten apple. Such a scene qualifies as a suitable determinant - that is, it could explain the vomiting - but it hardly has sufficient traumatic power to induce hysterical symptoms. By contrast, a serious train wreck involving the patient might be sufficiently traumatic, but its precise connection to vomiting is not immediately determined or motivated. In each case, something remains unexplained, and analysis must push on. As Freud elaborates his method in the essay, he constructs a vertical palimpsest in which symptom and scene are not present in a simple pairing, but rather are part of a long and tangled web of signification. Freud's disentangling of the chain of associations is linear, that is, ultimately from point A to point B, but he reminds the reader of the cross-overs and intersections that are always present. Yet there is no mistaking Freud's direction. "Whatever symptom we take as our point of departure," he writes, the destination is always the same: "the field of sexual experience" (SE 3: 199). Or to make explicit the vertical and spatial rhetoric governing Freud's discourse: "At the bottom of every case of hysteria there are one or more occurrences of premature sexual experience, occurrences which belong to the earliest years of childhood" (SE 3: 203). From the symptom, then, we are led back, structurally, to a memory, which hides a deeper memory. Historically, we move from a present symptom to a previous scene, usually in puberty, which masks an even earlier scene, always in infancy. My concern here is not to debate the accuracy or usefulness of Freud's argument regarding infantile seduction - in any event, he would radically revise the sexual theory in a year, by the fall of 1897 - but rather to explicate his method as such.2 In Freud's summary of the retrograde analytic trail there are at least six distinct stages. "We have come to know," Freud writes, that

12O Romantic Aversions in order to form a hysterical symptom [1] a defensive effort [2] against a distressing idea [3] must be present, that this idea must exhibit a logical or associative connection with an unconscious memory [4] through a few or many intermediate links, which themselves, too, remain unconscious at the moment, that this unconscious memory must have a sexual content [5], tha its content must be an experience which occurred during a certain infantile period of life [6]. (SE 3: 213) The careful and patient way that Freud rhetorically unfolds this palimpsestic tissue of memories, defences, and repressions - repeatedly reaching conclusions in his paper that intentionally turn out to be disappointments or dead ends - enacts the difficulty of the interpretive process itself. In the essay as a whole, as much as in the introductory archaeological analogy, Freud's style repeats the manoeuvres of the psychoanalytic method. For Freud in 1896, the scene is historical, the symptom is textual. However, in his own dismantling of this hierarchical opposition a year later, the crucial discovery Freud made - and the discovery that allowed psychoanalysis proper to develop, distinct from a sociology of incest - was that the scene or ground of historical event also turned out to be textual, that is, fantasy, wish, or myth. Freud never at any point in his career denied the actuality of infantile seduction in certain cases, but the difference between actual and fantasized seduction makes no difference for the inauguration of psychoanalysis, since it is precisely how these real or imagined events work themselves into the unconscious that psychoanalysis addresses.3 This point has been misunderstood to mean that Freud (or psychoanalysis) didn't care about child abuse, that by eliding the psychoanalytic significance of the difference between the actual and the fantasized, or between the historical and the textual, he trivialized the awful seriousness of sexual crimes against children. Such a view shows a genuine concern for the victims of sexual assault but a misreading of the origins of psychoanalysis. Of central significance in Freud's model is the way that interpretation always keeps reaching what looks like a limit. You never actually reach a limit, however; the ground or bottom repeatedly falls away so that even the final or primal scene is rendered textually. Stanley Fish, in an essay on Freud's case of the Wolf-Man, claims that this primal scene is always a "scene of persuasion" (Doing What Comes Naturally 547). "Now if at bottom," Fish writes, the primal scene is the scene of persuasion, then the one thing you cannot do is get to the bottom of it; for as the bottom or bottom line, it underwrites

121 Symptom and Scene in Freud and Wordsworth everything, including whatever efforts one might make either to elude it or achieve distance from it.4

As persuasion, therefore, the scene is thoroughly rhetorical or textual. Again we have the rhetoric of "bottoms," especially appropriate for an essay that argues for Freud's rhetorical retentiveness as a repetition of the Wolf-Man's inhibitions. In fact, one of Fish's epigraphs for the essay is taken from "a report by the Wolf-Man of what he thought to himself shortly after he met Freud for the first time: 'this man is a Jewish swindler, he wants to use me from behind and shit on my head.' This paper is dedicated to the proposition that the Wolf-Man got it right" (Doing What Comes Naturally 526). As we shall see, for Wordsworth as for Freud, the repetition can be traced all the way down: like its symptom, the scene is always a scene of reading. LIU:

THE AETIOLOGY OF DENIAL

to detect Some inner meanings which might harbour there The Prelude

To show how this (Freudian) hermeneutic of symptom and scene both has been and could be adapted, I turn now to Alan Liu's Wordsworth: The Sense of History. No brief summary could do justice to either the scope or the detail of Liu's book of more than seven hundred pages, but let me try, as I did with Freud, to explicate very briefly some aspects of his rhetoric and show their implications for a psychoanalytic reading of Wordsworth. By doing so, I shall be applying a "symptomatic analysis" to Liu, not in the Marxist sense of the term, but in a manner that seeks to question the fundamental assertions of Liu's model.5 In Wordsworth: The Sense of History, Liu constructs, in opposition to the conventional Romantic dialectic of Imagination versus Nature, a triangulation of what he calls "history, nature, self" (4). "In The Pre lude," Liu writes, history is the base upon which the issue of nature's sourcehood is worked out. The Prelude organizes the 1790 tour [through the Simplon Pass] so that "nature" is precipitated in Book 6 only as a denial of the history behind any tour, and the goal of the denial - not fully effective until the purge of Books 9 and 10 - is to carve the "self" out of history. The theory of denial is Imagination. (Sense 4-5)

122 Romantic Aversions What is interesting in this excerpt is not only Liu's triangulated thesis of "history, nature, self," and the deconstructive potential of such a system, but the implicit hierarchical structure of the three terms. The rhetorical strategy of selectively putting certain terms in quotation marks, as Liu does, has the effect of giving them a kind of figural distance, as if at this point they are not to be taken literally; yet the same figurality given to "nature" and "self" is not accorded to the terms "history," "base," "behind," or even "out," terms which are, as we have just seen, the index to the same conceptual scheme as Freud's.6 In other words, Liu's terms are offered as History - Nature - Self on one level, yet are really constructed hierarchically as Self Nature History.

History, for Liu, is the "base" or ground upon which both nature and self are built, and here, as in Freud's model, depth is privileged over surface, history valorized over nature and self. The two upper levels become "denials" or repressions or "symptoms" for the real "scene" of history.7 Liu elaborates: "Wordsworthian nature," he says, is an imaginary antagonist against which the self battles in feint, in a ploy to divert attention from the real battle to be joined between history and self. Whatever the outcome of the skirmish (called dialectic) between nature and self, history, the real antagonist, is thus momentarily denied ... (Sense 31) A revealing example that Liu uses to argue his case for the primal scene of history is derived from the first book of Virgil's Georgics, in which "a plowman working in the field ... suddenly turns up rusting armor and heroic bones" (Sense 18).8 Read in a palimpsestic way, the pastoral georgic from Virgil to Wordsworth, Liu argues, becomes "the supreme mediational form by which to bury history in nature, epic in pastoral" (Sense 18). Thus, he concludes, beneath landscape poetry, beneath the eighteenth-century topographical or tour genres, lies a buried or denied or repressed history; and, as with any repressed content, it must return. History will out. Liu is explicit on this point: "If we penetrate deeply enough," he writes, what we discover in Wordsworth's poetry is "the moving agon of the sense of history in its original power." And again, on the same page:

123 Symptom and Scene in Freud and Wordsworth

"Penetrate deeply enough under the rhetorical ambition and hardened ideology ... and we can recognize the original sense of history, inchoate, terrifying, and brutal, underlying Wordsworth's poetry" (Sense 499). This is a strong reading, nor terrifying nor brutal, though of ample power to chasten the poststructuralist critic. Yet I must question the ultimate validity of it. Is it true that in Wordsworth the "real" battle is not, as Paul de Man put it, between the priority of self and the priority of natural objects (Blindness 196-7), but rather between the self and history? Is it true that, at bottom in Wordsworth's poetry, both self and nature are merely veils or screens that mask the scene of history? Yet if history isn't rock bottom, then what is? What's deeper than history? A psychoanalytic reply might be that we face such questions when we mistake an imagistic or thematic scene for an interpretive ground. As an alternative, we might try to read the "history, nature, self" economy, not in vertical and hierarchical terms - Self over Nature over History - but rather in terms of an economy of difference. By doing so, we would see the dynamic of Wordsworth's poetry, not as a journey of discovery that seeks the goal or ground of interpretation, but rather as a tour, all surface and no depth, where one term or event or sign displaces the next only to be displaced in turn. If the hermeneutic in Wordsworth's poetry is a voyage of discovery, it is a discovery that discovers it is really a tour, and Wordsworth forever the tourist, the spectator ab extra.9 In other words, when you uncover the bones or the helmets while ploughing in the rain, when you exhume the body, you have not discovered or recovered history as a ground; at most you have found an index or trace of history, a sign or symptom or, as Cynthia Chase might say, a "decomposing figure." History is not discovered as a presence, but only as an absence.10 Liu does not exactly say that, well, once you've found the body, there's an end of it. Such an attitude would be the habeas corpus theory of history. But it is interesting that de Man says just the opposite, that when you do find the corpse, that is precisely when the interpretive problems begin: How, he asks, do you read the textuality of such an event? How do you dispose of the body?11 Interestingly, de Man poses these questions in the course of an essay on Shelley that takes as its epigraph a passage from Thomas Hardy dealing with archaeology and reading ("Shelley Disfigured" 39). Describing the "archeological labor" of critics on Shelley's poem The Triumph of Life, de Man writes that "such an attitude coincides with the use of history as a way to new beginnings, as 'digging in the grounds for the new foundation.' Much is invested in these

124 Romantic Aversions

metaphors of architecture and of statuary on which seems to hinge our ability to inhabit the world" ("Shelley Disfigured" 39, 40). Not interpret the world, de Man says, but "inhabit" the world: the difference is not just semiotic. Disposing of the body, of one's own body not least, has both rhetorical and existential dimensions, though to separate their interdependence, to try to disengage the inhabitation of the world from its interpretation, would be a misguided and futile effort. In de Man, a corpse is no more reduced to the status of a decomposing rhetorical figure than it is resurrected to the position of embodying "the original sense of history"; but at the same time it is impossible to determine whether the literal historical event cannot be prevented from being read rhetorically, or the rhetorical figure from being experienced literally, "felt in the blood." "Reading as disfiguration," de Man concludes, "to the very extent that it resists historicism, turns out to be historically more reliable than the products of historical archeology" ("Shelley Disfigured" 69). Such a statement clearly challenges the method of Wordsworth: The Sense of History, in which Liu is explicitly and elaborately self-conscious in his theorizing of historicism. Who else has made the annotated footnote such an egotistically sublime art? Yet there is a tension or contradiction, which Liu is aware of, stemming from his mix of deconstruct!ve and new historicist methodologies. Twice he cites approvingly Marjorie Levinson's formulation of a "deconstructive materialism" (Sense 39, 312) in an attempt to find an interpretive cooperation between considerably different poststructuralisms.12 Yet even as history becomes the ground of interpretation for Liu, new historicism "grounds" deconstruction, or grounds it out. Thus Liu's quarrel with the anti-historical turn of some poststructuralist readings, those that share an aversion to what Stephen Greenblatt has facetiously called the "slime of history" (101), contains its own form of denial. Liu writes: We flinch before the topical - the apparition of Napoleon in Imagination, for example - as before a devil; we seek ways to textualize it, to exorcise the mundane demon through phenomenal, psychic, or metaphoric displacement. (Sense 35)

This statement - which is only half-ironic, I think - betrays the assumption that "the topical," or history itself, is somehow pretextual and therefore unproblematic; Liu says that "we seek ways to textualize" history, as if it were not always already textual through and through. Elsewhere Liu accepts the poststructuralist notion that, as Roland Barthes in "The Discourse of History" writes, "fact never

125 Symptom and Scene in Freud and Wordsworth

has any but a linguistic existence" (138) - but here, at least, Liu denies the textuality of history in order to assert the history of textuality.13 Such a denial on Liu's part carries with it, as Jacques Derrida has said of historical logocentrism generally, "the theme of a final repression of difference" (Speech and Phenomena 141). In Liu's version of the battle between history and textuality, or between presence and difference, textuality is wrestled to the ground of history. Difference meets its WaterLiu. For all the impressive historical details that Liu amasses - family statistics, topographical aesthetics, and French revolutionary politics - there is still a sense of history as something transcendent, pure, absolute: in Liu's theory, history has less to do with race, class, and gender than with a consummate sense of the strength of usurpation in contemporary experience for Wordsworth. There are, however, other senses of history, and indeed other histories, yet to be understood in Wordsworth, senses excluded by Liu's grammar of definite articles and singular number ("Wordsworth: The Sense of History"; "Wordsworth: The History in 'Imagination'"). For example, we still need to assess how Wordsworth's later turn to Roman and classical history might be read as a swerve from contemporary history-that is, as an attempt to contain, to contextualize, or just to comprehend (make "sense" of) history as such. The paradox is that while for Liu "History" is abstractly immaculate in its own way, it is seen, as with Greenblatt, as being a dirty word in other critical minds. Thus rhetorical figuration by anti-historical critics is viewed as an attempt to purify or even cleanse altogether the stain of history that spoils the white radiance of textuality. As for this figurative that is, "phenomenal, psychic, or metaphoric" - displacement, Liu concludes: "That such figuration denies history is indisputable. But surely such denial is also the strongest kind of engagement with history" (Sense 35). For the new historicist as for the psychoanalyst, where denial was, there engagement shall be - or rather, where denial was, there engagement always already was too. WORDSWORTH: HISTORY AND REPETITION stumbling on, at length Came to a bottom The Prelude

I have juxtaposed Freud and Liu in this way because they share a common rhetoric. Freud is absent for the most part from Liu's book, but the fact that its argument depends, at the very least, on a symptomatology of denial opens it up to psychoanalytic readings.14 At the

126 Romantic Aversions

same time, Freud's archaeological rhetoric of discovery, unearthing, and reconstruction of a particular "scene" has everything to do with a "sense of history," though not necessarily, as I have suggested, with an end in history.15 In turning now to Wordsworth let me try to focus this topos of symptom and scene by means of a couple of brief readings. We might begin with the conclusion to book 1 of The Prelude, where, like Freud avant la lettre, Wordsworth says that "remotest infancy" becomes "A visible scene, on which the sun is shining" (1.635, 636). We might equally turn to the description of the "virgin scene" in the poem "Nutting" (PW 2:: 211), or to the "wild scene" and the "visible scene" in the early version of "There Was a Boy" (Norton Prelude 492), about which Coleridge had so much to say in chapter 20 of the Biographia Literaria.16 Let me start instead on different ground, with a passage in Wordsworth's Prelude, book 4, in which the poet thematizes these levels of surface and depth. I quote from the 1850 version of the poem: As one who hangs down-bending from the side Of a slow-moving boat, upon the breast Of a still water, solacing himself With such discoveries as his eye can make Beneath him in the bottom of the deep, Sees many beauteous sights - weeds, fishes, flowers, Grots, pebbles, roots of trees, and fancies more, Yet often is perplexed and cannot part The shadow from the substance, rocks and sky, Mountains and clouds, reflected in the depth Of the clear flood, from things which there abide In their true dwelling; now is crossed by gleam Of his own image, by a sun-beam now, And wavering motions sent he knows not whence, Impediments that make his task more sweet; Such pleasant office have we long pursued Incumbent o'er the surface of past time ... (4.256-72)

As I have noted elsewhere, this passage is one of only three epic similes in the whole of the 1850 Prelude.,17 As such, it invites consideration first in formal rhetorical terms such as LA. Richards's tenor and vehicle (96). The figure is structured conventionally, with the comparison making a simple claim: "As one who hangs down-bending from the side / Of a slow-moving boat ... Such pleasant office have we long pursued / Incumbent o'er the surface of past time." "The surface of past time": in its union of spatial and temporal dimen-

127 Symptom and Scene in Freud and Wordsworth

sions, overdetermined by the earlier association of "down-bending" and "slow-moving," the image nostalgically implies the inaccessibility or pastness of the past, the inevitability that the poet cannot get beneath the surface in his retrospective tour. He remains, like Freud's original traveller, in the position of spectator ab extra. Yet this position is an "office," as he calls it, in which, as "incumbent" - Wordsworth's pun is surely motivated by the Shakespearean "Impediments" two lines earlier18 - he has been both "perplexed" and "solac[ed]." As epic simile, the entire passage conforms to the convention that the vehicle should for the moment usurp the tenor, that the means of conveying the comparison should temporarily overshadow the larger function of the comparison - except that here, the figural means of conveyance is literally a means of conveyance: the vehicle is a vehicle, a "slow-moving boat." The passage begins to thematize its own rhetoric; distinctions between literal and figurative levels of meaning become uncertain, even as optical differentiations between surface and depth, between "the shadow and the substance," or the actual and the virtual image, are blurred. This interpretive impediment, however, is itself read by the poet, not as something to be lamented, but rather as something that makes "his task more sweet," his "task" being reading itself. We have a moment here which has the force of a paradigm: whenever interpretation reaches what appears to be a limit, whenever Wordsworth experiences perplexity or bafflement - as he does in the "spots of time" (Prelude 12.208), for example - that is precisely when interpretation itself becomes interpreted.19 Reaching a limit - an impasse, an aporia, even a reflective mirror - disturbs otherwise transparent assumptions about the literal and the figural. What is paradigmatic about the "spots of time" is that they are, in one sense, about impediments - that is, textual reflexiveness, thwarting, or unreadability. In this passage these impedimenta are thematized through certain rhetorical figures, chief of which is chiasmus. The thematic crossover or interpenetration of surface and depth, like the union of space and time at the end of the passage, is imaged in the form of a rhetorical crossing, a visual and verbal marriage that is not without its own impediments. Hanging over the side of his own wandering bark, the poet gazes: now is crossed by gleam Of his own image, by a sun-beam now, And wavering motions sent he knows not whence ...

To be "crossed" can suggest a thwarting, as in the Ravine of Gondo passage in book 6, where the cross-winds in the Alps are felt "at

128 Romantic Aversions

every turn" as "Winds thwarting winds, bewildered and forlorn" (6.627, 628). But the crossing here specifically takes the form of a rhetorical cross, or chiasmus: "now ... gleam ... image ... beam ... now." The palindromic structure of the figure, in which the word "image" functions as a nodal point, attempts to distinguish the surface symptoms from those things "in the bottom of the deep," "things which there abide / In their true dwelling." Strangely, the reflection of the self - the "gleam / Of his own image" - does not, at first glance, seem valorized here (we would expect that it would be, that a narcissistic moment would be the text's aim); rather, the image of the self operates on the same level as the other reflections of natural phenomena - mountains, clouds, sun-beams. The thrust of the passage instead seems to be to discriminate two different levels of interpretation. What introduces a "wavering motion" into this binary opposition, however, is a curious phrase that Wordsworth added in revision. The viewer, he says, often is perplexed and cannot part The shadow from the substance, rocks and sky, Mountains and clouds, reflected in the depth Of the clear flood ... (emphasis added)

"Reflected in the depth," not reflected on the surface? The perplexity of this mise en abyme, in its deeper entanglement, works to confuse the two separate levels of reading on which the whole argument depends. Surface and depth not only have usurped each other's place, but the very distinction between "shadow" and "substance" is put in question. What such a crossing, as both rhetorical figure and interpretive impasse, might mean for the notion of reflection or the larger issue of representation, especially self-representation, in The Prelude is a question that is continually posed by Wordsworth's text. This much, however, seems clear: in any structure of surface and depth - Freud's as well as Wordsworth's - repetition plays a crucial role. In the Freudian model, the critical insight is the concept of the symptom as a repetition of the scene. Instead of "working through" the trauma, the patient repeats or reproduces it, symptomatically at first, and then transferentially with the analyst. As Freud said of the "compulsion to repeat" in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, repetition substitutes for memory (SE 18: 19). The patient, he writes, "is obliged to repeat the repressed material as a contemporary experience instead of, as the physician would prefer to see, remembering it as something belonging to the past" (SE 18: 18).20 But this repetition is thoroughly

129 Symptom and Scene in Freud and Wordsworth

rhetorical and semiotic; it has always already textualized the "experience" or scene that it purports to repeat. Symptoms never have any but a linguistic existence. Rhetorically, the Wordsworthian symptom emerges as that scheme of repetition called chiasmus.21 If now we attempt to map this boating scene onto the earlier relation between history and textuality, or onto the three levels of "history, nature, self" in this palimpsest, we discover that Wordsworth's text does not seem to cooperate. The self appears to want to gaze through nature to the rock bottom of history - not "the surface of past time," but its very depths - yet is prevented, double-crossed by both language and nature. For what does the poet hope to see? What is he looking for? The image of hanging over the side of a boat is not limited to this episode of The Prelude, but is repeated in the next book in a significant context: some looked In passive expectation from the shore, While from a boat others hung o'er the deep, Sounding with grappling irons and long poles. At last, the dead man, 'mid that beauteous scene Of trees and hills and water, bolt upright Rose, with his ghastly face, a spectre shape Of terror... (5.444-51)

Like Virgil's "heroic bones," this moment can be read as an eruption of history into nature, yet the "textuality of this event," to recall de Man's phrase ("Shelley Disfigured" 67), the characteristically Wordsworthian aspect of this epitaph, remains to be interpreted. How does Wordsworth dispose of the body? The "beauteous scene" here, echoing the "beauteous sights" in the earlier "surface of past time" episode (4.261), turns out to be hardly a ground, even less a limit, but rather a repetition of something deeper: my inner eye had seen Such sights before, among the shining streams Of faery land, the forests of romance. (5453-5)

Like the Boy of Winander, whose name also was writ in water, the drowned man is a reflection of the spectator. We have at least three moments in the text that are superimposed: the trope of the "still water" and the "incumbent" poet; the experience of "the deep" yielding up its contents; and the memory of earlier "shining streams" in imagination. The text is awash with its own analysis. Even if we

130 Romantic Aversions

could touch bottom, we would discover that for Wordsworth, experience evokes a repetition of something already written, a historical replay of an imaginative text.

WORDS WORTH: IMAGINATION AND HISTORY even then I felt Gleams like the flashing of a shield The Prelude

Here might we pause, while still on familiar ground. But I wish to pursue this line a bit further to consider another, somewhat more speculative example of the symptom/scene model. By moving in this direction, we emulate the manoeuvres of the psychoanalytic method, proceeding from certainty to deliberate uncertainty, facing interpretive risks but confident of a return at the end. I conclude, therefore, with an out-of-the-way piece by Wordsworth in which the quarrying method of Freud again turns up some interesting but problematic artifacts. It is a curious text, part of a fragment of MS. w, written in early 1804, and originally intended to follow the Snowdon episode in the final book of The Prelude, but never included (see Norton Prelude 496-9). A rhetorical set-piece that easily could have been inserted at any of a number of places in The Prelude, it advertises its own status as a distinct imaginative exemplum in the growth of a poet's mind and thus bears analysis in isolation as well as in its surrounding context. Perhaps what attracts the critic initially is the way the episode both resists and challenges the opposition between experience and imagination, or between history and textuality: One evening, walking in the public way, A peasant of the valley where I dwelt Being my chance companion, he stopped short And pointed to an object full in view At a small distance. Twas a horse, that stood Alone upon a little breast of ground With a clear silver moonlight sky behind. With one leg from the ground the creature stood, Insensible and still; breath, motion gone, Hairs, colour, all but shape and substance gone, Mane, ears, and tail, as lifeless as the trunk That had no stir of breath. We paused awhile In pleasure of the sight, and left him there,

131 Symptom and Scene in Freud and Wordsworth With all his functions silently sealed up, Like an amphibious work of Nature's hand, A borderer dwelling betwixt life and death, A living statue or a statued life. (MS. w 57-73)

To perform a textual peel of this fragment, hermeneutically stripping away different layers of meaning in the manner of Freud, we might begin with the characteristically Wordsworthian poetics of encounter, as definitively treated by Geoffrey Hartman (Wordsworth's Poetry 1-30). My immediate interest, however, is not in the theme of selfconsciousness so much as in the way that the self here, as in the "surface of past time" passage, does not appear foregrounded to the extent it is in such scenes as the blind Beggar in London (Prelude 7.619-49). Wordsworth's claim that the encounter with the horse is meant "to embody / [The] pleasing argument" of an "analogy betwixt / The mind of man and Nature" (MS. w 33, 27-8) does not make interpretation any easier, though it perhaps justifies a psychoanalytic rhetoric. The episode begins in its "chancy" way, not with "a leading from above," as in "Resolution and Independence" (PW 2: 237), but with a more human contingency, the speaker's attention being directed to the scene in front of him by "a peasant of the valley." Like the "surface of past time" episode, the text emphasizes its own margins, its boundary layers between "life and death," as the poet says, or between nature and art, the object and the image. The peculiar adjective "amphibious," by no means common in Wordsworth, recalls a passage from The Prelude in which the poet's life at Cambridge is "compared / To a floating island, an amphibious spot / Unsound, of spongy texture" (3.335-7). A fair surface belies a foul depth, no grounding at all, either personal or interpretive. Whether the poet sails "upon the breast / Of a still water" or sees a horse standing "upon a little breast of ground," something symptomatically floats or remains precariously suspended, like a horse's leg in air. Though Wordsworth uses no interjective signposts here such as "Lo!" or "Behold!" the shock of mild surprise is familiarly Wordsworthian. Yet the speaker's response is not just surprise, but pleasure: "We paused awhile / In pleasure of the sight." But what exactly in this "pleasing argument" is pleasurable about this horse? Is it merely, as one critic suggests, its ordinariness? "What the Grasmere peasant points out to the poet," Jonathan Wordsworth writes, "is a horse in the moonlight, sleeping as horses often do sleep, on three feet" (Borders 2). Yet there is nothing so ordinary about Wordsworth's rhetoric in this passage, with its carefully wrought examples of anaphora,

132 Romantic Aversions

epistrophe, and chiasmus. Repetition in certain phrasings - "stood ... stood"; "breath ... breath"; and "gone ... gone" - not only rhetorically overdetermines the text but also creates a sense of hermeneutic closure, as if interpretation kept circling around the object without getting any closer, its own powers of explication being "silently sealed up." The stylization of description reflects the aestheticization of the horse itself, as a "living statue or a statued life." Like Freud's archaeological artifacts, this statue might provide an index to history, to "the events of the remote past ... Saxa loquuntur!" If stones can talk, maybe horses can, and not just in the way that the "Horse of knowledge" in book 7 of The Prelude communicates "by stamping out ... answers" on the ground (Norton Prelude 262n6). Here is a horse, Wordsworth's fragment implies, and thereby hangs a tale. "My present aim," he writes, "Is to contemplate for a needful while / (Passage which will conduct in season due / Back to the tale which I have left behind)" (MS. w 6-9). While among other tales The Winter's Tale stands as an obvious hintertext here in relation to living statues, the final epigrammatic verse, in its deliberately sculpted chiasmus ("living statue ... statued life"), verges on that central Wordsworthian genre of the epitaph. One almost expects a rhetorical figure linking "horse" and "corse," in the spirit of a Lucy poem: A slumber did my palfrey seal ... No motion has it now, no force. The emphasis on sight calls attention to the episode as something of an optical puzzle. Demarcations of foreground and background, lighting, attitude, and perspective cast the horse as "an object full in view," and thus place this text within the purview of the picturesque. Like the Wanderer in the first book of The Excursion, the horse is locodescriptively "stationed" (1.39); it is posed as just a silhouette, illuminated by "a clear silver moonlight sky behind." The reader sees only its contours, its "shape and substance" alone: breath, motion gone, Hairs, colour, all but shape and substance gone, Mane, ears, and tail, as lifeless as the trunk That had no stir of breath.

In this anti-blason, all horses are gray in the dark. Given the silhouetting of this horse, as well as its explicitly statuesque aspect, we are encouraged to approach it from the perspective of the visual arts, as either sculpture or a type of "still life." The passage is a powerful ekphrasis, a rhetorical flourish that delights in its own descriptiveness as it pauses awhile "in pleasure of the sight." The poet tropes the horse as a strange "work of Nature's hand." It is art, or an artifact,

133 Symptom and Scene in Freud and Wordsworth though one made by Nature. What is it about this horse that catches the viewer's eye? We know that elsewhere in this fragment of MS. w (75-130) Wordsworth got both matter and manner from specific travel and history books. He "drew, at times verbatim, on Ferdinand Columbus, Life and Actions of Christopher Columbus ... Richard Hakluyt's Principall Navigations ... Mungo Park, Travels in the Interior of Africa ... and William Dampier, A New Voyage round the World" (Norton Prelude 496; see also de Selincourt 623-8).22 With so much historical texture, and so many explicit references to historical explorers, it can hardly be said that Wordsworth here in MS. w denies history. Yet his engagement with history, through its textual mediations, could still be read as repression and denial. An adaptation of a Lacanian joke is apropos here: Wordsworth, why do you tell me you are engaging history so I'll believe you are denying it, when you really are engaging it?23 "Surely such denial is also the strongest kind of engagement with history," we recall Liu saying (Sense 35). Wordsworth's use of history might be neither advocacy nor suppression, yet it still runs the risk of being read as a swerve from the very thing it appears to invoke and encounter. In the context of MS. w, lines 1-33, and their later transformation into The Prelude 14.78–95, the only "history" in the horse appears to be the one related to "the history of a Poet's mind" (14.414), since the purpose of this scene, like the following ones dealing with Columbus, Gilbert, Dampier, and other explorers, is to provide the "analogy betwixt / The mind of man and Nature" (MS. w 27-8). In this episode we clearly have two components, self and nature, with that third element, history, apparently elided or at least subsumed under the aspect of personal imaginative history. Yet if this alleged incorporation of history into self can be read as "the strongest kind of engagement with history," it is not an engagement untroubled by its own textuality. What history is not inhabited by difference? The question is at once symptomatic and fundamental, and disturbs the assumption of an original or final scene of history as the unassailable limit of reading. But what about this dark horse? Where is the history in it? Let us imagine that it resides in the deliberate military pose of the creature. It stands like a stylized horse in a military painting or war memorial, one leg raised, not quite rampant, on "a little breast of ground." In his description of the "Armoury" (1805 Prelude 7.135) in the Tower of London, Wordsworth views Statues - man, And the horse under him - in gilded pomp

134 Romantic Aversions Adorning flowery gardens, 'mid vast squares; The Monument, and that Chamber of the Tower Where England's sovereigns sit in long array, Their steeds bestriding ... (Prelude 7.133-8)

Yet precisely what is missing from this statued horse is its rider, as though the animal had wandered "out of Romance," as Geoffrey Hartman might say (Wordsworth's Poetry xx) - or perhaps out of battle, or myth. No Bellerophon here; no "apparition of Napoleon" either (Liu, Sense 35). The horse is closer to the riderless ass in Peter Bell, likewise standing motionless in the clear moonlight. "Insensible and still," the horse is staged as one more of the "living pictures" (MS. w 32) that illustrate the mind in creation.24 Still, that one raised hoof raises speculations. What if the horse were to stamp? Would a fountain of poetic inspiration spring up? Or is the hoof an index to some imagined military exploit, itself a memory or self-echo of a childhood scene in which the poet on horseback "beat with thundering hoofs the level sand" (Prelude 2.137; 10.603)? What have we here - a naturalized Pegasus, a Marengo, or some other beast from out the "Augean stable" (Prelude 1O.585)?25 The bare simplicity of the scene belies a complex archaeology of reading. The horse is poised at an interpretive crossroads, an interface between history and textuality, or the intersection of "history, nature, self." Each step recovers the ground of something already written: dream, fantasy, wish, myth. At bottom, for Wordsworth, "history" is a repetition of "imagination."

8 Gentle Hearts and Hands: Reading Wordsworth after Geoffrey Hartman nor words, nor worth, Action, nor utterance, nor the power of speech, To stir men's blood Shakespeare, Julius Caesar Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew It was the spirit that we sought and knew That we should ask this often Wallace Stevens, "The Idea of Order at Key West"

The title of this essay contains an example of one of Geoffrey Hartman's favourite rhetorical figures: the phrase "Reading ... after Geoffrey Hartman" can itself be read as what Quintilian calls prolepsis, a figure of prediction.1 Yet how can we speak of reading "after" Geoffrey Hartman when he is still very much with us? Or does the proleptic suggestion in my title contain a muted epitaphic gesture, in the way that the closing lines of Wordsworth's "Solitary Reaper" do: "The music in my heart I bore, / Long after it was heard no more" (PW3: 77)? "After," in its temporal sense, implies belatedness but also the sense of "after-effect," or of "aftering" itself, which Hartman would associate with a "westering" impulse.2 I would not, perhaps, go so far as to suggest that prolepsis and epitaph necessarily evoke each other, though virtually any leaping ahead in Wordsworth contains implicitly a hint of final thoughts. I prefer, therefore, to construe the title along stylistic and methodological lines: "Reading ... after Geoffrey Hartman" I shall take to mean interpreting according to, or in the manner of. "Use every man after his desert, and who should 'scape whipping? Use them after your own honor and dignity," Hamlet says (2.2.516-18). But here too we are faced with a problem: if reading after implies writing in the manner of, then indeed our burden is great, now the name of Hartman is laid upon us. He is a hard act to follow, and who comes after must needs do so with a consciousness of self raised to critical, if not apocalyptic, pitch. Let me, then, present what Wordsworth might call an "after-thought," the title he gives to the final sonnet in his "River

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Duddon" sequence: "I see what was, and is, and will abide; / Still glides the Stream, and shall for ever glide; / The Form remains, the Function never dies" (PW 3: 261). Well, what are the "form and function" of reading after Geoffrey Hartman? According to him, criticism is getting harder to do, "yet more and more people are doing it," he writes ("Touching" 18).3 Long before the manufacturers of athletic shoes got into the market, Hartman was saying to critics: "Just do it." "The best apology for criticism (as for literature)," he writes in Criticism in the Wilderness, "is doing it; and, at present, reading it closely" (1). But what is it that we do when we read? And what sort of apology, what defence of criticism, can close reading offer us today? A larger question that remains implicit here is the status of theory after Hartman. Like other discourses, and as a discourse of the other, theory has its own intentional structure - that is, it exists as a theory of something, if only of theory itself. For this reason there is always something precarious about theory to the extent that it derives its language or method from other fields - literature, psychology, linguistics, or philosophy, to name a few. Since these disciplines tend to protect their own language and procedures, defending against another's appropriation of them, theory will always be, as Paul de Man said, in crisis (Blindness 8). While at present the crisis is not life-threatening - on the contrary, it appears to be self-sustaining - one cannot help wondering about the long-term prognosis. Theory has had a relatively short life, and the prospect of its endurance is a legitimate concern. Even if it survives the numerous attacks from different quarters, it is clear that theory will inevitably adapt, or mutate, in response to its cultural and intellectual environment. Yet no matter how critical reading changes, some "Form remains," as Wordsworth puts it. What Paul Klee said about his art applies to poetic interpretation too: close reading, like drawing, sometimes means taking a line for a walk. With Hartman, however, the critical path often leads through a wilderness in which interpretation itself becomes risky: regardless of which text by Hartman we consider, the "mournful iteration" of reading is something that is not to be repeated.4 Each essay, each performance stages its own hermeneutical drama, full of suspense and riddling questions, reflexive or metatheatrical awareness, and even comic relief; yet each also contains a through-line of plot or progress, ultimately the "progress of poesy" or of criticism itself. Nevertheless, while each performance is unique and therefore not reiterable, even by himself, there are certain habits or recurrent conventions that govern the encounter between Hartman

137 Reading Wordsworth after Geoffrey Hartman and a text. We expect local illumination, or explication de texte, to be sure; but also a setting of both text and commentary in the larger orbit of comparative literary history.5 "Nothing in language is alien to me," Hartman has written, "not even Heidegger's German" ("Wordsworth before Heidegger" 194). No field of discourse, either classical commonplace or contemporary cliche, is ruled out. We become witnesses to a habit of reading in which "the question of style is also a question of method."6 Now, certainly since the advent of poststructuralism, but even earlier in some of Hartman's writings, reading has been taken as the proper subject of literary criticism just as writing has been declared the proper subject of literature. What we call "reading" nowadays refers not to the way that we encounter texts, or to the way that texts address us, but to the way that they talk about themselves - that is, how they repeat their own figurality, or how they thematize, again and again, their own difference. In this view, whose heyday has passed but whose after-effects are still being felt, textuality is expressed in terms of otherness, displacement, repetition, and mise en abyme. But this is not the language of Geoffrey Hartman. For despite his close identification with deconstruction and the Yale School of criticism, Hartman was never dogmatic in his experimenting with poststructuralism, never truly an adherent. It was not that he touched, but did not lift, the hem of deconstruction's tunic; rather, he preferred to play the field and to enjoy the many pleasures of the text, and the chase of interpretation itself. Hartman had to invent his own system or be enslaved by another's. Yet "system" is hardly the right word, since Hartman rarely stands still (at one point he characterizes his own method as "intertextual leaping" ["'Timely Utterance'" 162]) long enough for his mode to become modish, or imitative of a fixed procedure. In Saving the Text, for example, he maintains that his criticism is "a counterstatement to Derrida" - "not a refutation," he says, "but rather a different turn in how to state the matter" of literary representation. "A restored theory of representation," he continues, "should acknowledge the deconstructionist challenge as necessary and timely, if somewhat self-involved - that is, only occasionally reflective of analogies to its own project in religious writing and especially in literary writing" (121). There were, however, many features of poststructuralism and deconstruction that attracted Hartman: greater interpretive freedom for commentary and the commentator, validation of a creative critical style, and, perhaps above all, the necessity of theory itself. Though Hartman's interest in theory predates the rise of poststructuralism - even his earliest works reveal

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theoretical preoccupations - there is no doubt that the ascent of theory as a discipline was felt by Hartman as both necessary and liberating in the history of criticism.7 But let me back up historically to consider a particular aspect of literary commentary that responds to Hartman's work on the history of critical style. I repeat the question that he himself asked in his "Short Discourse on Method" in 1954: What is Hartman's approach? What is his approach? Whenever a critic of literature is discussed, this question tends to preface all the rest. More than any other it rings in the student's ears the first weeks at graduate school. I could not understand it then, and still cannot. Approach? Either one has the truth about a poem or one does not. Approach? Just as a thousand misunderstandings will not alter in the least the possibility of a correct understanding, so a thousand varied approaches cannot negate uniqueness of meaning. Then I began to eat of the tree of knowledge, so that my eyes were multiplied, and where I had' seen but a single text I now perceived the formidable legion of variant, if not discordant, interpretations. The philologist and the philosopher, the sociologist, the humanist, the various historians of ideas, of literature, of politics, and of economics - the psychoanalyst and the empirical psychologist, the theologian and the lay Jewish and Christian critics, the more orthodox and the less orthodox - all had their "approach," believed themselves in possession of the truth, demanded a hearing, quarreled suavely or with verbal spittle, and insisted that even when the text did not quite fit, their analysis clarified a truth dimly perceived in the original. (Unmediated Vision ix)

While I find this theoretically precocious for 1954,1 am all the more impressed by the presence of certain concerns that would be deepened and elaborated throughout Hartman's ceuvre. The love of the art of interpreting is one. The awareness of competing approaches is another. The stylistic wit - "quarreled suavely or with verbal spittle" (in which the ear picks up a subtle chiasmus in the s and v consonants) - is a third. Even the aetiology of what Hartman would later call his "superiority complex vis-a-vis other critics, and [his] inferiority complex vis-a-vis art" is evident here ("Interpreter" 3). There is the sense, as we now read this before-text in the after-light of interpretation, that much of what was to follow in Hartman's career is contained here. Of course, our own historical and interpretive perspective, like that of the boy in the stolen boat in Wordsworth's Prelude, who rows with his back to the fore and his eye on the aft, allows us to confer or to reconfigure meaning retroactively. Yet there can be no mistaking certain interests of Hartman's that begin here

139 Reading Wordsworth after Geoffrey Hartman and continue through his most recent work. Take, for example, his following comments on how critics in the 19505 were being "forced to consider literature as more than an organic creation, a social pastime, a religious trope, an emotional outlet, a flower of civilization, more even than an exemplary stage for ideal probabilities": Literature was being recognized as a moral force in its own right, an institution with its own laws, and incipiently, a distinctive form of knowledge. The recognition meant labor, hard labor. The criticism of Voltaire and the classical writers, relying on an instinctive sense of decorum, as on the free and common consent of a class of gentleman readers, seemed to have perished like Atlantis. In its stead appeared the work of the owl-eyed philologist or historiographer with broad sympathies, the professional scholar with his "field," and the unpredictable responses of a profane crowd of enthusiasts, journalists, and college students. (Unmediated Vision x) These remarks, cast in the past tense but in fact prophetically forwardlooking, turned out to have their fulfilment in both the immediate and the long term. Three years after Hartman published these thoughts on literature as "an institution with its own laws," Northrop Frye published his Anatomy of Criticism; and, perhaps more relevantly, over forty years later, the loss of "an instinctive sense of decorum" in letters, and the disappearance of "the free and common consent of a class of gentleman readers," are still active concerns for Hartman. The opposition between what he calls the "gentlemanly" or "friendship style" of criticism, on the one hand, and the technical, abstract strivings of theory, on the other, is one of the themes of his 1991 book Minor Prophecies: The Literary Essay in the Culture Wars, in which he seeks "to understand what happened to English criticism in the period of roughly 1920 to 1950, when a 'teatotaling' style developed in academic circles": Now what happened is that, in a sense, nothing happened. An order of discourse strove hard to remain a discourse of order ... In adopting this demeanor English commentators followed an ingrained tradition. They took no solace from the notion of a science or a theory of literature: that was the Continental way, leading from Dilthey to Lukacs, and then increasingly to reflections inspired by Marxism and structuralism. The English classical writer, even when the stakes were high, wished to please rather than teach, and to remind rather than instruct. This critical tradition, keeping its distance from sacred but also from learned commentary, sought to purify the reader's taste and the national language, and so addressed itself to peers or friends - in short, to a class of equally cultured people. (60)

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It is significant and surely not accidental that Hartman's prose here emulates the very classical balance that he describes - "to please rather than teach, and to remind rather than instruct."8 Such balance has the effect of tempering the wild side of theory with the groundedness of literary history, while at the same time kick-starting interpretation through the self-awareness of theory. In its chronic form, this grammar can become a "wavering balance," as Wordsworth might say (Prelude 1.623), but when the treatment is nimble or acute, as it is with Hartman, it acquires the sure-footed power of paradox: the foreignness of theory, when wedded to the goodly universe of gentlemanly discourse, becomes what Hartman calls "a strange conversation" (Minor Prophecies 89). Yet it is a conversation in which the critic is no longer, like Wordsworth's poet, "a man speaking to men" (Prose 1: 138), but rather a "compiler" of "heterogeneous stories or types of discourse" whose relation is "antiphonal" (Minor Prophecies 89). The individual voice trades off against the voice of familiar society - neither in complete harmony nor in absolute discord with it, but rather in a "concourse wild" (Prelude 5.378) or "strange conversation" that is always responsive to the call of the text. Given his long-standing interest in the boundaries between literature and criticism - and indeed his efforts to renegotiate those boundaries - it is perhaps not surprising that the stylistic (and sometimes more than stylistic) phenomenon of "gentlemanliness" that Hartman describes in criticism also obtains in the poetry of the same period. In 1962 the English poet and critic Alfred Alvarez edited an anthology entitled The New Poetry, which included works by such poets as Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Thorn Gunn, Philip Larkin, and others. But what is most interesting about this anthology is the introductory essay by Alvarez, first published in Commentary in 1961.9 It is immediately apparent how its concerns complement Hartman's. Just as Hartman wished "to understand what happened to English criticism in the period of roughly 1920 to 1950" (Minor Prophecies 60), Alvarez claims that he is "simply attempting to give [his] idea of what, that really matters, has happened to poetry in England during the last decade [i.e., the 19503]" (17). Alvarez's essay, entitled "The New Poetry or Beyond the Gentility Principle," traces the development of English poetry from the 19203 to the 19505, with its series of what he calls "negative feed-backs," or stylistic reversals, which work, in their different ways, to preserve the idea that life in England goes on much as it always has, give or take a few minor changes in the class system. The upper-middle class, or Tory, ideal - presented in its pure crystalline form by John Betjeman - may have given way to the predominantly

141 Reading Wordsworth after Geoffrey Hartman lower-middle class, or Labour, ideal of the Movement and the Angries, but the concept of gentility still reigns supreme. And gentility is a belief that life is always more or less orderly, people always more or less polite, their emotions and habits more or less decent and more or less controllable; that God, in short, is more or less good. It is a stance which is becoming increasingly precarious to maintain ... (New Poetry 25)

Calling for "a new seriousness" in poetry which, "like Coleridge's Imagination, would reconcile 'a more than usual state of emotion with more than usual order'" (New Poetry 28, 32), Alvarez concludes: My own feeling is that a good deal of poetic talent exists in England at the moment. But whether or not it will come to anything largely depends not on the machinations of any literary racket but on the degree to which the poets can remain immune to the disease so often found in English culture: gentility. (New Poetry 32)

Hartman's focus on criticism, and Alvarez's on poetry, certainly supplement each other, though Hartman does not go so far as to call a genteel or gentlemanly style in criticism diseased. Yet both critics point to the "precariousness" of a style - critical or poetic, it makes no difference - pitched on the assumption of an audience of peers. Alvarez even suggests that British poets who spend at least some of their formative years in America have "the creative advantage of being three thousand miles away from the fog of English gentility." Such poets are, Alvarez argues, "less open to pressures which would flatten both their intelligence and the sharp violence of their experience into a socially more acceptable middle style."10 For Hartman, however, the precariousness is worth maintaining, for there is in his work the sense of ambivalence toward both theoretical strangeness and conversational "teatotaling" as critical extremes that would aspire to be norms. "Without contraries is no progression." Despite his quarrel with the smug or overly formal style of English criticism, Hartman still shows a muted appreciation of it, and certainly an ability to conform to it if he wishes. But this style is to theory for Hartman what Beulah is to Jerusalem for Blake: a resting-place from the culture wars of eternity. The "middle flight," disdained by Milton as by all the Romantics, is also passed over by Hartman in his quest for what he calls "an alternative form of reflective speech to set against the seduction of a sentimental and dominant mode" (Minor Prophecies 88). Thus if there is a tradition of "gentility" in criticism there is also gentleness in literature, a blessing in the gentle breeze of poetry. The

142 Romantic Aversions convention of the "gentle reader,'' for example, which Wordsworth adapts in his poem "Simon Lee," is only one instance of how the topos of gentleness, understood variously as social class, aesthetic category, and literary style, develops into questions of genre and intertext.11 One poem that touches on the cognate concerns of gentleness and genre is Wordsworth's "Nutting" (PW 2: 211-12), begun in late 1798 (see Mark L. Reed, Chronology of the Early Years 332 and Chronology of the Middle Years 166n36), and published in Lyrical Ballads in 1800 and, as Wordsworth said in his note to Isabella Fenwick, "intended as part of a poem on my own life, but struck out as not being wanted there."12 Precisely why "Nutting" was not "wanted" or needed in The Prelude we cannot say; like other manuscript fragments, such as the powerful ekphrasis of the horse standing on three legs in MS. w, the text "Nutting" - perhaps with the exception of its last three lines, which I consider later - could easily have been included with other childhood episodes in book 1 or, indeed, in any of a number of other places in The Prelude.13 It surely qualifies as a "spot of time," though to say so does not advance interpretation much. The poem has generally been read as a quest-romance (e.g., Hartman, Wordsworth's Poetry 73-5, and Ferguson 70–6), although the point of the quest - its aim and object - remains puzzling. A boy goes out one day to gather hazelnuts, but comes back instead with a burden of guilt for having violated nature. The violation motif, common to a number of episodes in book 1 of The Prelude, as Hartman has shown, also recalls statements by Wordsworth in Home at Grasmere: Nothing at that time So welcome, no temptation half so dear As that which urged me to a daring feat. Deep pools, tall trees, black chasms and dizzy crags And tottering towers - I loved to stand and read Their looks forbidding, read and disobey, Sometimes in act, and evermore in thought. (Home at Grasmere 97)

What is striking about this passage is the way that the topos of the book of nature is assimilated to the text of literary history. Exactly whom does the poet "read and disobey,' nature or poetry? In this "forest of romance" (Prelude 5.455) trees begin to stand in for precursors; we find ourselves in the enchanted grove where personification or prosopopoeia becomes literalized as animation. As interpreters it is easy for us to lose our way, especially when Wordsworth covers

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his tracks so cleverly that he throws us almost completely off the scent. It is not that Wordsworth is a "chameleon" poet, constantly altering his appearance, but rather that he has the power to absorb and transform his influences so thoroughly - yet so gently - that he appears "natural." One result of such transformative power is what Harold Bloom has called "apophrades," the intertextual effect in which precursors begin to sound like their descendants (Anxiety 13955). I was struck by such a phenomenon some years ago in a passage from Roland Barthes's Empire of Signs, in which Barthes attempts to describe the essence of the Japanese haiku. I quote this brief excerpt, not for its insight into the haiku but for its purely gratuitous allusion: [In the haiku], meaning is only a flash, a slash of light: When the light of sense goes out, but with a flash that has revealed the invisible world, Shakespeare wrote; but the haiku's flash illumines, reveals nothing ... (83; italics in original)14

It is an astonishing and wonderful error for Barthes to hear Shakespeare when in fact he is quoting Wordsworth; yet it is an interpretive after-effect I have myself experienced and continue to marvel at, all the more because of the way that, in this mini-literary history, Shakespeare displaces Milton. For a period in the 19705 and 19805, after the publication of Bloom's Anxiety of Influence, a number of critics productively laboured under the impression that Milton was the alpha and omega of Wordsworthian influence, that Shakespeare belonged, as Bloom himself said, "to the giant age before the flood" (Anxiety 11), and that really the only conversation worth listening in on was the dialogue between Milton and the Romantics. Bloom has since increasingly expanded his focus, however, and other readers have also liberated themselves from what now appears as an unnecessarily restrictive concentration on one instance of a more general theory of poetry. Hartman, of course, was one of those who were uncomfortable with the system, as when he wrote in 1980 that the emphasis on the presence of the Miltonic voice in Wordsworth occluded another, deeper voice: It seems to me that Wordsworth approaches Shakespeare through Milton. The overt presence, Milton's, may be the less dangerous one: it is possible that the real block, or the poet defended against because of the power of his word ... is Shakespeare. ("Diction" 127)

Intuitively, this seems right to me, although we cannot stop here; we need to open up intertextual perspectives on Wordsworth that take us back through both Milton and Shakespeare to even earlier hintertexts.15

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It is tempting, therefore, to read Wordsworth's "Nutting" as an allegory of intertextuality in which Wordsworth, "fearless of a rival," sallies forth to a bower of bliss which he sullies through a "strength / Of usurpation" (Prelude 6.599-600). At first, these "fresh woods" seem to present themselves in a Miltonic mode, as so many of Wordsworth's poems do. We have, for example, the sallying forth that echoes Milton's Areopagitica: "I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat" (Milton, Complete 728). The boy who journeys to the "dear nook," "O'er pathless rocks, / Through beds of matted fern, and tangled thickets, / Forcing [his] way," resembles, as critics have noted, Satan on his quest through Chaos (see, e.g., Jonathan Wordsworth, Borders 49-50; French 42); and Wordsworth's description of the "virgin scene," "where not a broken bough / Drooped with its withered leaves, ungracious sign / Of devastation," clearly echoes Eve's temptation scene and Adam's response in book 9 of Paradise Lost. At the same time, however, the middle section of the poem, with its evocation of a pastoral, fairy world, "Where fairy water-breaks do murmur on / For ever," and mossy stones lie "scattered like a flock of sheep," contains Shakespearean overtones: Lear and the flowers ("beneath the trees I sate / Among the flowers, and with the flowers I played"); the Sonnets (echoed in the "wealth of kings"); and both Richard III and Hamlet in the modulation of "sallied" (in the 1800 version) into "Deformed and sullied."16 In the performance of his own intertextuality, the poet of "Nutting" becomes "a Figure quaint, / Tricked out in proud disguise of cast-off weeds." A trick is a trope, in Renaissance rhetoric, and "cast-off weeds" are also second-hand words. "The trick of that voice I do well remember," Gloucester says of Lear (4.6.105). A Shakespearean voice coexists with a Miltonic rhetoric; the boy enters both the world before the Fall - the opposite image of which is Wordsworth's "Adam, yet in Paradise / Though fallen from bliss" (Prelude 8.659-60) - and also what Wordsworth elsewhere calls "the wild woods / Of Arden" (8.138-9). The parallelism of the Miltonic and Wordsworthian scenes (sylvan or virgin, as the case may be) implies that this episode hinges on a "before and after" structure. Despite the fact that at least one early reader could "make neither head nor tail of it," there is very little middle to this text:17 out of a total of fifty-six lines, only two deal with the central action, that is, nutting itself. I do not mean to suggest that "Nutting" is about nothing, but that rather it is about the nutting that is not there and, of course, the nutting that is:

145 Reading Wordsworth after Geoffrey Hartman Then up I rose, And dragged to earth both branch and bough, with crash And merciless ravage ... (43–5)18

The poem thus displaces its nominal subject; it is all preamble and denouement, like preface and essay supplementary, surrounding a transitory action, the motion of a muscle. What the poem delights in is the before- and after-vacancy, which turns out to be pure affect: "eagerness," "boyish hope," "suppression of the heart," "wise restraint / Voluptuous," "temper," "expectation," "sweet mood" - all these terms describing the before moment; and "present feelings," "Exult[ation]," "sense of pain," and "gentleness of heart" afterwards. A heavy load of affect is poised precariously on a slim fulcrum, keeping both text and reader off balance, as they strive to find a footing in "Nutting." Recall the perilous balance mandated by the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, in which Wordsworth says that the "feeling" developed in his poetry "gives importance to the action and situation, and not the action and situation to the feeling" (Prose 1: 129). But what a daring imbalance "Nutting" achieves! It mixes stasis with action, a contemplative mood with a violent act, and "apocalypse" with "akedah."19 Though the sexual allegory of the poem remains understated, it is still arguably the most overt example of eroticism in Wordsworth's poetry, and has never been satisfactorily interpreted, partly because its very obviousness seems to obviate it.20 Yet the lingering of the boy, his "sweet reluctant amorous delay," hints at perverse or fetishistic fantasies. Lingering, as Freud argued in his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, is a perversion if the sexual activity "linger[s] over the intermediate relations to the sexual object which should normally be traversed rapidly on the path towards the final sexual aim" (SE 7: 150). "I play the loiterer," Wordsworth says elsewhere (Prelude 3.582); but it is precisely this character of suspense or hesitation, one which is, for a moment, almost "stupidly good," that defines the poise of a text that is nearly all forepleasure and afterglow. The lingering of the boy is significant, moreover, for its relation to what Freud calls "deferred action," or Nachtraglichkeit, the way that early, often traumatic experiences are reworked at a later date.21 Here, expectation sits in the air while echoes of Milton play all around, recalling his defence of "why our sage and serious poet Spenser ... describing true temperance under the person of Guyon, brings him in with his palmer through the cave of Mammon and the bower of earthly bliss, that he might see and know, and yet abstain" (Milton, Complete 728-9). The boy's delay, described as "wise restraint / Voluptuous," borrows a Miltonic syntax

146 Romantic Aversions

to drive the emotion toward the sensuous and the passionate, confirming that this lingering "restraint" is indeed pleasurable. Seeing and knowing and yet abstaining, however, are precisely the imaginative processes that are usurped in "Nutting," as if the boy's act were also a trespass against Shakespeare, Milton, and their visionary company. In both word and deed, Wordsworth passes them "unalarmed" (Prospectus, PW 5: 4). The poem concludes, not with a customary Wordsworthian benediction, but an admonishment: Then, dearest Maiden, move along these shades In gentleness of heart; with gentle hand Touch - for there is a spirit in the woods.

An earlier draft of this conclusion foregrounds the poem's ethical and didactic emphasis on instruction: Then dearest maiden if I have not now The skill to teach thee think I pray of him The ragged boy & let his parting look Instruct thee how to move along these shades In gentleness of heart. - With gentle hand Touch, for there is a spirit in the woods.22

The poem is a Romantic exemplum, but an exemplum whose provenance is covered o'er, like "beds of matted fern, and tangled thickets." The "spirit in the woods" reminds us at once of the topos of the genius loci, or presiding spirit of place, which has been definitively treated by Hartman.23 Wordsworth overdetermines this sense when he admonishes the "Maiden" to "move along these shades / In gentleness of heart." The word "shades" is itself haunted, inhabited by a multiple semantic presence that invokes both the locus of the "shady nook" and the return of the intertextual undead. This episode, after all, belongs to "One of those heavenly days that cannot die." Yet who speaks this touching final admonition? Is it automatically assumed to be the boy, now matured into a man, having put away his childish pastimes? I suggest that the final three lines of the poem convey obliquely the voice of an epitaph, a warning to the living to tread softly, to touch gently: as Shakespeare says, "Curst be he that moves my bones." The abruptness of the turn from narrative to coda, with its imperative rhetoric, also suggests a shift of perspective, as though someone or something else were speaking the injunction. There is the feel of self-reference, as if the demonstrative in the

147 Reading Wordsworth after Geoffrey Hartman

phrase "these shades" pointed to the speaker himself, or included him in a company of shades.24 To say this is to imply that "Nutting" is related to not only the genre of epitaph, but nature-inscription, with its typical address to the reader: "Siste, viator" - one of the epigraphs that Hartman chose for his book Wordsworth's Poetry (1). Yet while implicitly acknowledging this tradition, "Nutting" revises the convention of the "halted traveler," in Hartman's great conceit (Wordsworth's Poetry 1), advising the maiden instead to move, or move along. Repeating her own stopping by woods, however, the poem itself halts, hesitates, and lingers before it resumes its way. If the boy is Hartman's classic "halted traveler," the Maiden also stops and starts, saying to genre, as Rosalind says to Jaques, "Farewell, Monsieur Traveller!" (As You Like It 4.1.32). What is more, in its concern with touching a tree, the poem also recalls and reverses a biblical prohibition: "nor shall ye touch it, lest ye die."25 Touching is not forbidden in Wordsworth, as long as it is done with "gentle" hearts and hands.26 Politically as well as poetically, the early Wordsworth always had the common touch. But here he appears to be attempting a style that is common and gentle at the same time. We should note that Wordsworth's interest in ghostly trees is by no means limited to "Nutting," but is part of a larger trope of a nature-consciousness in his poetry. Consider his later poem "The Haunted Tree," which centres on the image of a talking oak: As if (so Grecian shepherds would have deemed) The Hamadryad, pent within, bewailed Some bitter wrong. Nor is it unbelieved, By ruder fancy, that a troubled ghost Haunts the old trunk; lamenting deeds of which The flowery ground is conscious. (PW 2: 291)

"The yew-tree had its ghost," Wordsworth writes in The Prelude (8.379); and in almost self-parodying fashion, demonstrating an awareness of both topos and style, he writes in Home at Grasmere that "this grove / Is haunted - by what ghost? a gentle Spirit / Of memory faithful to the call of love" (75). As with Wordsworth's other "Yew-trees" (PW 2: 209-10), in whose shade Hartman and Riffaterre have met in friendly disputation (Hartman, "Use and Abuse"), fancy or "Phantasy" invests the tree with a ghostliness that is consciously poetic.27 The connection between trees and poetry is as old as trees themselves. From the etymological link in the word liber, meaning "the

148 Romantic Aversions inner bark of a tree" but also by extension a book, woods and words have gone together, often in specifically amorous contexts, as when the souls of Virgil's lovers end up in the form of a myrtle, or erotic poetry is carved or hung on tree trunks, as it is in Shakespeare.28 The same topos is present, in a disguised way, in Wordsworth, and may help us understand the sexual content of "Nutting." That is, insofar as this poem imagines a spirit in the wood, in the wounded tree itself, we begin to hear classical, medieval, and Renaissance precedents beyond those of Shakespeare and Milton. Whose woods these are we think we know, or we are tempted to find out. What other spirits are there, not trapped in epitaphic stone, but speaking from out trunk or timber? Does Wordsworth's tree have a name? And can we retrace a path from Wordsworth's hazel through Ariel's pine to Daphne's laurel?29 "Nutting" is Wordsworth's Golden Bough, a manifestation of the "pagan" (or Druidic) Wordsworth that Coleridge found so intriguing, or of the "animism" that R.D. Havens explored in Wordsworth over half a century ago.30 Frazer has much to tell us about primitive forms of tree-worship and totemism that might bear on a reading of the poem's coda, and that might also, from our late-twentieth-century ecological or "green" perspective, uncover the atavistic connections between tree-hugging and tree- worship, whether seen in Eve's "low reverence done" to the tree of knowledge in Paradise Lost (9.835), or in such Wordsworthian settings as his maypole celebrations and his comparison of Loughrigg Tarn to the sacred Lake Nemi or Speculum Dianae (the very scene with which Frazer, in an ekphrasis of J.M.W. Turner's painting, opens The Golden Bough).31 "There's a Tree, of many, one." But equally we might turn to John Evelyn's Sylva, or a Discourse of Forest-Trees (1664), which we know that Wordsworth read while yet a schoolboy at Hawkshead, and which contains in its lengthy "Historical Account of the Sacredness and Use of Standing Groves" (280-318) a discussion of the belief that trees contain the souls of the departed. Citing examples from Euripides, Ovid, and Tasso of sacred or animated groves - "like that which Rinaldo saw in the enchanted Forest [of Gerusalemme Liberata, canto 18.34-8]" (300) - Evelyn writes: "And that every great Tree included a certain tutelar Genius or Nymph living and dying with it, the Poets are full" (301).32 Still, if we wish to follow the trajectory of "Nutting" "from ritual to romance," from text to poem, we might begin where we are and work backwards. The tradition survives as late as Robert Frost, whose 1942 volume A Witness Tree opens with a poem entitled "Beech," containing the following lines: "One tree, by being deeply

149 Reading Wordsworth after Geoffrey Hartman

wounded, / Has been impressed as Witness Tree / And made commit to memory / My proof of being not unbounded" (361). But in the eighteenth century, when the topos reaches Wordsworth, it is "too late for the fond believing lyre": like Keats's Psyche, or Milton's post-nativity oracles, haunted trees are dumb. Cowper's poem "Yardley Oak," to which Hartman has pointed as an example of the tradition of the "oracular" tree, with connections to Wordsworth's poem "Yew-Trees," uses only a faded after-image of the convention.33 Addressing the oak, Cowper says that there was a time when trees may have spoken, but that time is past: Oh couldst thou speak, As in Dodona once thy kindred trees Oracular, I would not curious ask The future ... (40-3 )34

Not expecting that "trees shall speak again" (49), Cowper stands in for the voice of nature: But since, although well qualified by age To teach, no spirit dwells in thee, nor voice May be expected from thee ... I will perform Myself the oracle, and will discourse In my own ear such matter as I may. (137-43)

"Pardon," Keats asks of Psyche, "that thy secrets should be sung / Even into thine own soft-conched ear." "Let me be thy choir," he continues, "thy shrine, thy grove, thy oracle" (Poems 275, 276). The obvious classical source, one which Wordsworth would have known well in 1798, and even better after 1823-4, when he translated it, is the Polydorus episode from book 3 of The Aeneid.35 Aeneas, recounting his adventures after Troy, describes his landing at the Thracian Fields, where he immediately seeks to offer up a sacrifice. "Studious to deck the Altar with green shoots," Wordsworth's translation reads, Aeneas begins pulling up trees, only to find that they drip blood. Again he plucks the trees, "And from the bark blood trickled as before." On the third attempt, "a mournful groan was sent / And a voice follow'd, uttering this lament": "Torment me not, Aeneas. Why this pain Given to a buried Man? O cease, refrain, And spare thy pious hands this guilty stain!"

(PW 4: 337-8)

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"Then, dearest Maiden," Wordsworth writes in his own voice in "Nutting," "with gentle hand / Touch - for there is a spirit in the woods." Wordsworth's "gentle hand" recalls Virgil's "pius manus," the pious or dutiful hand defiling a tree that gives off both blood and voice.36 It seems clear, on stylistic grounds, that when Wordsworth translated the Polydorus episode of The Aeneid, he had in mind Spenser's reworking of it in the first book of The Faerie Queene, canto 2, in which Fradubio is the spirit imprisoned in a tree (28-45).37 Here we have the introduction of a maiden of sorts (Duessa), for whom the Redcrosse Knight tries to make a garland. But when he breaks off a bough, it bleeds, and "a piteous yelling voyce [is] heard, / Crying, O spare with guilty hands to teare / My tender sides in this rough rynd embard" (1.2.31). "Guilty hands" are im-pious hands, as they are in book 6 of The Prelude, where Nature admonishes a group of "riotous men" (6.425): "Stay, stay your sacrilegious hands ... Your impious work forbear!" (6.430, 433).38 To heal the wound in the tree's bark, Redcrosse applies fresh clay, even as Aeneas undertakes to "bestow / A second burial, and fresh mould upthrow" (PW 4: 338). With Wordsworth, however, there is no such recompense, only "a sense of pain" felt by the poet as he "beheld / The silent trees, and saw the intruding sky" (PW 2: 212). In a sudden, guilty reversal, Wordsworth the intruder becomes intruded upon, while talking trees are reduced to "mute dialogue" (Prelude 2.268). Both blood and voice are gone, though a phantom pain remains; and Wordsworth survives to caution and protect. It is a curious topos, this intersection of blood and voice in nature, though we begin to suspect its attraction for Wordsworth has something to do with the epitaphic tradition, with hearing or reading the text of a buried self. In Genesis 4.10, the Lord says to the murderer Cain, "The voice of thy brother's blood crieth unto me from the ground." In the Inferno, canto 13, Dante encounters the souls of suicides, transformed into trees whose leaves are perpetually eaten by the harpies as punishment for their self-murder. When, at Virgil's urging (followed by his reference to his own Polydorus episode in The Aeneid [Inferno 13.48]), Dante breaks off a branch from a thornbush, it too exudes speech and blood, or "parole e sangue," a phrase which Leo Spitzer in 1942 saw as a version of the rhetorical figure of hendiadys (88n7). Dante's speaking, bleeding plants, Spitzer says, are monstrous for their being unnatural hybrids of a "vegetal body" in which "human consciousness survives unabated" (84). In Wordsworth too, "The flowery ground is conscious." Like its earlier and later counterparts, this motif of parole e sangue literalizes what

151 Reading Wordsworth after Geoffrey Hartman

Hartman, in a different context, has called "words and wounds" (Saving the Text 118-57). A speaking, bleeding tree is at once a classical and a Gothic motif; it mediates its traditions in a way that Wordsworth's poem "The Danish Boy," for example, does not. In "Nutting" there are troubled deeds done in nature, and though these feats have a certain classical authority, they are transformed in Wordsworth from the higher strains of epic and romance to the "gentle hand" of folklore and ballad. "Nutting" begins, we should note, with the half-line "It seems a day," echoing the conventional ballad formula "It is," as Hartman has shown with respect to other Wordsworthian texts (e.g., "Wordsworth and Goethe" 61), yet even the modulation of "It is" into "It seems" introduces interpretive uncertainties. Seems, Maiden? Nay, it is. Yet the seeming aspect is right for such a haunted place, with its unsureness, its hesitation; even the motif of disguise ("a Figure quaint, / Tricked out in proud disguise") fits the ghostly pattern. So far, these intertextual filaments are tantalizing but tenuous; and certainly, to add Ovid, Tasso, and even Freud as further precedents or analogues is to make more ado about "Nutting" than has been made before.39 I do not wish to have Wordsworth's allegory of intertextuality become bogged down in that most ungentle activity of "carrion-eating," as Bloom has characterized source-hunting (Map 17), though further excursions into these dark woods might be defensible on the grounds that, as Bloom himself has said, "criticism is the art of knowing the hidden roads that go from poem to poem" (Anxiety 96). Let me therefore suggest one last source before returning to my larger argument. There is one hintertext in particular that, on both historical and stylistic grounds, helps to illuminate this unbloody, mute topos of voice and blood in "Nutting." It is Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, canto 6.26-56, in which Rogero ties his hippogryph to a myrtle that suddenly speaks, identifying itself as Astolpho, and recounting how the witch Alcina transformed him into the tree (4851). Astolpho is given a magic horn by Logistilla, and when he blows it, everyone panics (cantos 15.14-15 and 22.20–2). Now, Orlando Furioso is not actually present in the final text of "Nutting," but we recall how well Wordsworth knew his Ariosto from his Cambridge days, through his European tour in 1790, where a copy of Orlando Furioso was his "companion," to his translation of Orlando Furioso in 1802 and his letter in 1805 stating that he has been translating Ariosto "at the rate nearly of 100 lines a day."40 More convincing than this circumstantial evidence, however, is a remarkable passage in the earlier, discarded version of the poem, dating from the summer of 1798. This version begins:

152 Romantic Aversions Ah! what a crash was that! with gentle hand Touch these fair hazels - My beloved Friend! Though 'tis a sight invisible to thee From such rude intercourse the woods all shrink As at the blowing of Astolpho's horn. (PW 2: 504-5)

The source is unmistakable, though commentary generally has not noted it.41 Yet why did Wordsworth remove this allusion? Was it, like the poem as a whole in relation to The Prelude, "struck out as not being wanted there"? I move that this discarded passage be entered as evidence against Wordsworth in the charge of covering his tracks. This poem "Nutting," so natural and Wordsworthian on the surface, belies a depth of artifice and imitation that amazes the reader. A deceptively simple poet, with an avowedly common style, supremely uses art to hide art. His method is egotistically sublime: start with a topos, a genre, or a literary formula, and then so radically transform it that it becomes unrecognizable except in traces, phrases, overtones. Make your style no style. "Nutting" will come of nothing.42 Yet Wordsworth's covering of his tracks - his removal of names, quotations, or specific references (though not of their resonant aftereffects) - should move the interpreter to reflect on what repressions or evasions haunt his or her own style, beyond those echoes in criticism that we call footnotes. If Wordsworth has been "found out," as Thackeray might say, what should the aftermath be? I return to Hamlet: "Use every man after his desert, and who should 'scape whipping?" The covering of one's tracks, however, need not be an act of bad faith, especially if it is done under the sign of gentility. By removing name or reference, does Wordsworth mean, as Hartman would say, "to please rather than teach, and to remind rather than instruct"? Would allusion or quotation, in this poem, somehow be ungentle? And if so, does Wordsworth's common-gentle style therefore not amount to a naturally classical Romanticism? I have suggested that the topos of the "gentle hand," and its correspondent "gentleness of heart," is a question of style, though it is clearly more than that. The "dearest Maiden" apostrophized at the end of "Nutting" takes the place of the older convention of the gentle reader, in this case a reader of nature-inscriptions, and her "Touch," admonished by the poet to be gentle, suggests an interpretive as well as physical gesture. The first rule of interpretation, like that of medicine, ought to be to do no harm: the "gentle hand" of the reader or critic should offer no "rude intercourse" with texts, or at least it should be prepared to smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.

153 Reading Wordsworth after Geoffrey Hartman

If such interpretive handling seeks to redeem the "gentle sin" of reading, however, it does not do so without a lingering sense of responsibility, as seen in Wordsworth's manuscript disclaimer, in reference to the "mutilated bower," that "hand of mine / Wrought not this ruin -I am guiltless here" (P W 2: 505). The heroic axe that would destroy the sacred wood has been metamorphosed into the gentler "nutting-crook" (7), yet the boy who wields it, as Hartman has noted, quoting from Wordsworth's prefatory essay to The Borderers (Prose 1: 77), "is not unlike 'the Orlando of Ariosto, the Cardenio of Cervantes, who lays waste the groves that would shelter him'" (Wordsworth's Poetry 74; compare Hagstrum 95).43 Wordsworth's "silent trees" (53) "g[i]ve up / Their quiet being" (47-8), and in their mute and epitaphic witness the poet reads the ruined text of his own undoing, the romance of a shade. "Heroic argument" (Prelude 3.184), whether interpretive or literary, is called into question; it becomes a theme which Wordsworth wishes "to touch / With hand however weak, but in the main / It lies far hidden from the reach of words" (3.185-7). "In the main," a la main: Wordsworth's motivated sequence of "touch ... hand ... main ... [and] reach" reconstitutes the cautionary topoi of "Nutting." Though he may turn "to some gentle place / Within the groves of Chivalry" (Prelude 1.170-1) in search of a theme, Wordsworth recasts rather than refuses the notion of reading as romance, and defers or deflects action into before- and after-meditation. But the before-and-after structure of "Nutting" does not tell the whole story, for it omits the "hereafter" coda, the posthumous warning to the maiden to touch gently in the future. This is a proleptic gesture, for although the caveat is expressed in the present moment - "Then, dearest Maiden, move along these shades / In gentleness of heart; with gentle hand / Touch - for there is a spirit in the woods" - it seeks to prevent a repetition of violence; it instructs us how to read from now on. The liber naturae, or book of nature, will become a text before which we shall stand and read, read and not disobey. Reading after is where we begin. This prolepsis marks a reversal of the earlier version - although the history of composition is quite tangled - in which the Maiden is the one who ravages the tree, is deemed "An enemy of nature," and is invited to forego her behaviour, "half cruel in its eagerness," and "sink into a dream / Of gentle thoughts."44 "She is gentil that dooth gentil deedes." Switching the maiden from the beginning of the manuscript version, where she is the aggressor, to the end of the poem, where she is merely forewarned against offering such violence, constitutes another form of deferred action, a nachtra'glich revision that displaces the central

154 Romantic Aversions

act of the poem from one agent to another, from the present to the past, and then finally to the future. Instead of announcing to the maiden, "Siste, viator," that is, "stand still," the moral tag seems to declare, "Desiste": "O cease, refrain, / And spare thy pious hands this guilty stain!" The epitaphic voice chastens and moves the reader, as if to say: Go, and do not sin again. This kind of discourse, if it is not "gentlemanly," might instead be termed "maidenly": calling for a gentleness of heart and hand, it transforms classical, medieval, and Renaissance topoi into a poetic version of Hartman's "friendship style," in which severe injunction is tempered into "dearest" conversation. Correspondingly, the argument for interpretive touch as a figure for reading or hearing the text of literary history prompts reflection on one's relation to critical tradition, not least what it means to read Wordsworth after "gentlehearted" Geoffrey Hartman. My style, I believe, amounts to more than homage, though it is also that, and depends partly for its effect on an encounter of spirit and letter in both Wordsworth and Hartman. Like Wordsworth's Poet, the critic, "gentle creature as he is" (Prelude 1.135), fears to profane with unworthy hand the "frail shrine" of words, yet is hardly content with touching and not lifting. Decorum is always so precarious. The equilibrium of "Nutting" - its suspension of action, and its digression into thought - necessarily gives the reader pause. Literary conventions, recognized only in their mutilated form, stand as broken signposts on a forest path leading from classic to Romantic. What starts out as a schoolboy excursion takes us deep into Wordsworth territory, toward that intersection of prolepsis and epitaph with which I began, where a voice crying in the wilderness falls hauntingly on gentle ears, and bids us greet the spirit in its words.

Notes

CHAPTER ONE

1 Culler's essay originally appeared in Diacritics 7 (Winter 1977): 59-69, and is reprinted in The Pursuit of Signs. Many critics have used the essay. E.g., Mary Jacobus, explicitly echoing Culler, writes: "Apostrophe, as Jonathan Culler has observed, is an embarrassment" ("Apostrophe and Lyric Voice" 171). Barbara Johnson, in A World of Difference, also cites Culler's argument: "Jonathan Culler indeed sees apostrophe as an embarrassingly explicit emblem of procedures inherent, but usually better hidden, in lyric poetry as such" (185). And Patricia Parker also turns to Culler on this point: "The vocative, or apostrophe, remarks Jonathan Culler in the course of a well-known essay on the subject ... is also frequently a subject of embarrassment" (30). 2 For additional examples of critics who have referred to Culler on apostrophe, see especially Chase, who reiterates Culler's argument approvingly (68), and Findlay, who challenges Culler on his analysis of temporality in apostrophe (336-40). 3 Arieti and Crossett point out that the earliest use of the word apostrophe is in Philodemus, first century BC; it was not until much later that the word became used in its technical rhetorical sense (101). 4 See Auerbach's authoritative discussion in "Dante's Addresses to the Reader" 270. I am indebted for this reference to Paul Fry's citation of Auerbach in The Poet's Calling 298n6. 5 This inaccurate translation has caused other commentators to fail to distinguish the two terms. See, e.g., Patterson 128n10, where, in her

156 Notes to pages 15-18

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

discussion of the Rhetorica ad Herennium, she follows Caplan in equating apostrophe and exclamation. Paul Fry writes: "[A]postrophe, the blanket form of invocatio, is defined in all the Rhetorics as a turning aside to address some absent hearer ... The poet speaks these asides to a pro tern audience and then re-turns to the audience that is understood to be listening, as it were, under contract" (11). My only amendment to this definition is that the hearer does not need to be absent, as my examples from Quintilian, Sherry, and Hoskins make clear. Compare Abraham Fraunce, in The Arcadian Rhetoric (1588): "Apostrophe turning away, is when the speach is turned to some such person to whom it was not first prepared, sometimes the turning is to men ... sometimes from men, to Gods ... sometimes to a dumb and senseless creature" (cap. 30). Other examples could be added, though some later rhetoricians simply repeat without acknowledgment these basic definitions. Thomas Blount, for example, in The Academy of Eloquence (1654), takes his definition from John Hoskins's Directions for Speech and Style (1599), as does John Smith in The Mysterie of Rhetorique unvail'd (1657). See also the anonymous Rhetoric; or the Principles of Oratory Delineated (23-7), attributed to Rollins; Jamieson 174, 162; Henry N. Day 277; Stirling. Numerous contemporary handbooks also define apostrophe. Both the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics and Holman and Harmon's A Handbook to Literature, to take only two well-known examples, give essentially correct definitions of the figure (though they both err in their choice of texts meant to illustrate apostrophe, on grounds that I shall demonstrate later). Compare Puttenham, who gives the following definition of "Ecphonesis or the Outcry": "The figure of exclamation, I call him [the outcrie] because it utters our minde by all such words as do shew any extreme passion, whether it be by way of exclamation or crying out, admiration or wondering, imprecation or cursing, obtestation or taking God and the world to witnes, or any such like as declare an impotent affection" (177). This is the point where the Princeton Encyclopedia and Holman and Harmon's Handbook err. They both offer as an example of apostrophe the first line of Wordsworth's sonnet "London, 1802": "Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour ..." See de Man's note explaining how all "poemfs] of address" (Resistance 48) could be entitled Prosopopoeia - "As they in fact often are, though preferably by the more euphonic and noble term 'ode' or 'Ode to X'"

157 Notes to pages 18-20

14

15

16

17

(Resistance 53n22). It should be added that for de Man, X here refers to an inanimate object. There exists a genre or mode of "address" as such: Wordsworth's "Address to My Infant Daughter Dora," "Address to Kilchurn Castle," and "Address from the Spirit of Cockermouth Castle" are examples. Similarly, Wordsworth's more than three dozen poems entitled "To X" (e.g., "To a Butterfly," "To Joanna," "To the Daisy," "To a Skylark," "To H.C.") all announce themselves as instances of this mode. One could add the genres of the verse epistle, conversation poem, hymn, sonnet dedicatory, and so on, to this category. Hence I differ with Fry's terminology in his discussion of "the apostrophe called To H.C.'" (157). By definition, no poem called "To X" can be an apostrophe; apostrophe is a figure, not a genre. But it is a figure that breaks genre, as it does in Wordsworth's "Boy of Winander." Compare Chase, who closely paraphrases Culler here: "Critics as various as George Shuster (in The English Ode from Milton to Keats) and Michael Riffaterre (in La Production du texte) have tended to dismiss apostrophe as being insignificant because it is simply conventional" (68). But in Wordsworth, it should be added, the ear usually implies a voice to follow, often in alien, surprising, or usurping ways, as the Boy of Winander episode demonstrates. Unless otherwise noted, all references to Wordsworth's Prelude in this and the following chapters are to the 1850 version in the Norton Prelude. How are we to account for the persistence of this error in Culler and those who follow him? Here we can only speculate. It may not be enough to say that the problem begins with Culler's incorrect definition of apostrophe, and that therefore everything that sterns from this misunderstanding is wrong, for what Culler has to say about the temporality of apostrophe is useful. Nor is Culler the first person to make the mistake, as a glance at any of a number of handbooks will show. A better way might be to begin with the effect and work back to the cause, that is, to begin with the notion of embarrassment and then attempt to figure out why apostrophe, of all figures, might be the source of such ticklishness or discomfiture. But here too we reach a dead end, for nowhere does Culler explain exactly why apostrophes are necessarily embarrassing; as I suggest, some are, and some aren't. I suspect the real motive for misreading has to do with a larger misunderstanding of Romanticism - perhaps the unexamined tendency to see it in terms of Mill's opposition between rhetoric or eloquence as "heard" public discourse, and poetry as private, subjective, "overheard" soliloquy (Mill 12). If, as Shelley said, the poet "is a nightingale, who sits in

158 Notes to page 20 darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds" (486), then it is possible that a reader might misunderstand this to imply that the poet-nightingale has no need of rhetoric, no artfulness in its unpremeditated song. What could be sillier than a diversion of address when you're just talking to yourself? But this surely by-now outdated view of Romantic lyricism neglects what Shelley goes on to say in the same sentence: the poet may be a nightingale, but "his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why" (486). As Shelley well knew, the word "entranced," from Longinus on, has clear associations with rhetoric and the power of persuasion: this bird is convincing. Or to turn the tables, in anticipation of my reading of Wordsworth's "There Was a Boy," the poet is an owl, whose auditors are moved and then "removed," as Peacham would say, through an aversion of voice. Much work, obviously, still needs to be done to dispel lingering fallacies about Romantic or lyric voice; we need to revise our understanding of Romanticism from the perspective of the history of rhetoric. Quite apart from social history or politics, an unwritten history of Romanticism lies in the history of its words. 18 As a movement of language, apostrophe is analogous to the Saussurean notion of "difference" - that is, the play or shuttling of terms within a closed language system. Every signifier evokes or recalls every other signifier in the system, so that the linguistic sign is constituted as an effect or function of this periphrasis. For Derrida, language attempts to cover up this effect of difference through a vocabulary of presence (Writing 279-80); linguistic identity thus is seen not as a function of movement, a turning or troping of signs, but as a stable self-presence. The concept may be applied to our case. If the question of apostrophe is not one of voice as such, but of the movement or translation of voice from one addressee to another, then it is possible to see why apostrophe, as the very figure of difference - intersubjective, intertextual, intervocative - might be mistaken for address, the shuttling mistaken for presence. Apostrophe, however, is a carrier of voice, not voice itself. 19 In 1800 Wordsworth added the following note to "Tintern Abbey" in Lyrical Ballads: "I have not ventured to call this Poem an Ode; but it was written with a hope that in the transitions, and the impassioned music of the versification, would be found the principal requisites of that species of composition" (Brett and Jones 296). I am suggesting rhetorical grounds for considering this poem as an ode. Fry interprets Wordsworth's statement in a contrary, but persuasive, way: "Tintern Abbey,' Wordsworth's greatest lyric," he writes, "is nothing like an ode" (179). Fry's Shakespearean echo ("My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun") confirms the logic of what he goes on to say: "It is most

159 Notes to pages 20–1 probable that Wordsworth thought Tintern Abbey' too good to be called an ode" (179). However, compare Lee Johnson, who argues that "Tintern Abbey" is "a blank verse Pindaric ode designed as a double golden section" (19). What I still find intriguing is the hesitation of Wordsworth's "venturing" with respect to genre: to call or not to call the poem an ode is a question that implies high stakes, though exactly what - something too good? not good enough? - is screened by the rhetorical qualifications of the note. 20 See Geoffrey Hartman's comments on what he sees as the eloquent "break" after "There was a Boy" in Fate 183, 289, 341n1o. Regarding the concept of voice elsewhere in Wordsworth, see especially Hartman's essays "Words, Wish, Worth" and "Timely Utterance" for the connection of voice and divine fiat (Unremarkable 90–119 and 152–62); "Blessing the Torrent" for the relation of voice to the domestication of the sublime (Unremarkable 75-89); and "Use and Abuse" for voice in a ghostly or intermediary mode (Unremarkable 129-51). 21 The bibliography of modern commentary on the Boy of Winander is long and varied. Here are some selected sources. For the definitive reading of the episode in relation to the theme of self-consciousness, see Hartman, Wordsworth's Poetry 19–22; see also his discussions in Criticism in the Wilderness 222-5, and Fate 182-3, 286-92. Other valuable recent studies include Glen 264-71, and Dickstein 379-82 (for parallels with Coleridge's "The Nightingale"); Rehder 81–9, Gomme 509-12, and McConnell 166 (on syntax); Brisman, Milton's Poetry 262-5 and Romantic Origins 337–61, 373 (on "voice"); Gillham 82-3, Shullenberger 11517, Phinney 67-70, and Jacobus, "Art of Managing Books" 215-18 (on language); Regueiro 54-7, 88, 107 (on incompleteness of self); Spector 86-8, 103-4 (on mirror imagery); Frosch 185-6, 192, Morton 23, 29–32, Onorato 193-7, and Wolfson, "Illusion of Mastery" 923-5 (for psychoanalytic approach); T. Rajan 198-200 (on intertextualization); Galperin 624-5, Karl Johnson 197-204, Morkan 253, Johnston, Wordsworth 141-3 (on education); Ferguson 77, 167-70, 242-9 (on episode as "reading"); Warminski 991-6, Arac 63-4, and Chase (on interpretation). See also Ragussis 30; Ferry 87-9; Bernhardt-Kabisch 490; Barth 71-2; Bateson 21, 25, 28-30; Lukits; Shakir 163; Clarke 6–8; Danby 111-14; Murray 107-9; Huxley 57-8, 155-6; Ellis 114-20; Lindenberger 41-3; John Jones 91-3; Watson 147-9. 22 Haney cites this passage to trace the development of Nature in book 1 of The Prelude "from a ministering force ... to a witnessing agent" (59) and ultimately to a narrator who recounts "what the poet cannot" (60). The turning to Nature in "There Was a Boy" could stand as a textbook example of Quintilian's fourth class of metaphor, in which animate things are substituted for inanimate things (8.6.9-11). But this metaphorical

160 Notes to pages 22-4

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substitution, one immediately recognizes, is also a prosopopoeia. Quintilian elaborates: "[A]bove all, effects of extraordinary sublimity are produced when the theme is exalted by a bold and almost hazardous metaphor and inanimate objects are given life and action" (8.6.11). His example demonstrates how metaphor, apostrophe, and prosopopoeia at times (especially in sublime writing occasioned by passion) may be interimplicated. This text is more than pseudo-Miltonic pastiche, for it shows the sixteen-year-old Wordsworth experimenting with several poetic conventions at once: the tradition of pastoral elegy, the translation of Wales into the Lake District, and the invocation of Druid lore. Even the simple trimeter of "Nor in Winander's stream" seems unarguably derived from the style of "Lycidas." There is a strong creative power in the ambiguity of the antecedent of "they speak." Who speaks? The "they" obviously can be read as referring to "The Poets" three lines earlier, but following so closely upon the catalogue of hills and streams and rocks, the simple clause "they speak" can also be read as personifying these "senseless" objects, thus validating Wordsworth's claim that the poetic invocation is not "idly" done. A related shift of pronouns is also found in the Boy of Winander fragment in MS. JJ: the turn from the third-person "he" and "his," referring to the Boy, to the speaking "I" and "my" at line 12 and thereafter complicates the issue of original authorial intent, since by the time the poem appears in Lyrical Ballads (1800) the pronouns have been changed back to third person. It is not, as is often claimed, simply a question of Wordsworth's switching from first- to third-person discourse; the text originally (i.e., in MS. JJ) is divided over the identity of the Boy. See Norton Prelude 492. See my Monumental Writing: Aspects of Rhetoric in Wordsworth's Poetry for the intersection of voice and the master trope of epitaph in Wordsworth. See, e.g., Brisman, Romantic Origins 373: "The boy of Winander episode commences with a shaky image of the power of communion"; Barth: "deep communion between the boy and the natural world" (71); T. Rajan: "communion with nature" (198); Shakir: "intimate and unconscious communion" (163); Gillham: profound "communion" (82); Ferry: "perfect and equal exchange" between the boy and nature (89). A minority view, held by Hartman (Wordsworth's Poetry 22), McConnell (166), and Warminski (992-6), emphasizes instead confrontation and asymmetry in the episode. I have not forgotten that Wordsworth originally describes the vocal interchange as "a wild scene / Of mirth and jocund din" (Norton Prelude 492). But this "play" has its serious side, in the way that the skating episode in The Prelude, book 1 has its own "alien sound / Of melancholy"

161 Notes to pages 26–9 (1.443-4) that cuts across the "rapture" (1.430) of the child. One might pursue further parallels between the Boy of Winander episode and the skating scene in terms of the interplay of voice and echo. 29 Any approach to a deconstruction of the Boy of Winander's "speech act" must be chastened by Derrida's reminder that "it is not enough to recall that one always writes for someone; and the oppositions senderreceiver, code-message, etc., remain extremely coarse instruments. We would search the 'public' in vain for the first reader: i. e., the first author of a work" (Writing 227). What it means to be the "first" sender or "first" receiver is precisely what the Boy of Winander episode puts in question. For another juxtaposition of Frost and Wordsworth, but approached from the opposite end historically, see Brower 130-5. Brower notes "the high certainty of the Miltonic apostrophe to the scene, 'ye knew him well, ye cliffs'-an address that makes the Boy seem much less alone than Frost's observer" (132). I am indebted to Susan Wolfson for this reference. CHAPTER TWO

1 Poems on Various Subjects, by S.T. Coleridge, Late of Jesus College, Cambridge. London: Printed for G.G. and J. Robinsons, and J. Cottle, Bookseller, Bristol. 1796. Coleridge notes in his preface that "The Effusions signed C.L. [numbers 7, 11, 12, and 13] were written by Mr. Charles Lamb, of the India House ... For the rough sketch of Effusion xvi, I am indebted to Mr. Favell. And the first half of Effusion xv was written by the Author of 'Joan of Arc,' an Epic Poem" (CPW 2: 1137). As J.R. de J. Jackson's entries in Annals of English Verse show, "Poems on Various Subjects" was a popular title used by numerous authors during the Romantic period, including Henry James Pye, John Thelwall (who also wrote "effusions"), Thomas Warton, and others. 2 Coleridge's sonnet "To the Autumnal Moon," for example, was composed in 1788 but not published until 1796 (CPW 1: 5); see my discussion in chapter 4. The best existing discussion of the effusion is by Magnuson. See also Abrams, Correspondent Breeze 160–5 for some brief comments. The phrase "emotion recollected in tranquillity" is from Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads (Prose 1: 149). 3 In the table of contents the effusions are numbered using Arabic numerals, while the individual poems are numbered using Roman numerals. The additional titles given to individual poems often differ from the listing in the table of contents. For more bibliographic details, see CPW 2: 1135-8. 4 See also Carl H. Ketcham's comment on Wordsworth's "Effusion, in the Pleasure-ground on the Banks of the Bran, near Dunkeld": "[T]he poem is called an 'effusion,' which implies (if it is not just a literary convention)

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an immediate, spontaneous overflow of composition" (526). Jack Stillinger also briefly considers the implication of the term "effusion," seeing it as conveying "an air of relative frivolousness" (37). Albert S. Gerard discusses Coleridge's term "effusion" in relation to "romantic egotism" (24), which I consider below. See Paul M. Zall. David Erdman studies Coleridge's sonnets and effusions, but dismisses the latter term: "Coleridge had frequently poured out his soul in Odes and Effusions (the latter only tardily called Sonnets, a term perhaps more critically deprecatory than we realize) ... [In 1797] he now called them 'Sonnets' instead of 'Effusions.' But I suspect that to his ear the new term was more, not less, belittling; he was turning less against effusions of pathos than against 'puny pathos'" (570). For a concise discussion of Coleridge's early efforts in the sonnet, following Charlotte Smith and Bowles, see Curran 29-39. These reviews are excerpted in J.R. de J. Jackson, ed., Coleridge: The Critical Heritage 32-8. The two effusions were "The Rose" and "Kisses." See CPW 1: 45-6. Langhorne's edition of The Poetical Works of Mr William Collins. With Memoirs of the Author; and Observations on his Genius and Writings was published in 1765, and again in 1771, 1776, and 1781. Volume 1 contains forty letters; volume 2 has twenty-two, plus an index. The second edition of 1766 contains sixty-five letters in total. The second paragraph of the letter is worth quoting as a whole for the way it turns stylistic questions into other topics of conversation not unrelated to the themes of the first paragraph: Come then, my friend, let us unbend a little, and talk in our old strain - What have you been doing this season? are your espaliers pruned? are your tulips set? are your annuals classed? or have you neglected the occupation of Adam for that of Nimrod? If you have, what diversion has the field afforded you? have you signalized yourself once more at the bridge of H ? or does wisdom come with age, according to the old Saxon song; and has the goddess of fear preserved you for Mrs. and me? I assure you I have entertained a very poor opinion of the diversion of hunting in England, since I read the history of Poland. Had you and Tom , once been at a public hunt in that kingdom, the pityful foxes and hares of your own country would be below your notice. It has always been said that hunting is the image of war. In Poland it is compleatly so. The Polish kings, like Eastern monarchs, hunt with an army. A circular space is marked out in a forest which they encompass with nets, except one opening that answers to the plain. At a considerable distance a line of dogs, held in leashes, form a crescent; behind which the king, the huntsmen, and the spectators are drawn up in another

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line. The signal being given, the dogs are let loose into the forest, and drive before them whatever they find. In a short time come out stags, elks, wild bulls, lynxes, boars and bears; and every dog attackes the beast that is its proper prey. This mixed multitude of men, horses, and wild beasts, the noise of horns and the variety of combats is something extremely magnificent. But perhaps I have said too much. This, I know, will furnish you with a topic of conversation for a week, and should it end in a journey to Warsaw, I must never more see the face of Mrs. . (1: 163-6) Compare Lamb's advice to Coleridge in a letter written 8 November 1796: "Cultivate simplicity, Coleridge, or rather, I should say, banish elaborateness; for simplicity springs spontaneous from the heart, and carries into daylight its own modest buds and genuine, sweet, and clear flowers of expression" (Letters of Charles and Many Anne Lamb 1: 60-1). See, e.g., The Aeneid, trans. Mandelbaum, 5.818, 6.1, 7.600, 11.623, and 11.827. The relevant part of the passage that Coleridge copied reads: latè tam noscor, et audax Fama praeit Meritum, laxisque effertur habenis. Affectus animi varios, Bellumque sequacis Perlegis Invidiae: curasque revolvis inanes, Quas humilis tenero Stylus olim effudit in aevo. See Petrarch 396, and Coleridge, Notebooks, vol. 3, item 4178. Coleridge also uses the phrase "sermoni propriora" in Biographia Literaria 1: 26. Engell and Bate translate the phrase, which comes from Horace's Sermones (or Satires) 1.4.42, as "more suitable to prose / conversation," but they correctly note that Horace's phrase is actually "sermoni propiora," or "nearer to" conversation (BL 1: 26n2). See Horace, Satires 75. In a letter to William Sotheby, Coleridge himself refers to his tongue-in-cheek translation of the correct Horatian phrase: "'Sermoni propiora' which I once translated - 'Properer for a Sermon'" (CL 2: 864). Engell and Bate note that Coleridge is reported to have said that Lamb translated Horace's phrase in the same way (Table Talk 25 July 1832), but the reference in the letter to Sotheby (10 September 1802) indicates that Coleridge's translation may be of an earlier date. C.E. Bennett writes that "Horace's first published work was Book 1 of the Satires ... Though conventionally called 'Satires,' and alluded to by Horace himself as satirae, these were entitled by him Sermones, as being talks, so to speak, couched in the familiar language of everyday life" (Horace, Odes and Epodes ix-x). The overdetermined characterization of poetry as "talks, so to speak, couched in the familiar language of everyday life" is particularly apt for Coleridge's effusions. Richard Harter

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Fogle once characterized Coleridge's conversation poems as "comparable to the more formal eighteenth-century poem of meditation ... on the one hand, but modified on the other by the graceful informality of Horace's Epistles and Satires" (106). It is possible to hear an echo of Horace not only in the Latin tag but also in the phrase "middle thing," which, while describing a literary style, also recalls Horace's discussion of epic form - the convention of plunging into middle things (in medias res). Coleridge returns to the Horatian motto in his discussion of his early poetry in BL 1: 26. Horace cautioned that "the word once uncaged never comes home." Niall Rudd notes that Horace again uses the metaphor of words being irrevocably uttered in Epistles 1.18.71 and 1.20.6; in each case, he suggests, Horace's vehicle appears to be a bird being released. See Horace, Epistles 213-14. Discussing Horace's Epistles, Edward P. Morris writes: "The custom of dedicating a poem to an individual by a direct address, as Horace inscribes his first satire to Maecenas, is an approach to the epistolary form; no distinct line can be seen between the manner in which Lucretius addresses Memmius at intervals in the de Rerum Natura and the occasional address to the Pisones in the Ars Poetica" (Horace, Satires 9). The Miltonic context is not irrelevant, as evidenced by Coleridge's letter to his brother George in 1798, in which he says that he wishes, "in poetry, to elevate the imagination and set the affections in right tune by the beauty of the inanimate impregnated as with a living soul by the presence of life" (CL 1: 397). The phrase "set the affections in right tune" comes verbatim from a passage in Milton's Reason of Church Government, where Milton discusses his conception of the function of poetry and rhetoric (669). Considering the question of Coleridge's "voices" in a chronological perspective, Max F. Schulz has argued that "if the 179o's is the decade when Coleridge is most active in claiming through tags that his poems are spontaneous effusions, the second half of the 182o's is the period when he is most intent on trying to write poems which convince us of their extemporaneity by letting us watch them come into being" (158). See Anderson et al., especially their conclusion to The Familiar Letter in the Eighteenth Century (269-82), in which, curiously, no mention is made of Langhorne's Effusions. In this volume, Cecil Price, in his essay "The Art of Pleasing': The Letters of Chesterfield," cites John Tavernier's The Newest and Most Compleat Polite Familiar Letter Writer, 4th ed. (Berwick, 1768): "Letter writing is but a sort of literary conversation, and that you are to write to the person absent, in the manner you would speak to him, if present" (288n2).

165 Notes to pages 36-49 19 In "Distant Correspondents" Lamb humorously outlines his idea of the conventions of letter-writing: "Epistolary matter usually compriseth three topics: news, sentiment, and puns" (Selected Prose 137). H.J. Jackson, in her edition of Coleridge's Selected Letters, suggests a different trinity of epistolary conventions: spontaneity, informality, and intimacy (viii-ix). What Jackson says of Coleridge's letters applies almost equally to his early effusions. 20 Horace published the first book of Sermones in 35 BC, and his Epistulae (or the first book of what we call his Epistles) in 20 BC. See Horace, Complete Works 12, 258. 21 It is not a case of Coleridge's using a different version; Bowles did not at any point revise the lines. The seventh edition of Bowles's Sonnets and Other Poems, for example, which was printed in 1800 (after Coleridge's Poems on Various Subjects had appeared), still contains these exact lines in the Monody. 22 Magnuson (5) refers only to Coleridge's version of Bowles, and notes a thematic connection between Bowles's lyre and Coleridge's aeolian harp. Stillinger likewise mentions the Bowles epigraph, without noting Coleridge's rewriting of the original (36). 23 "Crop your young" is an early version of the fifth line of "Lycidas," which Balachandra Rajan has described as a crucial example of how Milton "yielded the poem to the power of its suddenness" (268). 24 Consider, e.g., the phrases "sweep the string" (17), "Oaten Flute" (33), "vocal reeds" (86), "my Oat" (88), "scrannel Pipes" (124), and "the tender stops of various Quills" (188). 25 One exception is K.M. Wheeler, who considers the musical aspects of the poem (73-8) and notes some related discussions (182n22). 26 See Richard Harter Fogle 109, and Harold Bloom, Visionary Company 202. Richard E. Matlak says that the poem "verges on humiliation of the poet as seer" (106). 27 See Coleridge's letter to John Thelwall in December 1796 (CL 1: 295), in which he calls "The Eolian Harp" "my favorite of my poems." 28 I take the phrase "dream of communication" from Geoffrey Hartman's essay on LA. Richards (Fate 20-40). 29 Logan's concordance notes only one other instance of "boldlier," in Coleridge's "Destiny of Nations": "Others boldlier think ..." (39). 30 I have come across approximately one hundred late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century works entitled "effusions." See, e.g., [Anon.], The Effusions of Love (London: Lister, [1783?]); [English lady of rank], Effusions of the heart, or, Miscellaneous Poems (Dublin: M. Graisberry, [1785?]); [Anon.], Flights of Fancy, or Poetical Effusions (London: J. Long, 1791); William Gilbert, The hurricane ...To which is subjoined, A solitary effusion

166 Notes to pages 51-6 in a summer's evening (Bristol: R. Edwards, 1796); Mary R. Stockdale, The Effusions of the Heart: Poems (London: J. Stockdale, 1798); [Anon.], Effusions of Fancy (London: Richardson, 1798); John Thelwall, Poems chiefly written in retirement ... Effusions of relative and social feeling (Hereford: W.H. Parker, 1801); Isabella Lickbarrow, Poetical Effusions (Kendal: M. Branthwaite, 1814); Margaret Burton, Poetical Effusions (London: Butterworth, 1816); Almira Selden, Effusions of the Heart, contained in a number of original poetical pieces, on various subjects (Bennington, Vermont: Printed by Darius Clark, 1820); and Ethelind M. Sawtell, The Mourner's Tribute, or, Effusions of Melancholy Hours (Montreal: Armour and Ramsey, 1840). See J.R. de J. Jackson, Annals of English Verse 17701835 and Romantic Poetry by Women: A Bibliography, 1770-1835 for relevant entries. See also the following entries in The British Library General Catalogue of Printed Books to 1975, vol. 92 (London: K.G. Saur, 1981): Poetical Effusions. By a Young Lady, author of "The Willow Branch" (Bath, 1824); Ephemeral Effusions. By D.R.M. [i.e., Dorothy Rose Miles?] (1861); [S.W.H. Ireland], Effusions of Love from Chatelar to Mary, Queen of Scotland (London: C. Chappie, 1805); [Bernard Barton], Metrical Effusions, or verses on various occasions (Woodbridge, 1812); Loyal Effusions. A selection of odes, songs ... by an old naval officer; as incitements to perseverance in heroism (London, 1819); and Poetical Effusions from Fairy Camp. [By Major Snell.] (Tewkesbury, 1802). Gender, as I have suggested in the case of "The Kiss" and "The Eolian Harp," is not irrelevant to the question of how to read Coleridge's effusions, though we might well expect that a discursive field so interpenetrated by different traditions would be open to appropriation by various personae and voices. CHAPTER

THREE

1 Bertrand H. Bronson, offering a representative reading of this kind of rhetoric, argues that eighteenth-century poets, "need[ing] to humanize their abstractions and generalizations" (173), found that prosopopoeia offset their tendency toward abstract thought. 2 This poem was written perhaps in 1802 and intended for the volume of 1807, but not published until 1815; see Wordsworth's Poems of 1807 183. The later version (PW 3: 35-6) differs at significant points from the MS. text of 1807 that I quote here. 3 One critic who has commented on this excerpt from The Prelude is Margery Sabin, in her chapter on "'Love' in The Prelude." I discuss Sabin again later. 4 E.g., in de Selincourt's parallel edition, the 1805 version has a new paragraph at the line "Thus daily were my sympathies enlarged" (2.181), but there is no paragraph break at the corresponding place in

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the 1850 version. The Norton Prelude does not have paragraph breaks in either version. W.J.B. Owen's edition of The Fourteen-Book "Prelude" has a new paragraph at the line "Thus were my sympathies enlarged" (2.175). Whether there is a formal break in the text, however, the logical and rhetorical structure of the entire passage clearly indicates one. Sir Walter Scott, in chapter i of The Bride of Lammermoor, has a lengthy discussion of sign-boards that provides an interesting context for this "slight / And mockery of the rustic painter's hand": It was not yet permitted to write upon the plastered door-way of an alehouse, or the suspended sign of an inn, "The Old Magpie/' or "The Saracen's Head," substituting that cold description for the lively effigies of the plumed chatterer, or the turban'd frown of the terrific soldan. That early and more simple age considered alike the necessities of all ranks, and depicted the symbols of good cheer so as to be obvious to all capacities; well judging, that a man, who could not read a syllable, might nevertheless love a pot of good ale as well as his better-educated neighbours, or even as the parson himself. Acting upon this liberal principle, publicans as yet hung forth the painted emblems of their calling, and sign-painters, if they seldom feasted, did not at least absolutely starve. (14-15) Nevertheless, the distinction between possessive forms for animate as opposed to inanimate objects still holds in some contemporary handbooks. For example, The Oxford Guide to Writing: A Rhetoric and Handbook for College Students states (692-3): In formal usage the -s or -s' possessive is restricted to nouns signifying humans beings or animals, especially those associated with people. Other living things, inanimate objects, and abstractions show possession by an of-phrase: the door of the closet NOT X the closet's door the concept of honor NOT X honor's concept. In the context of possessiveness, especially with the "of" as a genitive of attribution (the Boy of Winander), it is worth comparing Hartman's comments in Criticism in the Wilderness: "Our very use of the name 'Boy of Winander' suggests a myth; Winander is not simply a background to the child's destiny but so closely connected to it that the 'of assumes genealogical importance. The Boy belongs to, even is born of, the lake" (225). Sabin makes the point that "a primary aim of Wordsworth's epic endeavor is to revive the seriousness of 'love' in poetry" by transferring to nature the "depth and constancy of passion reserved by earlier poets for love of women or friends or God" (33, 34). See also Jean Hagstrum's discussion of the centrality of love, and especially "physically based love" (73), in Wordsworth (Romantic Body 72-108).

168 Notes to pages 68-74 9 Strictly speaking, the first "if" construction is completed, in a typically oblique Wordsworthian manner, by the "yet" clause in the third line following, and then is supplemented by six more "if" clauses. 10 It is not underestimated by G. Kim Blank, whose recent discussion of this aspect of Wordsworth's psychology and its relation to the making of his poetry is excellent (Wordsworth and Feeling 50–5). 11 This raises the question of whether echo and allusion themselves can be understood as a form of prosopopoeia: does literary echo not give voice to an otherwise absent, dead, or silent figure? The "company of flesh and blood" thus can be taken to include Wordsworth's "One great society alone on earth: / The noble Living and the noble Dead" (Prelude 11.393-4). CHAPTER FOUR

1 See CPW 1: 1, 7, 16, 19, 29, 33, 34. 2 Perhaps more than anyone else, M.H. Abrams has taught us about the function of expressiveness in the Romantic period. See, in particular, the first chapter of The Mirror and the Lamp for the four orientations of critical theory. My own approach is based less on orientation and more on genre, as I shall show. Frances Austin, in an interesting book, comments on Coleridge's exclamations (144-5). 3 In his Shakespearean Criticism, Coleridge repeatedly makes the connection between figurative language and passion: "All things that had been highly admired by mankind at any time, or which have gone into excess, must have been originally applicable to some part or other of our nature. They had become ridiculous only in the excess; but great geniuses having used them with the truth of nature and the force of passion, have extorted from all mankind praise, or, rather, won it by their instant sympathy. Men, afterwards, most desirous of the end, and mistaking the desire of the end for a capacity of the means, have mechanically, and devoid of that spirit of life, employed the terms ... Such was the nature of metaphors, apostrophes, and what were called conceits ... How ridiculous would it seem in a state of comparative insensibility to employ a figure used only by a person under the highest emotion, such as the impersonation of an abstract being, and an apostrophe to it as [if] it were not only in existence, but actually present" (2: 102-3). 4 Engell and Bate note that Coleridge here is echoing his preface to the second edition of his Poems (1797), and that his claim for pruning the double epithets in the first edition is overstated (BL 1: 7n1). 5 See Aristotle (47-50, 78-87) for his discussion of epideictic. The most comprehensive treatment of the history of epideictic is T.C. Burgess.

169 Notes to pages 74-5

6

7

8

9

10

For various studies of epideictic as praise, invention, display, and "oratory for the sake of oratory" (Kennedy 29), see Quintilian (where epideictic is described as "solely for the delectation of audiences, which indeed is shown to be its peculiar function by its name, which implies display" [3.7.1]); E.R. Curtius, esp. 154-66; George Kennedy 152-203; O.B. Hardison, Jr. 29-32; and Lawrence W. Rosenfield. For two studies of epideictic that complement my reading of Coleridge, see David Ginsberg's essay on Wordsworth's 1807 Poems, in Two Volumes; and Brian Vickers, "Epideictic and Epic." Gerald L. Bruns, who defines invention as "the art of finding things to say, and saying them, for whatever purpose" (1), has some valuable comments about the figure and the topos of invention that pertain to Romanticism: "[B]y Wordsworth's time," Bruns writes, "invention is clearly no longer an art of finding but a power of original conception" (102). Very little commentary on this text exists, although a few critics refer in passing to it. E.g., Lafcadio Hearn, in his chapter "Poems on Night: The Moon and the Stars," briefly discusses the poem's diction (2: 333-4); Francis Scarfe surveys Coleridge's poetic "nightscapes" to show their imagistic and thematic consistency, and argues that "To the Autumnal Moon" establishes "a relationship between the Moon and the emotions, to which Coleridge was to remain faithful for the rest of his life" (27). The rhyme scheme begins ab ab c d c d, which evokes the Shakespearean pattern, but then the poem follows the Italian example by introducing a volta and a sestet whose rhyme scheme is e a e a e a. The presence of only five rhymes associates the sonnet with the Italian model, as opposed to the seven rhymes in the Shakespearean form, although the repetition of the a rhyme in lines 10, 12, and 14 is unusual, though effective, especially when combined with the assonance of the d rhymes ("high," "sky"). See Quintilian: "This form of oratory [panegyric or epideictic] is directed in the main to the praise of gods and men, but may occasionally be applied to the praise of animals or even of inanimate objects" (3.7.6). See R.D. Havens, Influence of Milton 478-528 and 685-97 for a comprehensive survey of eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century sonnets; and see Chester F. Chapin for the eighteenth-century theory and practice of personifying abstractions such as "Hope." In his preface to the 1796 Poems on Various Subjects Coleridge makes the comparison to Bowles explicit: "I might indeed have called the majority of [these poems] Sonnets - but they do not possess that oneness of thought which I deem indispensible (sic) in a Sonnet - and (not a very honorable motive perhaps) I was fearful that the title 'Sonnet' might

170 Notes to pages 75-7

11

12

13 14

15

have reminded my reader of the Poems of the Rev. W.L. Bowles - a comparison with whom would have sunk me below that mediocrity, on the surface of which I am at present enabled to float" (CPW 2: 1137). I discuss this relation in chapter 2 above. See Paul M. Zall. Coleridge's Introduction to this collection is found in CPW 2: 1139-40. In addition to Coleridge's self-declared idolatry for Bowles, there is another, less recognized precursor in the sonnet: Charlotte Smith, two of whose Elegiac Sonnets (first published in 1784) Coleridge included in his "Sheet of Sonnets" in 1796. Coleridge writes in the Introduction to this collection that "Charlotte Smith and Bowles are they who first made the Sonnet popular among the present English: I am justified therefore by analogy in deducing its laws from their compositions" (CPW 2: 1139). One of Smith's sonnets in Coleridge's collection is "I love the [sic] mournful sober-suited Night" (CPW 2: 1141), which bears certain verbal resemblances to Coleridge's "various-vested Night." Stuart Curran prints the sonnet as "I love thee, mournful, sober-suited Night!"; see his edition of Charlotte Smith (39) and his discussion of Smith and Bowles in Poetic Form 30-6. See also Smith's sonnet "To the Moon," which likewise, in theme and imagery, resembles Coleridge's poem (Smith 15). Whether or not Coleridge's later exclusive emphasis on Bowles in the Biographia Literaria "is so exaggerated ... that it smacks of disingenuousness" hiding an "anti-Wordsworthian agenda" (Modiano 246, 247), it does tend to obscure other possible sources and influences, including Smith but also even earlier practitioners of the sonnet such as Thomas Warton, whose sonnet "On Bathing" ("When late the trees were stript by winter pale" [Warton 2: 147-9]) was also included by Coleridge in 1796 (CPW 2: 1141). Warton's sonnet "To the River Lodon" (2: 160-1) has long been acknowledged as an influence on Bowles's "To the River Itchin" and Coleridge's "To the River Otter." Kelvin Everest has a good discussion of Coleridge's preface on the sonnet, especially its indebtedness to William Preston's "Essay, Introductory to Sonnets and other Love Poems," published in 1793 (188-96). See also Basil Willey's earlier authoritative study of the "divinization of Nature" in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. See especially Abrams's discussion of the pre-Romantic "central structural trope" ("Structure and Style" 217) of moralizing nature. Abrams refers to Wasserman's article "Nature Moralized." I base this statement on the fact that the Ernest Hartley Coleridge edition indicates that "To the Autumnal Moon" was composed in 1788 (CPW i: 5), while Bowles's sonnets first appeared in 1789. See Bowles, Fourteen Sonnets (1789), and Abrams, "Wordsworth and Coleridge on Diction and Figures" (192-201) for a discussion of Bowles's influence.

171 Notes to pages 77-9 On "the art of analogy" as habit, if not figure, see Reeve Parker, especially the last chapter, on "To William Wordsworth," in which he speaks extensively of Coleridge's "analogical" mind. See also Susan J. Wolf son's excellent essay, "'Comparing Power': Coleridge and Simile," which I discuss later. Coleridge's distinction between symbol and allegory (Lay Sermons 30, 70–3), much discussed in recent criticism (see, e.g., de Man, Blindness 187-208 and McFarland, "Involute and Symbol"), is relevant but lies to one side of my focus in this chapter. I refer the reader to Steven Knapp's analysis of the relations between allegory (figural), analogy (literal), and symbol (the medium between allegory and analogy) in Coleridge's theory (see Knapp 7-23 and 149n8 for an overview of the major commentaries on this issue). Everest notes the influence of Bowles, but adds that "little work has been done on the tradition in which Bowles was writing, a tradition that appears to stem from the revival of the Miltonic sonnet initiated by Thomas Edwards, the friend of Richardson" (188). Norman Fruman shows the extent of Bowles's effect on Coleridge (Damaged 222-35), though the earliest evidence of influence comes after the text I am considering, with the publication of Bowles's Fourteen Sonnets in 1789. Fruman makes the argument that the bloated style "came naturally to Coleridge when he was working under pressure" (Damaged 296), and that Wordsworth's influence was a turning point. Compare Curran's discussion of the effect of Charlotte Smith and Bowles on Coleridge (30–6); like other critics, Curran accepts the standard history of influence, yet he senses something "incongruous" (37) or disproportionate about the effect of Bowles's achievement - a sense which I share and am inclined to explain by placing Coleridge's "Autumnal Moon" before Bowles. J.C.C. Mays, in his forthcoming edition of Coleridge's poetry, may revise our present dating; my argument in this chapter, however, does not depend on a question of direct influence, one way or the other. 16 Interestingly, Engell and Bate choose a description of the moon from Wordsworth's Excursion (4.1058-72) to illustrate Coleridge's "accidents of light or shade" (BL 2: 5n4). 17 For a counter-argument to the view of epideictic as self-display, see Lawrence W. Rosenfield, who seeks to rescue epideictic from its subservient position in rhetoric. He writes: "The term 'epideictic' comes from epideixis ('to shine or show forth'). Hence our translation of the word as 'display' (in the sense of show off) is only literally correct. More precisely the word suggests an exhibiting or making apparent (in the sense of showing or highlighting) what might otherwise remain unnoticed or invisible" (135) - a description peculiarly apt for Coleridge's moon and its uncanny apocalypse of "what might otherwise remain unnoticed or invisible."

172 Notes to pages 80-6 18 For another Wordsworth-Coleridge collaboration on moon imagery, see Wordsworth's "Beauty and Moonlight" (PW 1: 263-4) and Coleridge's adaptation "Lewti" (CPW 1: 253). I cannot elaborate the differences here, but it is worthwhile tracing how Coleridge reworks Wordsworth's classical imagery, turning the poem in the direction of Gothic. 19 See CPW 1: 209-10 and BL 1: 26-9 for Coleridge's discussion of his literary prank, including his admission that "phrases" in this mock sonnet "were borrowed entirely from my own poems" (BL 1: 27). The self-parody is amusing, yet indicative of Coleridge's self-consciousness of rhetoric and genre. Erdman does not note any connection between this mock sonnet and "To the Autumnal Moon." 20 On the question of how secrecy itself is related to the imagery of appearance and disappearance, Fruman offers some psychological speculation: Coleridge's poetry paradoxically comes either from "a wish to conceal something, or from unconscious pressure to express something forbidden" ("Creative Process" 161). Unlike Fruman's, my main interest here is not in Coleridge's personality and the very complicated questions of integrity, though I do later theorize a connection between Coleridgean rhetoric and Freudian psychology. 21 See Hartman, "Evening Star and Evening Land." Coleridge himself writes a sonnet entitled "To the Evening Star" (CPW 1: 16-17). 22 "Songs of the Pixies" 74 (CPW 1: 43). In this poem Coleridge calls Night the "Mother of wildly-working dreams!" (75), echoing the "Mother of wildly-working visions" in "Autumnal Moon." See also BL 1: 27n for the phrase "Eve saddens into night" in the first of his parodic "Sonnets Attempted in the Manner of Contemporary Writers"; in CPW 1: 209-10, the phrase is "Eve darkens into night." 23 See, e.g., the well-known dialogue between Humphry House (100–13) and Robert Penn Warren (29-41) on contrasting interpretations of moon imagery in "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." Arden Reed in Romantic Weather sees the moon in Coleridge's work as an image of "light without heat" (112), symbolic of epistemological obscurity (120), while Angus Fletcher describes the moon in Coleridge as an "angelic messenger" (153-4). 24 A revised version of Wolf son's essay appears in her study Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism, chapter 3. 25 The notion of complementarity raises the question of which part of the analogy takes priority, ontologically and interpretively. As written, the poem moves from nature to moralization, but what would be the implications if we were to switch octave and sestet, that is, to begin with an emotion such as Hope and then seek its natural correlative? Apologies to Coleridge for tampering with his text, but here is the sonnet in a Gestalt flip:

173 Notes to pages 86-92 Hail, mistress Hope! so changeful and so fair! Now dimly peering on the wistful sight; Now hid behind the dragon-wing'd Despair: But soon emerging in thy radiant might Thou o'er the sorrow-clouded breast of Care Dost sail, a meteor kindling in thy flight.

26

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30 31

Ah, such is she, mild splendour of the Night! Mother of wildly-working visions pale: I watch her gliding, while with watery light Her weak eye glimmers through a fleecy veil; And when she loves her paly orb to shroud Behind the gather'd blackness lost on high; And when she darts from the wind-rent cloud Her placid lightning o'er the awaken'd sky! Strictly speaking, the text contains more than the two central personifications of the Moon and Hope: Night, Despair, and Care also figure as prosopopoeias. Holmes describes Coleridge as "the abandoned and outcast child" (18) searching for "a lost mother" even into middle age (9). Fruman discusses Coleridge's relation to his mother, calling attention to how she "cruelly ignored his existence" after Coleridge was sent off to school (Damaged 22; see also 406). Another arbitrariness of interpretation lies in the troubling partitive constructions of the first two lines: "Splendour of ... Night" and "Mother of ... visions." I have been saying that the moon clothes and unclothes itself, although the text refers to the "various-vested Night," not the various-vested moon. But how are we to separate the moon from the night? Coleridge's rhetoric pushes in the direction of identity, or at least analogy, while still, through the "of" constructions, maintaining difference. Coleridge published "To the Autumnal Moon" in Poems on Various Subjects in 1796 but not in the second edition of 1797; he included it again in Poems of 1803. See CPW 1: 5. Hartman suggests that "[i]ts classical radix is probably the Tailor? an ...' construction" (Wordsworth's Poetry 347n17). By "final step," of course, I do not mean, in an "affective stylistics" sense, that the sequence of this repeated pattern of obscurity-revelation occurs literally in a one-, two-, three-step fashion; while the natural description of the moon does appear first in the sonnet, the interpretive leap occurs at the volta, over the gap between octave and sestet, and motivates the amplification of the analogy "such is Hope!" in the following six lines. Nevertheless, the realization that the "Ah" is itself a

174 Notes to pages 96-105 realization comes to the reader as something of a delayed reaction, thematizing the on-again, off-again rhetoric of the text. CHAPTER FIVE

1 See Neil Hertz for a discussion of the "reciprocal relation between figurative language and sublimity" (15) in Longinus. Hertz's larger argument seeks to show how "Longinus interweaves language of his own with that of the authors he admires" (2), and by so doing he creates and participates in a discourse of sublimity. 2 This sonnet has received virtually no attention from close readers. Marjorie Hope Nicolson, however, briefly mentions the poem in the context of changing aesthetic tastes in the eighteenth century (17-18). CHAPTER SIX 1 Donald E. Hayden briefly reconstructs Wordsworth's Manx tour in Wordsworth's Travels in Scotland (66-72). For Wordsworth's other tours, see Hayden's various volumes, including Wordsworth's Walking Tour of 1790, which reenacts Wordsworth's trips through Europe, documenting many aspects of his experiences in post-revolutionary France, and retracing his steps through the Alps. See also Jeffrey C. Robinson's essay on Wordsworth's Scottish tour of 1803. Max Wildi too has explored Wordsworth's Alpine experiences, especially his crossing of the Simplon Pass in 1790. More recently, Anne D. Wallace and Robin Jarvis have offered different views of the significance of the peripatetic and pedestrian travel in Wordsworth and other English writers. For two examples of the relation between poetry and place in the work of another Romantic poet - and one who was not known as a walker, as Wordsworth certainly was - see Nelson S. Bushnell's A Walk after John Keats (1936) and Carol Kyros Walker's photographic text Walking North with Keats (1992), both of which trace Keats's walking tour of 1818 through Scotland. 2 Dorothy Wordsworth writes in her journal for 15 July 1828 that Rev. Brown wished she "could prevail on Mr. Wordsworth to visit the little island - it would be 'a national honour'" (Journal of a Tour in the Isle of Man, 1828 [Journals 2: 417]). See also Hugh M. Pollard, who notes that this Rev. Brown was the father of the Manx poet T.E. Brown (6). 3 C.S. Wilkinson writes: "There was even a distant relationship between the two boys [Wordsworth and Fletcher Christian], Wordsworth's grandmother, Dorothy Crackanthorp, being a member of a great local family, one of whom had married a Fletcher" (14). Duncan Wu cites Wilkinson on this point (145). Wu also states that Fletcher Christian

175 Notes to pages 105-9

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"had been at school with William [in Cockermouth]" (162). His source again is Wilkinson (129; cited in Wu 85n1). Glynn Christian, a descendant of Fletcher Christian, outlines the Wordsworth connection, along with a great deal of other information about the mutiny and its aftermath (14-37). For the connection between the Bounty mutiny and Wordsworth's play The Borderers, see Geoffrey Sanborn, who also discusses the family friendship between the Wordsworths and the Christians (36). See Peter J. Manning for a discussion of the historical background and context of the poem. See T.W. Thompson 127 and 374-5; and Stephen Gill 40, 360, and 429n17. See Later Years, Part II, 277–8, and 277n3. Scott's acknowledgment can be found in Peveril of the Peak 2-4, followed by the Appendix 7-33. In his note on the "Trial and Execution of Christian," Scott refers to this appendix "as related by one who may be said to favour the sufferer" (599). Scott at one point in his Journal regards the Isle of Man "as a refuge for debtors" (371n3). Scott's editor Anderson suggests that Scott may have been contemplating the Isle of Man as a place to escape his debts. De Quincey in his Confessions makes a similar reference: after describing his escape from the Manchester Grammar School, De Quincey writes about his sojourn in Bangor, Wales. A good bishop warns De Quincey's landlady about taking in boarders: "You must recollect, Betty, that this place [Bangor] is in the high road to the Head; so that multitudes of Irish swindlers, running away from their debts into England - and of English swindlers running away from their debts to the Isle of Man, are likely to take this place in their route" (42). See, e.g., Later Years, Part I, 482, 507-8, and 573-4, where Dorothy writes how she "may get over to see them [Joanna and Henry] next summer." She did visit the Isle of Man in June and July 1828. See Dorothy Wordsworth's Journals 2: 401-19. See also Later Years, Part II, 3434, 623-5, and 628–9. Wordsworth says in a letter of 23 September 1833 that he had just visited the Isle of Man "for the first time" (Later Years, Part II, 641). In Song 27, 263–91, Drayton writes about how the Isle of Man "resembl[es] Lancashire, / To her shee'l stoutly stick, as to her neerest kin, / And cries the day is ours, brave Lancashire doth win" (286-8). E.g., "Mona from our Abode is daily seen," Wordsworth writes in the poem above (77); "[t]he Isle of Man is right opposite our Window" is the version in the letter (Middle Years, Part i, 508). See Wordsworth's reference to John's letter in Later Years, Part II, 630): "As John wrote on Sunday evening [i.e., 14 July 1833] I need only tell you that ..." Wordsworth's phrasing suggests that John's letter contained details of their tour which Wordsworth need not repeat.

176 Notes to pages 109-19 12 They arrived at Douglas, Isle of Man on 13 July and sailed to Greenock, Scotland late on the 16th. FB. Pinion notes that Wordsworth left Rydal Mount on Friday 12 July and returned to Rydal on 25 July (165). 13 See Mary Wordsworth's letter of 3 July 1833 (Later Years, Part II, 629). Mary writes in a postscript to a letter on 11 July 1843 that her sister Joanna Hutchinson plans to visit them and return "to the Isle of Man before the Steam Packets [from] Whitehaven cease to ply, viz. 27th of Sepr." (Later Years, Part iv, 456). Glynn Christian also describes the steam packet service between Whitehaven and Douglas in the later eighteenth century (37-9). 14 I quote from the texts in "Poems Composed or Suggested During a Tour, in the Summer of 1833" (PW 4: 20-55), and follow the numbering there. 15 Pollard notes how John Wesley in his Journal had also commented on the singing of the thrushes at Castletown when he visited in 1777 and again in 1781 (5, 6). 16 See H.C. Robinson's Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence, ed. Sadler, 142-3 for his account of this part of the visit to Rushen Abbey. The editor adds that Robinson "had pleasure in recollecting that he was present at the conception of this sonnet" (142n2). For further details recounted by Robinson, see his Correspondence 244-5 and his Diary, ed. Hudson, 130. 17 In the Essay, Supplementary to the 1815 Poems, Wordsworth writes: "Turning to my own shelves, I find the folio of Cowley, seventh edition, 1681" (Prose 3: 71) - which included the "Vision." Coleridge annotated Wordsworth's copy of Cowley; see Marginalia, Part 2, 102-6. Wu notes that Wordsworth "owned a copy of Cowley's Works by Oct. 1801, when C entered numerous marginalia in it" (38). 18 See Edith C. Batho, who discusses "Despond who will" in the context of the 1832 Reform Bill (183-4). Compare EM. Todd's discussion 190-200. CHAPTER SEVEN

1 De Certeau considers at length the question of history in Freud's writings in chapters 8 and 9. To compare the Lacanian perspective on the concept of the symptom in Freud, see the discussion of "le symptome" (or "le sinthome") in Ragland-Sullivan. 2 See Freud's important letter of 21 September 1897 to Wilhelm Fliess (Origins 215-18), in which he says he is "ready to abandon two things the complete solution of a neurosis and sure reliance on its aetiology in infancy" (216).

177 Notes to pages 120-2 3 See, e.g., the second of Freud's Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, in which he states, in reference to "The Aetiology of Hysteria," that he did not there exaggerate "the frequency or importance" (SE 7: 190) of sexual influence of adults on children. See also chapter 6 of The Interpretation of Dreams, where Freud states that "real and imaginary events appear in dreams at first sight as of equal validity; and that is so not only in dreams but in the production of more important psychical structures" (SE 4: 288). The footnote in the Standard Edition (4: 288n1) suggests, I think correctly, that Freud is likely referring to his earlier work on the aetiology of hysteria. 4 This sentence does not appear in the revised version of Fish's essay in Doing What Comes Naturally; it occurs in the earlier version published in TLS (938). 5 My procedure, to the extent that it adapts a symptomatology of reading, necessarily evokes certain Marxist methodologies, especially the kind practised by Fredric Jameson in The Political Unconscious, where Freud, subjected to what Jameson, after Marx, calls a "symptomal" analysis (57), is shown to repress History (see also Bowling's helpful discussion of "symptomatic analysis" [78-80, 90–3]). However, while certain aspects of the two approaches are similar in the particular textual features they choose to highlight, my aim, obviously, is to put in question some of the grounding certitudes inherent in Jameson's and Liu's approaches. 6 It is interesting to note how Liu's use of quotation marks changes from the first appearance of this portion of the book as an article in ELH to its later book form. Whether the changes can be ascribed to a difference in house style between the Johns Hopkins University and Stanford University presses (the publishers of the original article and the later book, respectively), the impression remains that "history," "nature," and "Imagination" have shifting status between the figural and the literal. 7 E.g., see Liu's claim that "Book 6's description of the 1790 tour, read in its own context, is a sustained effort to deny history by asserting nature as the separating mark constitutive of the 'egotistical' self" (Sense 518). Liu speaks of the repression of history in connection with the Simplon Pass (Sense 539). 8 I add further that this moment of surmise by Virgil has, in Dryden's translation, several similarities with Freud's archaeological analogy: Then, after length of Time, the lab'ring Swains, Who turn the Turfs of those unhappy Plains, Shall rusty Piles from the plough'd Furrows take, And over empty Helmets pass the Rake.

178 Notes to pages 123-5

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Amaz'd at Antick Titles on the Stones, And mighty Relics of Gygantick Bones. (662-7) I am revising a distinction that Liu makes in his discussion of the Simplon Pass episode: the autotelic "tour" versus the telic "voyage of exploration" (Sense 4). The phrase spectator ab extra is Coleridge's description of Wordsworth's quintessential imaginative stance (Table Talk 189, 210-11). See Liu, Sense 62on5 for his distinction between "enactive history" and "epitaphic history": "If enactive history brings the past into the present, epitaphic history effects precisely the reverse: it displaces even the living present into the undisturbed past." As I have discussed elsewhere, binary oppositions of this sort, between past and present, or between life and death, voice and silence, and speech and writing, are the very structures that Wordsworth's texts continually dismantle. As far as Liu's example of Virgil's Georgics is concerned, I do not think that an uncovered corpse "brings the past into the present" in the way that Liu suggests. "The final test of reading, in The Triumph of Life," de Man writes, "depends on how one reads the textuality of this event, how one disposes of Shelley's body ... The apparent ease with which readers of The Triumph of Life have been able to dispose of this challenge demonstrates the inadequacy of our understanding of Shelley and, beyond him, of romanticism in general" ("Shelley Disfigured" 67). See Levinson, Wordsworth's Great Period Poems 8-10. Levinson's phrase "deconstructive materialism" is meant to have oxymoronic or dialectical power, but as her list of critics alleged to be "at once materialist and deconstructive" (9) demonstrates, Levinson has a curious idea of what constitutes a deconstructive criticism. To take one example, she includes Kenneth Johnston (along with Liu) in her roster of deconstructive materialists! Now, Johnston, one of our finest historical scholars working on Wordsworth, is anything but deconstructive, as he himself admits in his book Wordsworth and "The Recluse." By the same token, not surprisingly, there is nothing deconstructive about Levinson's readings. In her essay "History as Gesture; or, The Scandal of History," Lynn Hunt recounts how critics have justifiably "accuse[d] the new historicists of gesturing toward history as if it were an unproblematic ground of truth without paying adequate attention to the ways in which history itself was constructed and reconstructed both by those who framed the original documents and those who later interpreted them" (100). Her argument that "many historians believe in the existence of history standing outside of interpretation" (100) can be taken to include the assumption of a history outside of textuality too.

179 Notes to pages 125-7 14 There are other good methodological reasons for juxtaposing Freud and Liu. As Slavoj Žižek, among others, has noted, "there is a fundamental homology between the interpretative procedure of Marx and Freud more precisely, between their analysis of commodity and of dreams" (11). Strictly speaking, in the case of Liu we could substitute "historicism" for "Marx," and still keep the parallelism intact. See Žižek 11-84 for a discussion of the symptom in Marxist and Lacanian terms. In his review of Liu's book, Kurt Heinzelman makes an observation on Liu vis-a-vis psychoanalysis and materialism: "Although Liu's critical quest is psychological, his method is not psychoanalytical, both because he wants to historicize causality materialistically and because he is not arguing for inadvertent or repressed denial but for a psychodynamic more deliberate, intentional, and authored" (134-5). 15 To recall Liu's opposition between the journey and the tour (Sense 4), we see where Freud stands in 1896 when he writes, with deliberate emphasis: "Whatever symptom we take as our point of departure, in the end we infallibly come to the field of sexual experience" (SE 3: 199). Freud obviously casts his analytical project in the form of the voyage of discovery - as in his opening archaeological analogy - and characterizes himself as the discoverer. He does not, like Wordsworth in France during the early stages of the Revolution, play the tourist. 16 I pause first over the literal word "scene" because of its resonances in both Wordsworth and modern criticism - for example, de Man's "scene of reading" again (Allegories of Reading, passim); Bloom's "scene of instruction" (Map 41-62; Poetry and Repression 52-82), or even Derrida's "fabulous scene" (Margins of Philosophy 213). In the Eiographia Literaria, chapter 20, Coleridge argues, not entirely persuasively, for the use of the word "scene" in a strict theatrical sense, as he claims both Shakespeare and Milton had used it. Wordsworth's "austerely accurate" diction in "There Was a Boy," Coleridge suggests (2: 103), judiciously respects this usage, so that the dramatic context is always present or implied in any scene. One could say, after Robert Greene, that "the onely Shake-scene in a countrey," for Coleridge, is the one that is genetically theatrical (Shakespeare 13). 17 See my Monumental Writing 49, 191n17. It is relevant to note the provenance of this topos of the poet as sailor; see, e.g., Curtius's claim that "the epic poet voyages over the open sea in a great ship, the lyric poet on a river in a small boat ... the poet becomes the sailor, his mind or work the boat" (128–9). The rhetorical structuring of this image as an epic simile clearly aligns Wordsworth with this tradition. Liu mentions this boating scene in the context of a "locodescriptive moment" (Sense 553n113). 18 The word "Impediments" recalls Shakespeare's Sonnet 116 ("Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit / Impediments"), with its

18o Notes to pages 127-9 intersection of marriage, a "wandering bark," and both legal and nautical impediments; and the impediment/marriage topos in Much Ado about Nothing 2.2.1-7, where we find a rhetorical cluster of impediments - that is, crossing, coming athwart, and barring: DON JOHN: It is so; the Count Claudio shall marry the daughter of Leonato. BORACHIO: Yea, my lord; but I can cross it. DON JOHN: Any bar, any cross, any impediment will be medicinable to me: I am sick in displeasure to him, and whatsoever comes athwart his affection ranges evenly with mine. How canst thou cross this marriage? See also Measure for Measure 3.1.242 for the image of "an impediment in the current" evoked in the context of marriage. Shakespeare plays with the legal and nautical connotations of the trope in all cases (see also Much Ado 3.2.93, 4.1.12, and 5.2.85). "Incumbent" is by contrast a Miltonic word - see Paradise Lost 1.226, where Satan is "incumbent on the dusky Air"; Wordsworth invokes it in book 3.119 of The Prelude ("Incumbencies more awful") in a Miltonic context. I suggest that "impediments" and "incumbent" are linked because of the intertextual play of Shakespeare and Milton as contraries in Wordsworth's own imagination. 19 See Hertz, especially his chapter "The Notion of Blockage in the Literature of the Sublime" (40–60), for a discussion of blockage as a literary topos that "reestablishes boundaries between representor and represented" (60). 20 Freud's footnote (SE 18: 18n1) usefully directs the reader to his paper "Recollecting, Repeating, and Working Through" (SE 12: 145-56). For one succinct description of the transference and its textual nature, see Peter Brooks ("Idea"), who explores the implications of the encounter between literature and psychoanalysis for a theory of reading. 21 Chiasmus in Wordsworth, in its reflexive A-B-B-A form, is conventionally a figural marriage, a trope for how, as the Prospectus to The Recluse puts it, "the discerning intellect of Man ... [is] wedded to this goodly universe" (PW 5: 4). Wordsworth celebrates this "great consummation" (PW 5: 5) in terms that, while making Blake protest, nevertheless enact the union: How exquisitely the individual Mind (And the progressive powers perhaps no less Of the whole species) to the external World Is fitted: - and how exquisitely, too Theme this but little heard of among men The external World is fitted to the Mind ... (P W 5: 5)

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What is significant in this passage is the rhetorical structuring of the marriage as chiasmus: "Mind ... World ... World ... Mind." In the context of this list of explorers, I return to the source of my first epigraph for this chapter: Graham Greene writes in Journey without Maps that "Freud has made us conscious as we have never been before of those ancestral threads which still exist in our unconscious minds to lead us back. The need, of course, has always been felt, to go back and begin again. Mungo Park, Livingstone, Stanley, Rimbaud, Conrad represented only another method to Freud's, a more costly, less easy method, calling for physical as well as mental strength" (308–9). See Lacan's version of "the sad plaint of the Jew to his crony: 'Why do you tell me you are going to Cracow so I'll believe you are going to Lvov, when you really are going to Cracow?" (173). Lacan uses the joke as an illustration of the signifying conventions of "game-strategy, where it is a rule that I deceive my adversary" (173). Within MS. w there is recurrent mention of horses and their riders. The pattern begins with the description of the traveller in the storm: "The horse and rider staggered in the blast" (45); it continues fifteen lines later with the stationary riderless horse that I discuss; and it concludes with the account of "that traveller" who "did find when he awaked / His horse in quiet standing at his side, / His arm within the bridle ..." (95, 100–2; Norton Prelude 498–9). Whether there is a narrative here within the obvious one is a question that deserves separate discussion. On Mount Helicon, Pegasus's stamping hoof creates the Hippocrene, "a new fountain that gushed out of the earth at a blow from the hard hoof of the winged horse Pegasus, Medusa's offspring" (Ovid 123). For a later variation on the myth of Pegasus, compare the closing lines of e.e. cummings's poem "what a proud dreamhorse": "o what a proud dreamhorse moving (whose feet / almost walk air), now who stops. Smiles.he / stamps" (Poems 313). Wordsworth's horse is crossed with both mythical and historical intertexts: as a Pegasean figure, child of Medusa (with its rider, as in Paradise Lost, being "unrein'd" and "dismounted" [7.17, 19]), it is overdetermined by Medusa's power to turn humans to stone, to "a living statue or a statued life": "Everywhere, all through the fields and along the roadways [Perseus] saw statues of men and beasts, whom the sight of the Gorgon had changed from their true selves into stone ... The fleet–winged steed Pegasus and his brother were born then, children of the Gorgon's blood" (Ovid 115). At the same time, the contemporary context is present, evoking military scenes similar to displays in the Tower of London, and anticipating the actual exhibition of Napoleon's white charger Marengo in London after the Battle of Waterloo. See Altick 239, 300 for an account of the various

182 Notes to pages 135-6 shows of Napoleonana in nineteenth-century London. Wordsworth, writing in 1804, might have known about Napoleon's famous horse, although he could not have seen it on exhibition. I leave aside the intertext of Swift's Houyhnhnms, but recall Freud again, thinking of Schiller: "Pegasus yoked to the plow!" (Origins 170). CHAPTER EIGHT

1 This essay was originally written for a conference entitled "Culture and Critical Form: Reading after Geoffrey Hartman," sponsored by the Centre for Research in Philosophy and Literature, University of Warwick, May 1993. I am grateful to Peter Larkin for organizing the conference, and for his comments on this paper, which inflects the general conference title for specific purposes. For the figure of prolepsis, see Quintilian 9.2.16-17. Quintilian prefers the Latin term praeswnptio, or "anticipation," to describe a rhetorical "genus" containing "several different species" of figures, including prediction, but also occupatio, or forestalling of objections, confession, self-correction, preparation, and qualification (9.2.17-18). 2 See, e.g., Hartman's discussion of the "westering" impulse of eighteenth-century English literature in "Blake and the Progress of Poesy." 3 Strictly speaking, Hartman is referring to "psychoanalytically oriented criticism," but his point holds for criticism generally (18). 4 The phrase "mournful iteration" is from Words worth's poem "A little onward lend thy guiding hand" (PW4: 92-4); see Hartman's essay "Words, Wish, Worth" for a commentary. Yet is it not paradoxical that literary criticism is not to be repeated? One difference between so-called creative and critical acts is that creative acts are, in one sense, iterable performances. To take an example from popular culture: a singer-songwriter creates a Top Ten hit, and when you attend the concert, often named after the song, you expect to hear the performer sing it. Why is it, then, that critics never repeat their work? Alas, we do, all the time; critics get as much mileage as possible from a paper, often giving it several times to (hopefully) different audiences. But the situation changes once the paper has appeared in print. Why do we not read our essays that are already in the public domain, in the way that a favourite author would repeat his most popular works, or a singer her greatest hits? It makes one wonder who is closer, the poet or the critic, to Keats's figure "forever piping songs forever new." Does the noniterability of the critical act depend on more than style, perhaps on an isolatable gist of argument or "heresy of paraphrase" in a way that literature does not? Why might we have a reading of Hartman's Akiba's Children, but not of Easy Pieces? While I cannot pursue these questions

183 Notes to pages 137-43

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here, I would like - just in case my suggestion about critics repeating their published work is ever taken literally - to put my vote in for Hartman to perform his 1979 essay "Words, Wish, Worth: Wordsworth." Hartman has written that "one of the highest aims of commentary" is "local illumination of the words of a text together with the foregrounding of a structure that provides a skeleton key for other poems and situates the object of analysis in generic terms" ("Use and Abuse" 131). This quotation, attributed to Hartman, is used by Michael Sprinker as the epigraph to his essay "Aesthetic Criticism: Geoffrey Hartman" (43). I adapt three sentences here from my article on Hartman in the Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory (354). This phrasing echoes Hartman in the title essay of Beyond Formalism: "Perhaps Wordsworth comes to reveal rather than teach ..." (49). Hartman has extended his interest in the phenomenon of "culture," in its various social, literary, and academic modes, in his recent book The Fateful Question of Culture. Alvarez, "English Poetry Today." Alvarez altered the title to "The New Poetry or Beyond the Gentility Principle" for the introduction to his Penguin edition in 1962. I quote from a sentence in the earlier version of Alvarez's essay published in Commentary (222). The sentence does not appear in the introduction to the Penguin edition. See lines 65-8 of "Simon Lee" (PW4: 63): O reader! had you in your mind Such stores as silent thought can bring, O gentle reader! you would find A tale in every thing. PW 2: 504. Hartman's reading of "Nutting" in Wordsworth's Poetry (735), while brief, implicitly contains the substance of many later discussions of the poem, a number of which I cite below. E.g., David Perkins says that "The general themes of ["Nutting"] are the large concerns of the first two books of The Prelude" (Poetry of Sincerity 184). For a discussion of the ekphrasis of the horse in MS. w (Norton Prelude 498), see chapter 7 above. I am indebted to Tracy Ware of Queen's University, Kingston, for drawing my attention to this remarkable passage in private correspondence and subsequently in the Wordsworth Circle. I would add that for Wordsworth the strength of Shakespeare is associated with the genre of the epitaph; his underpresence is a question of linkage between "the power of the man and the power of the monument" (see my Monumental Writing 144). The epitaphic element in Wordsworth, so pervasive and so fundamental, is, I think, ultimately derived from Shakespeare. Milton, in other ways a far more obvious

184 Notes to pages 144-5

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influence on Wordsworth, is secondary here. Shakespeare is the monumental poet, literally and figurally, and Wordsworth's epitaphic style, his composition of sonnet sequences, his recurrent tropes of voice and performance, and even his egotistical sublime have their origin in his response to the sweet swan of Avon, not to the lady of Christ's. A former student of mine, Frances Lister, has also noted an echo of Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida: the boy has "a huge wallet o'er [his] shoulders slung"; Ulysses says," Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back, / Wherein he puts alms for oblivion" (3.3.145). Lister further observes that these occurrences of the word "wallet" are the only ones in Shakespeare and Wordsworth. In his analysis of Wordsworth's style and prosody, Bruce Bigley, while noting the metaphorical continuity between the stones being "fleeced with moss" and "scattered like a flock of sheep," is reminded of a classical image - "the mad Ajax surrounded by slaughtered sheep" in Sophocles' Ajax (443). Wordsworth, writing to Sara Hutchinson in late February or early March 1801, records some responses to certain poems in the second edition of Lyrical Ballads (Early Years 319) - "For Coleridges [sic] entertainment I send the following harmonies of criticism" - and then goes on to cite reactions to "Nutting" by "Mr C. Wordsworth," who thought it "worth its weight in gold," and by "Mr Stoddart," who "can make neither head nor tail of it." The motif of rising up in Wordsworth usually indicates a sublime or imaginative moment. First "the hazels rose / Tall and erect"; then the speaker says, "up I rose." In the note to Isabella Fenwick, Wordsworth says that "these verses arose out of the remembrance of feelings I had often had when a boy" (PW 2: 504). It will be apparent to any reader of Hartman that by using "apocalypse" and "akedah" I am invoking terms that Hartman uses in Wordsworth's Poetry, passim. Most critics have had something to say about the sexual imagery and rhetoric in "Nutting": see, e.g., Ferry, who calls Wordsworth a "libertine" (23) and "a sort of rapist and voluptuary in nature" (25); Glen likewise calls the boy a "voluptuary" (272) and describes his excitement as "tumescent" (275), while Jonathan Wordsworth, like Garber (19), Rowe (20–1), and Blank (Wordsworth's Influence 164 and Wordsworth and Feeling 163-6), explicitly describes the boy's actions as "rape" (Borders 48). Cooke speaks of "the idiom of a rape" (Acts of Inclusion 139), while Brisman, reading the poem as a scene of "oedipal fantasy" (compare Douglas 76-84), terms the episode a "little rape" (Romantic Origins 300, 298). Other critics have explored the related issue of gender (through the Lucy-figure) in the poem: see Ross; Arac 34-49; Jacobus, Romanticism, Writing, and Sexual Difference 254-7; Homans,

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Women Writers 50-4 and "Scenes" 223-4; Crawford; Cooke, Acts of Inclusion 138; Bourke 173-97; G. Jones 219-22; Wolfson, "Gatherings" 19-30; and Douglass H. Thomson, whom I also cite below. The term Nachtraglichkeit occurs throughout Freud's writings. See, e.g., SE i: 233, 356-9. See also the discussion of "deferred action" in LaPlanche and Pontalis 111-14. I take this version, found in Dove Cottage MS. 15, from Parrish, Art 30. For a detailed history of "Nutting" manuscripts, with photographs and transcriptions, see Butler and Green, esp. 554-5. A possibly related fragment is found in MS. jj: Then dearest maiden on whose lap I rest My head do not deem that these Are idle sympathies See Parrish, ed., The Prelude 78-9, for photographic copy and transcription. Even in this brief fragment, one hears a Shakespearean overtone of Hamlet's "country matters" dialogue with Ophelia - "I mean, my head upon your lap" (3.2.109). Interestingly, Cooke hears a similar echo in the published poem: "But if the 'cheek on ... green stones ... fleeced with moss' suggests Hamlet's 'head in the lap' and the mons veneris, the fleece also anticipates a scene of pastoral innocence" (Acts of Inclusion 268n3i). See, in particular, Hartman's two essays "Wordsworth, Inscriptions, and Romantic Nature Poetry" and "Romantic Poetry and the Genius Loci." Perkins says that "the last three lines [of "Nutting"] are a mistake" because of Wordsworth's "imperious temptation to find a moral in his experience and to state it" (Poetry of Sincerity 185, 186). Levinson echoes Perkins in her contention that "as the culmination of a syllogistic structure ... the lines are a mistake" (Romantic Fragment Poem 64). But on the figure of "genius," as both poetic quality and nature-spirit, it is worth recalling John Wordsworth's letter of 25-6 February 1801 to Mary Hutchinson: "Wm says that the nutting and Joanna shew the greatest genious of any poems in the 2d Vol" of the 1800 Lyrical Ballads (John Wordsworth 96). In the fragmentary version of "Nutting" found in Wordsworth's letter to Coleridge on 14 or 21 December 1798, the text is more explicit in referring to the "spirits." This version reads: "They led me, and I followed in their steps ... They led me far, / Those guardian spirits, into some dear nook" (Early Years 241). In this context, Grob has a strong reading, contra Perkins and Ferry, that argues that nature, "far from being a passive victim in this tale of mutilation, knowingly and lovingly leads the child to her quiet bower to receive his merciless ravage" - with a determination "to make a moral agent of this passionate child" (827).

186 Notes to pages 147-8 25 Paradise Lost 9.663. As an aside, it should be noted that the prohibition against touching the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, as opposed to eating of it, is not mentioned by God in either Genesis or Paradise Lost; it comes from Eve, Adam, and the narrator (see Genesis 3.3, and Paradise Lost 7.46, 9.651, 663, 925). 26 For the sense of touch in Wordsworth and its relation to "psychoesthetic" or psychoanalytic criticism, see Hartman's essay "A Touching Compulsion." 27 On the tradition of poetic trees, see Ascoli 157-61. For other talking trees in Wordsworth, see, e.g., "The Oak and The Broom," in which the oracular tradition of a prophetic, talking oak is ironically undercut by a smaller, weaker bush (PW 2: 130–4). Arac mounts a challenging reading, opposed to Hartman's, that attempts to define Wordsworth's "modernity" - that is, the way that Wordsworth "rejected both poetic tradition and the social status with which it had come to be associated" (48). As I hear it, however, "Nutting" seems to invoke mutely these very things: the topos of gentleness looks before and after, toward both poetic tradition and social status. Compare Charles Altieri, on the interpretive aspects of the unconscious as well as social modes of "spirit" in the poem: "There is a spirit in these woods, but its meaning and force are reserved for those who can learn to read it as the poem does" (190). 28 See Aeneid 6.441; and As You Like It 3.2; see also my Monumental Writing, chapter 3 on the topos of the liber naturae in Wordsworth. The intersection of poetry and trees also suggests, distantly, the topos of the suspended musical instrument, as in Wordsworth's "Vernal Ode" of 1817: "While thy tired lute hangs on the hawthorn-tree" (PW 2: 311). 29 For Hartman's comments on the presence of classical literature in Wordsworth's poetry, see, in The Unremarkable Wordsworth, the various essays "Timely Utterance' Once More," which argues that "The theme of lost Hellenic grace or harmony [in Wordsworth] is not relevant except as it is also more than Hellenic and recalls the 'echo' formula of a poetry at once pastoral and elegiac" (155); "Blessing the Torrent," which states that "In Wordsworth's style, early or late, the fallen sublimity of classicizing or poetic diction blends with the naturalism of elemental speechacts" (87); and "Words, Wish, Worth," in which Hartman comments at length on Wordsworth's "regression, after 1801, to the Classics" (93) - a movement largely ignored by critics. As the present chapter demonstrates, I am inclined to suggest an earlier date for Wordsworth's turn or return to classicism - indeed, back to the very beginning of his "Romantic" emergence in Lyrical Ballads. For an older view of classical influences in Wordsworth's poetry, see Douglas Bush. For Ariel in the "cloven pine," see Shakespeare's Tempest (1.2.250–99). As a relevant gloss on my

187 Notes to page 148 reading of the spirit in the wood, I note Dorothy Wordsworth's reaction in 1805 to Sir Michael Fleming's proposal to cut down the trees on his property: "One who could do this wants a sense which others have. To him there is no 'Spirit in the Wood'" (Early Years 638). 30 Havens's study The Mind of a Poet, while outdated in some aspects, is useful for the way it raises certain issues now obscured or forgotten, yet still haunting Wordsworth's poetry, even from the far side of theory today. In discussing "Nutting," for example, Havens sees Wordsworth's MS. reference to "Those guardian spirits" who led him to the hazel bower as having "but one explanation: animism, the belief in spiritual beings who, like the dryads and nymphs of classical mythology, are associated with certain places, together with the belief in the possession of individual consciousness by each animate and perhaps each inanimate object. Such beliefs are universal and potent among primitive peoples ... Wordsworth is unusual in avowing them" (1: 76). While I believe that Havens is on the right track here, I feel that he calls off the investigation a bit early, as we see a couple of pages later: "But any attempt to seek a literary source for Wordsworth's animism or to trace it to influences exerted on him after his return from France involves a fundamental misconception. It is as if one should attribute his mystic experiences to the reading of Plotinus or his love of nature to the reading of Thomson. Such things he did not learn from books" (1: 78–9). Havens is right, in one sense: Wordsworth did not "learn" these feelings from books (though another "text," the liber naturae, was certainly instructive); rather, once the feelings sought to express themselves in answerable poetic forms and genres, there was available to him an entire literary tradition, as I shall demonstrate. Precisely how Wordsworth taps into and yet distances himself from that tradition is part of the question at hand. 31 Turner's painting The Golden Bough was exhibited in 1834, although Turner had completed paintings on the subject as early as 1798 in his Aeneas and the Sibyl, Lake Avernus; his painting Lake Nemi dates from ca. 1828. See Butlin and Joll, plates 214, 300, 334 (text 121-2, 161, 186-7). Wordsworth compares Loughrigg Tarn to Lake Nemi in a couple of places; see the 1811 "Epistle to Sir George Howland Beaumont" (16470; PW 4: 147) and the note to "Upon Perusing the Foregoing Epistle Thirty Years After its Composition" (PW 4: 151). Compare Frazer's chapters on "The King of the Wood," "The Worship of Trees," "Relics of Tree-Worship in Modern Europe," and "The Worship of the Oak" in volumes 1 and 2. Of particular interest, as we shall see, are Frazer's comments on trees "that bleed and utter cries of pain or indignation when they are hacked or burned" (2: 18). For may-bush and maypole references in Wordsworth, see The Prelude 8.128-63. While reading

188 Notes to pages 148–9 Wordsworth with Frazer turns up certain similarities - e.g., it offers to make the boy in "Nutting" into the ancient figure who sallies out to break off a branch from the sacred tree at Nemi, slay the rival priest, and become King of the Wood or Rex Nemorensis (Frazer 1: 11) - my own path takes a more specifically literary turn. Still, see Pipkin for the view that "'Nutting' resembles the rite of initiation in picturing an encounter with the sacred that changes the young Wordsworth's fundamental mode of being" (11). Also see Harding's sensitive "chthonic" (108) reading, especially the way that he relates metaphor and disguise in Wordsworth's boy to "the shaman who wears a caribou hide to attract, befriend, and control the spirits of the forest" (104). 32 Robert Woof, in editing T.W. Thompson, Wordsworth's Hawkshead, adds in appendix iv the text of a reminiscence in which the son of Thomas Bowman, one of Wordsworth's headmasters, recounts his father's description of the young Wordsworth's reading habits, which included texts by Evelyn and Ovid: "He was one of the very few boys, who used to read the old books in the School Library, George Sandys' Travels in the East' and his Ovid's 'Metamorphoses', Fox's 'Book of Martyrs' & Evelyn's 'Forest Trees'. There were others, but these I remember" (Thompson 344 and 344n1). See also Wu 56, 163 for agreement. In a letter to the Morning Post in 1844 on the Kendal and Windermere Railway, Wordsworth again speaks of Evelyn: "The accomplished Evelyn, giving an account of his journey from Italy through the Alps, dilates upon the terrible, the melancholy, and the uncomfortable; but, till he comes to the fruitful country in the neighbourhood of Geneva, not a syllable of delight or praise" (Prose 3: 341-2). Wordsworth's point in referring to Evelyn's Diary of his travels is to show how "the relish for choice and picturesque natural scenery ... is quite of recent origin" (Prose 3: 341). William Gilpin, in his 1791 Remarks on Forest Scenery, frequently cites Evelyn's Sylva, and also discusses the sacredness of groves, quoting a passage from Virgil's Aeneid, book 8 as an example of the templum nemorale or "haunt of Gods" (1: 205-7). Compare Susan Eilenberg's application of the ancient belief that "the ground was haunted and property was sacred" to a reading of Wordsworth's "place-naming poems" as "modern equivalents of these classical constructions" (69). For the role of prosopopoeia in allegories of writing and reading the book of nature, see Gilpin 1: 44, 103-5. for Tasso's account of Rinaldo in the enchanted forest, and how he cut down the walnut/myrtle tree to break the spell, see Godfrey of Bulloigne, canto 18.34-8. 33 See Keats's "Ode to Psyche" (276); and Milton's "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity": "The Oracles are dumb" (48). In "Use and Abuse" Hartman has commented on the "poetic tradition in which a tree or

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long-lived though mute object is made to speak: perhaps an oracular oak, perhaps a ruined castle, perhaps a genius loci" (132). For Hartman's reference to Cowper's "Yardley Oak," which he calls "the nearest analogue" to Wordsworth's "Yew-Trees," see "Use and Abuse" 150. For another of these "kindred trees / Oracular," compare Wordsworth's address to "The Oak of Guernica" (PW 3: 136): "Oak of Guernica! Tree of holier power / Than that which in Dodona did enshrine / (So faith too fondly deemed) a voice divine / Heard from the depths of its aerial bower - / How canst thou flourish at this blighting hour?" Wordsworth's demythologizing of the oldest oracle in Greece, and his subtle reanimating of nature through the prosopopoeia implicit in an address to a tree, clearly speak to the issue of imaginative metamorphosis in "Nutting." De Selincourt thinks that Wordsworth's translation of Virgil's Aeneid belongs to 1823-4, though he also suggests that parts of the translation may have been undertaken as early as 1819 (PW 4:469-71). Bruce E. Graver, in his forthcoming Cornell edition of Wordsworth's translations from Virgil and Chaucer, corrects earlier misdatings of the text, and convincingly demonstrates that the translation belongs to 1823-4. I am indebted to Professor Graver for responding to this essay in private correspondence and for allowing me to read a draft of his introduction to Wordsworth's translations. Apropos of my claim for a "source" in The Aeneid, R.D. Williams states that "the grim and weird story of Polydorus and the drops of blood trickling from the myrtle shoots is not found in Classical literature before Virgil" (Aeneidos: Liber Tertius 57). The relevant lines from Virgil read: "quid miserum, Aenea, laceras? iam parce sepulto, / parce pias scelerare manus" (26). "Pius" is, of course, the epithet applied to Aeneas, passim (see, e.g., Aeneidos: Liber Quintus 1 and 43n26). In the context of the Wordsworthian revisions, compare also Shakespeare's Richard III, in which Anne claims that "dead Henry's wounds / Open their congealed mouths and bleed afresh" in the presence of the murderer Richard (1.2.55-6). A wound becomes a mouth; voice, blood; and expression, effusion. Spenser is also evoked in Wordsworth's phrase "milk-white cluster," which Wordsworth retained in "Nutting" from 1800–36 (see PW2: 211), but later changed to "tempting clusters," echoing Milton. He uses the phrase "milk-white" again in "Personal Talk" in a specifically Spenserian context: "heavenly Una with her milk-white Lamb" (PW 4: 74). In The Prelude, Spenser is called "gentle": "And that gentle Bard, / Chosen by the Muses for their Page of State - / Sweet Spenser" (3.281-3). Theresa M. Kelley sees similarities between the boy of "Nutting" and the allegorical figure of Proteus in Spenser's Faerie Queene, book 3.

190 Notes to pages 150–1 38 Compare Wordsworth's "The Tuft of Primroses": "'Stay your impious hand'" (PW 5: 361). 39 Ovid has several references to the transformation of individuals into trees, including Daphne (1.518-57); Phaethon's sisters (2.330–66); the nymph in the oak tree sacred to Ceres (8.739-78); Dryope (9.357-97); and also Polydorus, mentioned in passing (13.618-58). In other analogues, Tennyson reworks the Arthurian legend of Merlin's imprisonment by Vivien under a stone, causing Merlin to be confined in an oak tree (395). In one modern retelling of the Orfeo story, Orfeo's breaking of a branch causes his wife pain and results in her being taken to the underworld (see Hieatt). Even Dorothy, in The Wizard of Oz, gets into trouble when she plucks an apple from the animated trees on the yellow brick road! For the relevant passages in Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata, I turn, curiously, to Freud, who thought enough of the episode of Tancred's double slaughter of Clorinda in cantos 12.64-7 and 13.38-45 to refer to it at some length in Beyond the Pleasure Principle in the context of the "compulsion to repeat." Freud's summary is worthy of being quoted in full: The most moving poetic picture of a fate such as this [i.e., of the "perpetual recurrence of the same thing"] is given by Tasso in his romantic epic Gerusalemme Liberata. Its hero, Tancred, unwittingly kills his beloved Clorinda in a duel while she is disguised in the armour of an enemy knight. After her burial he makes his way into a strange magic forest which strikes the Crusaders' army with terror. He slashes with his sword at a tall tree; but blood streams from the cut and the voice of Clorinda, whose soul is imprisoned in the tree, is heard complaining that he has wounded his beloved once again. If we take into account observations such as these, based upon behaviour in the transference and upon the life-histories of men and women, we shall find courage to assume that there really does exist in the mind a compulsion to repeat which overrides the pleasure principle. (SE 18: 22) See the translation of Tasso in Godfrey of Bulloigne 378-9 and 398-400. Wordsworth knew his Tasso, as we can see from his reference to Erminia in The Prelude, where she is mentioned in the same breath as Ariosto's Angelica (9.451-3). I return to Wordsworth's Italian influences later. 40 See Schneider 103, for the claim that a pocket copy of Orlando Furioso was Wordsworth's "companion" in the summer of 1790; and Wordsworth's letter of 17 and 24 October 1805 to Sir George Beaumont (Early Years 628). With the exception of a verse translation of the Orlando Furioso, canto 1.5-14, dating from November 1802 (see PW 4: 473 and Curtis, Poems, in Two Volumes 594-7), Wordsworth's later translations of

191 Notes to page 152 Ariosto "have not survived" (Early Years 628n2). For further information about Wordsworth's reading and translation of Ariosto, see Mark L. Reed, Chronology of the Early Years 23, 77, 155, 303-4, 325, and 346; and Chronology of the Middle Years 33, 201, 376. Some of these instances are summarized in Wu (7). Wordsworth's brother Richard writes on 23 May 1794: "I have forwarded the Italian Gram., Tasso and Ariosto for you at Keswick" (Early Years I2on4). Wordsworth writes to William Mathews on 21 March 1796: "My Sister would be very glad of your assistance in her Italian studies. She has already gone through half of Davila, and yesterday we began Ariosto" (Early Years 170). Recall also that at the time of the composition of "Nutting" in late 1798 Wordsworth was beginning The Prelude, which in its earliest drafts in MS. JJ opens with the famous question "Was it for this?" - a question which, as correspondence in TLS in 1975 showed, has a precedent in Virgil, Aeneid 2.664-5 ("Hoc erat ... quod me ... / eripis": "Was it for this that you save(d) me ... ?" [Pharr 131-2]); and Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, canto 7.56-9 (see Jonathan Wordsworth, "Echoes"; Howard ErskineHill; and especially John A. Hodgson, who thoroughly explicates the passage and its Wordsworthian adaptation). The connection between "Nutting" and The Prelude was made by Wordsworth himself in the Fen wick note, though the Ariosto link naturally remains unstated. 41 One critic who does refer to an Ariosto connection in a footnote is Douglass H. Thomson, though he does not mention Astolpho's metamorphosis. Thomson, however, comments at greater length on the presence of Shakespeare: the character of Orlando in As You Like It "furnishes a crucial analogue to the Lucy" of the manuscript fragment (291). Jean H. Hagstrum, discussing the ravaged grove of "Nutting" in The Romantic Body, writes that "Literary context of sorts is provided by the attack on the trees of the forest by the loved-crazed Orlando of Ariosto's epic, but the differences outweigh the similarities" (95). I would argue that Shakespeare overlaps here with Ariosto not only in the connection with the name Orlando and the convention of reading and writing love poetry in trees, as in As You Like It 3.2, but also in the Shakespeare-Ariosto connection of The Taming of the Shrew and I Suppositi. Thomson acutely notes that Wordsworth's consciously allusive epithets describing Lucy as "'inland bred'" and having "'some nurture'" are direct quotations from As You Like It (2.7.96-7). He also marks (290–1) the Shakespearean play on "gentleness" in As You Like It: "Your gentleness shall force / More than your force move us to gentleness" (2.7.101-2), which I take to be an example of antimetabole. More recently, Susan J. Wolfson has briefly noted the reference to Astolpho in "Gatherings" 27; Gregory Jones has followed suit in developing the Ariosto and Shakespeare links, though he does not refer to Thomson's

192 Notes to pages 152-3 and Hagstrum's earlier work, or the Astolpho allusion. On the AriostoVirgil connection, see Giamatti, who notes the allusion to Aeneas in Ariosto's use of the word "pio" in Astolpho's words to Rogero: "Se tu sei cortese e pio" (142–3). 42 My argument, which I can only sketch out here, is based on an observation in Mark L. Reed's Chronology of the Early Years: in the Christabel Notebook, Reed writes, "A small amount of messy draft possibly based on Ariosto and a few lines of draft toward The Danish Boy (before 15 Oct 1800; see Hale White 25-26; STCL I, 637) conclude the book" (325). Reed states that this manuscript material must date from between 6 October 1798 and October 1800 (325). In his "Addenda and Corrigenda" in Chronology of the Middle Years, Reed writes that this draft "'possibly from Ariosto' was probably toward W's ballad poem never written' for which The Danish Boy was to have served as a prelude (see Danish Boy IF note). (Information from Professor Paul Betz.)" (715). The Isabella Fenwick note to "The Danish Boy" reads: "Written in Germany 1799. It was entirely a fancy, but intended as a prelude to a ballad poem never written" (PW 2: 493). I am prepared to speculate that around the time that Wordsworth was composing "Nutting," he was rereading Ariosto's Orlando Furioso and specifically the Astolpho episode. The Virgilian, Dantean, and other contexts are, I believe, filtered through Ariosto. 43 This Ariosto reference in the preface to The Borderers is particularly interesting because it dates from around the year or so before the composition of "Nutting" in 1798. Wordsworth certainly seems to have had Ariosto on the mind during this period. I draw attention to a minor variant in Wordsworth's text, though one with implications for my reading: the Owen and Smyser Prose edition reads "the groves that should shelter him" (1: 77), not "that would shelter him," as in Hartman's version (my emphasis in both cases). Robert Osborn, in his edition of The Borderers, also has "should" (63). Wordsworth is referring to cantos 23.134-6 and 24.4 of Orlando Furioso. 44 Douglass H. Thomson has a fine reading of the early manuscript versions of "Nutting" in relation to the career of the figure "Lucy" in Wordsworth's poetry. He also notes that "The issue of whether or not the 'conclusion' [of "Nutting"] really did predate the'bbeginning og the poem (as Dorothy's letter suggests) involves a complicated bibliographical argument" (292).

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Index

abject, 4 Abrams, M.H., 20, 28, 29, 75-6, 161n2, 168n2, 17onn14&15. See also "greater Romantic lyric" address, 8–9, 12-20, 21-3, 27, 34–5, 38–40, 72-4, 82,147,1571114,1891134; to a deity, 73, 82 adjuration, 101 admonishment, 146, 150 Aeneas, 149-50, 187n31, 189n36, 192n41 affect, 6, 69, 83, 95, 103, 145 affected modesty, 29–30, 38, 42, 46, 78 "affective stylistics," 173n31 after-effect, 4, 35, 135, 137, 143, 152 after-image, 58, 149 aftering, 135; and "westering," 135, 182n2 aftermath, 152 after-pressure (Nachdrangen), 9 after-thought, 135-6 aggression, 24, 30, 153

Ah! See under Coleridge allegory, 17, 84, 144, 145, 171n15; of intertextuality, 144, 151; of reading, 45, 188n32 allusion, 7, 70, 143, 152, 168n11 Altick, Richard D., 181n25 Altieri, Charles, 186n27 Alvarez, Alfred, 140–1, amplification, 9, 86, 94 analogy, 39-40, 59–60, 65, 75-7, 84–6, 116, 131-3, 171n15,172n25,172n28;1 "as ... such," "as ... so," 84, 86, 88; between humans and nature, 59, 75, 131, 133; between nature and God, 75; moral, 75, 76. See also tenor; vehicle anaphora, 68, 77, 78, 85, 131 Anderson, Howard, 164n18 Anglesey, Isle of, 106–7. See also Mona anti-blason, 132

anticipation, 26, 81, 182n1 antimetabole, 191n41 antistrophe, 8 antithesis, 94 anxiety, 5, 9, 37, 45, 48 apocalypse, 171n17; and akedah, 145 apocalyptic rhetoric, 82, 88, 135 apophrades, 143 aporia, 127 apostrophe, 3, 6, 8, 9, 1127, 33, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 50–2, 55, 58, 59, 66, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 90, 94, 99, 100, 101, 112, 113, 114, 152, 155nn1, 2, & 3, 156n6, 158n18, 161n29, 168n3 Arac, Jonathan, 159n21, 184n2o, 186n27 archaeology: and psychoanalysis, 115-20, 123–6, 132; and reading, 11617, 123, 134 arche-trope, 20 Ariel, 148 Arieti, James A., and John M. Crossett, 155n3

214 Index Ariosto, Ludovico, 153, 191n41, 192nn42&43; Orlando Furioso (canto 6), 151-2; Astolpho episode, 151-2, 191n41, 192n42; in "Nutting" MS, 151-2, 191n41; Wordsworth's familiarity with, 151, 19onn39&40 Aristotle, 77, 79, 97, 101, 168n5 art hiding art, 96-7, 152 Ascoli, Albert Russell, 186n27 Astolpho. See Ariosto asyndeton, 94 audience, 32, 38, 40, 49, 77, 94-7, 101; theoros vs krites, 77. See also witness Auerbach, Erich, 12, 155n4 Augustan-Romantic, 5 Austin, Frances, 168n2 autobiography, 26, 115, 116 aversio, 3, 8, 9, 11-27, 40, 55 aversion, 3-27, 32-5, 3841, 48, 70, 73, 124, 158n17 aversion therapy, 12 awe, 82-3, 93 Bachelard, Gaston, 115 bafflement, 24, 26, 102, 127 ballad, 151 Ballad of Sir Patrick Spens, 57 Ballasalla, Isle of Man, 104, 111 Barth, J. Robert, 159n21, 16on27 Barthes, Roland, 124-5, 143 Barzun, Jacques, 4 Bate, Walter Jackson, 4 Bateson, F.W., 5, 159n21 Batho, Edith C, 176n18

Baudelaire, Charles, 18 Beach, Joseph Warren, 56 Beaumont, Sir George, 107-8, 109, 19on4O Beckett, Samuel, 81 "before and after" structure, 144, 153 belatedness, 135 Bellerophon, 134 benediction, 146 Bennett, C.E., 163n14 Bernhardt-Kabisch, Ernest, 159n21 Bialostosky, Don H., and Lawrence D. Needham, 6 Bible, 147, 150 Bigley, Bruce, 184n16 Blair, Hugh, 12, 16 Blake, William, 17-18, 94, 99, 141, 182n2 Blank, G. Kim, 168n1o, 184n2o Bligh, Captain, 105 blood and voice, 150–1. See also under Dante Bloom, Harold, 48, 91, 143, 151, 165n26, 179n16 Blount, Thomas, 12, 156n8 Boileau-Despreaux, Nicolas, 95-6 book of nature (liber naturae), 95, 142, 153, 186n28, 187n3o, 188n32 Bounty, 105, 175n3 Bourke, Richard, 184n2O Bowles, William Lisle, 28-30, 33, 41-4, 75, 91, 92, 93, 162n5, 169n1o, 17onn11&15; Monody, Written at Matlock, 289, 41-4, 165nn21&22; "To the River Itchin," 75, 17on11 Boy of Winander, 20–7, 56, 58, 61, 62, 66, 68, 80, 129, 159n21, 16on25, 167n7. See also "There

Was a Boy" under Wordsworth, William Bowyer, James, 8, 71, 73, 93 Brett, R.L., and A.R. Jones, 20 Brisman, Leslie, 159n21, 16on27, 184n2O Brody, Jules, 95, 97 Bronson, Bertrand H., 166n1 Brooks, Peter, 117, 18on2o Brower, Reuben A., 161n29 Brown, Marshall, 28 Brown, T.E., 174n2 Bruns, Gerald L., 169n5 Burgess, Theodore Chalon, 168n5 Burns, Robert, 114 Bush, Douglas, 7, 186n29 Bushnell, Nelson S., 174n1 Butler, James, and Karen Green, 185n22 Butlin, Martin, and Evelyn Joll, 187n31 Camden, William, 106 Caplan, Harry, 13, 14 Castletown, Isle of Man, 109, 176n15 Cave of Staff a, no, 111, 114 Cervantes, Miguel de, 153 Chapin, Chester E, 169n9 Chase, Cynthia, 123, 155n2, 157n15, 159n21 chiaroscuro, 77, 78 chiasmus, 68, 127–9, 132, 138, 18on21. See also palindrome Christian family (or Christian Curwen family), 105, 174n3; Edward, 105; Fletcher, 105, 174n3; John, 105; William, 105 Christian, Glynn, 175n3, 176n13

215 Index Churchill, Charles, 29, 30–1, 49 Cicero, 12, 13, 33 Cicero, pseudo-. See Rhetorica ad Herennium classical rhetorical tradition, 4, 7, 9-10, 97, 172n18, 1731130 classicism, 4-8, 51, 97; vs Romanticism, 4-6, 10, 97, 152, 154, 186n29 Clarke, C.C., 159n21 close reading, 4, 20, 52, 74, 80, 136. See also reading Cohn, Jan, and Thomas H. Miles, 95 Coleridge, Ernest Hartley, 73, 17on15 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 4-9, 14, 20, 54, 57, 66, 100, 126, 141, 148, 14n17; and "Ah," 39, 83, 88, 92, 93; Ah Aversive, 90; Ah Expressive, 90; Ah Mock-Regretful, 89–90; Ah Regretful, 8990; and "animated prose," 35; "between Poetry and Oratory," 28-49, 71, 76; "bloated and puffing" style, 71, 73-4, 88, 93, 171n15; and Bowles, 28-30, 33, 41-4; at Christ's Hospital, 71, 87, 93; conversation poems, 20, 23, 28, 34, 35, 44, 48, 72, 76, 157n14, 164n14; defiance of Churchill, 29, 37, 49; and double epithets, 73, 74; and Dryden, 47-8; egotism, 31, 36, 37, 162n4; and enthusiasm, 71, 72, 73; and lost mother, 87-8, 173n27; as Nehemiah Higginbottom, 80; and the "PUBLIC," 36–8; and renunciation of instinct, 87; and

"sequacious" as intertext, 45, 47-8; "sermoni propriora," 35, 76, 1631113; and the sonnet, 29–30, 37, 74-5, 162n5, 16on1o, 17onnn&12; and "such," 83-5, 88, 92, 93; and table-talk, 36; unacknowledged editing, 42; Wordsworth's addresses to, 66, 100 WORKS - "Absence: A Farewell Ode on Quitting School," 89; "Address to a Young Jack-Ass," 34; Biographia Literaria, 2–9, 33-5, 37, 73, 75, 77, 80, 91, 126, 163n13, 17on11, 171n16, 172nn19&22, 179n16; Christabel, 82; "Complaint of Ninathoma," 29; Complete Poetical Works, 73; "Constancy to an Ideal Object," 84; "Dejection: An Ode," 8-9, 34, 57-8, 73, 78, 81, 90; "Destiny of Nations," 165n29; "Dura Navis," 79-80; "Easter Holidays," 73; "Effusions," 6, 20, 2849, 74, 76, 161n1, 162n5, 165n3o (see also effusion); "The Eolian Harp" ("Effusion xxxv"), 28, 34, 41, 42–9, 76, 84, 91, 165n27; epigraph to "Effusions," 41-4; epigraph to "Epistles," 38; "Epitaph," 40, 72; "Fears in Solitude," 35; "Frost at Midnight," 9, 34, 40, 82; "Hymn before Sunrise, in the Vale of Chamouni," 73; "The Kiss" ("Effusion xxviii"), 44, 165n3o; "Kisses"

("Effusion xxvi"), 162n7; "Kubla Khan," 34, 56; Lay Sermons, 171n15; "Lewti," 172n18; Marginalia, 176n17; "Monody on a Tea-Kettle," 89; "My heart has thank'd thee, BOWLES!" ("Effusion I"), 41, 42-3; "The Nightingale," 28, 34, 80, 159n21; Notebooks, 90, 163n12; "On a Ruined House in a Romantic Country," 80; "On Receiving a Letter Informing Me of the Birth of a Son," 34; "On receiving an Account that his Only Sister's Death was Inevitable," 89; Poems (1803), 74, 173n29; Poems on Various Subjects, 28–49, 73, 74, 161n1, 173n29; preface to Poems (1797), 168n4; preface to Poems on Various Subjects, 29–31, 36, 37-8, 75, 169n1o; "Progress of Vice," 90; "Reflections On Having Left A Place of Retirement," 34-5, 84; reviews of Poems on Various Subjects, 30, 73; "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," 82, 172n23; "The Rose," 162n7; Shakespearean Criticism, 14, 71, 168n3; "Songs of the Pixies," 81, 172n22; "Sonnet: On Quitting School for College," 89; "Sonnet: To the River Otter," 75, 89, 17on11; "Sonnets Attempted in the Manner of Contemporary Writers," 172n22; Sonnets from Various

216 Index Authors, 30, 42, 75, lyonn; Table Talk, 163n13, 178n9; "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison," 34; "To an Infant" ("Effusion xxxiv"), 39-40, 84; "To Kosciusco" ("Effusion viii"), 39; "To the Rev. George Coleridge," 84; "To Schiller," 29; "To the Autumnal Moon" ("Effusion xviii"), 29, 71-93, 161n2, 17on15; "To the Evening Star," 172n21; "To the Nightingale" ("Effusion xxiii"), 43; "To William Wordsworth," 34, 48, 83, 90, 171n15 collaboration, 172n18 Collins, William, 31, 162n7; "Ode to Evening," 81; "Ode to Fear," 90; "The Passions: An Ode for Music," 45 commentary, 137-41, 152, 183n5 The Commitments, xi commonplace, 97, 104, 109, 111, 137. See also topos conative function, 12 concealment, in rhetoric, 38, 96–7; in Wordsworth, 152 conceit, 39, 40, 43, 45, 46, 91, 147 confirmation, 40, 66. See also witness; corroboration consciousness, 22, 63, 90, 93, 135, 150; in nature, 22, 150 Constable, John, no contest, singing, 23-4 conversation poems. See conversation poems under Coleridge

Cooke, Michael G., 184n20, 185n22 Cooksons, of Kendal, 111 correspondence, 32, 35, 36, 38, 75 corroboration, 21, 66, 68. See also confirmation; witness Cowley, Abraham, 11214, 176n17 Cowper, William, 149, 189n33 Crabbe, George, 24 Crawford, Rachel, 184n20 criticism, 11, 97, 115, 13541, 151, 154; as commentary, 137-9, 152; and conversation, 140, 141, 143, 154; vs creation, 137-40; defence of, 136; as form, 136-41 Crockett, Bryan, 7 Cromwell, Oliver, 112-13 Culler, Jonathan, 11, 1213, 14, 17-20, 51, 155nn1&2, 157n17 cummings, e.e., 181n25 Curran, Stuart, 162n5, 17on11, 171n15 Curtis, Jared, 109, 112, 19on4o Curtius, Ernst Robert, 95, 169n5, 179n17 Danby, John E, 159n21 Dante Alighieri, 192n42; Inferno, canto 13, 150; "parole e sangue," 1501 Daphne, 148, 190n39 Day, Angel, 12, 15, 23 Day, Henry N., 156n9 dea abscondita, 82, 88 death, 24, 27, 85, 98–9, 131, 146 de Certeau, Michel, 117, 176n1 deconstruction, 20, 36, 122, 124, 137, 161n29, 178n12 decorum, 37, 138, 154

defence, rhetorical, 8, 10, 101, 103; of criticism, 136; of egotism, 38; psychoanalytic, 3, 115, 120 deferred action (Nachtraglichkeit), 145, 153, 185n21 deliberative rhetoric, 15, 77, 101 de Man, Paul, xi, 4, 8, 16, 17, 18, 19, 26, 115, 1234, 129, 136, 156n13, 171n15, 178n11, 179n16 Demosthenes, 13 denial, 120, 121-2, 124, 125, 133 depth: vs surface, 115-34 De Quincey, Thomas, 234, 47, 91, 175n6 Derrida, Jacques, 11, 16, 18, 26, 125, 137, 158n18, 161n29, 179n16 de Selincourt, Ernest, 54, 59, 133, 166n4, 189n35 detour, 9, 10, 16, 119 diachronic structure, 115 dialectic, 3, 23, 121 dialogue, 21, 23, 27, 40, 150 diatyposis, 94 Dickstein, Morris, 159n21 diction, 7, 9, 46, 61, 73, 77,95 difference, 4-6, 10, 48, 49, 123, 133, 158n18, 173n28; and deconstruction, 20, 26, 36, 83, 97, 125; and reading, 45; and repetition, 83, 103, 137 digression, 9 discovery (and selfdiscovery), 74–6, 83, 88, 90–3, 123. See also genre disfiguration, 124 display (and self-display), 6, 74, 78, 79, 83, 171n17 diversion of address, 8, 13, 14, 16, 19, 25, 90

217 Index Dodona, 149, 189n34 Donne, John, 79; Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, 79; "The Flea," 45 Douglas, Isle of Man, 104, 109, no, 176n12 Douglas, Wallace W., 184n2O Dowling, William C., 177n5 Drayton, Michael, 106–7, 175n9 Druids, 148, 16on23 Dryden, John, xi, 47-8; Essay of Dramatic Poesy, 97; "Song for St Cecilia's Day," 47; translation of Virgil, 177n8 ears, 20, 154, 157n16 Echo, 27. See also Narcissus echo, 25-7, 56, 58, 62, 65, 67-8, 152, 168n11 ecphonesis, 12, 16, 18, 19, 72, 73, 90, 156n11 Edwards, Thomas, 171n15 effusion, 3, 6, 28–49, 76, 93, 102, 161n4, 162n5, 189n36; definitions of, 30, 33, 35; vs epistle, 38; as "lady's" genre, 49; sample list of, 165n3o; sentiments by military men, 49; and sonnet, 29-30. See also under Coleridge effusis habenis, 33 effusiveness, 32, 42, 72, 73 egotism. See under Coleridge egotistical sublime. See sublime Eilenberg, Susan, 188n32 ekphrasis, 132, 148 elegy, 22, 26 Eliot, T.S., 56 Ellis, David, 159n21

embarrassment, 11, 14, 51, 155n1, 157n17 emotion, 14, 28, 29, 49, 64, 73, 84, 86, 88, 95 encomium, 79 Endymion, 65 energeia, 79 Engell, James, and W. Jackson Bate, 163n13, 168n4, 171n16 enthusiasm, 71, 72, 73, 84, 90,91 epic, 37, 73, 101, 122, 151, 164n15, 167n8 epic simile, 86, 126–7, 179n17. See also simile epideictic, branch of rhetoric, 6, 15, 74, 76, 77, 79, 83, 84, 88, 91, 168n5, 169n8, 171n17 epideixis, 74, 78–9 epiphora, 68 epistle, 35, 38, 48, 107, 109; literary epistle, 35. See also letters; verse epistle epistolary writing. See epistle epistrophe, 132 epitaph, 21, 23, 27, 40, 61, 69, 85, 98, 110, 129, 132, 135, 146, 147, 148, 150, 153, 154, 16on26, 183n15 epode, 8 Erdman, David Y, 80, 162n5, 172n19 erotesis, 45, 100–1. See also rhetorical question eroticism: in Coleridge's "Eolian Harp" and "The Kiss," 44-6; in Wordsworth's "Nutting," 145-6, 148, 184n2o; in Wordsworth's Prelude, book 2, 60–2; in Wordsworth's "Westminster Bridge," 60–1 Erskine-Hill, Howard, 191n40

ethics, 42, 45 Euripides, 148 Eve, in Paradise Lost, 24, 81, 101, 144, 148 Evelyn, John, 148, 188n32 Everest, Kelvin, 17on12, 171n15 exclamatio, exclamation, 12,14, 16, 17, 18, 22, 40, 64, 71-3, 84, 88, 90, 91, 92, 168n2. See also Ah! under Coleridge exemplum, 130, 146 exhibition. See display ex machina, 9 exordium, 13 explication de texte, 137 expression, 3, 6, 36, 40, 42, 71, 73, 90, 91, 92, 93, 95, 168n2, 189n36 fable, pagan, 7, 8 fancy, 91, 147 Farish, Charles, 58 Fenner, Dudley, 12, 15 Fenwick, Isabella, notes to. See Fenwick notes under Wordsworth, William Ferguson, Frances, 142, 159n21 Ferry, David, 61, 159n21, 16on27, 184n2O, 185n24 figures of rhetoric, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11-13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 33, 40, 48, 50, 55, 58, 64, 65, 66, 68, 72, 84, 92, 94-7, 115, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 132, 135, 150, 154. See also individual entries figures of speech. See figures of rhetoric Findlay, L.M., 155n2 Fingal, ghost of, no Fish, Stanley, 117, 120–1, 177n4 Fletcher, Angus, 172n23 Fliess, Wilhelm, 176n2 Fogle, Richard Harter, 163n14, 165n26

218 Index folklore, 9, 151 forensic rhetoric, 3, 12,13, 15, 21, 23, 40, 77 form, 76, 91, 136; and criticism, 136-41; and rhetoric, 20, 92 fragment, 28, 130, 132 Fraunce, Abraham, 12, 156n7 Frazer, James George, 148, 187n31 French, Roberts W., 144 Freud, Sigmund, 3, 6, 10, 87-8, 93, 115-34, 145, 151, 172n2o, 176nn1&2, 179n14; "The Aetiology of Hysteria," 11521, 177n3, 179n15; Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 87–8, 128, 19on39; "fort-da" game, 87–8; The Interpretation of Dreams, 177n3; Nachtraglichkeit, 145, 153; "Recollecting, Repeating, and Working Through," 18on2o; "Repression," 3, 10; Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 1456, 177n3. See also psychoanalysis Frosch, Thomas R., 159n21 Frost, Robert, 26, 27, 1489, 161n29 Fruman, Norman, 171n15, 172n2o, 173n27 Fry, Paul H., 16, 155n4, 156n6, 157n14, 158n19 Frye, Northrop, 4, 88, 139 Galperin, William H., 159n21 Garber, Frederick, 1841120 Genesis, 43, 150, 186n25 gender, 165n30 genius, 10, 74, 93, 148, 185n23 genius loci, xi, 64, 146

genre, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 20, 28, 30–1, 35, 36, 37, 42, 44, 48, 49, 63, 72, 76, 80, 91, 93, 107, 132, 142, 147, 152, 157n14, 172n19; evening star, 80, 172n21; and gentleness, 142; and geography, 105; of invention or discovery, 92; moon poem, 80–2; of surmise, 42, 91-3; tour as, 104 gentility, 140–1, 152, 183n9 gentlemanliness, 140 gentlemanly style, 139– 41, 154 gentleness, 141, 142, 145, 146, 147, 152, 153, 154, 186n27; and genre, 142; of heart, 145, 146, 147, 152, 153, 154; and interpretation, 152-3; and style, 147 gentle hand, 146, 147, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154 gentle reader, 139, 142, 152 genus sermonis, 33-4, 35, 76 geography, 56, 64, 105, 109, 114 georgic, 107, 122 Gerard, Albert S., 162n4 ghostliness, 146–52. See also haunted figures; "Nutting" under Wordsworth, William; trees Giamatti, A. Bartlett, 192n41 Gibbons, Thomas, 15-16, 18 Gilbert, Allan H., 106 Gill, Stephen, 175115 Gillham, D.G., 159n21, 16on27 Gilpin, William, 188n32 Ginsberg, David, 169n5 Glen, Heather, 159n21, 184n2o

Godfrey of Bulloigne (Gemsalemme Liberata). See Tasso, Torquato Golden Bough. See Frazer, James George Gomme, A.H., 159n21 Gothic, 151, 172n18 grammar, 36, 63-5, 84, 140 Graver, Bruce E., 189n35 Gray, Thomas: "Elegy written in a Country Churchyard," 27; "Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College," 89 "greater Romantic lyric," 20, 75. See also Abrams, M.H. "green" Romanticism, 100–3, 148 Greenblatt, Stephen, 124, 125 Greene, Graham, 115, 181n22 Greene, Robert, 179n16 Griffin, Robert J., 6 Grob, Alan, 185n24 guilt, 22, 24, 37, 69, 142, 150, 153; guilty vs pious hands, 149-50, 154 habeas corpus, 21, 123 Hagstrum, Jean H., 153, 167n8, 191n41 hands, 25; gentle hand, 146-7, 150–4; guilty vs pious hands, 149–50, 154 Haney, David P., 159n22 harangue of the troops, 101 Harding, Anthony John, 6, 188n31 Hardison, O.B., Jr, 169n5 Hardy, Thomas, 123 harp, 41-8; as instrument, 41-2; as topos, 42-4 Hartman, Geoffrey H., xi, 7-8, 23, 80, 91-2, 131,

219 Index 134, 135–54, 159nn20&21, 16on27, 165n28, 167n7, 172n21, 173n3O, 182n4, 183n12, 185n23, 186nn26&29, 188n33; apocalypse vs akedah, 135, 184n19; and apology for criticism, 136; and close reading, 135-41; commentary, 137-41, 152, 183n5; and conversation, 140, 141, 143, 154; conversational "teatotaling," 139–41; critical style, 138-41; criticism and culture, 138–41, 183n8; "friendship style" of criticism, 139, 154; genius loci, xi; gentlemanly discourse, 139-41, 154; "halted traveler," 147; history of criticism, 138–41; interpretation, 91; method, 137–9; performance of criticism, 136–7, 182n4; and prolepsis, 135; theory, 136– 8; and "westering," 135, 182n2; "words and wounds," 151; and Yale School, 137 haunted figures, 10, 146– 7, 149, 151, 152, 154 Havens, Raymond Dexter, 148, 169n9, 187n3o Hayden, Donald E., 174n1 Hearn, Lafcadio, 169n6 Heidegger, Martin, 137 Heinzelman, Kurt, 6, 179n14 Hellenism, Romantic, 5 hendiadys, 150 hermeneutics, 56, 85, 92, 115, 116, 121, 123, 131, 132, 136; and medical diagnostics, 118; and psychoanalysis, 115-17, 121, 131

Hermogenes, 16 Hertz, Neil, 174n1, iSonig heuresis, 74, 88 Hieatt, Constance B.; 19on39 hintertext, 45, 82, 101, 113, 132, 143, 151 historicism, 124. See also new historicism history, 3, 115-34, 151; classical, 125; "history of a Poet's mind," 133; literary, 4, 6, 28, 29, 99, 137, 140, 142-3, 154; presence vs absence, 123, 178n1o; of style, 6; and textuality, 11634 Hodgson, John A., 191n40 Holman, C. Hugh, and William Harmon, 156nn1o&12 Holmes, John, 16 Holmes, Richard, 87, 1731n27 Homans, Margaret, 184n2o Homer, 92 homology, 6 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 90 Horace, 35, 38–9, 48; Ars Poetica, 164n15; Epistles (Epistulae), 38, 164nn14&15, 165n2o; Sermones (or Satires), 35, 38, 163nn13&14, 165n2O Hoskins, John, 12, 14, 15, 16, 73, 156nn6&8 House, Humphry, 172n23 Hunt, Lynn, 178n13 Hunter, Kathryn Montgomery, 118 Hutchinson, Henry, 105, 109, 175n7 Hutchinson, Joanna, 105, 175n7, 176n13 Hutchinson, Mary, 185n23 Hutchinson, Sara, 184n17 Huxley, Aldous, 159n21

hymn, 72, 157n14; to the gods, 74 hyperbaton, 94 hyperbole, 31, 94 hysteria, 115-20, 177n3 icon, 63 ideology, 123; Romantic, 6 imagination, 4, 24, 33, 48, 57, 61, 65, 75, 77, 84, 91, 103, 106, 107, no, 116, 121,

129,

130,

134;

attributive effect of, 78; vs nature, 23, 121 impediment, 126–7, 179n18 imperative, 101, 146 index, 63, 123, 132, 134 influence, 6, 143-54; anxiety of, 5, 143 innerness, 7 inscription, in nature, 147, 152 instinct, 10, 87 instruction, 146 intentional structure, 136 interpellation, 16, 72, 74 interpretation, 4, 6, 45, 55–6, 62, 72, 73, 74, 77, 85, 88, 91, 92, 93, 104, 115, 117, 118, 120, 123, 124, 127-32, 134, 135-8, 140, 142-3, 145, 151-4; first rule of, 152 interrogation, 91, 92, 94, 101 interruption, 15, 16, 18, 20 intersubjectivity, 14-15, 23 intertextuality, 4, 6, 14, 21, 24, 33, 35, 42, 43, 47-8, 58, 69, 70, 100, no, 137, 142-4, 146, 151 inventio (invention), 29, 74, 75, 76, 79, 84, 88, 90, 91-2, 107, 169n5. See also under genre invocation, 22, 27, 46, 68, 70,73 lona, 114 irony, 38, 41, 48, 86, 97, 124

22O Index Isle of Man, 104-14. See also Mona iterability, 182n4 Jackson, H.J., 165n19 Jackson, J.R. de J., 161n1, 162n6, 165n30 Jacobs, Carol, 95 Jacobus, Mary, 11, 155n1, 159n21, 184n20 Jakobson, Roman, 12, 723 Jameson, Fredric, 177n5 Jamieson, Alexander, 156n9 Jarvis, Robin, 174n1 Jeffrey, Francis, 24 Johnson, Barbara, 155n1 Johnson, Karl R., 159n21 Johnson, Lee M., 159n19 Johnson, Samuel, 42, 91 Johnston, Kenneth R., 81, 159n21, 178n12 Jones, Gregory, 184n2O, 191n41 Jones, John, 159n21 Joseph, Sister Miriam, 16 Jung, C.G., 3 Keats, John, 5, 18, 43, 76, 90, 92-3, 149, 174n1, 188n33 Kelley, Theresa M., 189n37 Kennedy, George A., 97, 169n5 Ketcham, Carl H., 161n4 Kinsley, James, 57 Klee, Paul, 136 Knapp, Steven, 171n15 Kneale, J. Douglas, 68, 16on26, 179n17, 183nn7&15, 186n28 Lacan, Jacques, 133, 176m, 179n14, 181n23 Lake Nemi (Speculum Dianae), 148, 187n31 Lamb, Charles, 36, 161n1, 163n1o, 163n13, 165n19

Langhorne, John, 30–5, 38, 49, 162nn7&9 LaPlanche, J., and J.-B. Pontalis, 185n21 Larkin, Peter, 182n1 Larkin, Philip, 81, 140 letters, 31-2, 36, 102, 165n19; familiar, 35, 164n18. See also epistle Levinson, Marjorie, 124, 178n12, 185n23 liber naturae. See book of nature Lindenberger, Herbert, 159n21 listening, 9, 27, 38, 45 Lister, Frances, 184n16 Liu, Alan, 116, 121-5, 133, 134, 177nn6&7, 179n14 locodescription, 9, 60, 77, 83, 85, 86, 107 Logan, Sister Eugenia, 84, 165n29 logocentrism, 95, 117, 125 Longinus, 6, 14, 94-103, 158n17, 174n1. See also sublime Lonsdale, Lord, 105 Lonsdale, Roger Loughrigg Tarn, 148, 187n31. See also Lake Nemi love, 58–9, 60–2, 65-7, 6970, 167n8 Lovejoy, Arthur O., 4 Lukits, Steven, 159n21 lyric, 11, 17, 18, 28, 44, 73 MacNeill, Hector, 44 Macpherson, James, 114 Magnuson, Paul, 29, 161n2, 165n22 Mahony, Patrick J., 117 Man, Isle of. See Isle of Man Manannan, no Manx poems. See under Wordsworth, William Mandelbaum, Allen, 163n11

Manning, Peter J., 175n4 Marengo, 134, 181n25 Marx, Karl, 121, 177n5, 179n14 Mathews, William, 191n4o Matlak, Richard E., 6, 165n26 Maxwell, J.C., 54 Mays, J.C.C., 171n15 McConnell, Frank, 159n21, 16on27 McFarland, Thomas, 171n15 mediation, 56, 62, 133 Medusa, 181n25 memorials, 104 memory, 41, 47, 62, 63, 68, 115, 119-20, 128, 129, 134, 147, 149 metamorphosis, 142-54, 189n34 metaphor, 60, 68, 85, 94, 96 metaphysical rhetoric, 91 metatext, 62 method, methodology, 4, 115, 117, 119-20, 124, 130, 135, 136, 137–9 metonymy, 42 Miles, Josephine, 66 Mileur, Jean-Pierre, 44 Mill, John Stuart, 34, 96, 157n17. See also rhetoric Miller, J. Hillis, 61 Milton, John, 3, 35, 46, 48, 73, 84, 91-2, loo–1i, 106, 107, 141, 143-6, 148, 149, 16on23, 161n29, 18on18, 183n15, 188n33; appearance of Satan, 57, 108, 18on18; Areopagitica, 144, 145-6; "Comus," 31; "Lycidas," 20, 41, 42, 46, 48, 64, 84, 91, 106, 16on23, 165nn23&24; Paradise Lost, 24, 35, 43, 57, 73, 81, 92, 93, 100-1, no, 144, 148, 186n25; Reason of Church

221 Index Government, 164n16; Variorum, 106 mimesis, 25, 26, 27 mind, 9, 23, 59-60, 74, 85, 131, 133, 134 minstrel figure, 58 mis de cote, 3, 10 mise en abyme, 58, 128, 137 misprision, 41, 45 misreading, 41 Modiano, Raimonda, 17on11 Mona, 104, 106–7, 108, 109, 112, 175n10. See also Anglesey, Isle of; Isle of Man Monk, Samuel H., 95 monody, 37, 42 moon imagery, 57-8, 645, 74–93, 171n16, 172n18, 172n23 Moorman, Mary, 109 moral issues, 7, 139 moralizing nature, 75-7, 79, 83, 85, 87, 91, 17on14 Morkan, Joel, 159n21 Morris, Edward P., 164n15 Morton, Lionel, 159n21 Murray, Roger N., 159n21 muses, 46, 107 music, 24, 25, 27, 42, 43, 45-7 mutability, 111 muteness, 22, 24, 26, 27, 150, 153. See also voice myth, mythology, 5, 7, 8, 48, 64, 99, 106, no, 120, 134 Nachdrangen. See afterpressure Nachtraglichkeit. See deferred action name, 54-5, 63, 64, 148, 152; nickname, 64; proper, 54-5 Napoleon, 124, 134, 181n25

Narcissus, 27; narcissistic moment, 128. See also Echo narrative, 25, 26, 116, 118, 146 nature, 6, 9, 20, 21-2, 24, 47, 59-61, 65-70, 77, 84, 85, 92, 93, 95, 100– 3, 111, 113, 121-3, 129, 131, 132, 133, 134, 142, 149, 17on13; communion with, 24; vs imagination, 23, 121; love of, 59-61, 65-6, 69-70; sublime in, 98; violation of, 24, 142, 145, 153-4; voice of, 25, 27, 149 nature-consciousness, 147-52 nature-inscription, 147, 152 nature-worship, 24 neoclassicism, 5, 6, 51, 97 new historicism, 124, 178n13 Nicolson, Marjorie Hope nocturne, 81 nodal point, 4, 119, 128 O, as exclamation, 16–17 occupatio (preterition), 3, 8, 9, 182n1 occupation, 5, 7, 8 ode, 8, 11, 16, 18, 19, 35, 72, 156n13; and "Tintern Abbey," 20, 158n19 œuvre, 6 onomatopoeia, 26 Onorato, Richard J., 69, 159n21 oratory, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 34, 35, 96, 97, 169n8 Orfeo: See Hieatt, Constance B. Orlando, 191n41 Orpheus, 45, 47-8 Osborn, Robert, 192n43 other, otherness, 4, 6, 7, 9, 10, 137

outcrie (or outcry), 12, 16, 72, 78, 83, 88, 92, 93, 156n11 overdetermination, 22, 41, 42, 58, 64, 68, 70, 119, 127, 132, 146 Ovid, 5, 148, 151, 181n25, 188n32, 19on39 Owen, W.J.B., 23, 167n4 Oxford English Dictionary, 65,88 Oxford Guide to Writing, 167n6 oxymoron, 45 Paglia, Camille, 46-7 palimpsest, 62, 115, 119, 120, 122, 129 palindrome, 68, 128 panegyric, 79, 169n8 paparazzi, 82-3 paradox, 91, 96–7, 99, 117, 125, 140 parallelism, 79, 88 parapraxis, 41 Parker, Alan, xi Parker, Patricia, 155n1 Parker, Reeve, 48, 84, 93, 171n15 Parrish, Stephen Maxfield, 185n22 passion, 14, 16, 21, 22, 33, 40, 42, 51-2, 59, 60, 62, 64, 65, 68, 69, 72, 90, 93, 96, 98, 101 pastoral, 23-4, 58, 107, 122, 144 pastoral elegy, 20 pathetic fallacy, 22, 84 pathos, 9, 40, 91, 98 Patterson, Annabel M., 16, 155n5 Patrides, C.A., 42 Peacham, Henry, 12, 1415, 16, 18, 72, 158n17 Pegasus, 134, 181n25 Peirce, C.S., 63 peripatetic, 104, 174n1 periphrasis, 94 Perkins, David, 93, 183n13, 185nn23&24

222 Index personification, 6, 14, 21, 22, 23, 25, 27, 50–70, 73, 74, 79, 85–6, 102, 113, 142, 169n9, 173n26; Wordsworth's supposed rejection of, 7, 14, 50–2. See also prosopopoeia persuasion, 6, 13, 52, 94103, 120-1. See also transport Petrarch, 33-4, 66, 163n12 Pharr, Clyde, 191n40 phatic function, 72 Philodemus, 155n3 Phinney, A.W., 159n21 picturesque, 132, 188n32 Pinion, F.B., 176n12 Pipkin, James W., 188n31 pizzicato, 46 Plug, Jan, 9 poetic diction, eighteenthcentury, 3 poetics, 17, 19, 103; classical, 51; of encounter, 131 Pollard, Hugh M., 174n2, 176n15 Polydorus (Aeneid, book 3), 149–50, 189n36; in Ovid, 19on39 polyptoton, 33, 94 Pope, Alexander, 6, 47 possession, 61, 64 possessive construction, 55, 61, 63-4, 167n6 possessiveness, 61, 64-5, 167n7 poststructuralism, 123, 124, 137 prediction, 135, 182n1 preromanticism, 28, 45, 80, 17on14 Preston, William, 17on12 preterition. See occupatio pre-text, 14, 17, 18, 26, 100 Price, Cecil, 164n18 Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 156nn1o&12

progress of poesy, 136 prophecy, 113-14 prolepsis, 26, 135, 153, 154, iSani Proserpina, 100–1 prosopopoeia, 6, 7, 12, 13-14, 18, 19, 21, 25, 50–70, 85–6, 103, 142, 156n13, 166n1, 168n11, 173n26, 188n32; animating power of, 23, 25, 27, 74, 142; Wordsworth's supposed rejection of, 7, 14, 50–2. See also personification prosthesis, rhetorical, 90 psychoanalysis, 3, 4, 87, 115-34, 182n3, 186n26; and hermeneutics, 115, 123; as depth, 115-21; as method, 117, 119–20, 130; origins of, 119-20. See also Freud punning, 102 Puttenham, George, 12, 15, 72, 156n11 putting aside, 3, 4, 10, 23 Pye, Henry James, 161n1 quest-romance, 4, 142 Quintilian, 12, 13, 16, 31, 33, 135, 156n6, 159n22, 169nn5&8, 182n1 Ragland-Sullivan, Ellie, 176n1 Ragussis, Michael, 159n21 Rajan, Balachandra, 165n23 Rajan, Tilottama, 159n21, 16on27 Ramsey, Isle of Man, 104, 109 readers, 9, 34, 36, 37, 41, 50-2, 138–41, 144, 147, 152 reading, 20, 27, 45, 55-6, 58, 62, 84, 92-3, 115, 116, 121, 127, 128, 133, 134, 135-54. See also close reading; gentle

reader; scene of reading; unreadability reason, 4 Reed, Arden, 172n23 Reed, Mark L., 142, 191n4o, 192n42 referentiality, 54-5 reflexivity, 39, 56, 58, 127, 136 Regueiro, Helen, 159n21 Rehder, Robert, 159n21 repetition, 4, 5, 26, 27, 58, 68, 69, 79, 82, 83, 103, 116–17, 120–1, 125, 128– 30, 132, 134, 137, 147, 153; "compulsion to repeat," 128, 190n39; echolalic, 26 repetition-with-adifference, 4, 25, 101, 103 representation, 128, 137 repression, 3, 4, 6, 8, 10, 11, 115, 120, 122, 125, 128, 152 resistance, 102-3, 130 response, 22, 25–6, 27 responsibility, 22, 153 reversal, 21, 25, 150, 153 rhetoric, 3, 5, 6, 8, 9, 12, 13, 14-15, 29–30, 32, 33, 42, 44, 48, 50–3, 65, 68, 69, 71, 72, 73, 74, 77, 78, 84, 90, 91-2, 94-7, 100– 3, no, 113-14, 117, 119, 120–1, 122,

128,

131,

124,

144,

125,

146,

171n17, 172n2o; and form, 20, 45, 92; and logic, 8, 33; and passion, 14, 16, 22, 40, 512, 59, 65, 72, 90, 168n3; "heard" vs "overheard," 34. See also Mill, John Stuart Rhetorica ad Herennium, 13, 156n5 rhetorical figures. See figures of rhetoric rhetorical question, 45, 100–1. See also erotesis

223 Index rhetorical schemes, 12, 15, 16, 79, 94, 129 rhetorical structure, 8, 18, 25, 38, 56, 58, 67-8, 79, 84,86 rhetorical tradition, 4 rhyme scheme, 100, 169n7 Richards, I.A., 126, 165n28 ridiculous, the, 14 Riffaterre, Michael, 16, 18, 19–20, 147, 157n15 Rimbaud, Arthur, 7 Robinson, Henry Crabb, 104, 109, 114, 176n16 Robinson, Jeffrey C., 174m [Rollins], 156n9 romance, 88, 107, 134, 148, 151, 153 Romantic Hellenism, 5 Romanticism, 3–6, 10, 80, 93, 97, 117, 157n17; "green," 100–3, 148; vs classicism, 3-6, 10, 97, 152, 154, 186n29 Rosenfield, Lawrence W., 169n5, 171n17 Ross, Marlon B., 184n20 Rowe, M.W., 184n20 Rubenstein, Jill, 47 Rudd, Niall, 164n15 Rushen Abbey, Isle of Man, 104, 176n16 Sabin, Margery, 66, 166n3, 167n8 St Bees School, 105 St Cecilia, 48 Sanborn, Geoffrey, 105, 175n3 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 63, 158n18 Scarfe, Francis, 169n6 scene, 115-34, 144, 179n16; of history, 122, 123, 133; of persuasion, 120–1; primal, 120, 122; of reading, 62, 115, 121, 133; vs symptom, 115-34; theatrical,

179n16. See also depth; surface schemes, rhetorical. See rhetorical schemes Schneider, Ben Ross, Jr, 190n40 Schulz, Max E, 164n17 Scotland, 104, 106, 108, no, 113-14, 174n1, 176n12 Scott, Sir Walter, 105; The Bride of Lammermoor, 167n5; Journal, 175n6; Peveril of the Peak, 105, 175n6 Scott-James, R.A., 97 screen footnote, 9 secrecy, 172n2O self, 9, 128, 131, 150; vs history and nature, 121-3, 129, 133, 134 self-analysis, 116 self-consciousness, 76, 91, 99, 124, 131, 135, 140 self-discovery. See discovery self-display. See display self-reflexiveness, 26 semeion, 115, 118 semiotics, 62-3, 124, 128; medical, 118 sensibility, 74 sentiment, 7, 8, 41, 69 sequaciousness, 47 serenade, 81 sermo, 38, 48 Shakespeare, William, 16, 30, 57, 65, 70, 82, 83, 101, 127, 143-4, 146, 148, 179n16, 183n15; As You Like It, 147, 148, 186n28, 191n41; Hamlet, 135, 144, 152, 185n22; 1 Henry IV, 82; Julius Caesar, 135; King Lear, 57, 144; Measure for Measure, 18on18; Much Ado about Nothing, 18on18; "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun," 158n19;

Richard II, 24, 101; Richard III, 144, 189n36; Romeo and Juliet, 24, 65; Sonnets, 30, 70, 144, 169n7, 179n18; The Taming of the Shrew, 191n41; The Tempest, 148, 186n29; Troilus and Cressida, 184n16; The Winter's Tale, 132 Shakir, Evelyn, 159n21, 16on27 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 4, 5, 17-18, 59, 65-6, 81, 91, 113, 123-4, 129, 157n17, 178n11 Sherry, Richard, 12, 1415, 156n6 Shullenberger, William, 159n21 Shuster, George N., 19 Sidney, Sir Philip, 80 sign, 115 signified, 63, 115 signifier, 63, 115; floating, 61 simile, 76, 77, 84, 86, 90– 1, 92, 171n15; epic simile, 86 sincerity, 31 Smith, Charlotte, 162n5, 171n15; Elegiac Sonnets, 17on11 Smith, John (of Montague Close), 12, 17, 156n8 Snaefell, Isle of Man, 104, 107, 112-14 Snyder, Franklyn Bliss, 66 soliloquy, 34, 82 sonnet, 29-30, 37, 74-5, 162n5, 169n7; and effusion, 29–30; sonnet dedicatory, 157n14; in eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, 169n9; Coleridge's preface on, 30. See also Bowles; Coleridge, Samuel Taylor; Wordsworth, William;

224 Index Shakespeare; Smith, Charlotte; Warton Sotheby, William, 76, 163n13 Spasmodic rhetoric, 72 spectator ab extra, 77, 123, 127, 178n9 Spector, Stephen J., 159n21 Speculum Dianae. See Lake Nemi speech act, 21, 38, 72-3, 161n29 Spenser, Edmund, 145, 150, 189n37; Fradubio in the tree (Faerie Queene, canto 2), 150 Spitzer, Leo, 150 "spots of time." See under Wordsworth, William Sprinker, Michael, 183n6 Staffa. See Cave of Staffa stand, 99 stationing, 86; geographical, 56; locodescriptive, 86, 132 Stevens, Wallace, 135 Stillinger, Jack, 162n4, 165n22 Stirling, John, 156n9 strophe, 8, 20 style, 4, 6, 16, 31-3, 38, 50, 95, 135, 137-41, 147, 151, 152; Coleridge's, 73-4; common vs gentle, 147, 152; critical, 137; eighteenth-century, 3-4, 56, 69-70, 72; Freud's, 117, 120; "friendship style" of criticism, 139, 154; gentle, gentlemanly, 13941, 147, 154; Geoffrey Hartman's, 135-54; mock-heroic, 62; Romantic, 4; simple, 163n1o; "teatotaling," 139-41; Wordsworth's, 50, 55, 69-70, 142-54 sublime, the, 6, 14, 94103, 184n18; egotisti-

cal, 152; natural, 95, 98; as style, 72, 95-6, 98 sublimity, 4, 91, 94-8, 174n1 supplement, 26, 79 surface, vs depth, 115-34 surmise, 42, 91-3 syllepsis, 24 symbol, 63, 171n15 sympathy, 50–70 symptom, 5, 6, 115-34, 176n1; vs scene, 115-34. See also depth; surface symptomatic analysis, 121, 177n5 synchronic structure, 115 Tasso, Torquato, 148, 151, 188n32, 19onn39&40 Tavernier, John, 164n18 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord: Merlin confined in oak tree, 190n39 tenor, 85, 86, 88, 126–7 testimony, 21, 27 textuality, 6, 23, 62-3, 116, 118, 120–1, 123-5, 127, 129, 130–1, 133, 134, 153, 154 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 152 Thelwall, John, 161n1, 165n27 theory, 17, 20, 71, 115, 119, 123, 124, 137-41, 143; as discourse of the other, 136; foreignness of, 140-1; status of, 136–7 Thomas, D.M., 117 Thompson, T.W., 175n5, 188n32 Thomson, Douglass H., 184n2O, 191n41, 192n44 Thomson, J.A.K., 4 Thomson, James, 45 TLS, 191n4O Todd, .F.M., 176n18 topographical genre, 114, 122

topos, topoi, 4, 5, 8, 22, 24, 29, 34, 58, 59, 74, 76, 78, 90, 97, 98, 101, 10414, 126, 142, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 152, 153, 154; and the topical, 112-14, 124 totemism, 148 touch, 136, 137, 142, 146, 147, 150, 152-3, 154, 186n26; common vs gentle, 147; as interpretation, 152-4; a tree, 147; prohibition against, 147, 186n25 tour, 104, 114, 122, 123, 127, 174n1, 178n9 Townsend, Pete, 46 tradition, 8, 29-30, 48, 49, 74, 99, 147, 154, 187n3o transference, 128, 18on2O transitions of the ode, 8, 20 translation, 17, 98, 99; and the sublime, 99 transport, 85, 94-103. See also persuasion transportation, 102-3 travel, pedestrian, 104, 174n1 trauma, 119, 128, 145 trees, 142, 147-54; enchanted, 142, 147; ghostly, 146-7; Golden Bough, 148; haunted, 149; and lovers, 148; oracular, 149, 186n27, 188nn33&34; sacred, 148, 153, 188n32; spirit in, 147-54; talking, 147, 150, 186n27; touching, 147; as witness, 149; worship of, 148, 187n31; wounded, 14854; writing on, 148 Trilling, Lionel, 117 trope, 6, 12, 15, 16, 18, 19, 20, 21, 27, 43, 46, 51, 55, 58, 59, 78, 84, 85, 86, 92, 93, 94-5, 101, 115, 117, 129, 132, 144, 147

225

Index

turn, 8, 9, 14, 18, 20, 21, 22, 25, 40, 68, 69, 73, 92, 99, 100, 125; of phrase, 3, 6; of voice, 17, 18, 27. See also strophe; antistrophe turne tale, 12, 15, 17 Turner, J.M.W., 148, 187n31 turning aside or away, 34, 9, 10, 14, 17, 20, 27, 67, 70, 99, 113 Tynwald, Isle of Man, 104, 111-13 uncanny, 36, 97, 171n17 unconscious, the, 41, 115, 120 unreadability, 6, 115, 116, 127. See also reading usurpation, 25, 26, 62, 83, 97, 125, 128, 144, 146 Vance, Norman, 5 vehicle, 85, 86, 88, 126–7 ventriloquism, 40 verse epistle, 35, 38, 72, 107, 109, 157n14. See also epistle Vickers, Brian, 169n5 Virgil, 33, 57, 122, 129, 148; Aeneid, 5, 148, 14950, 163n11, 186n28, 188n32, 189n36,191n40; Georgics, 107, 122, 177n8, 178n1o; in the Inferno, 150; "pius manus," 150, 189n36, 192n41; Polydorus episode (Aeneid, book 3), 149-50; "slackened reins," 33 vocative discourse, 12, 14, 19, 21 voice, 6, 11, 12, 18-27, 35, 37, 38, 90, 113, 144, 146, 149-50, 154, 159n20, 16on26, 164n17; blood and, 150–1, 189n36; movement of, 12, 17, 19, 20, 23; of nature, 25,

27, 149; removing of, 12, 18, 21, 22, 25, 26; silencing of, 22, 25,153. See also muteness Wales, 106. See also Anglesey, Isle of Walker, Carol Kyros, 174n1 Walker, John, 16 walking tour. See under Wordsworth, William Wallace, Anne D., 174n1 Ware, Tracy, 183n14 Warminski, Andrzej, 159n21, 16on27 Warren, Robert Penn, 172n23 Warton, Thomas, 161n1, 17on11 Wasserman, Earl R., 75, 17on14 Watson, J.R., 159n21 Webb, Timothy, 5 Wesley, John, 176n15 Wheeler, K.M., 47, 165n25 Wildi, Max, 174n1 Wilkinson, C.S., 174n3 Willey, Basil, 17on13 Williams, R.D., 189n36 Williams, William Carlos, 62 Wilson, Thomas, 17 Wimsatt, William K., Jr, 75 Winander, 54-5, 56, 58, 60–1, 63, 64, 66. See also Boy of Winander Windermere, 54, 61, 63, 64, 102-3 witness, 21, 40, 66, 68, 77, 137, 153. See also audience; confirmation; corroboration The Wizard of Oz, 190n39 Wolf-Man, 120–1 Wolfson, Susan J., 84, 159n21, 161n29, 171n15, 172n24, 184n2o, 191n41 wonder, 74, 82-3, 88 Woof, Robert, 188n32

Wordsworth, Christopher, 112 Wordsworth, Dorothy, 104, 105–6, 187n29; Journal of a Tour in the Isle of Man, 1828, 104, 105, 174n2, 175n7 Wordsworth, John, 104, 105, 109, 114, 175n11, 185n23 Wordsworth, Jonathan, 131, 144, 184n2o, 191n40 Wordsworth, Mary, 176n13 Wordsworth, Richard, 105-6, 191n40 Wordsworth, William, 4, 5, 6–8, 9, 14, 17, 20, 34, 35, 36, 58, 95; addresses to Coleridge, 66, 100; animism, 148, 187n30; apophrades, 143; and Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, 151-2, 19onn39&4o; and Astolpho in "Nutting" MS, 151-2; "aversion from writing," 36; blind Beggar passage, 26, 131; and the Board of Trade, 103; and Boy of Winander: see "There Was a Boy" under OTHER WORKS; as "chameleon" poet, 143; and Christian (and Christian Curwen) family, 105; at Cockermouth, 105, 174n3; Coleridge's analysis of, 35; confronting a grave, 26; death of parents, 69; dream of the Arab, 61; drowned man episode, 26, 61, 129-30; Fenwick notes, 109, 112, 142, 152, 184n18, 191n4o, 192n42; gentleness, 135-54; and "growth of a poet's mind," 116, 130; at

226 Index Hawkshead, 105, 148; letters, 11, 102, 108–9, 175n11; and Longinus, 94-103; Lucy-figure, 184n20, 191n41, 192n44; "man speaking to men," 20, 34, 36, 140; Manx poems, 6, 104-14; and Milton, 3, 100, 101, 106, 108, 143-6, 148-9; and paganism, 7-8, 148; and Polydorus episode in Aeneid, book 3, 149-50; and Reform Bill of 1832, 113-14; selfecho, 100, 134; selfquotation, 100; selfreading, 100, 116; selfreference, 146-7; and Shakespeare, 127, 1434, 146, 148; as spectator ab extra, 123, 127; and Spenser, 145, 150; "spots of time," 26, 127, 142; and sublimity, 94-103; and Tasso, 19on39; transforming influences, 143-54; turn to classicism, 125, 186n29; and Virgil, 149– 50; walking tours, 10414; Wordsworthian Solitary, 111; and Yarrow, 106 "THE PRELUDE" - The Prelude (1799), 53, 55, 64, 65, 68 - The Prelude (1805), 23, 26, 48, 53, 56, 64, 98, 133, 166n4 - The Prelude (1850), 20, 23, 26, 53, 64, 66, 80, 116, 121, 126, 128, 129, 130, 138, 142, 152, 166n4; book 1: 17, 20, 126, 140, 142, 153, 154, 16on28; book 1.567-73 ("The sands of Westmoreland"), 21, 24; book 2: 4, 27, 59-61, 66, 91, 134, 150; book

2.138–97 ("Thou one dear Vale!"), 53-70; book 2.232-65 ("Blest the infant Babe"), 66-7, 68, 69; book 2.276-82 ("props of my affections"), 68-9; book 2.419-51 ("If this be error"), 67-70; book 3: 76, 131, 145, 153, 189n37; book 4: 62, 86, 116; book 4.256–72 ("surface of past time"), 126–30; book 5: 20, 27, 56, 62, 140, 142; book 5.444-51 ("the dead man"), 129; book 5.364-425 ("There was a Boy": see "There Was a Boy"); book 6: 66, 83, 116, 127-8, 144, 150; book 7: 58, 98, 132, 133-4; book 7.619-49 (blind Beggar), 131; book 8: 27, 144, 147, 187n31; book 9: 190n39; book 10: 24, 134; book 11: 66, 100, 168n11; book 12: 25, 90, 127; book 14: 27, 57, 87, 116, 130, 133 OTHER WORKS

- "Address from the Spirit of Cockermouth Castle," 157n14; "Address to Kilchurn Castle," 157n14; "Address to My Infant Daughter Dora," 157n14; Aeneid, translation of, 5, 149–50, 189n35; "Afterthought" (River Duddon), 135–6; "A slumber did my spirit seal," 27; "Beauty and Moonlight," 172n18; The Borderers, 11, 153, 192n43; "Brook! whose society the Poet seeks," 51; "The Danish Boy/' 151,

192n42; "Despond who will - I heard a voice exclaim," 113-14; "Dion," 5; "The Dog An Idyllium," 22; "Effusion, in the Pleasure-ground on the Banks of the Bran, near Dunkeld," 161n4; "Epistle to Sir George Howland Beaumont," 107, 109, 187n31; "Essay, Supplementary" (1815), 83, 176n17; "Evening Voluntaries" ("Who but is pleased to watch the moon on high"), 81, 85; The Excursion, 5, 22, 23, 132, 171n16; "Extempore Effusion upon the Death of James Hogg," 49; Guide through the District of the Lakes, 56– 7, 58, 61-2; "The Haunted Tree," 147, 150; Home at Grasmere, no, 142, 147; "In A Steamboat off Saint Bees' Heads, on the Coast of Cumberland," 109; "Inscriptions Supposed to be Found in and near a Hermit's Cell," 84-5; "In the Channel, Between the Coast of Cumberland and the Isle of Man," 109; "In the Frith of Clyde, Ailsa Crag," 109; "Itinerary Poems" (in Yarrow Revisited), 104-14; "Laodamia," 5; "Lines Written as a School Exercise," 51; "A little onward lend thy guiding hand," 182114; "London, 1802" ("Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour"), 156n12; Lucy poems,

227 Index 132; Lyrical Ballads, 5, 112, 142, 184n17, 185n23, 186n29; Manx poems, 6, 104-14; Morning Post, letters to editor of, 102-3, 188n32; MS. JJ of 1798– 9 Prelude, 23, 26, 160n25,185n22,191n40; MS. w, lines 57-73 (ekphrasis of horse), 130–4, 142, 181n24; "A Night-Piece," 81; "Nuns fret not," 101; "Nutting," 101, 126, 142-54, 183n12, 184n17, 185n24, 187n3o, 189n37, 191n4O, 192n44; "The Oak and The Broom," 186n27; "The Oak of Guernica," 189n34; "Ode: Intimations of Immortality," 90, 99, 148; "Ode to Lycoris," 7–8; "On Entering Douglas Bay," 109; "On the Projected Kendal and Windermere Railway" ("Is then no nook ... ?"), 99-103; "Personal Talk," 189n37; Peter Bell, 134; "Poem ... Addressed to S.T. Coleridge," 20; "Poems Composed or Sug-

gested During a Tour, in the Summer of 1833," 176n14; Poems of 1807, 51, 169n5; Poems on the Naming of Places, 63, 105; Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 7, 14, 50–2, 145, 161n2; 1815 Preface to Poems, 57, 91, 108; Prospectus to The Recluse, 66, 146, 18on21; "Proud were ye, Mountains," 102; "Resolution and Independence," 131; The River Duddon, 135–6; "Simon Lee," 142, 183n11; "The Solitary Reaper," 91, 135; "Steamboats, Viaducts, and Railways," 102; "The Sublime and the Beautiful," 98; "Surprised by joy," 98–9; "There Was a Boy," 11, 12, 20–7, 80, 126, 159n21, 16on25, 179n16 (see also Boy of Winander); "Tintern Abbey," 20, 55, 60, 66, 69, 76, 113, 158n19; "To ——, in her Seventieth Year," 81; "To a Butterfly," 157n14; "To the Daisy," 157n14; "To

H. C.," 157n14; "To Joanna," 157n14; "To M.H.," 101; "To a Skylark," 157n14; "The Tuft of Primroses," 19on38; "Tynwald Hill," 109, 111-12; "Upon Perusing the Foregoing Epistle Thirty Years After its Composition," 187n31; "Vernal Ode," 186n28; "View from the Top of Black Comb," 106, 109; "Westminster Bridge," 60–1; "'With how sad steps, O Moon,'" 80; "Yew-Trees," 147, 149, 189n33; Yarrow Revisited, 104, 106 Wordsworth, William, son of poet, 105 writing, 11, 25, 62, 93, 94, 130, 134, 135, 137, 1478; nature-inscription, 147; elevated (sublime), 94-8 Wu, Duncan, 174n3, 176n17, 188n32, 191n40 Zall, Paul M., 42, 162n5, 17on11 Žižek, Slavoj, 179n14 Zuyder Zee, 8