William Wordsworth: Intensity and Achievement [1 ed.] 9780198112532

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This book seeks to isolate the special factors that generate \\'ordsworth's greatness as a pace. Setting out fr om a dissatisfaction \Yith the current trend towards New I listoricism in \\'ordsworthian criticism, it endea\ours to qualify the social and political bias of that criticism by a renewed assertion of the poetic primac� of the personal and qualitatiYc. Taking ,\larjoric LeYinson's reading of 'Tintern Abbey' as the book's starting point, ,\lcFarland sets forth a different way of approaching the poem, and then identifies 'intensity' as the secret of\Vordsworth's power. The permutations of that quality arc illustrated by careful examinations of'Ruth', of the'spots of time', and of 'Home at Grasmere'. There folio\\. chapters on \Vordsworth's desiccation, which is seen as precisely the absence of intensity; and on the aspiration of The Recluse. ,\lcFarland then discusses the special way in \\·hich \\'ords\rnrth assumed the prophetic stance, which was essential to his poetic vision; and the book concludes with a reading of The Borderers, not as a successful play but as a disposal chamber for the dark matter of \\' ords\Yorth's cosmos. Thomas J\1cFarland has been associated with no fc\\·er than fourteen colleges, universities, and research institutes, including Harvard., Yale, Oxford, and Tubingen. Among his numerous books are Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition (1969) and Romantic Cruxes: The English Essayists and the Spirit ofthe Age (1987), both published by the Clarendon Press.

Jacket illu�tration: "Ti,ntern Abbe�' by Thomas Girtin, watercolour,

179{. Blaclhurn .\luscum and .-\rt Gallery.

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

For Richard Gravil and Molly Lefebure

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH Intensity and Achievement THOMAS McFARLAND

CLARENDON PRESS · OXFORD

Oxford University Press, Walton Street, Oxford ox2. 6or Oxford New York Toronto Delhi Bombay Calcutta Madras Karachi Kuala Lumpur Singapore Hong Kong Tokyo Nairobi Dar es Salaam Cape Town Melbourne Auckland Madrid and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan Oxford is a trade mark of Oxford University Press Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Thomas McFarland I992

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press. Within the UK, exceptions are allowed in respect of any fair dealing for the purpose of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of the licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside these terms and in other countries should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data McFarland, Thomas, 1926William Wordsworth: intensity and achievement I Thomas McFarland. Includes bibliographical references and index. I. Wordsworth, William, 1770-1850-Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. PR5888.M39. 1992 82r'.7-dc20 9I-24622 ISBN o-19-81r253-X

3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by The Ipswich Book Company Ltd, Suffolk

Preface: From the Margins to the Centre As the title of this Preface implies, the present volume has been conceived less as a critical scaffolding raised beside the Words­ worthian edifice, than as a series of sorties mounted from the margins of the Wordsworthian page in poetic history. Forgoing some of the thematic cross-bracing necessary to the design of such a scaffolding, the argument seeks to exert its energy in another way. It lays siege to the text at likely breaching points along the base. Though the book in its most urgent intent aspires to force its way from its marginal starting-point to the very heart of Wordsworth's unique quality as a poet, at other times it makes use of its mar­ ginal freedom to confront auxiliary formations constituted by current modes in Wordsworthian criticism. Indeed, by repeatedly defining itself against one recent reinforcement to that criticism, the book in its initial emphasis not only remains in the margins of Wordsworth's text but might even seem to be contesting them. Ever �nee the word marginalia was coined, apparently by Coleridge in r 80 5, the marginal gloss such as we find in Blake or in the five huge volumes of Coleridge's Marginalia, or, alternat­ ively, as an art form in the margins of the 'Ancient Mariner', has more and more tended toward the status of genre. Vale ry experi­ mented with its possibilities in France, and Derrida has more recently gone still further in that line; while in America Lawrence Lipking, among others, has reflected on the kinds of leverage that the marginal gloss can provide in its relation to a text. A special aspect of the kind of leverage that this volume exerts is that it is gained by resisting the temptation to formulate a conven­ tionally unifying theme for the argument. The book rather tries to prise up important matters simply as they are addressed in textual focus. That textual focus is supplied by the poetry of Wordsworth, and its marginal glosses are the chapters that follow. If one persists in demanding a general theme, however, the book might from its margins seem to declare a most unmarginal concern: it might seem to be 'about' the greatness of Wordsworth as a poet. In a subsidiary sense, it might seem to be unified by a recurring preoccupation with the relation of presence to absence. A briefer version of Chapter 2 was published in 1987 by the

VI

Preface

Rutgers University Press (see the collection by Kenneth Johnston and Gene Ruoff called The Age of William Wordsworth; Critical Essays on the Romantic Tradition). To the extent that it has seemed feasible, I have throughout the volume attempted to refer discussion to-and sometimes even intertwine statements with-aspects of my other published work. I have done so with the aim of fitting the book into a context established by a coherence of effort over a period of years. Lastly, I wish to take this occasion to salute and offer thanks to a select group of scholars who in varying ways have shown themselves to be my friends. Among them I wish especially to record my gratitude to M. H. Abrams and to Walter Jackson Bate. T.M.

Contents Key to Brief Titles Cited r. The Clamour of Absence: Reading and Misreading in Wordsworthian Criticism

x1 r

2. Wordsworth's Hedgerows: The Infrashape of the Longer Romantic Lyric

34

3. I cannot paint What then I was: The Psychological Structure of Wordsworthian Intensity

57

4. Wordsworth's Desiccation

89

5. Perfection Absolute: The Aspiration of The Recluse

98

6. The Prophetic Stance

r2 3

7. The Play of Absence: The Borderers and the Winds of Culture

r 37

Index

165

Key to Brief Titles Cited BRIEF titles that appear in the notes refer either to full citations occurring shortly before or to the editions listed below. Abrams,

Correspondent Breeze Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism

Addison

Biographia Literaria

M.

H. Abrams, The Correspondent Breeze: Essays on English Romanticism (New York:

W.W. Norton, 1984). M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradi­

tion and Revolution in Romantic Literature

(New York: W.W. Norton, 1971). Joseph Addison, The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 4 vols. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria,

or, Biographical Sketches of my Literary Life and Opinions, ed. James Engell andW. Jackson

Blake

Brooks, The Well

Wrought Urn

Bultmann Byron, Letters

Coleridge, Poems

Collected Letters

Criticism

Bate (London: Princeton, NJ: 1983), 2 vols.

Routledge & Kegan Paul; Princeton University Press,

The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David

Erdman, commentary by Harold Bloom, newly revised ed. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univer­ sity of California Press, 1982). Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975 [1947]}. Rudolf Bultmann, History of the Synoptic Tradi­ tion, trans. John Marsh (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963). Byron's Letters & Journals, ed. Leslie A. Mar­ chand (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press; London: John Murray, 1973-1982), 12 vols.

The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912), 2 vols.

Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed.

Earl Leslie Griggs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956-1971), 6 vols. Criticism: The Major Texts, ed. Walter Jackson

X

Danby Darlington Davie De Quincey De Quincey, Recollections Derrida, Grammatologie Dummelow Ferry

Flaubert Fletcher Gill Gilman

Hallam Tennyson

Haydon

Key to Brief Titles Cited Bate (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Com­ pany, 1952). John Danby, The Simple Wordsworth: Studies in the Poems 1797-1807 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971 (1960]). Home at Grasmere: Part First, Book First, of The Recluse, ed. Beth Darlington (Ithaca, NY: Cor­ nell University Press, 1977). Donald Davie, Articulate Energy: An Inquiry into the Syntax of English Poetry (London: Rout­ ledge & Kegan Paul, 1955). The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey, ed. David Masson (Edinburgh: Adam & Charles Black, 1889-90), 14 vols. Thomas De Quincey, Recollections of the Lakes and the Lake Poets, ed. David Wright, Penguin English Library (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970). Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1967). John Roberts Dummelow (ed.), A Commentary to the Holy Bible (New York: Macmillan, 19 58 (1909]). David Ferry, The Limits of Mortality: An Essay on Wordsworth's Major Poems (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1959). Oeuvres completes de Gustave Flaubert, xv (Paris: Louis Conard, 1910). Angus Fletcher, The Prophetic Moment: An Essay on Spenser (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1971). Stephen Gill, William Wordsworth: A Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). Conversations with Nietzsche: A Life in the Words of his Contemporaries, ed. Sander L. Gilman, trans. David J. Parent (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). [Hallam Tennyson], Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir; by His Son (New York: Greenwood Press, 1969 [1897]), 2 vols. The Diary of Benjamin Robert Haydon, ed. Wil­ lard Bissell Pope (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960-3), 5 vols.

Key to Brief Titles Cited Hazlitt

Hazlitt, Letters

Hegel

Heidegger, Einfuhrung in die Metaphysik Heidegger, Was heisst Denken? Holderlin

Hollingdale Horne Hughes Johnston Journals Keats, Letters Kierkegaard, journals

XI

The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, after the edition of A. R. Waller and Arnold Glover (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1930-4), 21 vols. The Letters of William Hazlitt, ed. Herschel Moreland Sikes, assisted by William Hallam Bonner and Gerald Fahey, the Gotham Library (New York: New York University Press, 1978). G. W. F. Hegel: Werke in zwanzig Biinden, Theorie Werkausgabe, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt-am-Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1967-71), 21 vols. Martin Heidegger, Einfuhrung in die Metaphysik (Tiibingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1953). Martin Heidegger, Was heisst Denken? (Tiibin­ gen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1954). Friedrich Holderlin, Siimtliche Werke, Stuttgart Holderlin Edition, commissioned by the Min­ istry of Culture of Baden-Wiirttemberg, ed. Friedrich Beissner (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer Verlag, 1946- ), 7 vols. in 12 to date. R. J. Hollingdale, Nietzsche (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973). R. H. Horne, A New Spirit of the Age (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1844). Glenn Hughes, lmagism & the lmagists: A Study in Modern Poetry (London: Bowes & Bowes, 1960 [1931]). Kenneth R. Johnston, Wordsworth and The Recluse (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 1984). Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, 2nd ed., ed. Mary Moorman (London: Oxford University Press, 1976 (1971]). The Letters of John Keats, 1814-1821, 2nd edn., ed. Hyder Edward Rollins, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, I 96 5 ), 2 vols. The journals of S0ren Kierkegaard, ed. and trans. Alexander Dru (London: Oxford University Press, I 9 5 r ).

Xll

Langbaum, The Poetry of Experience Leavis, Revaluation Letters: The Early Years Letters: The Later Years

Levinson Lives of the Poets

McFarland, Coleridge McFarland, 'Involute and Symbol'

McFarland, Originality McFarland, Romanticism McFarland, Shapes of Culture McFarland, 'Wordsworth on Man'

Key to Brief Titles Cited Robert Langbaum, The Poetry of Experience: The Dramatic Monologue in Modern Literary Tradition (New York: W. W. Norton, 1963 (1957]). F. R. Leavis, Revaluation: Tradition and Devel­ opment in English Poetry (London: Chatto & Windus, 1969 [1936]). The Letters of William and Dorothy Words­ worth: The Early Years, 1787-1805, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, revised by Chester L. Shaver (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967). The Letters of William and Dorothy Words­ worth, III. The Later Years, Part 1: 1821-1828, 2nd ed., ed. Ernest de Selincourt, revised by Alan G. Hill, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978). Marjorie Levinson, Wordsworth's Great Period Poems: Four Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Samuel Johnson, Lives of the English Poets, ed. George Birkbeck Hill (New York: Octagon Books, 1967 [1905]), 3 vols. Thomas McFarland, Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969). Thomas McFarland, 'Involute and Symbol in the Romantic Imagination', Coleridge, Keats and the Imagination: Romanticism and Adam's Dream: Essays in Honor of Walter Jackson Bate, ed. J. Robert Barth and John L. Mahoney (Columbia and London: Unversity of Missouri Press, 1990), 29-57. Thomas McFarland, Originality and Imagination (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Uni­ versity Press, 1985). Thomas McFarland, Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin: Wordsworth: Coleridge and Modal­ ities of Fragmentation (Princeton, NJ: Prince­ ton University Press, 1981). Thomas McFarland, Shapes of Culture (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1987). Thomas McFarland, 'Wordsworth on Man, on Nature, and on Human Life', Studies in Romanticism, 21 (1982), 601-18.

Key to Brief Titles Cited Mann

Memoirs Middle Years, I Middle Years, II

Xlll

Thomas Mann, Last Essays, trans. Richard and Clara Winston and Tania and James Stern (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970 [1958)). Christopher Wordsworth, Memoirs of William Wordsworth (London: EdwardMoxon, 1851), 2 vols.

The Letters of William and Dorothy Words­ worth, II. The Middle Years, Part I: 2nd ed., ed. Ernest de Selincourt, revised by Mary Moorman (Oxford: Claren­ donPress, 1969).

1806-18II,

The Letters of William and Dorothy Words­ worth, Ill. The Middle Years, Part II:

Patmore

2nd ed., ed. Ernest de Selincourt, revised by Mary Moorman and Alan G. Hill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970). Mary Moorman, William Wordsworth: A Bio­ graphy (Oxford: ClarendonPress, 1957-65), 2 vols. Friedrich Nietzsche: Werke in drei Banden, ed. Karl Schlechta (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1954-6), 3 vols. Richard J. Onorato, The Character of the Poet: Wordsworth in 'The Prelude' (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UniversityPress, 1971). The Borderers; by William Wordsworth, ed. Robert Osborn (Ithaca, NY, andLondon: Cor­ nell UniversityPress, 1982). P. G. Patmore, My Friends and Acquaintance:

Perkins

Otley, 1854), 3 vols. David Perkins, The Quest for Permanence: The

Moorman

Nietzsche

Onorato

Osborn

Poetical Works Prelude

1812-1820,

Being Memorials, Mind-Portraits, and Personal Recollections of Deceased Celebrities of the Nineteenth Century (London: Saunders and

Symbolism of Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats

(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965). The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940-9), 5 vols. William Wordsworth, The Prelude: A Parallel Text, ed. J.C. Maxwell (Harmondsworth: Pen­ guin Books, 1971). The numbers in parenthesis

XIV

Prose Puttenham

Ransom, The New Criticism Ransom, The World's Body Robinson Robson Rousseau

Salvesen Sara Coleridge, Memoir Schelling

Schlegel

Shakespearean Criticism Shelley

Key to Brief Titles Cited that usually follow the tide as cited refer to the poem's 1805 and 1850 versions. The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. ]. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 3 vols. George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, in vol. ii of Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. Greg­ ory Smith (London: Oxford University Press, 1950 [1904]). John Crowe Ransom, The New Criticism (Nor­ walk, Conn.: New Directions, 1941). John Crowe Ransom, The World's Body (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1938). Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and their Writ­ ers, ed. Edith]. Morley (New York: AMS Press, 1967), 3 vols. W. W. Robson, Critical Essays (London: Rout­ ledge & Kegan Paul, 1966). CEuvres completes de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond, Editions de la Pleiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1959-69), 4 vols. Christopher Salvesen, The Landscape of Memory: A Study of Wordsworth's Poetry (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965). Memoir and Letters of Sara Coleridge, Edited by her Daughter [Edith Coleridge] (London: Henry S. King, 1873), 2 vols. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph van Schellings siimmtliche Werke, ed. K. F. A. Schelling (Stutt­ gart and Augsburg: Cotta, 1856-61), 14 vols. Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel Ausgabe, ed. Ernest Behler with the assistance of Jean-Jacques Anstett and Hans Eichner (Munich, Paderborn, Vienna: Verlag Ferdinand Schoningh, 1958- ), 35 vols. when completed. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Shakespearean Criti­ cism, ed. Thomas Middleton Raysor, Every­ man's Library (London: J. M. Dent; New York: Duttori, 1960), 2 vols. The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Roger lngpen and Walter E. Peck (New York: Gordian Press, 1965), IO vols.

xv

Key to Brief Titles Cited Sidney Spinoza

Table Talk Tennyson

ed. Albert Feuillerat (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968-70), 4 vols. Spinoza Opera, commissioned by the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences, ed. Carl Gebhardt (Heidelberg: Carl Winters Universitaetsbuch­ handlung, 1972), 4 vols.

The Prose Works of Sir Philip Sidney,

The Table Talk and Omniana of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. T. Ashe (London: George Bell and Sons, 1888). The Complete Poetical Works of Tennyson, ed. W. J. Rolfe, Cambridge Houghton Mifflin, 1898).

edition

(Boston:

ed. Patricia Parker and David Quint (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press,

Theory

Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts,

Trilling

Lionel Trilling, 'Wordsworth and the Rabbis', The Opposing Self, in The Works of Lionel Trilling, Uniform Edition (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977-9), 8 vols. Aileen Ward, john Keats: The Making of a Poet (New York: Viking Press, 1963). Yvor Winters, Forms of Discovery: Critical and

Ward Winters,

Forms of Discovery

Wolff,

Preliminary Discourse

1986).

Historical Essays on the Forms of the Short Poem in English (Denver: Alan Swallow, 1967). Christian von Wolff, Preliminary Discourse on Philosophy in General, trans. Richard Black­ well (Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1963).

I

The Clamour of Absence: Reading and Misreading in Wordsworthian Criticism IN a recent book of mine called Shapes of Culture, it is argued that the forms of culture have been, or are in the process of being, overwhelmed by repetition and exponentially increasing commen­ tary. As a result, it is argued, what used to be forms definingly related to other forms are now increasingly transformed to a congeries of unrelated and self-referential shapes. English studies, for instance, are metamorphosing before our eyes, their forms rapidly giving way to diverse, arbitrary, and unrelated shapes. I shall in this opening chapter attempt to examine more closely the structure of one such shape that newly supplants a part of the formal field of Romantic studies, and, in more particular focus, superimposes itself on Wordsworthian criticism. As representative of the transformation, I shall choose the discussion of 'Tintern Abbey' in Marjorie Levinson's Wordsworth's Great Period Poems. I select this essay not simply as a moment in the history of Wordsworthian criticism but also as a symbol of accelerating cultural change, and I do so with a twofold aim. One part of that aim is to supply, with reference to my own formulations, a more precise delineation of cultural shape; the other is to afford a reader, quite apart from my own distinctions, the opportunity of reflecting on the bounds of relevance in literary discourse and on the decorum of connections in this new departure in criticism. The new departure might rather accurately be described as a literary version of the New Historicism. Or again, which Levinson expressly concedes, as an adaptation of John Barrell's approach to Constable. Put in simplest terms, for the presence traditionally held to be the only proper domain of critical analysis, Levinson attempts to substitute controlling criteria drawn from the domain of absence. Chief among these criteria is Tintern Abbey as an edifice. 'The Abbey', she says, 'is not of course and to belabor a point in the poem. Its iconic and conceptual absence, however-a visible

2

The Clamour of Absence

darkness-precipitates and organizes that script, those features, that we call the text.' 1 Levinson was led to this position by teaching itself. Her analysis of the poem 'arose from my efforts to teach the great period poems to undergraduates, who had not learned not to ask irrelevant and irreverent questions. They wondered why, for example, in a poem commonly known as "Tintern Abbey" and, by its title, very concretely situated with respect to time and place of composition, there is no mention of an abbey, and only the most generalized treatment of occasion. When I reflected on this discrepancy-a logical contradiction between title and text-it occurred to me that the amassing harmonies of Wordsworth's poem effectively muffle the social and political resonance of the date inscribed in the title, of the designated five-year interval, and of the scene of writing.' 2 (It is interesting to note that at the outset Levinson's argument is built upon the sentimentality-it recalls a presidential candidate's invoking his small daughter's advice as a guide for the nation's foreign policy-by which student ignorance is transmuted to a higher wisdom. Also, it is necessary to point out that though the poem is•'comn\only known as "Tintern Abbey"', that is not in fact its title.) Levinson is not the first to notice the absences of the poem, and indeed, she quotes Mary Moorman as the epigraph to the first chapter of her book: It is a curious fact [writes Moorman] that nowhere in the poem does Wordsworth mention Tintem Abbey itself, though we know that he must have admired it, for they returned from Chepstow to spend a second night there. Gilpin describes its condition; the grass in the ruins was kept mown, but it was a dwelling place of beggars and the wretchedly poor. The river was then full of shipping, carrying coal and timber from the forest of Dean. This also Wordsworth does not mention. 3

But what Moorman is content to record as a curious fact (the present author, incidentally, regards it merely as a fact; the word 'curious' supplied by Moorman is nowhere enclosed in that fact), Levinson takes as a deconstructive fulcrum with which to overturn our traditional understanding of the poem. '"Tintern Abbey's" transcendence', she concludes, 'does not confirm the narrator's 1 Levinson, 2. 5.

2

Ibid. 2..

3

Ibid. 14.

The Clamour of Absence

3

discovery of "the thing he loved", it betrays his flight "from something that he dreads". Wordsworth's negotiations with an impossible reality sketch a response one is likely to share, under­ stand, and forgive, if such things need forgiving. I have hoped to bring "Tintern Abbey" back to earth that we may do more than worship it. '4 Specifically, Levinson contends 'that what "Tintern Abbey" presents, as, if not natural values, then undetermined and apolitical ones, define a negative ideal: the escape from cultural values'. 5 The thrust of Levinson's analysis, even if not its declared purpose, is therefore patronizing toward Wordsworth's intent and toward his achievement. 'By narrowing and skewing his field of vision,' she asserts, 'Wordsworth manages to "see into the life of things". At the same time and quite casually, so it seems, he excludes from his field certain conflictual sights and meanings­ roughly, the life of things.' 6 The life of things that Wordsworth leaves out, argues Levinson, is the actual presence of the poor people huddled in the actual edifice of the abbey, as well as the historical and socio-economic situation of the Wye River Valley and the town of Tintern itself. 'Whatever interpretation we choose,' she states, 'we are bound to see that Wordsworth's pastoral prospect is a fragile affair, artfully assembled by acts of exclusion.'7 As these quotations from Levinson accumulate, we are led to wonder about the relative value of what Wordsworth chooses not to put into the poem compared to what he does put in. Levinson takes her licence for affording a greater value to the poem's absences than its presences from the title itself: 'Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, on revisiting the banks of the Wye during a tour, July 13, 1798'. As she says, 'Why Wordsworth composed for his lofty, psychically searching meditation a title so burdened with topical meanings is the question that motivates this essay.' 8 Examining the title, she finds that the date 'July 13, 1798, marked almost to the day the nine-year anniversary of the original Bastille Day (the eight-year anniversary of Wordsworth's first visit to France), and the five-year anniversary of the murder of Marat, also the date of Wordsworth's first visit to Tintern Abbey.'9 Is the title, then, merely a gigantic parapractic invitation to deconstruc• Ibid. 5 5. ' Ibid. 32..

Ibid. 16. • Ibid. 16.

5

• Ibid. 24-5. • Ibid.

4

The Clamour of Absence

tion? The answer to that question must needs depend on what we accept as the logical relevance of such observations. It is impressive that the date is the fifth anniversary of Marat's murder, but then what do we make of the fact that it was Robespierre's, not Marat's, death that sent Wordsworth into paroxysms of joy and thankful­ ness? 10 That 13 July 1798 marked almost to the day the nine-year anniversary of the original Bastille Day is also intriguing, but it would have been vastly, even exponentially, more intriguing had that Bastille moment actually been 13 July, and not, forever and eternally, 14 July. To what extent does a near miss qualify for parapractic use? And is nine years as good as ten? Even more, would we not be better convinced could we show that in fact there never was a 13 July 1798, that instead it was a Wordsworthian figment; or, on the other hand, that if such a date did in historical chronology come round on the calendar of Wordsworth's youth, that he then chose to write a poem entitled 'Lines Written on the Day Before the Ninth Anniversary of Bastille Day, July 13, 1798'? To be sure, Wordsworth's titles are virtually unique in the history of poetry, and their clumsiness is legend. This particular one for ·'Tintern Abbey', moreover, does have still other unusual things connected with it, and Levinson makes the most of her second chance. I shall let her state the point in its fullness: Wordsworth said he composed the poem on the way to Bristol. As Moorman and others have noted, this means that his phrase, 'A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey' should have been 'A Few Miles Below Tintern Abbey' ... The first-the very first-impression made by Wordsworth's snake of a title is that the speaker gazes down upon the Abbey from some peak a few 10 Wordsworth is exceptionally emphatic on this point: 'the town of Arras, place from which I Issued that Robespierre, who afterwards I Wielded the sceptre of the Atheist crew ... 0 Friend! few happier moments have been mine I Through my whole life than that when first I heard I That this foul Tribe of Moloch was o'erthrown, I And their chief regent levelled with the dust' (Wordsworth, The Prelude (1805), x. 42.6, lines 456-8, 467-70). Again: 'I carelessly inquired I If any news were stirring; he replied I In the familiar language of the day I That, Robespierre was dead ... That he and his supporters were all fallen. I Great was my glee of spirit, great my joy I In vengeance, and eternal justice, thus I Made manifest' (x. 430, lines 536, 539-42.). In the 1850 version, the news that 'Robespierre is dead!' leads to the statement that 'Great was my transport, deep my gratitude I To everlasting Justice, by this Fiat made manifest. "Come now, ye golden times," I Said, I forth-pouring on those open sands I A hymn of triumph ...' (x. 431, lines 573, 576-80).

The Clamour of Absence

5

miles above it. It takes a split second for 'miles' to sink in, especially if the reader's expectations have been formed by poems such as 'Grongar Hill' and the 'Eton College Ode'-topographical poems that situate the speaker on an eminence offering a wide prospect to his view. The conventions of nineteenth-century landscape painting would also reinforce this . . 1mpress1on. In substituting-unintentionally, I believe-'above' for 'below', Words­ worth not only puts himself above the polluted segment of the river, he implies his possession of a Pisgah prospect-an overlook permitting comprehensive and composed vision. The preposition 'above' gives us the poetic action of 'looking over' Tintern Abbey.In that nuance hides a 'play on words' ... In that nuance lies the authentic explanation of this great escape, 'Tintern Abbey'.11

Levinson here not only beckons us towards her own interpreta­ tion of language, but as it were applies a Herculean headlock to force us toward that interpretation. However bizarre her notion that 'a few miles above Tintern Abbey' means either a few miles up in the air above the abbey, or an elevated hypotenuse that allows one to see the abbey miles away while beholding the steep and lofty cliffs, the hedgerows, and the rest, however bizarre this may seem, that is what she claims. She obliquely concedes the fantasticaliry of the claim by positing that it 'takes a split second for "miles" to sink in'. One supposes that readers will have to testify for themselves whether the split second occurs in their own readings of the title; I can only supply witness that it has never occurred in mine. But Levinson urgently needs her bizarre reading of 'a few miles above Tintern Abbey' in order to validate her contention that Wordsworth is excluding the abbey. If, as she says, the 'preposition "above" gives us the poetic action of "looking over" Tintern Abbey', we do indeed have a 'play on words' that allows us the conjunction of 'what gets looked over' with what gets 'over­ looked'-and the further conjunction of the essay's title, 'Insight and Oversight: reading "Tintern Abbey'". Alas, no chain is stronger than its weakest link. If there is no oversight, there can be no insight; if nothing is looked over, then nothing can be overlooked; if 'a few miles above Tintem Abbey' does not mean, or even subliminally suggest, the bizarre notion of 11

Levinson, 5 3-5.

6

The Clamour of Absence

elevation to a prospect above the abbey, then there is in fact no abbey in the poem itself for Wordsworth to exclude. The abbey is not in the poem because Wordsworth is nowhere near the abbey, 12 not because he is overlooking the abbey either visually or meta­ phorically. Why then should he have the abbey in the title of the poem at all? Simply because, as the most widely known landmark in the district, it gave a precise location for the equally precise further specification, 'a few miles above'. Granted, but why then be so precise, and add the further specification, 'July 13, 1798'? Coleridge supplies the answer, in his classic formulation about Wordsworth's procedure: the title is a choice example of Words­ worth's 'anxiety of explanation and retrospect'.13 If we resurvey the title in the matrix of such an anxiety, we see that, against Levinson's interpretation, all its elements, not simply the abbey itself or the date, are equally anxious in their explanation and retrospect: 'Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, on revisiting the banks of the Wye during a tour, July 13, 1798'. The explanation that the visit was 'during a tour' is perhaps even more needlessly specific than the date 13 July 1798; the explanation 'revisiting the banks of the Wye' perhaps even more needlessly specific than the location 'a few miles above Tintern Abbey'. Another poet, unburdened by Wordsworth's anxiety of explana­ tion and retrospect, might well have called the same poem 'Lines Written in Monmouthshire Around the Turn of the Century'. The uniquely Wordsworthian 'anxiety of explanation and retro­ spect' is readily understandable to us as a by-product of Words­ worth's idiosyncratic preoccupation with the past. As Christopher Salvesen has said, 'the deepest current of feeling in his nature' was 'the continuous presence of his own past'. 14 The anxious specifica­ tions are, as it were, rivets driven into time in an attempt to keep it from slipping away. Indeed, it is our own instinctive acceptance of Wordsworth's anxiety about the past that causes us to accept the validity of his explanations and retrospections in the Fenwick Notes. We accept 12 In view of Wordsworth's absolute removal from proximity to the abbey, one can only react with bewilderment to Levinson's question, 'Why, then, does Wordsworth not describe the Abbey as he describes Peele Castle or the many abbeys, Tintern included, in the later poetry?' (Levinson, 14.) 13 Biographia Literaria, ii. 12.9. 14 Salvesen, 4 5.

7 his statement there about the provenance of 'Tintern Abbey', though we would not necessarily accept a similar statement had Coleridge made it about one of his own poems. In fact, Coleridge's own statements about the date and occasion of his poems are everywhere so suspect that one is sometimes tempted to feel that they may be as fictional as the poems themselves, and that whatever the truth is at least we may feel assured that it is hardly congruent with Coleridge's testimony. But if Coleridge's explanations and retrospects are unreliable, why then credit Wordsworth's? Surely Wordsworth was as much concerned with self-promotion as Col­ eridge was; yet we none the less tend to accept Wordsworth's explanations more readily than we do Coleridge's. The answer, I suggest, is that we sense the intense anxiety behind the Words­ worthian explanations. Even so-and this we must always keep in mind-those explanations are not necessarily correct. To cite a single instance, the Fenwick Note to 'The Reverie of Poor Susan' runs this way: 'Written 1801 or 1802. This arose out of ri1y observation of the affecting music of these birds hanging in this way in the London streets during the freshness and stillness of the Spring morning.' 15 But to that explanation De Selincourt lacon­ ically comments: 'As the poem was published in 1800 the I.F. note is clearly wrong.' 16 And yet for the most part, aware of Wordsworth's anxiety to get it right, we do tend to credit his explanations. And if we accept the explanation to Isabella Fenwick about the origin of 'Tintern Abbey', it does seem that Levinson has a point about the seeming confusion of up the river and down the river. 'We might observe in this context', says Levinson, 'that Wordsworth's explanation of his position above Tintern (note, 1798: "the river is not affected by the tides a few miles above Tintern") strikes a disingenuous note. Had he situated himself downstream-within the tidal field-the river would not have "reflected the several objects on its banks"· with a clear grandeur. Wordsworth would have instead observed an "ouzy, and discolored", that is, polluted surface.' 17 This charge of disingenuousness, then, is Levinson's explanation of the discrep­ ancy noted above: 'Wordsworth said he composed the poem on the way to Bristol. As Moorman and others have noted, this means The Clamour of Absence

15 Poetical Works, ii. 507.

1

•

Ibid.

17

Levinson, 32..

The Clamour of Absence

8

that his phrase, "A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey" should have been "A Few Miles Below Tintern Abbey".' 18 But in view of our awareness of Wordsworth's anxiety to get it right, we might decide to pause a bit on this issue and consider the matter further. If we do, we might well conclude that it is not Wordsworth, but Levinson, who does not get it right. Levinson says that 'Wordsworth said he composed the poem on the way to Bristol.' But what Wordsworth actually said was 'I began it upon leaving Tintern, after crossing the Wye, and concluded it just as I was entering Bristol in the evening, after a ramble of 4 or 5 days, with my sister.' 19 The whole 'ramble' of four or five days­ Levinson refers to it as 'this strangely frantic itinerary'20 -clearly constitutes a single experiential unit. It is to that unit, I suggest, that we refer the origins of the poem, for Wordsworth notoriously conceived the creation of a poem as a process spread out in time, not an event of the moment: I have said that Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till by a species of reaction the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, similar to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind. In this mood successful composition generally begins. 21

Though we might not feel justified in contesting Wordsworth's declaration that he began 'Tintern Abbey' after leaving Tintern on the way back to Bristol, we might well wonder just what that means in the light of his formula about emotion recollected in tranquillity. Had not Wordsworth in the course of the ramble in fact found himself 'a few miles above Tintern Abbey', Levinsoh's argument might seem conclusive; but on the contrary he and Dorothy were a few miles above Tintern Abbey on both I I June and 1 2 June, which might reasonably seem to account for the initial emotion. The emotion would then have been recollected in tranquillity on the 13th. Moorman herself is not certain just where the recollection in tranquillity took place, nor is she sure where the actual wording of the poem might have been set in motion. She suggests that 'it must have been composed largely on board the 18 20

Levinson, 5 3. Levinson, 48.

19

21

Poetical Works, ii. 517. Prose, i. 148.

The Clamour of Absence

9 "small vessel" which took them back to Bristol. Much more probably, however, it was begun on the first day at Tintern when they were walking up the river towards Monmouth, and simply completed on the 13 th.'22 Whatever the poem's process, it drew upon the extended ramble as a single unit of experience. In a note for his nephew Christopher, Wordsworth recalled that 'We crossed the Severn Ferry, and walked ten miles further to Tintern Abbey, a very beautiful ruin on the Wye. The next morning we walked along the river through Monmouth to Goderich Castle, there slept, and returned the next day to Tintern, thence to Chepstow, and from Chepstow back again in a boat to Tintern, where we slept, and thence back in a small vessel to Bristol. '23 That the poem was a process that depended upon an emotional experience above, not below, Tintern Abbey is further suggested by the rather unusual fact that there was no one moment of its composition when the poet sat down and wrote the opening words 'Five years have passed'; rather Wordsworth is at pains to state that 'not any part of it [was] written down till I reached Bristol'. 24 A further suggestion that the poem was not, as Levinson puts forward, solely created 'on the way to Bristol' is conveyed by the Duke of Argyle's testimony in 1848: He told us he had written Tintern Abbey in 1798, taking four days to compose it, the last 20 lines or so being composed as he walked down the hill from Clifton to Bristol. 25

This-a four-day composition coinciding with the 'ramble of 4 or 5 days, with my sister'-sounds like the deeper probability derived from everything we know about Wordsworth and his approach to the making of a poem. If the 'few miles above Tintern Abbey' cannot be impeached as locus of the poem's origin, then there would seem to be no grounding for Levinson's arguments. If the actual edifice of Tintern Abbey can in no way, either by the declared intent of the poem, or by an examination of its unstated or excluded premises, be found in the poem, it would seem that Levinson's discourse of absence has no true application to 'Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey'. " Moorman, i. 402. ,. Poetical Works, ii.

21

517.

Memoirs, i. zs Ibid.

117.

IO

The Clamour of Absence

It does not follow, however, that in the theory of cultural formation as such absence has no place. In my book Shapes of Culture, the argument is advanced that because culture pursues not knowledge but meaning, and because absolute meaning, as opposed to equivalent meaning, is both evanescent and extremely scarce, culture itself is necessarily forever directing its search toward the domain of absence. As the book says: Philosophy as part of culture, culture as part of life, life as perspective on being, constitute a series of presences stretched out between two absences. The first is indicated by the memory of past meaning; the second, by the hope of reclaiming that meaning. Between these two absences, across the texture of life, the winds of culture blow. Their motion and force are made up, with regard to meaning, of translations; with regard to activity, of repetitions. But it is the third kind of meaning, the absence that resides at both frontiers of these presences, that roils the surface of human existence and propagates the winds that blow. The incomplete meaning of presence streams toward the vacuum engendered by absence.26

Now absence is a conception and an emphasis much involved with the recent theoretical currents flowing from France. New Historicism itself, one may say parenthetically, is a kind of dissem• ination, or perhaps a supplement, to use Derrida's terms, of Foucault intertextualized by Derrida, even though, or perhaps especially because, the two French savants mutually rejected one another. 'Structuralism, by way of deconstruction,' as Levinson says, 'materializes textual absence and identifies its semiotic charge, so to speak.'27 Indeed, the whole enterprise of Derrida is an attack on twin monoliths that he identifies as 'logocentricity' and 'the metaphysics of presence'. 28 'What opens up sense and language,' he says, 'is writing as the disappearance of natural presence.'29 With his conceptions of sous rature-'under erasure' -la trace, and differance, Derrida finds every text to be intertextualized by unperceived cultural matter and meanings that compromise its status as presence. Scrupulous about the identification of his antecedents, Derrida repeatedly points to Heidegger; and in Heidegger we find Anwes• enheit, or presence, signalized as the privileged subject of Western 16

17 McFarland, Shapes of Culture, 110-11. Levinson, 8. 29 Ibid. 2.28. '" Derrida, Grammatologie, 71.

The Clamour of Absence

II

metaphysics from Greek philosophy onward. But Heidegger's 'presencing', which is bound up with his insistence on truth, Greek aletheia, as an unveiling to presence, by the same token ineluctably implies the relevance of Abwesenheit or absence. Heidegger himself is sometimes concerned with the play between the two in great poetry, where presence becomes absence and absence reveals presence. Indeed, so pervasive is the role of absence in twentieth­ century continental philosophizing that one may point to Robert Sokolowski's phenomenological treatise, Presence and Absence. But though such considerations in their contemporary currency stem from Heidegger, they do not in fact originate with that philosopher. Directly behind Heidegger stands Hegel's insistence on the identity of Being and Nothingness-'Das reine Sein und das reine Nichts ist also dasselbe'30 -and directly behind Hegel stands the formula of Spinoza's fiftieth epistle: determinatio negatio est­ determination is negation. 31 Indeed, Derrida's pregnant term differ­ ance, which he adapts from Saussure, indicates precisely the double valence of determinatio and negatio, for as Barbara Johnson says, in commenting on Derrida's term, 'To mean, in other words, is automatically not to be. As soon as there is meaning, there is difference. Derrida's word for this lag inherent in any signifying act is differance, from which the French verb differer which means both "to differ" and "to defer". What Derrida attempts to demonstrate is that this differance inhabits the very core of what appears to be immediate and present.'32 Substituting Spinoza's equation for Derridian formulations, we are forced to understand culturally pertinent absence as that negatio that reciprocally represents the determinatio of a given text. But the reciprocity is narrowly defining. Levinson has attempted to limn a negatio, true, but it is a negatio that does not in the event determine the poetic reality of 'Tintern Abbey'. The isolation of a pertinent negatio, indeed, must always follow, not precede, the exact cognizance of the poetic determination, and this cognizance Levinson does not attain. Any other conception of the relationship of cultural presence to " Spinoza, iv. 2.40. Hegel, v. 83. z Barbara Johnson, 'Translator's Introduction' to Jacques Derrida, Dissemina­ tion, trans. with an introduction and additional notes by Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981 ), p. ix. 30

3

The Clamour of Absence

12

cultural absence leads to results that even where theoretically true are always nugatory. A classic example of such theoretically true but critically unenlightening invocation of the relation of presence to absence is presented by Tennyson's 'Flower in the Crannied Wall': Flower in the crannied wall, I pluck you out of the crannies, I hold you here, root and all, in my hand, Little flower-but ifl could understand What you are, root and all, and all in all, I should know what God and man is. 33

Certainly if we could truly understand any determination in all its connections, root and all, and all in all, we would understand a totalizing negatio. In such opening out from a specific presence to a totality of absence, everything is interlinked, and in that appre­ hension Levinson's attempt to join the French Revolution, the sociology of the poor, the rise of urban pollution, and the history of monasticism to Wordsworth's poem would be valid, but so would the relation of the poem to Virgil's Georgics or to the construction of the Parthenon-all these things could ultimately be traced from the poem, but at the same time they would be critically nill; for their absence, to utilize the phrase of Hegel, inhabits a night in which all cows are black. Our question here, on the contrary, is, what constitutes critically enlightening invocation of absence, and to what extent do or should the absences of a poem displace or even condition our cognition of the poem's presences? Levinson charges 'Tintern Abbey' with escapism-calls it 'this great escape'. 34 She implies that it should be blamed for suppressing the awareness of the poor; as she says, 'mixing metaphors, the "still, sad music of humanity" drowns out the noise produced by real people in real distress'. 35 Even at the outset we must surely find the contention ironic in light of John Keble's tribute to Wordsworth as the poet of the poor, as 'the one among all poets who has set forth the manners, the pursuits, and the religion of the poor'. 36 Indeed, Wordsworth himself 'said that he "had given twelve hours thought to the conditions and prospects of society, for one 33 35

Tennyson, 274. Ibid. 45.

36

34 Levinson, 55.

Memoirs, ii. 3 55.

The Clamour of Absence

13

to poetry" '. 37 With his deep concern for the human heart-'my theme I No other than the very heart of man'38 -how could he possibly not see and feel for human beings? The answer is that he understood very well that Our life is turned Out of her course, wherever man is made An offering, or a sacrifice, a tool Or implement, a passive thing employed As a brute mean, without acknowledgement Of common right or interest in the end; Used or abused, as selfishness may prompt. 19

He as much as anyone was 'for the injustice grieving, that hath made I So wide a difference between man and man.'40 As much as anyone he lamented that difference: 'Alas! what differs more than man from man! And whence that difference? Whence but from himself? For see the universal Race endowed With the same upright form!-The sun is fixed, And the infinite magnificence of heaven Fixed, within reach of every human eye; The sleepless ocean murmurs for all ears; The vernal field infuses fresh delight Into all hearts.'••

And sometimes he proposes specific social reforms, as, for example, in the ninth book of The Excursion, where the Wanderer pleads for universal public education and presents to the Solitary an affecting and in truth almost Blakian image of exploited children: When, heretofore, I placed before your sight A Little-one, subjected to the arts Of modern ingenuity, and made The senseless member of a vast machine, Serving as doth a spindle or a wheel; Think not, that, pitying him, I could forget The rustic Boy, who walks the fields, untaught; 37

Abrams, Correspondent Breeze, 56. Prelude (1805), XII. 500, lines 2.39-40. 39 Poetical Works, v. 2.90: The Excursion, bk. IX, lines 113-19 . .,, Ibid. 2.94, lines 2.53-4. •• Ibid. 2.93, lines 2.06-14. 31

The Clamour of Absence The slave of ignorance, and oft of want, And miserable hunger. Much, too much, Of this unhappy lot, in early youth We both have witnessed. 42

Of course it is certainly the case that Wordsworth, like the rest of us, wanted to extend more concern to the less fortunate than he did. But as with most of us, this concern, unless it were to consume his whole life and overwhelm the uniquely personal nature of his experience of value, could be only partly realized. We see Words­ worth's entirely typical predicament in 'Home at Grasmere', which begins with the intensest kind of salutations for the personal, and then-but only then-extends its vision to the abstractly social. He says at line 340, after having surfeited on the paradisal celebration of his personal happiness among those he truly loved, that 'I came not dreaming of unruffled life': I wanted not a scale To regulate my hopes. Pleased with the good, I shrink not from the evil with disgust, Or with immoderate pain. I look for Man, The common Creature of the brotherhood, Differing but little from the Man elsewhere, For selfishness, and envy, and revenge, Ill neighbourhood-pity that this should be­ Flattery and double-dealing, strife and wrong. 43

But at least in Grasmere, social problems seem not so pressing, or are more tractable, than elsewhere: Yet it is something gained, it is in truth A mighty gain, that Labour here preserves His rosy face, a Servant only here Of the fire-side, or of the open field, A Freeman, therefore, sound and unimpaired; That extreme penury is here unknown And cold and hunger's abject wretchedness, Mortal to body, and the heaven-born mind; That they who want, are not too great a weight For those who can relieve. Here may the heart Breathe in the air of fellow-suffering •1 Poetical Works, v. 2.91-2., lines 157-66. 43 Poetical Works, v. 32.5: 'Home at Grasmere', lines 349-57.

The Clamour of Absence

15

Dreadless, as in a kind of fresher breeze Of her own native element, the hand Be ready and unwearied without plea From tasks too frequent, or beyond its power. 44

After these ruminations, Wordsworth in effect warns himself nevertheless not to become too inward-turning in his own happi­ ness; he reminds himself that the egotistical sublime is not enough: No, we are not alone, we do not stand, My Sister, here misplaced and desolate, Loving what no one cares for but ourselves; We shall not scatter through the plains and rocks Of this fair Vale, and o'er its spacious heights Unprofitable kindliness, bestowed On objects unaccustomed to the gifts Of feeling, we do not tend a lamp Whose lustre we alone participate, Which shines dependent upon us alone.◄'

To be sure, Wordsworth's great poetry can only rarely be seen as embodying a special agenda of reform. 'The Ruined Cottage' could certainly be rewritten from the standpoint of Engels and Marx; the poem itself, however, carries no word of explicit criticism of the socio-economic order that brought Margaret's life to ruin. Likewise with 'Resolution and Independence', a poem that might logically have taken shape as a call to social reform, but in fact is entirely and definitively not such a call. Matters in our ken are, however, excluded in the actual poem. Dorothy's journal tells us that the old Leech-gatherer has had ten children; in the poem, on the contrary, he is a monolith of solitude. Indeed, the whole point of the poem is that the Leech-gatherer has not been deprived of humanity despite his extreme old age, his extreme poverty, and his extreme aloneness. Here too the materials would undoubtedly have been handled differently by Friedrich Engels. Such possibilities were equally present to Wordsworth's own mind, as we may judge from his letter of rebuke to Sara Hutchinson for not understanding the poem. As he says, 'I cannot conceive a figure more impressive than that of an old Man like this, the •• Ibid. 325-6, lines 358-72.

•• Ibid. 327, lines 427-34, 436-8.

16

The Clamour of Absence

survivor of a Wife and ten children, travelling alone among the mountains and all lonely places, carrying with him his own fortitude, and the necessities which an unjust state of society has entailed upon him.'46 Here, in the explicit recognition of an 'unjust state of society' that conditions the existence of his Leech-gatherer, we see a choice example of the social awareness that Levinson censures Wordsworth for not allowing to rise to consciousness. But clearly it does rise to consciousness; it simply is not fitting to the poem Wordsworth chose to write. The unjust state of society is as much opposed to what Words­ worth was trying to do as are the Leech-gatherer's ten children. At least part of the reason is contained in Wordsworth's explicit disowning of any provenance for the old man, of any antecedence for his appearance. As he emphasizes to Sara Hutchinson: A person reading this Poem with feelings like mine will have been awed and controuled, expecting almost something spiritual or supernatural­ What is brought forward? 'A lonely place, a Pond,' 'by which an old man was, far from all house or home'-not stood, not sat, but was.• 7

'Resolution and Independence', in short, presents an existential, not a sociological, framing of the human situation. Of course Friedrich Engels would not have agreed to Words­ worth's exclusions. But then Engels was not able to write great poetry.48 This, the fact that its analyses cannot account for or engage the greatness of a poem, is the rock toward which all New Historical criticism is drifting, and in the event must founder. In Levinson's discussion, 'Tintern Abbey' becomes simply a document 46

Letters: The Early Years, 366-7. 7 Ibid. 366. 48 On the issue of the relationship between the personal vision necessary to great poetry and a consuming commitment to social betterment, Leavis speaks judi­ ciously: 'Behind, then, the impersonality of Wordsworth's wisdom there is an immediately personal urgency ... In so far as his eyes may fairly be said to "avert their ken from half of human fate", extremely painful awareness of this half is his excuse. For if his problem was personal, it was not selfishly so, not merely self­ regarding; and it is also a general one: if (arid how shall they not?) the sensitive and imaginative freely let their "hearts lie open" to the sufferings of the world, how are they to retain any health or faith for living? Conflicting duties seem to be imposed ... His heart was far from "unoccupied by sorrow of its own", and his sense of responsibility for human distress and his generously active sympathies had involved him in emotional disasters that threatened his hold on life. A disciplined limiting of contemplation to the endurable, and, consequently, a withdrawal to a reassuring environment, became terrible necessities for him' (Leavis, Reualuation, 178-9). •

The Clamour of Absence

17

of sociological bad faith. 49 Far from seeming a great poem, her transformed understanding makes it seem not even a good one. Take, for instance, the wonderful phrase 'the still, sad music of humanity'. Levinson, apparently unable to hear this phrase as the exquisite formulation it is, chooses to regard it as an incantation by which to dismiss what she calls 'real people in real distress'. But the phrase is a subliming of the real distresses of real people, a distillation and mourning of countless such distresses; in truth, its nobility resides in its raising of individual woes to the condition of human life itself. That this interpretation and not Levinson's is the true one can easily be shown from countless loci in Wordsworth. To cite merely one, let us consider a beautiful though not well-known poem called 'Inscription for a Seat by a Roadside, Half Way up a Steep Hill, Facing the South'. 50 The poem was written in late 1796 or early 1797, and in its hortatory tone invites comparison with 'Lines Left upon a Seat in a Yew-tree'. But where the latter poem explores and rebukes solitariness, this one salutes communal concern. The steep hill seems if not to symbolize then at least to intertwine with the idea of life as an arduous journey. The statement is very simple: a young man is addressed in all the pride of youth and admonished to be mindful of the trouble of those less favoured, whether younger or old, that by doing so he will prepare a rest for himself in the future, and possibly, in a beautiful turn at the end of the poem, a place in paradise. 'Thou', begins the poem, ... who in youthful vigour rich, and light With youthful thoughts, dost need no rest! 0 thou To whom alike the valley and the hill Present a path of ease! Should e'er thine eye Glance on this sod, and this rude tablet, stop! 'Tis a rude spot; yet here, with thankful hearts, The foot-worn soldier and his family Have rested, wife and babe, and boy, perchance, Some eight years old or less, and scantly fed, Garbed like his father, and already bound To his poor father's trade! Or think of him, •• 'Given the sort of issues raised by "Tintern Abbey" 's occasion, it follows that the primary poetic action is the suppression of the social' (Levinson, 37). so William Wordsworth: The Poems, 2. vols., ed. John 0. Hayden (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981), 1. 2.43-4.

18

The Clamour of Absence Who, laden with his implements of toil, Returns at night to some far-distant home, And having plodded on through rain and mire With limbs o'er laboured, weak from feverish heat, And chafed and fretted by December blasts, Here pauses, thankful, he hath reached so far Or reflect on them, Who, in the spring, to meet the warmer sun, Crawl up this steep hillside, that needlessly Bends double their weak frames, already bowed By age or malady; and when at last They gain this wished-for turf, this seat of sods, Repose, and, well admonished, ponder here On final rest.

Having thus catalogued real people with real problems-and perhaps also having suggested the existential resistance of the human situation to eager visions of social improvement-the poem goes on to warn the youth that he too will become old and feeble, and that he should 'be prompt I To make thy present strength the staff of all'. If he does, continues the poem: ... for thy future self thou shalt provide Through every change of various life a seat, Not built by hands, on which thy inner part, Imperishable, many a grievous hour, Or bleak, or sultry, may repose; yea, sleep The sleep of death, and dream of blissful worlds, Then wake in Heaven, and find the dream all true!

In this little poem, teeming with specific awareness of real people with real problems, and mindful of the social obligations of the fortunate to those less fortunate, there is in effect presented an extended gloss on the theme of the 'still, sad music of humanity'. That glowing phrase, in truth, far from drowning out the specific noises of the people in this poem, could in fact serve as an exemplary title for the gentle record of their travail. The statement in 'Tintern Abbey' most related to the concerns of the 'still, sad music of humanity' fares no better at Levinson's hands. I refer of course to the almost unbearably poignant nomi­ nation of 'that best portion of a good man's life, I His little, nameless, unremembered acts I Of kindness and of love'. Those

The Clamour of Absence

19

acts too are what the 'Inscription for a Seat by a Roadside' is all about: the youth is urged to 'be prompt I To make thy present strength the staff of all', and the way in which such strength becomes the staff of all is precisely designated by Wordsworth's immortal phrase as 'little, nameless, unremembered, acts I Of kindness and of love'. Levinson, however, rides roughshod over the phrase: Another example of this device [she writes]-the purloined letter trick-is the phrase, 'little unremembered acts'. Thus, according to Karl Kroeber, does Wordsworth 'make history out of nature'. I would say that Words­ worth does just the opposite. By defining ,the stuff of history as private, or generally inconsequential, unchronicled, and plastic experience, Words­ worth suppresses all those large, recorded events-of which Tintern Abbey is so formidable a reminder-not so obsequious to the imagination.51

On the contrary, just as the phrase, 'those little, nameless, unremembered acts I Of kindness and of love', directly accounts for what in any life are, or at any event should be, the most certain, gratifying, and imperative moral transactions that living experience offers, by the same token the 'still, sad music of humanity' exquisitely subsumes whatever actual social sadness William and Dorothy encountered on the 'ramble of 4 or 5 days'. Levinson notes, following Moorman, that Wordsworth had in his possession on the ramble William Gilpin's guidebook called Observations on the River Wye, 1792, where it is stated: But were the building [that is, Tintern Abbey] ever so beautiful, encom­ passed as it is with shabby houses, it could make no appearance from the river ... Among other things in this scene of desolation, the poverty and wretchedness of the inhabitants are remarkable. They occupy little huts, raised among the ruins of the monastery and seem to have no employment, but begging."

Presumably some of this was to be seen in 1798, although how much Wordsworth and Dorothy observed cannot of course be known. Levinson quotes Thomas Green's Extracts from the Diary of a Lover of Literature for 27 June 1799: Descended ... into a deep and sequestered hollow, formed by a sweeping recess of the Western banks of the Wye, and enclosing in its secluded bottom the village and abbey of Tintern: a delicious retreat ... After 11

Levinson, 4 3.

52 Ibid. 3 I.

20

The Clamour of Absence

encountering the thick enclosures and vile hovels which in every direction vexatiously obstruct the approach to the Abbey-Church, and intercept a distinct view of it, magical and sublime effect, on entering the West door, of the whole interior of this venerable pit, carpeted with velvet turf, and roofed by the azure sky ... Strolled in the evening up the banks of the Wye, through the scattered village of Tintern:-Many of the houses in ruins, and the whole place exhibiting strong marks of poverty and wretchedness.53

Turner's famous water-colour, painted between the date of Gilpin's description and Wordsworth's visit, shows debris that may or may not be thought to contain little huts, but the debris is less noticeable than the ruin itself or the vegetation that intertwines it, the whole scene according well enough with the more rapturous parts of Green's description, which was truncated for inclusion here. In any event, whether we presume William and Dorothy to have taken deep notice of the huts, hovels, and misery around Tintern Abbey, in their many rambles elsewhere in Britain, they had ample opportunity to observe, to grieve for, and to record in journal and poem the plight of the poor. De Quincey reminds us, in whimsically commenting that Wordsworth's legs 'were pointedly condemned by all female connoiseurs in legs', that they 'had been serviceable legs beyond the average standard of human requisition; for I calculate, upon good data, that with these identical legs Words­ worth must have traversed a distance of 175,000 to 180,000 English miles-a mode of exertion which, to him, stood in the stead of alcohol and all other stimulants'. 54 Be that as it may, Wordsworth was constantly walking, and as constantly reacting to real social distress. That distress is entirely subsumed by the phrase 'the still, sad music of humanity'. Huts, hovels, and misery he saw in abundance, and grieved for, however unspecific he may choose to be about the situation at Tintern Abbey. For a single example, in the eighth book of The Excursion an affecting portrait is drawn of a factory boy, and the Recluse exclaims, 'Hope is none for him!': And tens of thousands suffer wrong as deep, Yet be it asked in justice to our age, If there were not, before ... 53 Levinson, 3 1.

54

De Quincey, ii. 242.

The Clamour of Absence

21

These structures rose, ... If there were not, then, in our far-famed Isle, Multitudes, who from infancy had breathed Air unimprisoned, and had lived at large; Yet walked beneath the sun, in human shape, As abject, as degraded?' 5

And then, after this recognition of abject and degraded humanity, come the huts and hovels: At this day, Who shall enumerate the crazy huts And tottering hovels, whence do issue forth A ragged Offspring, with their upright hair Crowned like the image of fantastic Fear; Or wearing ... An ill-adjusted turban, for defence Or fierceness, wreathed around their sunburnt brows By savage Nature? Shrivelled are their lips, Naked, and coloured like the soil, the feet On which they stand Figure and mien, complexion and attire, Are leagued to strike dismay and the like are bred, All England through. 56

But it is not just here that Wordsworth reveals specifically his deep and comprehensive awareness of social misery. To take merely one instance from many, the poem called 'A Narrow Girdle of Rough Stones' supplies a virtual paradigm for the precise reality of that social awareness. Out on a walk, Wordsworth and his friends advanced Along the indented shore; when suddenly, Through a thin veil of glittering haze was seen Before us, on a point of jutting land, The tall and upright figure of a Man Attired in peasant's garb, who stood alone, Angling beside the margin of the lake. 55 56

Poetical Works, v. 276: The Excursion, bk. vm, lines 334, 336-45. Ibid.

276-7, lines 345-55, 358-9, 369-70.

22

The Clamour of Absence

As might seem a fairly ordinary likelihood, Wordsworth and his friends in their initial reaction wonder why the man is fishing rather than working: 'Improvident and reckless,' we exclaimed, 'The Man must be, who can thus lose a day Of the mid harvest, when the labourer's hire Is ample, and some little might be stored Wherewith to cheer him in the winter time.'

As Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Dorothy approach closer, how­ ever, they see that the man is ravaged by poverty and illness, and they quickly change their condescending attitude to one of recog­ nition of 'the still, sad music of humanity': Thus talking of that Peasant, we approached Close to the spot where with his rod and line He stood alone; whereat he turned his head To greet us-and we saw a Man worn down By sickness, gaunt and lean, with sunken cheeks And wasted limbs, his legs so long and lean That for my single self I looked at them, Forgetful of the body they sustained.Too weak to labour in the harvest field, The Man was using his best skill to gain A pittance from the dead unfeeling lake That knew not of his wants.

With this awareness of the real distress of a real person, Wordsworth and his friends do exactly what Levinson in all her arguments implies that they do not: they identify with the man's plight, rebuke themselves, and search their consciences: I will not say What thoughts immediately were ours, nor how The happy idleness of that sweet morn, With all its lovely images, was changed To serious musing and to self-reproach. Nor did we fail to see within ourselves What need there is to be reserved in speech, And temper all our thoughts with charity. -Therefore, unwilling to forget that day, My Friend, Myself, and She who then received The same admonishment, have called the place

The Clamour of Absence

23

By a memorial name, uncouth indeed As e'er by mariner was given to bay Or foreland, on a new-discovered coast: And POINT RASH-JUDGMENT is the name it bears. 57

Perhaps Wordsworth is not the only one who should memorialize a mistaken apprehension with the epithet 'rash judgment'. Yet if Levinson's reading continually seems to do violence to the integrity of 'Tintern Abbey' and its resonance of meanings, to what do we ascribe this energetic overshooting of the mark? Certainly not, as the sentence just written guarantees, to either lack of energy or lack of dedication, nor, I hasten to add, to lack of good faith. Though Levinson's reading of the poem may sometimes amount almost to a libel on Wordsworth's own good faith, that is hardly its purpose. Rather, its arbitrariness and its lack of connection with previous understandings supply the answer: the reading is a shape of culture. The rise of shapes of culture is, as suggested earlier, an effect of the inundation of contemporary understanding by previous under­ standing and commentary. Two facts connected with this inunda­ tion dictate the arbitrary shapes that are replacing the previously related forms. First, and this refers to larger transformations such as the present metamorphosis of English studies as such, really to know a larger cultural form is increasingly less possible. Not only do doctoral students now customarily know only bits and snippets of English literature-'fields' as they are now called-as opposed to at least the nominal requirement of a few decades ago that they have some acquaintance with all of it, but established figures, their teachers, are losing control also. As a single case in point, Frank Kermode recently commented to me with surprise that one of the world's most praised young scholars in literature of the English Renaissance asked, in response to Kermode's remark about Benja­ min Whichcote's role in Cromwell's regime, 'Who was Benjamin Whichcote?' The second pertinent fact in the rise of cultural shapes is dictated by the need to say something new. The hungry generations of young scholars rush on to the scene eager to make their own marks, only to find that what really needs to be done has already 57 Poetical Works, ii. 115-17: 'A Narrow Girdle of Rough Stones', lines 44-9,

50-4, 5 5-66, 66-80.

The Clamour of Absence been done. Undaunted, for a while theisimply do it or say it over again. Gradually, however, the accumulating redundancy makes such efforts so soggy that further repetition seems pointless and dispiriting. As Graham Hough has written, in a review of a volume called Criticism in the University: The state of chronic hypochondria in which literary education subsists shows no sign of abating. Indeed, in some quarters it is entering an acute phase. Regular and formerly healthful activities lose their zest, attacked by morbid depression of spirits ... It is painfully evident among the contrib­ utors to Criticism in the University that practically everyone is bored and irritated by the teaching of literature on traditional lines, and more than doubtful whether it is doing any good to anyone ... Not long ago Sir Peter Medawar remarked that when the momentous DNA discoveries were being made there were plenty of people in the English faculties of universities quite as clever as Crick and Watson-but Crick and Watson had something to be clever about. For the last thirty years or so ambitious literary exegetes have lacked precisely this-something to be clever about. Commentary and interpretation of the classic canon is by now so copious, so complete, that no addition to it is likely to matter very much. Most of the editing of any importance has been done. No creative upheaval like the Modernist movement of the earlier part of this century has come about, to make us redraw the map of literary history. So one has had the sad spectacle of many trim and high-powered intellectual machines with their wheels spinning in air. 58

Hough goes on to suggest that the wheels are now finding traction simply because newly and arbitrarily invented topics of discourse are being shoved under them. To vary the metaphor, the present situation is in some of its aspects well described by Dr Johnson's rebuke of an opponent, that finding the cow of truth already at the dairy, he set out to milk the bull. No one actually wants to seem to be milking the bull, however, and the new shapes of culture, as I have emphasized, customarily masquerade in the guise of forms of culture. Though formal connections are radically attenuated, ad hoc connections are sup­ plied in order to mimic the structure of a form of culture. Such ad hoc connections at the present time almost invariably accompany a shape of culture, as does 'special language' that simultaneously proclaims membership in a new community of 58

Quoted in McFarland, Shapes of Culture, I 6.

The Clamour of Absence understanding and impedes the unmasking of any core of truth the shape may or may not possess. 59 In the present instance, and mutatis mutandis this is the case in every New Historical approach to literary matters that I myself have seen, that masked core is a kind of coin whose obverse is an unquestioning commitment to left-wing political understandings of the human situation, and whose reverse is an inability to confront the quality of the poem Wordsworth or another poet actually did write. Instead of convinc­ ing critical evaluation one encounters such obfuscated judgements as Levinson's statement that the poem's power derives from Wordsworth's gothic, materialist, and in Lionel Trilling's phrase, 'Jewish' sensibility. 'Tintern Abbey' 's celebrated mysticism, that I associate with its Protestant progressive theme, produces the deathly isolation of the mind that would find this 'the image of the sole self'. By its morbid representational aura, this persona confesses its divorce from an order of collectivity that might validate poetic achieve­ ment, or confirm the poet's social and therefore individual being. 60

If it may seem that the spinning wheels are in that passage gaining a merely arbitrary traction, such an effect is equally apparent, and the utilization of a special language more so, in a statement about the poet's turning to his sister in 'Tintern Abbey': The turn to Dorothy is not only a rhetorical move showing us how to take the poem (i.e. psychologistically, as a record of individual consciousness, or 'kindly'). The address, like the peripheral sightings of the Abbey and Wordsworth's Pindaric maneuvers represents a genuine effort to escape the binary problematic through which the poem gets written. Since the poet's steady and focused gaze cannot illuminate the pockets of actuality whose presence he senses, he beseeches the 'shooting lights' of his sister's 'wild eyes'. 'Wild' is, consistently, Dorothy's epithet. She is felt to exist on the margins of the poet's enclosure and to have access both to the haven and to the unimaginable relations outside it. She is the hypostatized, desired alien-a phantom figure-always on the boundary of the familiar and now and then sliding into the beyond. By her faery freedom, Dorothy­ Lucy is to Wordsworth an invaluable textual device; led by her, he is now 59 See the chapter called 'Special Languages' in McFarland, Shapes of Culture, 82.-113. The controlling factor m the formation of special languages is always a version of what Nietzsche indicates in his aphorism: 'Evny deep thinker is more afraid of being understood than of being misunderstood' (Nietzsche, 1i. 7 5 2.). 60 Le,·inson, 34.

The Clamour of Absence and then estranged from his knowledges. We might recall in this context Lucy Gray, that aptly named liminal figure. 61

In the curious amalgam of the obvious and the tendentious that the passage presents, it might be well to linger on Levinson's reading of 'wild eyes', with its implication that somehow, by the epithet 'wild', Dorothy is reduced to marginal status. On the contrary, 'wild' is not a rhetorical creation but a simple description.Anyone who has seen the portrait of Dorothy in the parlour at Rydal Mount knows that in plain fact she did have 'wild eyes', which, in the testimony of De Quincey, in no way implied any marginaliza­ tion of her importance in her brother's life.'She was all fire', recalls De Quincey, 'and, as this ardour looked out in the very gleam of her wild eyes (those "wild eyes" so finely noticed in the "Tintern Abbey") . ..easily enough it might happen that any apprehension of an unkind word should with her kindle a dispute.It might have happened; and yet, to the great honour of both, having such impassioned temperaments, rarely did it happen.'62 After further tributes, De Quincey says: I may sum up in one brief abstract the amount of Miss Wordsworth's character, as a companion, by saying, that she was the very wildest (in the sense of the most natural) person I have ever known; and also the truest, most inevitable, and at the same time the quickest and readiest in her sympathy with either joy or sorrow, with laughter or with tears, with the realities of life or the larger realities of the poets! 63

Certain words in Levinson's passage just quoted contain the unmistakable charge of the special language in which her kind of discourse is couched. One notes 'problematic', which has achieved its present currency largely through Paul de Man; 'margins', which, like so much in the religion of radical political attitudes, stems from Foucault, and before him, Sartre; and 'liminal', which is associated with Victor Turner among others.Elsewhere Levinson's language is continually larded with such signalling words: to turn to the first page of the introduction, one encounters 'demystifica­ tion', which is De Man's counter, and on subsequent pages various other linguistic signals, such as 'privileged', which comes from Derrida, 'difference', 'positioning', 'strategies', 'situated', and so on. This kind of language reaches out to a network of-to accept 61 Levinson, 49.

62

De Quincey, ii.

28 5-6.

63

Ibid. 297.

The Clamour of Absence the jargon-'privileged' theorists. Consider this passage, following upon the quotation of a passage from Althusser about textual silence:

That silence or 'unspeakable' (Jameson's 'logical scandal', Macherey's 'rupture' and 'fissure,' BakhtinNolosinov's 'intonation', Della Volpe­ McGann's 'quid'), inheres within the work and can determine its periph­ eral contours as well. The internal scandal occurs in those syntactic, dramatic, thematic, affective, and rhetorical contradictions that so deeply made (produced) and make (constitute) the work as to be nearly imperceptible to readers who share that work's field of vision, what these writers call its problematic. The omission of the picture of the place (as opposed to 'mind') from 'Tintern Abbey' is a contradiction of this kind, a thematidiconic bind.•• Despite her fondness for special language, Levinson makes quite clear what her procedure is to be. 'I assemble material long familiar to Wordsworth scholars and culled from the most general of nineteenth-century histories', she says. 'By using this material in a systematic way and for the purposes of textual intervention, I hope to explain the poem's transformational grammar. By going outside the work, we may produce, I think, a closer reading of it.'65 Levinson concedes that the poems of which she speaks-'Tintern Abbey', 'Michael', the 'Intimations Ode', 'Peele Castle', are 'incon­ testably among the poet's greatest works'; she also concedes that 'These poems speak not a word about those sociopolitical themes which had occupied Wordsworth and others less than a decade before and which had become, in the light of the post-Revolution­ ary world, awkward on a number of levels.'66 But as she continues, 'My argument is that the extreme disinterest evinced by these works indicates their resumption of those problematic themes at the level of image and of metaphysics, precisely because they were deadlocked at the practical level. '67 Again, she says that the procedure employed throughout her book is one 'whereby a manifold of contemporary meanings, originally associated with or systematically informing the poet's representations, is restored to a work which defines by its illogical affirmations the contours of that repressed material. The deconstruction proceeds by way of the '"' Levinson, 9.

• , Ibid. 18.

•• Ibid. 4-5 .

•

1

Ibid. 5.

The Clamour of Absence reconstructed alterity, situated by the critic at the heart of the manifest discourse. 68 Well and good, perhaps, but where does one draw the line as to how much repressed material is in fact in the poem? Simply to assert my own witness, I understood and loved 'Tintern Abbey' long before I knew much about Wordsworth's earlier involvement with the issues of the French Revolution, or much about his other poetry; I know quite a bit now about those corollary matters, but they do not affect my possession of the poem. Indeed, when I was in graduate school it was fashionable to take note of Arthur Beatty's finding of Hartley's psychology in the statement of the poem. 69 I did not think then, nor do I now, that Hartley is necessary, either to my understanding of 'Tintern Abbey', or to its achievement. 70 A similar situation seems to me to obtain with Levinson's data. Though Wordsworth knew something about almost all the issues Levinson raises, just as he knew something about Hartley, in neither instance do I find the absence of those issues to constitute the determining negatio of the poem's state­ ment. Anxiety about time, yes, anxiety about the living of life, yes, the tension between individual consciousness and social conscious­ ness, yes. But to realize how far Levinson's licence for 'textual intervention' can lead us from any issue reasonably at hand, consider her statement about John Wordsworth's death, which is contained in the introduction to her book and is produced with regard to 'Peele Castle' rather than 'Tintern Abbey': Wordsworth's grief in 1806, one year after the death of his brother, is, whether we are aware of it or not, moving and interesting to us precisely because it is so much different from one's own real or imagined griefs. And that difference is a function of the diverse or contemporary meanings subsumed by that death-a function of the historicity of that loss and the representation of it. 68 Levinson, 11. 69 Arthur Beatty, William Wordsworth: His Doctrine and Art in Their Historical Relations (Madison: University of Wisconsin Studies in Language and Literature, 17, 192.2.), 89-116 et passim; with the conclusion that 'we have tried to show that [Wordsworth] is the poet of the English philosophy of Locke and his school in general, and of the English associationistic philosophy in particular' (p. 2.72.). 70 After writing the sentence above, I find that F. R. Leavis shares my view: 'The play of varied metaphorical implications (the ·imagery is complex-"interfus'd", "gravitation", "filial bond") does what a Hartleian commentary can only weaken' (Leavis, Revaluation, I 61).

The Clamour of Absence The death of John Wordsworth was, to the poet, a class loss, containing a collection of losses and betrayals, many of them drawn from what we might call, the public sector. The poet does not speak these things; he does not draw the arrow leading from private grief to public critique, because he does not, he cannot know this connection. To produce the poem-the hetero-cosmic affirmation-Wordsworth cannot connect the Isle of Wight with the Rampside interlude, the death of John Wordsworth •with the deaths of Marat, Robespierre, John Taylor, and Raisley Calvert, Beau­ mont's sublime sea with the devouring Revolutionary deluge. To do so would be to name the contradiction which organized his culture and his particular mode of insertion/implication in that culture. 71

The absences nominated in that passage most certainly inhabit the night in which all cows are black. Intriguingly, the unconscious materials of Wordsworth's grief that so unmistakably present themselves in psychoanalytic perspective-that is, the repressed griefs for the death of his father, and still earlier, for the death of his mother-are the only cows not let out into this night. Those twin griefs themselves constitute a fascinating absence in Levinson's free-wheeling catalogue. Actually, Levinson's licence for intervention is so broad that she really has no right to exclude anything. For instance, she has no right to such a statement as the following: 'The doctrine delivered by "Tintern Abbey" is not, of course, a lesson about the Puritan Revolution but about both the French and Industrial Revolu­ tions.'72 By the broad terms of her licence, the Puritan Revolution has every reason to claim pride of place with the French and Industrial Revolutions; it, as well as the later upheavals, was in Wordsworth's consciousness; it was historically connected to the French Revolution; and furthermore, Wordsworth's immersion in Milton becomes a special validating factor for the pertinence of the Puritan Revolution ('his sense of affinity with Milton', insists Trilling, 'was as much with Milton's political as with his poetical career'). 73 Let us, however, linger a bit longer over the death of John Wordsworth, for by doing so we can perhaps see how the New Historical tendency to refer cultural manifestations constantly to political or sociological situations tends to distort actual structures.

71 Levinson, 12.

72 Ibid. I 7.

71

Trilling,

105.

The Clamour of Absence Levinson tries to connect 'the death of John Wordsworth with the deaths of Marat, Robespierre, John Taylor, and Raisley Cavert'. 74 To do so is to disperse the significance of the event in Wordsworth's life, is to dissipate the intensity of feeling of Wordsworth for his brother, is to take what is personal and deep and reconstitute it public and shallow. We can, indeed, hardly overestimate the personal depth of Wordsworth's grief at his brother's loss. Not only did that grief engender such a poem as 'Peele Castle', but in truth it engendered no fewer than five other extraordinarily affecting poetic expressions: 'Distressful gift! this Book receives', 'To the Daisy', 'Elegiac Verses in Memory of My Brother, John Wordsworth', 'Character of the Happy Warrior', and, at least in its origins, 'The White Doe of Rylstone'. Furthermore, the grief reached into every fibre of Wordsworth's personal being, as the following words from my own Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin might suggest: 1 Even through the protective armor of Wordsworth's stoicism we can, by accumulating his brief remarks to various correspondents after his brother's death, perhaps see-as in time-lapse photography-this depth of feeling. Their amassed weight is overwhelming: '... a great affliction ... the set is now broken ...';'I can say nothing higher of my ever dear Brother than that he was worthy of his Sister who is now weeping beside me . ..'; 'We have done all that could be done to console each other by weeping together';'... oh my dear Friends! what have we not endured!'; 'We know what we have lost, and what we have to endure; our anguish is allayed, but pain and sadness have taken place of it; with fits of sorrow which we endeavour to suppress but cannot'; ... ' let me again mention my beloved Brother'; 'I shall never forget him, never lose sight of him'; 'This affliction weighs so heavy on the hearts of all in this house, that we have neither strength nor spirits for any thing. Our Brother was the pride and delight of our hearts ...'; 'The distress of mind under which we are at present labouring is not to be measured by any living person but one, and that is poor Coleridge, who is now far from us at Malta. Our Brother was so modest and shy a man, that not a tenth part of his worth, ahove all, his Taste, Genius, and intellectual merits was known to anybody but ourselves and Coleridge...';'. .. he was innocent as he was brave.. .'; 'I never wrote a line without a thought of its giving him pleasure ...'; 'We have lost so much hope and gladsome thought .. .' 'He loved every thing which we did, and every thing about us here incessantly reminds us of him

,, � . ,,,

74

Levinson,

1 2.

The Clamour of Absence

31

and our irreparable loss. But I will not distress you, for you can give us no relief';'He did not know how I loved and honored him, and how often he was in my thoughts';' ... to encourage you to write to us. I have now and then in my distress, turning here and turning there, a thought of this kind, and then I said to myself what can he write, or what can any body write

tous'. 75

What, one asks, does or can this overwhelming focus of grief have to do 'with the deaths of Marat, Robespierre, John Taylor, and Raisley Calvert'? To claim that it does relate is simply to forfeit all authority as a critic. The connection of John Wordsworth's death with the deaths of Marat and Robespierre, however, is not in its deep structure concerned with critical authority or accuracies of meaning. Such a connection is dictated rather by the needs of Levinson's cultural shape, which masquerades as form by attaching itself to the network of New Historical proponents and their political lingua franca. Levinson herself gives a reassuring tug at the network by nominating, in a footnote, some of its stanchions. She refers to 'Historicist critique, as practiced today by some Romanticists (and, more strikingly, by such Renaissance scholars as Stephen Green­ blatt, Frank Whigham, Louis Montrose, and from a slightly different angle, Nancy Vickers)'. 76 A larger listing for ad hoc connections is supplied by Jean E. Howard, in an article called 'The New Historicism in Renaissance Studies': A new kind of activity is gaining prominence in Renaissance studies: a sustained attempt to read literary texts of the English Renaissance in relationship to other aspects of the social formation in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. This development, loosely called the 'new history' and flourishing both in Europe and America, involves figures such as Stephen Greenblatt, Jonathan Dollimore, Alan Sinfield, Kiernan Ryan, Lisa Jardine, Leah Marcus, Louis Montrose, Jonathan Goldberg, Stephen Orgel, Steven Mullaney, Don E. Wayne, Leonard Tennenhouse, Arthur Marotti, and others.Journals such as ELH, English Literary Renaissance, Representations, and L TP: Journal of Literature Teaching Politics, regu­ larly publish 'new history' pieces. In short, a critical movement is emerging.77 76 Levinson, 135 · 75 McFarland, Romanticism, 169 n. 77 Jean E. Howard, 'The New Historicism in Renaissance Studies', English Literary Renaissance, 16 (1986), 13.

-

32

The Clamour of Absence

What all these people agree on may be glimpsed in a representative statement by Louis Montrose: Though sometimes reproducing the shortcomings of the older modes of historical criticism, but also often appropriating their labors to good effect, the newer historical orientation is new in its refusal of traditional distinctions between literature and history, between text and context; new in resisting a traditional opposition of the privileged individual-whether an author or a work-to a world 'outside'. I speak merely of a new orientation because those identified with it, by themselves or by others, tend to be heterogeneous in their practices and reticent in their theorization of those practices. In brief, their project is to resituate canonical literary texts among the multiple forms of writing, and in relation to the non­ discursive practices and institutions, of the social formation in which those texts were initially produced-while at the same time, recognizing that this project of historical resituation is necessarily the textual construction of critics who are themselves historical subjects. 78

Yet this common cause, and the scholars and critics that espouse it, are not really stanchions for cultural connection; they are rather more like cultural mushrooms newly sprung up, strikingly visible but without tested strength or solidity. (Montrose himself says that 'It remains to be seen if the interest currently aroused by this kind of work amounts to more than the ephemeral prestige of the latest academic fashion'.) 79 The figures and their common cause create themselves largely by 'networking', as Howard's list implies. Indeed, that strange verb 'to network' actually has come into currency in American academic usage to describe the attempts of individuals to connect their shapes of cultural discourse with what are hoped to be formal guarantees of relevance. It is customary now to see advanced graduate students or young professional scholars with lengthy listings on their curricula vitae generated mainly by conferences which they themselves arrange and to which they reciprocally invite one another, or journal collections to which they reciprocally contribute in order to further one another's claims to the connections of cultural form. Any deeper meaning to the connections is surely illusory. It is notable that the effect of Derrida's levelling of language to the 78

3o4. 79

Louis Montrose, 'The Elizabethan Subject and the Spenserian Text', in Theory, Ibid.

The Clamour of Absence

33 general condition of ecriture, as well as his intertextualizing of all texts, tends to obliterate boundaries: 'There is nothing outside the text', he says in an especially pregnant formulation. 80 And it is no accident that current theory, following Derrida, characteristically addresses itself not to 'poems', or 'epics', or 'novels', but to 'texts', that is, to linguistic fragments without cultural form, small enough to be cognized and self-sufficient enough to bear extended analysis. The very conception of 'text' in its current theoretical usage is a witness to the chaos of the modern cultural scene. As to why one should deconstruct a text in the first place, Derrida can supply only suspect answers. On the one hand, by showing the text what the text does not know, the deconstructive critic raises himself above the author. On the other, the deconstructive process has the effect of placing us in the abyss (mettre en abime), which may be an abyss of freedom but is also certainly one of nihilism. So the cultural connections pointed to by Levinson's procedure are ultimately as unattached in their current company as in their historical adhesions. In truth, this chapter itself, simply by its stance of opposition to what she is doing, constitutes, unwillingly and without that intent, a connection for her shape of cultural event. To the extent to which one finds Levinson's work enlighten­ ing-and I emphasize that I do not single her out for personal rebuttal, but rather as the representative of a congeries, a minor galaxy, of floating shapes-to that extent it may be accorded praise and should be read. It is not, however, entirely relevant as criticism, and it has little real connection with the forms of culture. But by those very facts, her reading of 'Tintern Abbey' becomes a lumi­ nous example of modern cultural reality. •

0

Derrida, Grammatologie, 2.2.7.

2

Wordsworth's Hedgerows: The Infrashape of the Longer Romantic Lyric IN her reading of 'Tintern Abbey' as a repression of awareness about the plight of the poor, Marjorie Levinson places special emphasis on the passage near the poem's beginning where Words­ worth writes: Once again I see These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines Of sportive wood run wild; these pastoral farms, Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke Sent up, in silence, from among the trees! With some uncertain notice, as might seem Of,vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods, Or of some Hermit's cave, where by his fire The Hermit sits alone. 1

Levinson points out that 'The cottage plots noted in the poem are "green to the very door" because the common lands had been enclosed some time back and the only arable land remaining to the cottager was his front garden.'2 It follows, she contends, that 'the green lawns, that figure in the poem as an image of psychic and material wellbeing, are the miserable product of an economic fact and its charged history, as are the attractively, "sportively" sprinkled lines of hedges, another emblem of enclosure.' 3 Indeed, the hedgerows and the greenery to the door are prime exhibits for her general contention that 'Whatever interpretation we choose, we are bound to see that Wordsworth's pastoral prospect is a fragiie affair, artfully assembled by acts of exclusion.'4 Those acts of exclusion, such is the implication, constitute an improper and invalid suppression of awareness. 'We can assume, I think, that the meaning of those hedgerows was available to Wordsworth.' 5 ' Poetical Works, ii. 2.59-60: 'Tintern Abbey', lines 14-2.2.. 2 Levinson, 3 o. 3 Ibid. 4 2.. s Ibid. 4 2.. • Ibid. 3 2..

Wordsworth's Hedgerows

35

Levinson's interesting and highly original concentration on Wordsworth's hedgerows fills a margin of 'Tintern Abbey' with new intertextual material; in the present chapter I shall attempt to fill another margin with what I hope shall be equally valid even if wholly different commentary on 'the meaning of those hedgerows'. My purpose will be not only to formulate what I hope will be germane argument, but also, by juxtaposing the absolute difference of the two commentaries to illustrate as dramatically as possible the almost boundless possibilities of marginal relevance generated by the statement of a great poem. To begin with, we must think about not only what Wordsworth saw, but about how seeing relates to the structure of Romantic poetry. In his History of the Synoptic Tradition, Rudolf Bultmann, in speaking of similitudes, observes of one of the strands of language in the gospels, that 'Ideas and conditions, characters and commands are all given expression in immense concreteness.' For instance, notes Bultmann:

In Matt. 5: 45 the goodness of God is pictured by saying that he makes his sun to shine on the evil and the good, and sends his rain on the just and the unjust. Anxious folk are depicted in Matt. 6: 25, 31 by their own questions: 'What shall we eat? What shall we drink? and Wherewithal shall we be clothed?' ...The son's request to the father in Matt. 7: 9 f.is concretely expressed as asking for fish or bread ... Evil desire must be exterminated, even to plucking out the eye or cutting off the hand (Matt. 5: 29 £.). The right hand must not know what the left hand does (Matt. 6: 3 ) ... A camel goes more easily through a needle's eye, than a rich man enters the kingdom of God (Mk. 10: 25 ). The Pharisees strain at gnats and swallow camels (Matt. 23: 24).• Of special interest for our purposes that follow is that this 'immense concreteness', as pointed to by Bultmann, accompanies the move­ ment of thought into the most abstract region of spiritual concern. The texts identified by Bultmann, indeed, seem primordial local­ izations of what Heidegger calls, in Was heisst Denken?, a 'totally specific interpretation, of "Being" -Being as being present'. This, he insists, is an

interpretation of Being [that] has been current so long that we regard it as self-evident. • Bultmann, 166-7.

Wordsworth's Hedgerows Since in all metaphysics from the beginning of Western thought, Being means being present, Being, if it is to be thought in the highest instance, must be thought as pure presence, that is, as the presence that persists, the abiding present, the steadily standing 'now'.7

Anwesenheit or 'presence', for Heidegger, arose as the chief charac­ teristic of Western thought by the early identification of two Greek words, physis and idea ('for two thousand years, these ties between logos, aletheia, physis, noein, and idea have remained hidden in unin­ telligibility'). As he discusses the interrelations of those Greek words in his Einfuhrung in die Metaphysik, Heidegger concludes that In the end the word idea, eidon, 'idea', came to the fore as the decisive and predominant name for being (physis) ... The word idea means that which is seen in the visible, the aspect it offers. 8

The abstract insistence of Heidegger combines with the concrete examples of Bultmann to suggest important truths for the study of poetry. Though a poem is a concretion, the idea of a poem­ obviously-is an abstraction. But this abstraction, I shall suggest, following the derivation by which 'idea means that which is seen in the visible', is inextricably bound up with a form of Anwesenheit. In this presence, the 'idea' is not formally given as object of inspection but for all that is ineluctably constituted as something that potentially could be 'seen in the visible'. It is 'seen', however, by poets, readers, and critics only by implication, as the inexplicit and unconscious substratum of the poem. Yet this substratum, or better, because it takes a definite form as something that might be 'seen in the visible', even though it is not consciously so seen in the surface attendings of the poem, this infrashape, nevertheless exerts a decisive control on our expectations as to what is fitting in the poem's language and organization. The infrashape assumes particular importance in the longer Romantic lyric, for there it differs from the infrashape of other kinds of poetry. It dictates, in fact, the decorum of such a lyric, and the false mental picture of what it is can likewise result in a false criticism of the poem. For critics, no less than poets, proceed from subliminal awareness of concrete shapes underlying the abstract wordage of the poem. 7 8

Heidegger, Was heisst Denken?, 41-2. Heidegger, Einfuhrung in die Metaphysik, 130, 137, 138.

Wordsworth's Hedgerows

37 Although the concept of decorum is usually associated with neo­ classic poetry, one of the purposes of this chapter is to suggest that' it should also be associated, though in a different way, with Romantic poetry. Puttenham, in The Arte of English Poesie, devotes considerable discussion to what is fitting to a poem: The Greekes call this good grace of euery thing in his kinde ro Jr(Jt:nov, the Latines decorum; we in our vulgar call it by a scholasticall terme decencie; our owne Saxon English terme is seemelynesse, that is to say, for his good shape and vtter appearance well pleasing the eye; we call it also comelynesse, for the delight it bringeth comming towardes vs, and to that purpose may be called pleasant approche. So as euery way seeking to express this r:rrrnov of the Greekes and decorum of the Latines, we are faine in our vulgar toung to borrow the terme which our eye onely for his noble prerogatiue ouer all the rest of the sences doth vsurpe, and to apply the same to all good, comely, pleasant, and honest things, euen to the spirituall objectes of the mynde.9

Notable in Puttenham's statement is the insistence that what is fitting refers to a 'spirituall object' of the mind, which in turn possesses a 'good shape and vtter appearance well pleasing the eye'. Decorum, prepon, decencie, seemelynesse, comelynesse, all are governed by the visually objective: 'to borrow the terme which our eye onely for his noble prerogatiue ouer all the rest of the sences doth vsurpe'. Puttenham's exaltation of sight over all the rest of the senses resumes a long tradition signalized by Aristotle's insistence that the desire of humans to know makes them prefer sight to all other senses. 10 In the eighteenth century, again, Addison inaugurates his series of papers on the imagination by saying that 'our sight is the most perfect and most delightful of all our Senses'. 'It is this sense', he continues, 'which furnishes the Imagination with its Ideas; so that by the Pleasures of the Imagination or Fancy (which I shall use promiscuously) I here mean such as arise from visible Objects, either when we have them actually in our view, or when we call up their Ideas into our Minds.'11 Puttenham's emphasis coincides too with the biblical character­ istics noted by Bultmann, as well as with the theoretical insistences of Heidegger. The 'spiritual! objectes of the mynde' comprised by 9 10

Puttenham, pp. 173-4. Aristotle, Metaphysics, 980•2.2-8.

11

Addison, iii. 5 35-6.

Wordsworth's Hedgerows great poetry are made up not only of the words and meanings of the poem, but also by a visually concrete, if submerged, image, which can be 'seen in the visible'. This is the truth celebrated in a different terminology by R. P. Blackmur's conception of 'language as gesture'. It is the violation of the sense of what is fitting that generates most judgements as to what constitutes a fault in a poem. Horace, indeed, in Ars Poetica, builds his main argument around the necessity of knowing what is fitting in poetry. In the neo-classic period, this was usually referred to the decorum of occasions, of materials, of expectations, and of genre, much as it was in Horace himself. But in Romantic times, the matrix changed, because of definitive pronouncements as to the freedom and unboundedness of the poet with regard to subject-matter, occasion, content, and form. Romantic poetry, said Friedrich Schlegel, in his famous definition, was a 'progressive universal poetry' that took up every­ thing into its movement; 12 'The bounded is loathed by its posses­ sor', concurred Blake. 13 The movement of poetry was conceived as a flow. Good poetry, as Wordsworth defined it, was 'the spon­ taneous overflow of powerful feelings'. 14 'Shelley', wrote Mary Shelley, 'was thrown on his own resources, and on the inspiration of his own soul, and wrote because his mind overflowed.' 15 'The Poem, entitled "Mont Blanc"', confirmed Shelley himself, was 'an undisciplined overflowing of the soul.' 16 Romanticism, said Kier­ kegaard in synopsis, 'implies overflowing all boundaries'. 17 The ideas of progression, of unboundedness, and of flow com­ bined to produce the subliminally visual infrashape of the longer Romantic lyric. That infrashape-or 'spirituall object of th_e mynde'-was not an entity compressed, stressed, and demarcated, but an entity unbounded, progressive, and flowing. In short, the visual infrashape of the longer Romantic lyric was a stream. As the brilliant Romantic critic Hazlitt said, 'Poetry puts a spirit of life and motion into the universe. lt describes the flowing, not the fixed.' 18 The importance of this visual infrashape, found in the world of 1• Prose, i. 12.6. Schlegel, ii. 182.. 13 Blake, 2.. 17 Kierkegaard, journals, 2.5. 16 Ibid.vi.87-8. 15 Shelley, iv.79. 18 Hazlitt, v. 3. Again: 'to mingle the tide of verse, "the golden cadences of poetry", with the tide of feeling, flowing and murmuring as it flows ...' (ibid. 12.). 12

Wordsworth's Hedgerows

39

nature, was augmented by a special urgency of the Romantic agenda, one that, under the general aegis of pantheism, of 'the one Life within us and abroad', sought to conceive mind and nature as a single entity. Holderlin, for only one of innumerable examples, declared that to heal the split between man and nature, to unite ourselves with nature in one infinite entity, is the aim of all our aspiration,1 9 The Romantic philosopher Schelling, again, said that nature was visible mind, and mind was invisible nature.20 It is not merely a Wordsworthian, but a Romantic, merging of human being and nature that is signalized by Wordsworth's question: Was it for this That one, the fairest of all rivers, loved To blend his murmurs with my nurse's song, For this, didst thou, 0 Derwent! winding among grassy holms Where I was looking on, a babe in arms Make ceaseless music that composed my thoughts?' 1

To look at a stream, however, is to be aware not only of water moving by, but also to be aware that neither beginning nor end can be seen; and this characteristic dictates the nature of those poems of which we speak. For the longer Romantic lyric must be a poem that cannot be taken in at a single intuition of two open pages. The reader in his progress must at some point lose view, physically and with regard to meaning as well, both of the beginning and of the ending of the poem. 'O stream!', says Shelley in 'Alastor', 'Whose source is inaccessibly profound, I Whither do thy mysterious waters tend? I Thou imagest my life.'22 It images his poem, too, as it does all the longer Romantic lyrics. For 'Alastor' streams on for 720 lines, 'Epipsychidion' for 604, 'Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills' for 373, 'The Witch of Atlas' for 672, and so on. Even 'Mont Blanc' is a longer Romantic lyric, for it extends to more than 140 lines and cannot physically be surveyed in a single glance. Shelley's commitment to the streaming infrashape is apparent too in his curious challenge to Keats to see which poet could first 20 Schelling, ii. 56. 19 Hi.ilderlin, ii. 236. 21 Prelude (1850), I. 49, lines 269-71, 274-7. 22 Shell , i. 191, lines 502-5. ey

Wordsworth's Hedgerows compose a poem of 4,000 lines.23 It is true, of course, that Keats's product in the competition, 'Endymion', showed that he did not at that time manage the streaming mode very well. And some of his greatest poems, such as 'To Autumn' or 'Ode on a Grecian Urn', clearly do not overlie a streaming infrashape. His more mature 'Hyperion' does follow the streaming course, however (Shelley, significantly, regarded it as Keats's best poem), and such marvels as 'The Eve of St Agnes' and even 'Ode to a Nightingale' do as well. Similar observations could be made with regard to all the Romantic poets. Not only do Wordsworth's greatest statements­ 'Tintern Abbey', 'The Immortality Ode', 'The Ruined Cottage', 'Michael', the first two books of The Prelude-all overlie a streaming infrashape, but Wordsworth, like the other Romantics, seemed virtually hypnotized by the idea of running water. (Mary Moorman's biography, indeed, on its very first page says: 'The first object which attracted him as he gazed into the past was a river. He beheld it as a source of beneficence and peace, and hailed it as an influence stretching back even beyond the gates of conscious memory ... The sound of running water was always among the most precious to him of all the multitudinous sounds which reached his sensitive ears from the mysterious universe. He often felt it almost as part of his own being.')24 To illustrate Moorman's observation, one may consider the lines in The Excursion where Wordsworth institutes a lengthy and specific comparison of the being of human life to the course of a stream. The passage in its extraordinary richness witnesses how deeply the image of the stream occupied the metaphorical con­ sciousness not only of this poet but of Romantic poets in general: The tenour Which my life holds, he readily may conceive Whoe'er hath stood to watch a mountain brook In some still passage of its course, and seen, Within the depths of its capacious breast, Inverted trees, rocks, clouds, and azure sky; And, on its glassy surface, specks of foam. And conglobated bubbles undissolved, Numerous as stars; that, by their onward lapse, 23 Ward, 102..

24

Moorman, i. r.

Wordsworth's Hedgerows

41

Betray to sight the motion of the stream, Else imperceptible. Meanwhile, is heard A softened roar, or murmur; and the sound Though soothing, and the little floating isles Though beautiful, are both by Nature charged With the same pensive office; and make known Through what perplexing labyrinths, abrupt Precipitations, and untoward straits, The earth-born wanderer hath passed; and quickly, That respite o'er, like traverses and toils Must he again encounter.-Such a stream Is human Life; and so the Spirit fares In the best quiet to her course allowed; And such is mine,-save only for a hope That my particular current soon will reach The unfathomable gulf, where all is still! 25

Wordsworth, indeed, though he sometimes bemoaned a certain propensity for short forms such as sonnets, and was rebuked by Coleridge for indulging the propensity, could set even the sonnets to streaming, as in his The River Duddon: A Series of Sonnets, where the fourteen-line unit, under the visual impact of the river, is multiplied by 34 to produce a longer Romantic lyric of 4 76 lines. The sense of the river is unmistakably correlated with the actual composition of the verse. In Sonnet 1 2, for instance, Wordsworth exhorts his muse: 'On, loitering Muse-the swift stream chides us-on!', and further down in the same sonnet he refers to 'The Bard who walks with Duddon for his guide'. 26 But to bypass other familiar examples, we may look at a typical though virtually unknown poem. In a longer Romantic lyric of 204 lines, written during the desiccated 18 20s and called, with lurching clumsiness, 'Composed When a Probability Existed of Our Being Obliged to Quit Rydal Mount as a Residence', Wordsworth not only streams in writing but writes about streams. 27 Thus, after a perfunctory look at 'Sky-piercing Hills' and 'familiar trees' as objects to which he might have to bid farewell, he settles down to the 'pellucid Spring' (line 8), which henceforth becomes the chief topic of his poem. He hails it as 'translucent Spring' (30), detects 25 2

•

Poetical Works, v. 108: The Excursion, bk. 111, lines 967-91. Ibid. iii. 25 1: The River Duddon, XII, lines 1, 11.

,. Ibid. iv. 381-7.

Wordsworth's Hedgerows its 'dimpling stir of life' (38), hails it again as 'Thou, clear Spring' (84), and speaks of its 'rippling airs I Concealed' (95-6). He then begins to take in other flowings, noting bizarrely that Millions of kneeling Hindoos at this day Bow to the watery Element, adored In their vast Stream, and if an age hath been (As Books and haply votive Altars vouch) When British floods were worshipped, some faint trace Of that idolatry, through monkish rites Transmitted far as living memory, Might wait on Thee, a silent Monitor, On thee, bright Spring, a bashful little-one Yet to the measure of thy promises True, as the mightiest. (120-30)

Later he says, interestingly enough for this argument about the visual infrastructure of poetry, that 'new-born waters' are 'deemed the happiest source I Of Inspiration for the conscious lyre.' (163-4). He concludes the poem with a tribute, (204): 'To thee, dear Spring, aQd all-sustaining Heaven!' A gr�at Wordsworthian poem, no less than this banal effort, is also to the measure of its promises true in that it too takes its course from the streaming infrashape. For 'Tintern Abbey', with its length of 159 lines, represents a choice example of the longer Romantic lyric. And its strength allows it to serve, as the poem just rehearsed cannot, as basis for what shall be a fairly convoluted argument about poetic quality and the criteria for judging it. Now it was notoriously the case that the New Criticism, which promulgated the techniques for reading poetry that still reign ·in our educational systems, did not particularly care for Romantic poetry, and especially for the streamlike poetry of the longer Romantic lyric. 'The literary critic', said John Crowe Ransom in The World's Body, 'also has something to say about romanticism, and it might come to something like this: that romantic literature is imperfect in objectivity, or "aesthetic distance", and that out of this imperfection comes its weakness of structure; that the romantic poet does not quite realize the aesthetic attitude, and is not the pure artist.'28 In The New Criticism, again, he speaks of 'the 28

Ransom, The World's Body, 333.

Wordsworth's Hedgerows

43

shoddy resonances like those of the romantic Wordsworth'.29 In that same volume, referring to Wordsworth's Prelude, he writes:

The poet became a little paralyzed, we may imagine, when he took pen in hand to write a poem; or got that way after going a certain distance in the writing of a long one. I go beyond the direct evidence here, but I assume that making distinguished metrical discourse was such a job, and consisted in his own mind with so much corruption of the sense at best, that he fell into the habit of choosing the most resounding words, and stringing them together as the meter dictated. This is not unusual in Romantic poetry. The point to make about Romantic poetry now is not the one about its noble words, but a negative and nasty one: the noble words are almost absurdly incoherent. Jo It is interesting to note that Ransom here attacks not the usual New Critical victim, Shelley, but Wordsworth, whose prestige in general was somewhat less eroded than that of other Romantics. Indeed, Cleanth Brooks, in The Well Wrought Urn, makes the 'Immortality Ode' one of the ten poems discussed in detail. To be sure, Brooks seems to find the 'Ode' considerably flawed: 'The "Ode" for all its fine passages, is not entirely successful as a poem. '31 And his animadversions could be supplemented by more severe ones from Yvor Winters and F. R. Leavis, who, though not New Critics narrowly so defined, were in sympathy with the larger trends of that school. 32 The concept of 'weakness of structure' is at the forefront of Ransom's animus against Romantic poetry in general. The phrase readily lends itself to describing a dissatisfaction with the streaming infrashape-which is not a structure at all, weak or otherwise-of the longer Romantic lyric. For Ransom, as Brooks says, insists 'on a rather tight and systematic structure of the images of a poem,'33 and that in itself militates against the very idea of 'a certain distance in the writing of a long one'. One is accordingly not surprised to find that the New Critics thought well of the compact paradoxes and ironies of Blake's gnomic verses-which were all they seemed to know of Blake; it remained for Frye, with theoretical categories suited to longer, flowing poems such as The Faerie Queene and 29

Ransom, The New Criticism, 333. Jo Ibid. 305-6. " Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn, 12.5. 32 Winters, Forms of Discovery, 171-2.; Lcavis, Revaluation, 184-5. H Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn, 2.43.

44

Wordsworth's Hedgerows

Paradise Lost (which the New Critics -almost unanimously deni­ grated), to point to the power of the lengthy prophetic books. By the same token, none of the New Critics was very enthusiastic about Wordsworth's Prelude, which seems to us now almost unarguably the greatest poem of the nineteenth century; but Brooks and Warren admired the intensely compacted 'A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal', 34 and Leavis said that it 'shows Wordsworth at his supreme height'. 35 It seems clear, in brief, that the New Critics, when they inspected a poem, were as much involved with a subliminally visible infra­ shape as were the Romantics when they generated their longer lyrics. But the infrashapes in the two instances were entirely different. The New Critics actually wanted a 'tight and systematic structure' in their field of view, even though such a structure is not favoured in nature over streaming entities. 'The first law to be prescribed to criticism,' said Ransom in The World's Body, 'is that it shall be objective, shall cite the nature of the object rather than its effects upon the subject.'36 To stand by a stream, aware neither of a beginning nor of an end, is not to cognize the "object" Ransom had in mind; indeed, it is precisely the lack of an intensive object ('romantic literature is imperfect in objectivity') that he pairs with 'weakness of structure' in his general indictment of Romantic poetry. Simply stated, what the New Critics wanted to see was an object hard, compact, demarcated, not an object extended and streaming. Still more specifically, where the Romantics actually saw the visual idea of a stream in their mind's eye, the New Critics, to accept the phrase proffered by Brooks, actually saw a well-wrought urn (Brooks even says that 'The poem, if it be a true poem is a simulacrum of reality',37 and the statement seems to refer less to reality as such, which is a very large and diffuse conception, than to the idea of a concrete visual object). Such an infrashape is not congruent to most Romantic poetry; it pertains perhaps to Keats's 'Ode on a Grecian Urn', to 'To Autumn', to a few shorter poems by Blake and Wordsworth, and to very little else. " Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, Understanding Poetry, 3rd ed. (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960 (1938]), 177-80. 35 Leavis, Revaluation, 214. 36 Ransom, The World's Body, 342. 37 Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn, 213.

Wordsworth's Hedgerows

45 That the urn was actually a visual object, an infrashape that the poem had to overlie, rather than a mere trope, is crucial to an understanding of New Critical theory. Brooks, indeed, readily admits that he and his fellow critics conceive Donne's phrase as actually constituting the structure they want to see: The urn to which we are summoned, the urn which holds the ashes of the phoenix, is like the well-wrought urn of Donne's 'Canonization' which holds the phoenix-lovers' ashes: it is the poem itself. One is reminded of another urn, Keats's Grecian urn, which contained for Keats, Truth and Beauty, as Shakespeare's urn encloses 'Beautie, Truth, and Raritie'. But there is a sense in which all such well-wrought urns contain the ashes of a Phoenix. The urns are not meant for memorial purposes only, though that often seems to be their chief significance to the professors of literature ... We must be prepared to accept the paradox of the imagination itself; else 'Beautie, Truth and Raritie' remain enclosed in their cinders and we shall end with essential cinders, for all our pains. 38

To 'accept the paradox of the imagination itself' is for the New Critics to engage in the coherence-judgements of their kind of approach, with its emphasis on a texture of tensions: paradox, ambiguity, and irony ('there is irony of a very powerful sort in Wordsworth's "Intimations Ode"' says Brooks approvingly.) 39 To them the phoenix of meaning arises, as it were, only when the ashes are stirred by close critical reading. To that end, and especially to illustrate the way in which the differing infrashapes dictate different aesthetic expectations, let us inspect the opening of 'Tintern Abbey', which we shall follow until the first sharp divergence from the New Critical infrashape occurs: Five years have past; five summers, with the length Of five long winters! and again I hear these Waters, rolling from their mountain-springs With a soft inland murmur.-Once again Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs, That on a wild secluded scene impress 31 Ibid. 2.0-1. Again: 'The poem is an instance of the doctrine which it asserts; it is both the assertion and the realization of the assertion. The poet has actually before our eyes built within the song the "pretty room" with which he says the lovers can be content. The poem itself is the well-wrought urn which can hold the lovers' ashes and which will not suffer in comparison with the prince's "halfe-acre tomb"' (p. 17). 1• Ibid. 2.10.

Wordsworth,s Hedgerows Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect The landscape with the quiet of the sky. The day is come when I again repose Here, under this dark sycamore, and view These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard-tufts, Which at this season, with their unripe fruits, Are clad in one green hue, and lose themselves 'Mid groves and copses. Once again I see These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines Of sportive wood run wild: these pastoral farms Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke Sent up, in silence, from among the trees! 40

There is, one thinks, nothing until the line about the hedgerows with which New Criticism would find fault. The opening, indeed, is memorable and archetypally poetic. In a discussion called 'Poetry and the Poem: The Structure of Poetic Content', which occurs in my book entitled Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin, it is argued that two depth-features, which are called essentia and ens, are necessary to all true poetry. 41 Poetic ens is the interinanimation of the sense of human life with the awareness of the concrete outer world; it is the intermingling of subject and object. As Robert Langbaum has said of the Romantic lyric in general, 'The poet talks about himself by talking about an object; and he talks about an object by talking about himself. ' 42 One applauds the insight at the same time that one insists that it is a characteristic not restricted to the Romantic lyric but is a defining characteristic of poetry as such. So, too, Coleridge recognizes that 'in every work of art there is a reconcilement of the external with the internal'. 43 When Wordsworth says that 'there is not a single image from Nature in the whole body' of D ryden's verse, 44 he is recognizing that poet's radical deficiency in ens; and Leavis is recognizing the same deficiency when he describes Shelley's peculiar fault as a 'weak grasp upon the actual'. 45 Again, the early poetry of Yeats is insipid 0 Poetical Works, ii. 259-60: 'Tinrern Abbey', lines 1-18. •1 McFarland, Romanticism, 255-8 8. 42 Langbaum, The Poetry of Experience, 5 3. 43 Coleridge, 'On Poesy or Arr', in S. T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. with his Aestherical Essays by J. Shawcross (London: Oxford University Press, 1907), ii. 258. 44 Letters: The Early Years, 641. 45 Leavis, Revaluation, 206. •

47 mainly because of a Shelleyan lack of ens. The lmagist Manifesto in modern British and American poetry was actually a declaration of the necessity of ens in the complete poetic act, and Pound's instructive criticisms of Yeats were largely a rectification of that poet's tendency toward weak realization of ens. The second feature that true poetry must exhibit is essentia. The essentia of a poetic act consists in the invocation of time's flow past a framed now. The lyric instant, or essence of poetry, it is maintained, consists in summoning an awareness intrinsic to the human situation, but one that can be indicated neither by philo­ sophy nor by any other discursive form: that is, it presents the peculiarly human mode of existence in its eternally dual form as the simultaneity of nowness and passing away, or, in Jasperian terms, as a tension of Dasein and Existenz. In the lines that begin 'Tintern Abbey' the essentia is profound and insistent, engaging in a direct, simple, and extraordinarily powerful way the being of the observer and the flow of time past him: 'Five years have past'; and then the time is hammered home: 'five summers'; and hammered again: 'five long winters'. The powerful strokes of time's passage are matched with equally powerful repetitions that recall it to nowness: 'again I hear'; 'Once again do I behold'. The structure of entic perspective is here particularly intriguing. First, the poet hails the streaming infra­ shape: 'again I hear these I Waters, rolling from their mountain­ springs I With a soft inland murmur'. The evocation, however, is auditory and symbolic rather than visual, and it thereby serves to deflect emphasis, which is re-bestowed upon the overtly visual beholding of 'these steep and lofty cliffs'; for the poem will not actually deal with flowings of water but will instead constitute the flow itself. The power, directness, and harmonic simplicity of the opening are virtually Handelian in their majesty. There is no muting or finesse but everywhere power and insistence. Following this organ prelude, as it were, the connections with external nature become more particularized and delicate. The generality by which 'Thoughts of more deep seclusion' are said to be parallel to a connection of the 'landscape with the quiet of the sky', gives way to the specific and immediate: 'Here, under this dark sycamore'; 'These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard tufts'. The specifica­ tions lead to the famous hedgerows: 'Once again I see I These Wordsworth's Hedgerows

Wordsworth's Hedgerows

I

hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines Of sportive wood run wild'. But here, from the expectations of New Critical structure, a flaw obtrudes. Since the progression has been from the generality of 'mountain-springs' and 'steep and lofty cliffs'-indeed, from 'land­ scape' and 'sky'-to specific objects like 'this dark sycamore', one would expect any appositional. structure for hedgerows to specify in still more precise detail. Instead, the passage runs off into fanciful imprecision: 'These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines Of sportive wood run wild'. The sense of the poetic eye of decorum wavering from the object is then strengthened by 'these pastoral farms, Green to the very door'. Pastoral farms, presum­ ably farms for sheep rather than grain or cattle, nevertheless invoke by the actual word 'pastoral' a tradition of imitation and a tradition of artificiality, neither of which seems to fit very well with the sublime directness and simplicity of the opening. One can almost imagine a severe critic such as Winters or Leavis saying brusquely: 'Make up your mind, are they hedge-rows or are they not?' Certainly in this tradition of insistence on clear articula­ tion of images, which is heir to the criticism of Pope and Dr Johnson, precise delineation is valued. But in 'hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows', imagistic reference begins to eddy, as though there has been a slackening in the poet's attention. The New Critics looked upon T. S. Eliot as 'one of the most important sources of a new criticism', felt that 'It is likely that we have had no better critic than Eliot' (both statements occur in Ransom's The New Criticism). But Eliot himself was heir to Pound's insistence on precision and compression in imagery; and the lmagist Manifesto, which expresses concerns close to both Eliot and Pound, exhorts the poet, in its fourth statement, 'To present an image (hence the name imagist). We are not a school of painters, but we believe that poetry should render particulars exactly and not deal in vague generalities . . .'. The fifth statement in the manifesto urges a 'poetry that is hard and clear, never blurred nor indefinite', and the sixth says that 'concentration is of the very essence of poetry'. 46 'Tintern Abbey' in the hedgerow passage does not seem to be rendering particulars exactly, nor does the verse here seem to be 'hard and clear'; it seems, on the contrary, 'blurred

I

I

•• Hughes, 40.

Wordsworth's Hedgerows

49

and indefinite'. And the 'hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows' equivo­ cation does not seem to show much of the desired concentration. If it be interposed in defence of 'hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows' that Wordsworth did not subscribe to lmagist tenets, the counter would be that he did not do so historically, but he did so virtually. Indeed, the first item in the lmagist Manifesto accords absolutely with Wordsworth's own prescription of the language really used by men, for it bids us 'to use the language of common speech, but to employ always the exact word, not the nearly-exact, nor the merely decorative word'.47 Richard Aldington, in fact, pointed out, in the Preface to the lmagist credo, that 'These principles are not new; they have fallen into desuetude. They are the essentials of all great poetry.'48 How much Wordsworth himself concurred in these views might be gauged from his criticism of Macpherson's Ossian: 'In nature everything is distinct, yet nothing defined into absolute independent singleness. In Macpherson's work it is exactly the reverse; every thing . . . is . . . defined, insulated, dislocated, deadened,-yet nothing distinct.'49 Again, he said that 'in his translations from Vergil, whenever Vergil can be fairly said to have his eye upon his object, Dryden always spoils the passage'. 50 If Wordsworth does not quite seem to keep his own eye upon the object in the equivocation about the hedgerows, it would accordingly appear that by theories to which he himself subscribed, he would here be somewhat open to Winters's fierce denunciation, expressed with regard to the 'Immortality Ode', that 'Wordsworth gives us bad oratory about his own clumsy emotions and a landscape that he has never fully realized'. 51 One does not need to accept Winters's customary rhetorical exaggeration to see that the charge about 'a landscape that he has never fully really realized' is a duplicate of Wordsworth's own judgement of Macpherson. Furthermore, it is apparent to any close reader of Wordsworth that the great poet is not usually very specific in his invocation of nature. This claim about Wordsworth's lack of visual particularity in the rendering of nature will seem outrageous only to the umm•• Prose, iii. 77. " Ibid. •- Hughes, �9'" Letters: The Early Years, 64 1. ll Winters, Forms of Discovery, 172..

50

Wordsworth's Hedgerows

tiated. It has, in fact, been made repeatedly by those who pay close attention to poetry. For a single instance, Donald Davie, speaking of the blank verse of The Prelude, says: We can make a start by pointing out that Wordsworth's world is not pre­ eminently a world of 'things'. His language ...is not concrete. Because in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth castigated some earlier poets for giving no proof that they had ever truly looked at natural phenomena, it is often supposed that his own verse is full of such phenomena rendered in all their quiddity and concreteness. But this is a sort of optical illusion. What Wordsworth renders is not the natural world but (with masterly fidelity) the effect that world has upon him ...As Lionel Trilling remarks: ...His finest passages are moral, emotional, subjective; whatever visual intensity they have comes from his response to the object, not from his close observation of it. 52

To this last, one would only urge the amendment that Words­ worth's response was not characteristically to 'the object' as such, New Critical bias notwithstanding, but to the streaming connection he saw in the natural scene. For example, consider the supreme lines in 'Tintern Abbey' that run this way: And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man: A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things.53

The passage is remarkable for its non-specific generality as it hails nature, from the unspecified 'presence' and the unspecified 'elevated thoughts' at the beginning, to the unspecified 'objects of all thought' and the unspecified 'all things' at the end. In between, the nominations of nature are hugely unspecific. The 'setting suns' here have none of the particularized glory of the orange sky of evening in The Prelude's skating scene; the 'blue sky' is about as general a 52 Davie, 107. 53 Poetical Works, ii. 2.61-2.: 'Tintern Abbey', lines 93-102..

Wordsworth's Hedgerows

51

description as one can imagine-so general as to be almost banal­ and the imagistic precision or particularization of 'round ocean' and 'living air' is virtually nil!. And yet, despite the radical failure of the lines to measure up to the criteria of the Imagist Manifesto or the New Criticism, the passage is enormously powerful-a true apex of poetry. In what does its power consist? Perhaps as good an answer as any is that it consists in the sense of inevitability. The movement of the passage is so sure and deep that its statement seems ineluctable; it seems, that is, to constitute a steady current of certainty, an irresistible flow of feeling. The flow exists in the ordering of the words themselves. Thus the first and second lines are powerfully enjambed, the second and the third are enjambed as well, as are the third and fourth. The sixth line flows from the fifth also, not by enjambment but by the variant efficacy of the conjunction 'And', and the seventh line maintains the flow from the sixth by a second use of 'And', and further impels it by a third 'and' immediately afterward. The eighth and ninth lines again flow by enjambment, which is reinforced by the apposition in the ninth line, while the tenth line begins with yet a fourth 'And'. Though the lines, if seen as overlying a well-wrought urn as infrashape, might be criticized as lacking a desired distinctness and particularity of imagery, when they are accompanied by a different awareness of infrashape no such judgement presents itself. When one sees a streaming infrashape, then the passage exhibits an exquisite decorum. For just as the particularized stones in a dry stream-bed are more clearly delineated because there is no flow, so does the presence of flow make their precise outline less prominent. And just as the streaming infrashape is hailed at the poem's outset by the assurance that 'again I hear these I Waters, rolling from their mountain-springs', so does the verb 'roll' of that passage, which augments the sense of flow, govern and conclude the movement of the 'sense sublime' passage: A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things.

At least part of the grandeur of the whole passage, indeed, stems precisely from the onomatopoeic triumph that all ten lines 'roll through' our poetic ear just as the motion and spirit 'rolls through'

52

Wordsworth's Hedgerows

all things. The passage is a miracle of cadence, a living embodiment of the movement of a stream. Just as poetic lines that seem flawed when taken to overlie the infrashape of a sharply delimited object may seem correct when referred to the streaming infrashape, so too does the equivocation about the hedgerows no longer seem a poetic flaw when adjusted to the proper infrashape. The imagery of 'Tintern Abbey', in fact, begins to stream before the 'hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows' pas­ sage occurs, which thereby reveals itself as continuing the flow set in motion: these orchard tufts, Which at this season, with their unripe fruits, Are clad in one green hue, and lose themselves 'Mid groves and copses. Once again I see These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines Of sportive wood run wild.

The image of the 'orchard-tufts', instead of remaining static and precise, streams to the vision of 'one green hue' and streams further to 'groves and copses'. Immediately following, the 'hedge-rows' stream to 'hardly hedge-rows' and stream further to 'little lines of sportive wood run wild'. But the second streaming of imagery is different in structure from the first. The 'orchard-tufts' stream by a movement of the eye: they 'lose themselves I 'Mid groves and copses'. The 'hedge­ rows', however, stream not by a movement of the eye but by a movement of the imagination. If one looks long enough at orchard­ tufts they can in fact merge into one green hue; yet no matter how long one looks at hedgerows, they never in fact are seen as little lines of sportive wood run wild. Though one 'should gaze for ever', he 'may not hope from outward forms to win I The passion and the life, whose fountains are within'. 54 One can move from 'hedge­ rows' to 'little lines of sportive wood run wild' only by an act of imagination, and the act in this instance is that eddy of mind known as reverie. In truth, the mental possibility called reverie was one of the treasured hallmarks of the Romantic sensibility, and by its agency

54

Coleridge, Poems, i. 365: 'Dejection: An Ode', lines 43, 45-6.

53 the distinctness and sharpness treasured by the lmagist Manifesto give way to unwilled mergings. Both the high Romantic credentials of reverie and its unbidden mergings are indicated by Rousseau's Reveries d'un promeneur solitaire: Wordsworth's Hedgerows

Coming out of a long and sweet reverie, seeing myself surrounded by greenery, flowers, and birds, and letting my eyes wander in the distance over the Romantic banks that bordered a vast expanse of clear and crystalline water, l assimilated to my fictions all these amiable objects, and finding myself at last brought back by degrees to myself and my surround­ ings, I could not mark the point of separation between fictions and realities, so much did everything collaborate equally in endearing to me the reflective and solitary life I led in this lovely place."

It is almost as though Wordsworth's 'hedge-rows, hardly hedge­ rows, little lines Of sportive wood run wild' were produced exactly to illustrate Rousseau's reveristic annulment of 'the point of separation between fictions and realities'. The 'hedge-rows' are realities of present vision, the 'little lines of sportive wood run wild' are fictions arising from the reality, and the equivocating word 'hardly' bridges the line of separation between the two. The merging from reality to fiction is, moreover, precisely an instance of flow. Indeed, the idea of flow is as intrinsic to reverie as it is to the infrashape of the longer Romantic lyric. Rousseau explicitly links his apotheosis of reverie with the movement of water; for reverie must be a current, or to use a later phrase, a stream of consc10usness:

I

I let myself go and drifted slowly as the water moved me, sometimes for several hours, absorbed in a thousand confused but delicious reveries which, without having any well-defined or constant object, were none the less to my taste ....The flux and reflux of that water, its sound, continuous but swelling at intervals, striking continually my ear and my eyes, supplanted the internal movements that the reverie extinguished in me and sufficed to make me feel my existence with pleasure, without taking the trouble to think. From time to time arose a feeble and short reflection on the instability of the things of this world of which the surface of the waters offered me the image; but soon these weak impressions died out in the ss Rousseau, i.

1048.

Wordsworth's Hedgerows 54 continuous movement that rocked me,- and which, without any active participation of my mind, did not fail to take hold of me. 56

If the progress of 'hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows' may be seen as according with the flux and drifting of reverie as well as with the decorum of a streaming infrashape, its relationship with its antecedent passage nevertheless seems, with regard to decorum, more problematic. For the relation of the orchard-tufts losing themselves ' 'Mid groves and copses' and of the hedgerows merging into the reveristic fiction of 'little lines of sportive wood run wild' is not precisely parallel. From the expectations of a well-wrought urn, indeed, the relationship is flawed. Both passages flow; but they are asymmetrical in that one represents a movement of the eye and the other a movement of imagination. Yet from the perspective of the streaming infrashape that asym­ metry is not a flaw. Not only did the Romantics in general theoretically prefer the unboundedness of the asymmetrical to the restriction of symmetry-prefer the unfinished Gothic cathedral to the symmetrical Greek temple57 -but such preference for the asymmetrical characterized their taste in streaming. They looked not toward the placidity of an Afton flowing gently between placid green banks; rather they looked toward the image of the mountain torrent, rushing now fiercely, now gently, in windings and turnings, sometimes as a cataract, against boulders, outcroppings of land, and other asymmetric features that emphasized the strength and wildness of the flow. The sounding cataract haunted the Romantics like a passion. 'The little boat,' says Shelley in 'Alastor', 'Still fled before the storm; still fled, like foam I Down the steep cataract of a wintry river. '58 Such a streaming was in marked contrast to the movement of water that the neo-classic sensibility could on occasion assert as its own poetic ideal. Denham's famous wish that his verse might be like the Thames envisions a flow quite unlike that of a boulder­ strewn mountain torrent: 0 could I flow like thee, and make thy stream My great example, as it is my theme!

Rousseau, i. 1044-5. See e.g. W. D. Robson-Scott, The Literary Background of the Gothic Revival in Germany: A Chapter in the History of Taste (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965). 58 Shelley, i. 186, lines 344-6. 56

57

Wordsworth's Hedgerows

55

Though deep, yet clear, though gentle, yet not dull, Strong without rage, without ore-flowing full. 59

As Dr Johnson said, 'almost every writer for a century past has imitated' Denham's lines, following upon Dryden's commendation of them.60 Yet though the image of their flow constitutes an ideal for the neo-classic sensibility, it does not refer to the streaming that makes up the infrashape of the longer Romantic lyric. That infrashape is as replete with boulders as the lyrics them­ selves are full of asymmetries. Certain modes of critical assumption tend to stigmatize such asymmetries as faults. Some asymmetries, of course, might indeed eventually be seen as faults. Others, however, like the image of the hedgerows, exactly fit the decorum of the flowing infrashape of the longer Romantic lyric. (Even those that are faults can be allowed in a longer poem, according to Horace's own definition of decorum: 'There are faults, however, that we can willingly forgive ... When the beauties in a poem predominate, I shall not make an issue of a few blemishes that have resulted from carelessness or human frailty ... I am . .. irritated whenever the great Homer nods. But then, when a work is long, sleep inevitably creeps over it.') 61 In any event, it is not easy in every circumstance to define what constitutes a fault in a poem. To speak with assurance, one may not rely on unexamined assumptions, but must rather be aware of the decorum of the whole poem, the decorum of its tradition, and lastly, of the decorum of the literally visual concretion, the infra­ shape, that underlies its poetic form. A final point. When the hedgerows stream over into little lines of sportive wood run wild, they actually are not in violation of Wordsworth's own views of the relation of an image to the natural object. His comments on Macpherson were adduced earlier as tantamount to the tenets of the Imagist Manifesto.In one import­ ant respect, however, Wordsworth's emphasis is unique. He argues that in Macpherson everything is 'defined, insulated, dislocated, deadened,-yet nothing distinct'. But 'In nature everything is distinct, yet nothing defined into absolute independent singleness.' The red wheelbarrow of the lmagists is, as it were, defined 'into 59 Sir John Denham, 'Cooper's Hill', lines 189-92.. .., Lives of the Poets, i. 78. 61 Horace, Art of Poetry, in Criticism, 56-7.

Wordsworth's Hedgerows absolute independent singleness'. But for Wordsworth the image is not to be thus torn from the matrix of awareness. To have the orchard-tufts lose themselves ' 'Mid groves and copses' precisely illustrates the distinctness of the natural object at the same time that it denies its singleness by relating it to the natural matrix. So, too, the hedgerows are cognized distinctly; but they are not 'defined, insulated, dislocated, deadened'. And they are not 'defined into absolute independent singleness'. Rather, quite in keeping with Wordsworth's own visualization of the natural image, no less than with the infrashape of the poem as a whole, their distinct cogni­ zance is linked and related to the fanciful cognizance of little lines of sportive wood run wild.

3

I cannot paint What then I was: The Psychological Structure of Wordsworthian Intensity IN the foregoing chapter an attempt was made to set another kind of marginal commentary over against Marjorie Levinson's dis­ course of absence. An attempt was also made, at least to some extent, to do what she is charged with not doing: that is, to approach the poetic greatness of Wordsworth's poem. But by their very nature such attempts are always, in one degree or another, partial and incomplete; they glimpse the poem rather than totally comprehend its quality. Shelley maintains that no poet ever entirely captures his vision within his poem; 1 to that falling away must inexorably be added the secondary falling away constituted by the poetic translation called criticism. To the degree, therefore, that the act of criticism does manage to reveal poetic quality, it always whets the appetite for more. In this chapter, accordingly, an attempt will be made to carry the qualita­ tive investigation further. I shall be talking not so much of 'Tintern Abbey', however, which has perhaps already occupied enough of this book, as of the special nature of Wordsworth's greatness as a poet. Or rather, I shall attempt to isolate and in some manner illuminate one aspect, though an important one, of that urgency of statement that raises Wordsworth to the very first rank of world poetry, and that accounts for the quality of other poems as well as of 'Tintern Abbey'. Now Wordsworth's supreme qualities as a poet are so generally conceded that often one forgets that he, more than any other major poet, presents unsolved problems about the nature of his achieve­ ment. Two that I have called attention to elsewhere are, first, the prevalence of blocking elements preliminary to and even inter1 'The most glorious poetry that has ever been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conception of the Poet' (Shelley, vii. 135 ).

I cannot paint What then I was twined with some of his greatest passages,2 and secondly, his unique ability toyitalize.abstracticn�s such as 'power', 'joy', 'love', 'grandeur', 'spirit', and other expressions worn so thin by indiscriminate use that most skilful poets would simply not be able to work with them, would indeed avoid them at all costs. 3 A third is the nature of his fabled anti-climax. I refer here not to the causes of the anti-climax, or to the dates, or even to the question of whether there was in fact an anti-climax, even though all these questions have been the subject of prolonged and vigorous debate. I refer rather to the nature of the changes in his poetic production that causes one to feel the later poems are desiccated in comparison to his greatest statements. To this last problem and to the question of Wordsworth's uniquely vitalized abstractions, I shall in this chapter propose a solution contained in a single word: intensity. Hazlitt, with his acute critical intelligence, used that word very early in describing Wordsworth:

'heart\...

To the author of the Lyrical Ballads nature is a kind of home; and he may be said to take a personal interest in the universe. There is no image so insignificant that it has not in some mood or other found the way into his heart: no sound that does not awaken the memory of other years ...The daisy looks up to him with sparkling eye ... a linnet's nest startles him with boyish delight: an old withered thorn is weighed down with a heap of recollections: a grey cloak, seen on some wild moor, torn by the wind, or drenched in the rain, afterwards becomes an object of imagination to him: even the lichens on the rocks have a life and being in his thoughts. He has described all these objects in a way and with an intensity of feeling that no one else had done before him ... He is in this sense the most original poet now living, and the one whose writings could the least be spared: for they have no substitute elsewhere.4

Although most readers of Wordsworth would agree with the importance of intensity of feeling as an index to his peculiar quality, the question still remains as to how his poetry generates intensity, and why is intensity so much more important to his poetry than it is to that of others? W�f!l_U.sLrealize,-first-of all, �ha_t_ the intensicy ,_whatever else it may have been, was a mode of Wordsworth's own experience of McFarland, Originality, 61-72.. 3 See below p. 112. n. 46. • Hazlitt, xi.

2

89.

I cannot paint What then I was

59 reality. He felt it within himself, felt it with a c�nain_ty that actmitteclofnoequ1voca6on; andne va ue 1t as unique: Possessions have I that are solely mine, Something within which yet is shared by none, Not even the nearest to me and most dear. 5

His 'ear was touched I With dreams and visionary impulses I To me alone imparted'. 6 In his most typical moments, the intensity made him confident, enriched at every glance: The more I see the more delight my mind Receives, or by reflexion can create. 7

That confidence generated an unshakeable conviction of the unique importance of his experience: The boon is absolute; surpassing grace To me hath been vouchsafed."

Such inner delight and confidence, such certainty of grace, were the origin and source of the Wordsworthian intensity. Even here at the outset, however, we feel that Wordsworth is distinct from other poets. M.@y of th�ther poets do not seem particularly noteworthy in their inner abundance-Eliot, for an outstanding instance. Some, however, do. Keats was one of the latter: 'Keats was in his glory in the fields,' recalls Benjamin Haydon, 'The humming of the bee, the sight of a flower, the glitter of the sun, seemed to make his nature tremble! his eyes glistened! his cheek flushed! his mouth positively quivered & clentched!'9 Yet we discern a difference in the intensity of Keats and that of Wordsworth, a difference that may be hard to define but none the less is unmistakably there. Perhaps as good a preliminary formula­ tion of the difference as any might be to say that Keats's intensity seems to reveal itself as what we might call ardour, and lends itself in that form to his poetry, while Wordsworth's intensity seems to be certainty, certainty about the importance of his experience, certainty about the unique value of his vision. 5 Poetical Works, v. 336: 'Home at Grasmere', lines 686-8. 6 Ibid. ii. 114: 'To Joanna', lines 70-2. 7 Ibid. v. 330: 'Home at Grasmere', lines 498-9. ' Ibid. 317, lines 103-4. 9 Haydon, ii. 3 16.

60

I cannot paint What then I was

Indeed, as I have elsewhere argued,�it is this certainty, and not any formally philosophical commitment or interest, that accounted for Coleridge's insistence that Wordsworth was a philosopher. 'The same certainty that Wordsworth possessed the truth,' I wrote, 'caused Coleridge to fasten upon him as the great philosophical poet. For however formally unphilosophical and untheoretical Wordsworth may have been, truth, which his whole being radiated the confidence of possessing, is what all philosophers have always sought. Therefore Wordsworth, like his six years' child, was, despite his innocence of formal learning, a best philosopher and an eye among the blind.' 10 The matter is very important. As long as Wordsworth felt the certainty of his truth, he was a great poet; when certainty departed, he became merely a man writing verse. For he had never really been a poet in the most traditional sense, despite his many experiments with subject-matters and poetic styles. As John Danby observes, 'Wordsworth, at heart ... was profoundly uninterested in poetry as words.' 11 Wordsworth rather asitl.!ed_simply t_o bear witness to his truth. He said thafne"lived merely to register the truth-'I who live to register the truti/12and this�s'ingle claim accounts for the whole of his poetic being, both the heights, when the certainty of truth informed his verse, and the desiccations, when it did not. As I have said apropos of what I call Wordsworth's 'limpid style', which was the vehicle most suited to the expression of his truth: It is the limpid style ... that supplies us with clues to the profoundest directions and goals of Wordsworth's poetic strivings. First of all, it reveals why he was so concerned to free himself from poetic diction, and''itreveals also why Coleridge, despite 'his superior 'critical skills, never really addressed the point of Wordsworth's stand on poetic diction. Coleridge himself ... typically moved toward a heightened diction and a complex syntax. He aimed in general at an intricate artifact. He strove to erect a verbal structure adequate to support and to display the monumental mass of theological philosophy that he intended it to convey. W(!rdsworth, on the contrary, was in a sense always trying to diminish, not augment, the artifact. He sought a direct expression of an inner truth that was felt�with a literally prophetic conviction and certainty, and it was necessary that the poem not come between that truth and its proclamation. Wordsworth needed, not to hypostasize his poetry by an ornate style, but rather so to 10

12

11 McFarland, Romanticism, 2.53. Danby, 16. Poetical Works, v.314: 'Home at Grasmere', line 47.

I cannot paint What then I was

61

purify the style that the poem disappeared and only the distilled truth remained. Thus Coleridge, significantly, realizes that the speaker in 'The Prelude' is not primarily a poet, but 'Friend of the wise, and teacher of the Good', that 'The Prelude' is not so much an artifact as a 'prophetic Lay'.13

In this context, 'Ruth' presents itself as a paradigm for one mode of Wordsworthian intensity. The intensity suffusing the poem results in an extreme control that virtually reduces the statement itself to a transparency. The transparency, even more than the sadness of the story, is the condition of the poem's immense poignancy. Coleridge was so affected by 'Ruth' that he even said that he would rather have written it than 'a million' poems such as 'Christabel'. 14 The poem is about the vulnerability of the human heart. Its achievement, as with so much of Wordsworth's great poetry of pathos, is so to present that vulnerability as to make us all participate in its feeling, realize, as it were, that we do indeed have all of us one human heart. It is deliberately rather lengthy, the more to funnel down to a single explosive jet: the destruction of a human soul by the betrayal of its love. We recall that one of Hamlet's catalogue of woes that particularly insults and outrages him is 'the pangs of despised love', which ranks so high among 'the heartache, and the thousand natural shocks I That flesh is heir to'. To give one's heart, and then to be betrayed, is in truth one of the prime indices of human pain; and yet it is, paradoxically, at the same time one of the prime indices of human worth. As Hazlitt, who experienced the full and immense pain of such rejection, said, 'I am in some sense proud that I can feel this dreadful passion-it makes me a kind of peer in the kingdom of love, but I could have wished it had been for an object that at least could have understood its value and pitied its excess.' 15 Hazlitt's pain was indeed immense: 'My heart is torn out of me, and every feeling for which I wished to live. It is like a dream, an enchantment; it torments me and it makes me mad. I lie down with it, I rise up with it, and I see no chance of repose.' 16 Again, 'Mocked, mocked by her in whom I placed my hope, writhing, writhing in misery and despair, caused by one who hardens herself against me. I wished for courage to throw myself into the waters; but I could not even do that-and McFarland, Romanticism, 250-r. 16 Ibid. 15 Hazlitt, Letters, 27 5.

13

" Collected Letters, i. 6 3 2.

I cannot paint What then I was my little boy, too, prevented me, when I thought of his face at hearing of his father's death, and his desolation in life.' 17 And yet, to some extent, Hazlitt's pain was ameliorated by his ability to speak it. Ruth, on the contrary, cannot give significant voice to her woe: God help thee, Ruth!-Such pains she had, That she in half a year was mad, And in a prison housed; And there, with many a doleful song Made of wild words, her cup of wrong She fearfully caroused. 18

When after three seasons, there came 'a respite' to her pain she 'from her prison fled', and 'Among the fields she breathed again'. 19 Yet Wordsworth, with masterful understatement, is able to make her freedom in nature even more poignant than her madness: The engines of her pain, the tools That shaped her sorrow, rocks and pools, Airs that gently stir The vernal leaves-she loved them still; Nor ever taxed them with the ill Which had been done to her. 20

Wordsworth, indeed, with the proleptic psychoanalytical under­ standing that characterized his conjectures about the infant babe in Book Two of The Prelude, represents Ruth as having been forced by her rejection into Freudian regression, the state that character­ izes the severest mental ills. She is literally evicted from adulthood into a renewed childhood: I, too, have passed her on the hills Setting her little water-mills By spouts and fountains wildSuch small machinery as she turned Ere she had wept, ere she had mourned A young and happy Child!21 17 1

• 21

18 Poetical Works, ii. 233: 'Ruth', lines 193-8. Patmore, iii. 176. 20 Ibid. 234, lines 217-:z.:z.. Ibid., line 211. Ibid. :z.3 5, lines 247-52.

I cannot paint What then I was Ruth is not only mute in her agony; she is also aridly alone. A passage in Dorothy's journal hypostasizes the Wordsworthi:m sense of the dreadfulness of betrayal in matters of the heart: On the Rays we met a woman with 2 little girls one in her arms the other about 4 years old walking by her side, a pretty little thing, but half starved. She had on a pair of slippers that had belonged to some gentleman's child, down at the heels-it was not easy to keep them on but, poor thing! young as she was, she walked carefully with them. Alas too young for such cares and such travels. The Mother when we accosted her told us that her husband had left her and gone off with another woman and how she 'pursued' them. Then her fury kindled and her eyes rolled about. She changed again to tears. 22

But poignant though this is, at least this forsaken woman does not share the total aloneness of Ruth; indeed, the child with the slippers down at the heels-'Alas too young for such cares and such travels'-perhaps elicits our anguish even more than does the distraught mother. Wordsworth permits no such diversion of sympathy with Ruth. It is here somewhat as it is with 'Resolution and Independence', Dorothy's journal had noted that the old Leech-gatherer had had ten children; but Wordsworth's poem strips him to the same cosmic aloneness as he bestows on Ruth. Both participate, to cite the phrasing of 'The Old Cumberland Beggar', in 'that vast solitude to which I The tide of things has borne' them. Ruth's solitude, however, is even more poignant than that of the Leech-gatherer or the Cumberland Beggar; for she has been cast into it by an assault on her heart. The forsaken woman was of course one of the deepest tropes by which Wordsworth penetrated to his great theme that 'we have all of us one human heart'. As early as 'An Evening Walk' he had summoned this trope in the vision of the woman, who 'with her infants, from some shady seat I By the lake's edge' rose to face the noontide heat: I see her now, denied to lay her head, On cold blue nights, in hut or straw-built shed, Turn to a silent smile their sleepy cry. Oh! when the sleety showers her path assail, And like a torrent roars the headstrong gale; 22

Journals, 121.

I cannot paint What then I was No more her breath can thaw their fingers cold, Their frozen arms her neck no more can fold; Weak roof a cowering form two babes to shield, And faint the fire a dying heart can yield! 23

But here, as with the woman Dorothy encountered, much of the sadness is dispersed into the relationship of the mother to her infants. A fortiori this holds true for the greatest of Wordsworth's realizations of the theme of the forsaken woman; for the soul­ shaking poignancy of Margaret's situation in 'The Ruined Cottage' specifically arises from the decline of her achieved relationship to her husband Robert, and then to her two children, symbolized by the decline of the cottage from home to ruin. Likewise the female vagrant of 'Guilt and Sorrow' has had both husband and children. Ruth is perhaps more like Martha Ray of 'The Thorn', betrayed and destroyed by Stephen Hill. Yet even Martha Ray seems to participate in the fullness of life to the extent of having a child; and another of Wordsworth's forsaken women, Betty Foy, at least has her idiot boy Johnny. Ruth, however, is totally alone, except for the assault upon her being mounted by the beautiful but faithless youth from the New World. We perhaps have to go to another great artist, Flaubert, to find a true parallel. For in Un cceur simple Felicite-the name is exquisitely ironic-has one chance for the affirmation supplied by love, and she, like Ruth, experiences the full and mighty pain of rejection. Her lover, Theodore-a name matching in irony her own-'proposed marriage. She hesitated to believe him. He took great oaths': 24 The moment arrived; she ran toward her lover. Instead of him, she found one of his friends. He told her that she should never see him again. In order to keep from being conscripted, Theodore had married an old, very rich woman, Madame Lehoussais, from Toucques. Tumultuous grief. She threw herself on the ground, cried, called on God, and moaned all alone in the fields until sunrise. Then she went back to the farm, declared her intention of leaving; and, at the end of the month, having received her payment, she wrapped up her little luggage in a handkerchief, and returned to Pont-l'Eveque. 25 23 Poetical Works, i. 27-9: 'An Evening Walk', lines 2.52.-3, 2.56-8, 2.69-74. 2 • Flaubert, 9. H Ibid. IO.

I cannot paint What then I was This rejection is merely one episode in Flaubert's great story, an episode preceded by the sardonic assurance that Felicite 'had had, like others, her history of love'. 26 Ruth's own 'histoire de !'amour', on the other hand, constitutes not an episode but the totality of her experience of the world. Her love is perhaps not so much despised, as, to substitute the more philosophical reading of Shakespeare's first folio, 'dispriz'd' by her lover: And yet he with no feigned delight Had wooed the Maiden, day and night Had loved her, night and morn: What could he less than love a Maid Whose heart with so much nature played? So kind and so forlorn! Sometimes, most earnestly, he said, 'O Ruth! I have been worse than dead; My soul from darkness is released.' 27

Yet the youth, who is represented not so much as evil, as in Scott Fitzgerald's burning moral category, 'careless', cannot sustain his nobler mind: Full soon that better mind was gone; No hope, no wish remained, not one, They stirred him now no more; New objects did new pleasure give, And once again he wished to live As lawless as before. 28

An idiosyncratic feature of 'Ruth', indeed, is the lengthy atten­ tion Wordsworth pays to the youth's psychology and attractive­ ness, although it is Ruth herself who carries the whole weight of the poem's poignancy. The depiction of the youth, coming from the savannahs of Georgia, seems almost to represent a psycho­ logical continuation of the situation of Luke from 'Michael'. Luke, who is the repository of all his father's hopes, is not so much bad as weak: 2 •

27

Ibid. 7.

Poetical Works, ii. 2.32: 'Ruth', Imes 157-64, 178.

" Ibid. 2.33, lines 181-6.

66

I cannot paint What then I was A good report did from their Kinsman come, Of Luke and his well-doing: and the Boy Wrote loving letters, full of wondrous news, The Shepherd went about his daily work With confident and cheerful thoughts; Meantime Luke began To slacken in his duty; and, at length, He in the dissolute city gave himself To evil courses: ignominy and shame Fell on him, so that he was driven at last To seek a hiding-place beyond the seas. 29

In both 'Michael' and 'Ruth' Wordsworth avails himself of an identical technique of litotes to express the most overwhelming shock.The collapse of all Michael's hopes in the defection of Luke is treated almost off-handedly, with the cursory notice of something not very important: 'Meantime ... evil courses ... ignominy and shame ... seek a hiding-place beyond the seas.' This same stark and unadorned notation of a cataclysmic moral event characterizes the Georgia youth's abandonment of Ruth, even to the casual synchronicity of the word 'meantime':

Meanwhile, as thus with him it fared, They for the voyage were prepared, And went to the sea-shore, But, when they thither came, the Youth Deserted his poor Bride, and Ruth Could never find him more. 30 Whereas in 'Michael' the strategy of the poem dismisses Luke almost casually, so that the world of Michael himself remains totally foregrounded; it is as though in 'Ruth' Wordsworth feels a need to examine more closely how one person can, almost inad­ vertently, bring such enormous pain into the life of another. It is, in truth, almost as if Ruth's lover is not just like Luke but is Luke himself, returned from beyond the seas, still a person to be loved, still a person to deal emotional destruction:

There came a Youth from Georgia's shore­ A military casque he wore, 29 30

Poetical Works, ii. 93: 'Michael', lines 431-3, 438-9, 442-7. Ibid. 233: 'Ruth', lines 187-92.

I cannot paint What then I was With splendid feathers drest; He brought them from the Cherokees; The feathers nodded in the breeze, And made a gallant crest. He was a lovely Youth! I guess The panther in the wilderness Was not so fair as he; And, when he chose to spon and play, No dolphin ever was so gay Upon the tropic sea. 31 Like Othello, the youth speaks of strange and wondrous things, and the combination of his personal beauty and exotic experience is palpably irresistible:

The Youth of green savannahs spake, And many an endless, endless lake, With all its fairy crowds Of islands, that together lie As quietly as spots of sky Among the evening clouds. 32 His enormous attractiveness is further enhanced by his lack of guile and disingenuousness; he, like Luke, means well:

'Sweet Ruth! and could you go with me My helpmate in the woods to be, Our shed at night to rear; Or run, my own adopted bride, A sylvan huntress at my side, And drive the flying deer!' 'And now, as fitting is and right, We in the church our faith will plight, A husband and a wife.' Even so they did; and I may say That to sweet Ruth that happy day Was more than human life, 33 The Georgia youth, like Luke, lacks the familial stays and the sense of duty that will qualify him for noble inclusion in 31 Poetical Works, 2.2.8, lines 19-2.4, 37-42.. 31 Ibid. 2.2.9, lines 67-72.. 33 Ibid. 2.30, lines 91-6, 103-8.

68

I cannot paint What then I was

Wordsworth's 'one great society'. On the contrary, he is truly the sport of every random gust: Whatever in those climes he found Irregular in sight or sound Did to his mind impart A kindred impulse, seemed allied To his own powers, and justified The workings of his heart. But ill he lived, much evil saw, With men to whom no better law Nor better life was known; Deliberately, and undeceived, Those wild men's vices he received, And gave them back his own. 34

Wordsworth's lengthy analysis of the youth's psychology has no counterpart in his presentation of Ruth's. On the contrary, there is something fey about Ruth, some cosmic predetermination as guiltless victim: 35 When Ruth was left half desolate, Her Father took another Mate; And Ruth, not seven years old, A slighted child, at her own will Went wandering over dale and hill, In thoughtless freedom, bold. And she had made a pipe of straw, And music from that pipe could draw Like sounds of winds and floods; ◄ Poetical Works, ii. 231, lines 127-32, 145-50. 35 Perhaps her most poignant analogue is Alice Fell. As Dorothy Wordsworth reported: 'It was a little girl that was crying as if her heart would burst. She had got up behind the chaise and her cloak was caught by the wheel and was jammed in and it hung there. She was crying after it. Poor thing. Mr Graham took her into the chaise and the cloak was released from the wheel but the child's misery did not cease for her cloak was torn to rags; it had been a miserable cloak before, but she had no other and it was the greatest sorrow that could befal her. Her name was Alice Fell. She had no parents ...' (Journals, 92). Cf. Wordsworth's 'Alice Fell': 'And there a little Girl I found, I Sitting behind the chaise, alone. I 'My cloak!' no other word she spake, I But loud and bitterly she wept, I As if her innocent heart would break... Insensible to all relief I Sat the poor girl, and forth did send I Sob after sob, as if her grief I Could never, never have an end.' (Poetical Works, i. 233: 'Alice Fell; or, Poverty', lines 19-23, 37-40.) 3

I cannot paint What then I was Had built a bower upon the green, As if she from her birth had been An infant of the woods. 36

These stanzas, which open the poem, glow with an almost uncanny luminosity; indeed, they have no true analogues elsewhere in Wordsworth. Coleridge once said of some lines by his friend that 'had I met these lines running wild in the deserts of Arabia, I should instantly have screamed out "Wordsworth!" '37 To the opening stanzas of 'Ruth', however, we want to scream out 'Blake!' Like Blake's infant, leaping into this dangerous world, Ruth's first encounter with our awareness is as a 'slighted child', 'half desolate'. She is like Blake's little chimney sweeper: When my mother died I was very young, And my father sold me while yet my tongue, Could scarcely cry weep weep weep weep So your chimneys I sweep & in soot I sleep. 38

Ruth and her pipe of straw qualify her for forlorn inclusion in the very introduction to Blake's world of innocence: Piping down the valleys wild Piping songs of pleasant glee On a cloud I saw a child. And he laughing said to me. Pipe a song about a Lamb; So I piped with merry chear, Piper pipe that song again­ So I piped, he wept to hear. 39

Ruth's sojourn in the world of innocence is brief; her return to it at the poem's end is ironic: Such small machinery as she turned Ere she had wept, ere she had mourned, A young and happy Child!•0 36 Poetical Works, ii. 227: 'Ruth', lines 1-12. 37 Collected Letters, i. 453. 38 Blake, 10: 'The Chimney Sweeper', lines r-4. 39 Ibid. 7: 'Songs of Innocence. Introduction', lines 1-8. 40 Poetical Works, ii. 235: 'Ruth', lines 250-2.

70

I cannot paint What then I was

But she, 'half desolate', had never been truly a happy Child, though she is always, from first to last, an innocent: An innocent life, yet far astray! And Ruth will, long before her day, Be broken down and old.• 1

The implied pastoralism of her oaten pipe does not persist into her regression to forlorn childishness: That oaten pipe of hers is mute, Or thrown away; but with a flute Her loneliness she cheers. 42

During the course of this rehearsal of Wordsworth's poem, some of the characteristics of the Wordsworthian intensity may have perhaps become clearer. We recognize that 'Ruth' is a true expression of Wordsworth's power at the same time that we recognize that it is not in the absolute forefront of his achievement. It is, for instance, by no means so strong a poem as either 'The Ruined Cottage' or 'Michael'; nor is it so strong as 'The Old Cumberland Beggar'. In this latter instance, the lesser stature of 'Ruth' is partly defined by its experimental and almost careless stanzaic pattern (doubtless adopted in the interests of ballad-like simplicity) as contrasted with the grandeur of the blank verse in 'The Old Cumberland Beggar'. The verbal formulations of 'Ruth' in this pattern simply cannot and do not attain the sonority of the other poem. And yet 'Ruth' is nevertheless a moving and powerful poem, and its lesser achievement perhaps makes it even more S}lited to our illustrative purpose; for it reveals in starker form what Wordsworth is doing to make it so true a poem-how, in short, he generates its intensity. He does not do it by compression, for the poem, as observed above, is actually almost desultory. He does not contribute to it by grandeur of cadence, as in 'Michael' or 'The Ruined Cottage' or 'The Old Cumberland Beggar'. He does not undergird it by complication of movement, as in 'Tintern Abbey' and the 'Immor­ tality Ode'. The intensity is generated rather by expanding and contracting a single fact, the essential need of humans for relation and affirmation. By first proffering and then denying the fulfilment 41

Poetical Works, ii. 2.34, lines 2.2.9-31.

42

Ibid., lines 2.41-3.

I cannot paint What then I was

71

of that need, the poem's dynamics intensify to reach cataclysm; indeed, the poignancy seems almost to explode, as though this psychological crux were being transformed into a kind of nova. The possibility of soul-destroying rejection can be cognized by all. It actually has been experienced by some. In a degree and even though not to such an ultimate extent, it has been participated in by many more. It is a central locus of human pain, perhaps even the most central locus of human pain. All impeding data are removed from the poem so that the explosion of pain alone occupies our attention. No limitations in Ruth's character are presented to qualify our sympathy; no daily ameliorations or subsidiary supports of human concern and rela­ tionship are presented to muffle her disaster. The father who deserts her as a child serves as ominous prefiguration for the Georgia youth who deserts her in the full tide of her life. The entire poem channels down this narrow cleft to erupt in the mute roar of Ruth's soul-destroying rejection. It is this narrowing and concentration, emanating from an irreducible human situation available to all, hypostasized deep underneath the realm of intellectual formulation or interpretative sophistication, that imparts to 'Ruth' its intensity. It is an intensity that makes up for a relative lack of linguistic richness and rhythmic cadence, and it carries the poem triumphantly into the select and serious group of Wordsworth's immortal statements. Over the entire poem there hovers the Wordsworthian certainty, the absolute knowledge of good and ill-of, in homely terms, what is important-that is so potent a factor in his greatest poetry. This unique certainty somehow transcends Wordsworth's formal art, and allows him in some of his greatest moments almost to forgo the requirements of communication. 'I cannot paint What then I was', he says in one of the very greatest statements he ever made; a statement, too, that expresses more by its denial of communication than other statements express by the most detailed affirmation.43 Ut pictura poesis! One is conditioned to agree with the dictum, 44

I

•J Poetical Works, 261: 'Tintern Abbey', lines 75-6. 44 See e.g. the fine study by Jean H. Hagstrum, The Sister Arts; The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry from Dryden to Gray (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958). But for powerful arguments that qualify our usual interpretation of ut pictura poesis, see studies by Wesley Trimpi, 'The Meaning of Horace's Ut Pictura Poesis', Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 36

72

I cannot paint What then I was

but what does one say when a poet withdraws from the poem, takes up into himself, the very essence that he declares himself to be painting? 'I cannot paint what then I was.' The statement is a ne plus ultra of Wordsworthian intensity in that it points not to language, the domain of most poets and all scholars, but to a transcendent experience that lies outside language. Wordsworth in his greatest moments does not describe experi­ ence; rather, to use a theological term, he 'witnesses' it. 'I cannot paint what then I was' is precisely an example of what Coleridge meant by symbolic statement, and what Paul de Man cannot understand by the term symbol.45 The utterance, though totally an absence as descriptive statement, is totally a presence as witness to exultation. To be sure, 'Ruth' does not attain the supreme heights of 'Tintern Abbey', where the phrase 'I cannot paint what then I was' occurs. Of Wordsworth's two great modes, the personal and the narra­ tional, the one that most surely conveys the Wordsworthian intensity is the personal. In the personal, Wordsworth is able to draw on the mighty resources of his 'egotistical sublime', whereas in the narrational, the intensity is always in some way limited by his idiosyncratic stance, in Coleridge's profound observation, of 'spectator ab extra,-feeling for, but never with', his characters.46 Furthermore, the narrational approach is to some extent bound up with what Coleridge censured as his 'undue predilection for the dramatic form in certain poems'; 47 for what always seems to be tugging at his narratives-we see it clearly in the story of Ruth-is the sense of a small drama of life. His characteristic narrational framing device, as in 'The Ruined Cottage' or 'Michael', makes the tales of Margaret and of Michael when presented actually seem as though the narrator has drawn the curtain on a kind of stage from which is enacted the story of human woe. We may set 'Tintern Abbey' and the 'Immortality Ode' on the personal side of Wordsworth's technique, and 'The Ruined Cot-

(1973), 1-34; 'Horace's "Ut Pictura Poesis": The Argume'lt for Stylistic Decorum', Traditio, 34 (1978), 29-73; Muses of One Mind: The Literary Analysis of Experience and its Continuity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 101. •5 See McFarland, 'Involute and Symbol', 29-57. •• Table Talk, 193: 16 Feb. 1833. 47 Biographia Literaria, ii. 135.

I cannot paint What then I was

73

tage' and 'Michael' on the narrational; and though we might find it hard at first inspection to say which of the four mighty efforts is the most powerful, we should also, most of us, be inclined finally to give the palm to the two great personal poems. Likewise, The Prelude and The Excursion are in a sense the same poem, the one written in the personal mode and the other in the narrational; and here too, and perhaps more clearly than in the examples just adduced, we find the personal perspective allows more intensity than does the narrational. Indeed, though not all of The Prelude is equally intense, rarely do we find clumsiness such as arises in The Excursion from the necessity for the dramatic stage-managing of Wordsworth's diverging personae as Wanderer, Solitary, Pastor, and Poet. In the narrational poem, one constantly encounters lines like'Here closed the Sage that eloquent harangue'; 4 8 or' "Happy", rejoined the Wanderer, ' ' they who gain A panegyric from your generous tongue!" '; 49 or '"'Hope is none for him!" The pale Recluse indignantly exclaimed'; 50 or 'This ardent sally pleased the mild good Man'; 51 or 'On us the venerable Pastor turned His beaming eye that had been raised to Heaven'.52 A great deal of this kind of language necessarily accretes to The Excursion, and its presence makes it very difficult for that poem to attain the personal intensity that marks such an expression as 'I cannot paint what then I was'. The intensity of 'Ruth', achieved by the devices noted above, is likewise not quite so incandescent as that of 'Tintern Abbey'. The reason perhaps involves still further ramifications of the difference between Wordsworth's personal and narrational presence. He is certainly and above all the poet of loss, and Shelley, saying that 'thou hast wept to know That things depart which never may return', unerringly identifies his inmost essence. 53 But though 'Tintern Abbey' and the 'Immortality Ode' contain deep recognition of the structure of loss, they also contain deep emotional, if not always logical, compensation for that loss. The greatest narrational poetry, on the other hand-'Ruth', but characteristically also 'Michael' and 'The Ruined Cottage' or the Solitary's despondency in The Excursion-is presented as what

I

I

I

I

•• •• " "

Poetical Works, v. 150: The Excursion, bk. JV, line 1276. Ibid. 268, bk. VIII, lines 82-3. ' 0 Ibid. 276, lines 334-5. 52 Ibid. 309, bk. 1x, lines 680-1. Ibid. 279, line 434. Shelley, i. 206: 'To Wordsworth', lines 1-2.

I cannot paint What then I was 74 seems on the surface an almost pure loss, without the explicitly compensating joy of the great personal statements. It is that compensating joy that powers the mighty engine of Wordsworth's poetic productivity. The joy stands in binary oppo­ sition to the loss; it lends the loss its intensity as loss. Indeed, joy, even when no longer present, is necessary as the alloy that allows a poetic statement to achieve the structure of permanence; it changes loss from simple absence to present poignancy. Neither joy without loss, nor loss without joy, can by itself work language into true poetic greatness. Yet if Wordsworth in his greatest statements is the poet of loss, what is his joy like before its alloy? There exists a mother lode of Wordsworthian joy from which the malleable gold must be mined and delivered into the crucible of loss to receive its strengthening fire. That mother lode is entered through the opening of 'Home at Grasmere'. There we experience the almost mystical fullness of Wordsworth's joy uniquely divorced from its characteristic con­ junction with loss. It is astonishing that this poem has received relatively so little notice from Wordsworthian commentators; astonishing that it has not been seen as containing the pulsating heart of Wordsworthian values; astonishing, indeed, that it was not even known until 1888, when it was published by Macmillan as The Recluse: Book First, Part First, Home at Grasmere; 54 astonishing, still again, that it contains in its relatively few lines the true urgency of his vast unfinished philosophical poem The Recluse, and that its central importance in that context has never been fully cognized. Indeed, after the exultant Kyrie of 'Home at Grasmere' the Solitary and the Pastor could drone on forever, for there was nothing else to say that really needed to be said. The first 300 lines or so of 'Home at Grasmere' are an unmatched lode of Wordsworthian intensity. 55 They express his deepest intui­ tion of what existence ought to be, and the intensity of their 54 For the complicated and rather mysterious provenance of its printing see Darlington, 'Appendix I. Publication and Reception of Home at Grasmere', 455-62.. 55 As Darlington si ificantly points out, 'when Wordsworth began writing gn Home at Grasmere in the early spring of 1800 he was free and unfettered, burdened neither by the magnitude of his own commitment nor by Coleridge's ambitious hopes' (Darlington, 8).

I cannot paint What then I was

75

gladness is overwhelming. The gladness is not compensating, as in 'Tintern Abbey'; the joy is not, as in the 'Immortality Ode', a little forced. It is gladness as the very condition of life, joy as the palpable condition of the total merging of feeling and place: 'Tis, but I cannot name it, 'tis the sense Of majesty, and beauty, and repose, A blended holiness of earth and sky, Something that makes this individual Spot, This small Abiding-place of many Men, A termination, and a last retreat, A Centre, come from wheresoe'er you will, A Whole without dependence or defect, Made for itself; and happy in itself, Perfect Contentment, Unity entire. 56

In that attempt at expressing the intensity of the inexpressible, the words 'I cannot name it' are revealed as co-ordinate with the 'I cannot paint what then I was' in 'Tintern Abbey'. And yet there is one enormous difference. 'I cannot paint what then I was' already contains within it the form of loss; whereas what Wordsworth here 'cannot name' is a vision of total presence, of 'A Whole without dependence or defect', of 'Perfect Contentment, Unity entire'. The structure of 'Home at Grasmere', indeed, is quite different from the intricate structure of 'Tintern Abbey'. The latter poem makes a statement as well as celebrates an intensity of feeling. 'Home at Grasmere', however, to use a theoretical term I have brought forward elsewhere, is entirely in the thaliatic mode. 57 It celebrates rather than describes. It witnesses rather than argues. It has the intensity of feeling but not the structural alloy of a great poem in that it exhibits little tension between present and past. Paradoxically put, 'Home at Grasmere' exhibits the deepest and fullest lode of joyful intensity in all of Wordsworth, but it is not one of the supremely great poems he wrote. For, except for this poem, Wordsworth's great personal state­ ments are almost always cast into the past tense, and wear their loss on their sleeve. Characteristically, in his most intense moments Wordsworth finds that 'The things which l have seen I now can see 56 57

Poetical Works, v. 318: 'Home at Grasmcrc', lines 1,42.-51. Sec McFarland, Romant,cism, .p 4-15.

I cannot paint What then I was 58

no more'; in his deepest apprehensions he is haunted by the knowledge 'That there hath past away a glory from the earth.'59 In his stance as a poet, in his most profound stance as a poet, that is, he sees only by glimpses, not with the full gaze of his joy; for what he wants to look at is already lost: The days gone by Return upon me almost from the dawn Of life; the hiding-places of man's power Open; I would approach them, but they close. I see by glimpses now; when age comes on, May scarcely see at all; and I would give, While yet we may, as far as words can give, Substance and life to what I feel, enshrining, Such is my hope, the spirit of the Past For future restoration. 60

Even his closest approximations to fullness of joy are felt as in the past, although at certain moments he can as it were make them present by projecting himself into that past: Oh, many a time have I, a five years' child In a small mill-race severed from his stream, Made one long bathing of a summer's day; Basked in the sun, and plunged and basked again Alternate, all a summer's day, or scoured The sandy fields, leaping through flowery groves Of yellow ragwort. 61

We recognize that passage as participating in the Wordsworthian intensity, and it reveals to us another secret of that intensity's structure: it is constructed by the movement from the merely glimpsing or even darkened 'now' to a fully recovered 'then'. The foregoing passage is an example of what Wordsworth called 'spots of time'-indeed, it is the very first 'spot of time' we encounter in The Prelude. Such episodes, as he said in the 1805 version of The Prelude, 62 have a 'vivifying' virtue or in the 1850 version a 'renovating' virtue; 63 they are 'scattered everywhere'. 64 In 59 Ibid., line 18. 58 Poetical Works, iv. 2.79: 'Immortality Ode', line 9. 61 Ibid. 1. 51, lines 2.88-94. 60 Prelude (1850), XII. 483, lines 2.77-86. 62 Ibid. (1805), XI. 478, line 2.60. 63 Ibid. (1850), XII. 479, line 2.10. .. Ibid., line 2.2.4; line 2.75 in the 1805 version.

I cannot paint What then I was

77 terms of the argument in this chapter, however, we might almost better call them 'caches of intensity' than 'spots of time'. Still, not only are they characterized by intensity, but they are also lost in the past-'taking their date I From our first childhood'. 65 They are almost invariably explosive with joy (the sole exception is the curious and anomalous episode Wordsworth uses as example when he broaches the phrase itself in Book Twelve). The explosive joy is a palpable condition of intensity; conversely, the intensity of such passages is communicated by their explosive joy. But the joy resides only partly in the structure of the episode; a still larger part emanates from the achievement of reclaiming the 'chronotope'­ surely one needs Bakhtin's term here-from absence in the past to presence. The fullest of all such reclamations is perhaps the etched clarity of the immortal skating scene: So through the darkness and the cold we flew, And not a voice was idle; with the din Smitten, the precipices rang aloud; The leafless trees and every icy crag Tinkled like iron; while far distant hills Into the tumult sent an alien sound Of melancholy not unnoticed, while the stars Eastward were sparkling clear, and in the west The orange sky of evening died away.••

Such moments, however, no matter how vivid their presence becomes, are characteristically in the past and really exist as absence: -Unfading recollections! at this hour The heart is almost mine with which I felt, From some hill-top on sunny afternoons, The kite high among fleecy clouds Pull at its rein like an impatient courser. 67

But when these absences are reclaimed to presence and take shape as a 'spot of time', there is the unmistakable voice of intensity: 65 Prelude (1850), x11, line 224-5; lines 275-6 in the 1805 version. 66 Ibid. 1. 61, lines 438-46. For discussion of the meaning of the transcendence achieved by these lines see McFarland, Shapes of Culture, 45-62. 67 Ibid. (1805), 1. 62, lines 517-21.

I cannot paint What then I was for I would walk alone, In storm and tempest, or in starlight nights Beneath the quiet heavens, and at that time Have felt what'er there is of power in sound To breathe an elevated mood, by form Of image unprofaned; and I would stand, Beneath some rock, listening to sounds that are The ghostly language of the ancient earth, Or make their dim abode in distant winds, Thence did I drink the visionary power. I deem not profitless those fleeting moods Of shadowy exultation. 68

Wherever Wordsworth achieves such reclamational immediacy, even when the awareness does not have the episodic shape of a 'spot of time', the past tense, which keeps the experience at a gap from the poet, is bridged by an elation that is itself intensity: To every natural form, rock, fruit or flower, Even the loose stones that cover the highway, I gave a moral life: I saw them feel, Or linked them to some feeling: the great mass Lay bedded in a quickening soul, and all That I beheld respired with inward meaning. 69

And yet, though Wordsworth's most characteristic personal intensity is generated by the rush from absence to presence, there must, though we rarely see it, be an originary presence of joy divorced from the form of loss. Without this originary presence of joy there could be no source for the elation that accompanies the reclamation from absence to presence. Wordsworth himself intuited that all depended on 'the one Presence, and the Life I Of the great whole'. 70 but this source was in his most characteristic moments not at hand: 'How shall I trace the history? where seek I The origin of what I then have felt?'71 he asks in the 1805 Prelude, revising the question in the r 8 50 version to 'How shall I seek the origin? where find I Faith in the marvellous things which then I felt?' 72 To such a question, the whole of The Prelude serves as answer, 68

69 71

Prelude (1850), II. 88-90, lines 32.1-32. 70 Ibid., lines 130-1. Ibid. m. 108, lines 124-9. 7 2 Ibid. (1850), 93, lines 346-7. Ibid. 1. 92, lines 365-6.

I cannot paint What then I was

79 especially the supreme intensity in the first two books. Still, all that achievement is ineluctably reclamational. In one place only in Wordsworth do we find a deep well of joy undefiled, of joy as presence itself. That place is 'Home at Grasmere', which celebrates presence untorn by loss, 'A Whole without dependence or defect' , 73 'Perfect Contentment, Unity entire': 74 among the bowers Of blissful Eden this was neither given Nor could be given, possession of the good Which had been sighed for, ancient thought fulfilled And dear Imaginations realized, Up to their highest measure, yea, and more. 75

That is the joy that cannot be painted or named but only witnessed. 'Home at Grasmere' is unique in Wordsworth's canon for generating maximum intensity without the elated rush from absence to presence. It thus provides additional data for our understanding of the structure of the Wordsworthian intensity. For it constitutes an opulent lode of what I have called 'the third kind of meaning', which is a meaning independent of translational equivalences. 76 It is meaning absolute; it is joy as a state of being. It is in short, to use Wordsworth's own phrase from 'Home at Grasmere', a sense of 'perfection absolute•.n The joy in this poem is truly unique. There really is nothing like it, not only in Wordsworth, but in any other place. It is a total satisfaction, an absolute absence of loss. The poem is much less artefact than a continuing thalia of being: This day is a thanksgiving, 'tis a day Of glad emotion and deep quietness; Not upon me alone hath been bestowed, Me rich in many onward-looking thoughts, The penetrating bliss; oh surely these Have felt it, not the happy Choirs of Spring, Her own peculiar family of love That sport among green leaves, a blither train!'

7

3 Poetical Works, v.318: 'Home at Grasmerc', line 149. ,. Ibid., line 151. 75 Ibid.317, lines 104-9. 76 See McFarland, Shapes of Culture, 40-61. n Poetical Works, v. 324: 'Home at Grasmere', line 307. 1 • Poetical Works, v. 321-2, lines 230-7.

Bo

I cannot paint What then I was

The whole passage, with the characteristic Wordsworthian sense of loss reversed, transformed entirely to 'onward-looking thoughts', itself exhibits a kind of 'deep quietness' in its gladness. The sense of loss is still more unmistakably reversed in some discarded lines for the poem. There not loss but present possession is the theme: This solitude of mine, the distant thought Is fetch'd out of the heaven in which it was. The unappropriated bliss hath found An owner, and that owner I am he. The Lord of this enjoyment is on Earth And in my breast. What wonder if I speak With fervour, am exalted with the thought Of my possessions, of my genuine wealth Inward and outward, what I keep, have gain'd, Shall gain, must gain, if sound be my belief From past and present, rightly understood, That in my day of Childhood I was less The mind of Nature, less, take all in all, Whatever may be lost, than I am now. 79

Those lines were doubtless rejected because Wordsworth judged them poetically below his exalted mood of gladness; but they dramatically witness the displacement of the concern with loss and absence by a sense of total presence. Elsewhere in 'Home at Grasmere' the gladness is inundating: But the gates of Spring Are opened; churlish Winter hath given leave That she should entertain for this one day, Perhaps for many genial days to come, His guests, and make them jocund. •0

The great mother lode of Wordsworthian joy in 'Home at Grasmere' is constituted by the coming together of his feeling for nature and his personal feeling. That personal feeling is centred upon what I have elsewhere attempted to elucidate as 'the signific­ ant group', 81 but no external description of the significant group can surpass the one Wordsworth himself gives in this poem: 79 Poetical Works, v. 3l5 n.-3l6 n. 81 McFarland, Romanticism, 137-215.

80 Ibid. 320, lines 188-92.

I cannot paint What then I was

81

we have within ourselves Enough to fill the present day with joy, And overspread the future years with hope, Our beautiful and quiet home, enriched Already with a Stranger whom we love Deeply, a Stranger of our Father's house, A never-resting Pilgrim of the Sea, Who finds at last an hour to his content Beneath our roof. And others whom we love Will seek us also, Sisters of our hearts, And One, like them, a Brother of our hearts, Philosopher and Poet, in whose sight These Mountains will rejoice with open joy -Such is our wealth, 0 Vale of Peace, we are And must be, with God's will, a happy Band. 82

The members of this happy band were John Wordsworth (the 'never-resting Pilgrim of the Sea'), Coleridge (the 'Brother of our hearts, Philosopher and Poet'), Mary and Sara Hutchinson ('Sisters of our hearts'). And Dorothy. Dorothy above all: Can the choice mislead, That made the calmest, fairest spot on earth, With all its unappropriated good, My own; and not mine only, for with me Entrenched, say rather peacefully embowered, Under yon Orchard, in yon humble Cot, A younger Orphan of a Home extinct, The only Daughter of my Parents, dwells."'

The lines that follow contain an absolute wonderment of joy, along with a curious cessation of description. They become by that fact a variant of 'I cannot paint what then I was' or 'I cannot name it': Aye, think on that, my Heart, and cease to stir, Pause upon that, and let the breathing frame No longer breathe, but all be satisfied.••

The word 'entrenched' that Wordsworth presents, then erases, in his evocation of his Dorothy-joy is revealing: 'Entrenched, say rather peacefully embowered'. 'Peacefully embowered' is glad enough but also conventional enough; 'entrenched', however, " Poetical Works, v. 335: 'Home at Grasmere', Imes 649-63. •• Ibid., lines 80-2.. 13 Poetical Works, v.316, lines 2.-9.

I cannot paint What then I was suggests other matters. It suggests a threat on the other side of this paroxysm of joy. True, it suggests the fulfilment of what Words­ worth in The Excursion longingly put forward, a vision:

Of Life continuous, Being unimpaired; That hath been, is, and where it was and is There shall endure,-existence unexposed To the blind walk of mortal accident; From diminution safe and weakening age. 8 s But that vision by its very invocation summons up the form of loss: 'the blind walk of mortal accident', 'diminution', and 'weakening age'. In other words, just as Wordsworthian joy is necessary to constitute the poignancy of Wordsworthian loss, so too is Words­ worthian loss, even when banished to absence, traceable in the structure of his form of joy. That that form depends so much on Dorothy, indeed, is suggestive of a loss restored by her presence. The entire significant group of Grasmere vale is glimpsed as paradisal fulfilment in the exalted concluding lines of 'When to the Attractions of the Busy World':

Mingling most earnest wishes for the day When we, and others whom we love, shall meet A second time, in Grasmere's happy Vale. 86 Here, however, the fulfilment itself is glimpsed from a realm of non-fulfilment: absence is looking toward future presence. The beautiful lines suggest paradise, but paradise for everyone is always lost or not yet come. Except in 'Home at Grasmere'. There 'we, and others whom we love', are seen as having in fact met a second time in Grasmere's happy Vale. And that vale is paradise, or at the very least the threshold of paradise:

'What a happy fortune were it here to live! And, if a thought of dying, if a thought Of mortal separation, could intrude With paradise before him, here to die!'87 u Ibid. 133: The Excursion, bk. IV, lines 755-9. 86 Poetical Works, ii. 12.3: 'When to the Attractions of the Busy World', lines 108-10. 17 Ibid. v. 313: 'Home at Grasmere', lines II-14.

I cannot paint What then I was

83

Such was the thought of the youthful Wordsworth before actually coming to live in the vale. Once there, he gave full voice to the sense of its being paradise: ... such unfettered liberty was his Such power and joy; but only for this end, To flit from field to rock, from rock to field Within the bound of this high Concave; here Must be his Home, this Valley be his World. And now 'tis mine, perchance for life, dear Vale, Beloved Grasmere (let the Wandering Streams Take up, the cloud-capt hills repeat, the Name), One of thy loving dwellings is my Home.88

The 'others whom we love' are there in the later invocation of the si gnificant group, the 'happy Band'. The 'we' is wonderingly constituted by the presence of Dorothy: Mine eyes did ne'er Fix on a lovely object, nor my mind Take pleasure in the midst of happy thoughts, But either She whom now I have, who now Divides with me this loved Abode, was there, Or not far off. Where'er my footsteps turned, Her Voice was like a hidden Bird that sang, The thought of her was like a flash of light, Or an unseen companionship, a breath, Or fragrance independent of the wind. In all my goings, in the new and old Of all my meditations, and in this Favorite of all, in this the most of all.89

Reunited with Dorothy, Wordsworth in his jubilance takes the image of the 'hidden Bird that sang' and develops it into an exquisite extended metaphor, a thaliatic exultation of light, free­ dom, and joy. The 'birds', he says in soaring gladness, keep festival This day, who drooped, or seemed to droop, so long; They shew their pleasure, and shall I do less? Happier of happy though I be, like them 11 Ibid. 314-15, lines 37-9, 44-5, 56-9.

19

Ibid. 316, lines 85-97.

I cannot paint What then I was I cannot take possession of the sky, Mount with a thoughtless impulse, and wheel there, One of a mighty multitude, whose way Is a perpetual harmony, and dance Magnificent. Behold, how with a grace Of ceaseless motion, that might scarcely seem Inferior to angelical, they prolong Their curious pastime, shaping in midair, And sometimes with ambitious wing that soars High as the level of the mountain tops, A circuit ampler than the lake beneath, Their own domain;-but ever, while intent On tracing and retracing that large round, Their jubilant activity evolves Hundreds of curves and circlets, to and fro, -then up again aloft, Up with a sally and a flash of speed, As if they scorned both resting-place and rest! 90

The 'jubilant activity' of the birds is a fitting correlation to the jubilation Wordsworth feels, reunited with Dorothy in Grasmere's happy vale. Why Dorothy was so important in all this happiness was well understood by Wordsworth. As early as 1787, in 'The Vale of Esthwaite', he had with his uncanny prolepsis of psychoanalytical understanding intuitively realized that Dorothy bore within her relationship to him the most important relationship of all, that to his departed mother: Sister, for whom I feel a love What warms a Brother far above, On you, as sad she marks the scene, Why does my heart so fondly lean? Why but because in you is given All, all, my soul would wish from Heaven? Why but because I fondly view All, all that Heaven has claimed, in you? 91

The departed mother not only made Dorothy a symbolic focus for an absolute fullness of relationship, but that mother had also been 90 Poetical Works, ii. 320-1, lines 195-2.13, 2.2.7-9. 91 Ibid. i. 282: 'The Vale of Esthwaite', lines 52.8-35.

I cannot paint What then I was

85

essentially projected into the objects of nature. 92 When she died Wordsworth found himself with an unimpaired capacity to relate: but to relate now in shifted focus to nature as source:

I was left alone 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 to me, and from this cause it came, That now to Nature's finer influxes My mind lay open. 93 If the building of Wordsworth's feelings still stood when the props of his affection were removed, it was because it had been so well built by transfers of his mother's love to the objects of nature that always afterward sustained him:

Blest the infant Babe, {For with my best conjecture I would trace Our Being's eanhly progress,) 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! For him, in one dear Presence, there exists A virtue which irradiates and exalts Objects through widest intercourse of sense. No outcast he, bewildered and depressed: Along his infant veins are interfused The gravitation and the filial bond Of nature that connects him with the world. Is there a flower, to which he points with hand Too weak to gather it, already love Drawn from love's purest earthly fount for him Hath beautified that flower. 9• Add to this profound, this truly remarkable understanding the Freudian truth pointed to by Richard Onorato, that 'vales' symbol92 Cf. Onorato's psychoanalytical observation: 'In our account of Wordsworth he is seen as fixated co a trauma, obsessed by a vital relationship with Nature which has come to stand unconsciously for the lost mother' (p. 64). For the role of the absent mother see James A. W. Heffernan, 'The Presence of the Absent Mother in Wordsworth's Prelude', Studies in Romanticism, 2.7 (1988), 2.53-72.. 91 Prelude (1805), 11. 88, lines 2.92.-9. ,. Ibid. (1850), 85-7, lines 2.32.-48.

86

I cannot paint What then I was

ize the mother, and we see all the elements that fused into the radiant joy of the paradisal reunion in Grasmere's happy vale. 95 It is a total restoration, from the earliest stages of Wordsworth's being, of the blessedness felt by the infant babe, who with his soul drinks in the feelings of his mother's eye. Dorothy has rejoined him in Grasmere's happy vale; and Dorothy is not only 'All, all, my soul would wish from Heaven', but she is also the symbolic repository of 'All, all that Heaven has claimed'. For her to live with Wordsworth in Grasmere constitutes the great restoration whereby all losses are restored and sorrows end. The maternal embrace is not only reconstituted by Dorothy's presence in the 'loved Abode'-it is not ruined, this blessed cottage ('Aye, think on that, my Heart, and cease to stir')-but also by nature -herself in the symbolic aspect of the beautiful vale: Embrace me then, ye Hills, and close me in, Now in the clear and open day I feel Your guardianship; I take it to my heart; 'Tis like the solemn shelter of the night. But I would call thee beautiful, for mild, And soft, and gay, and beautiful thou art, Dear Valley, having in thy face a smile Though peaceful, full of gladness. 96

The sense of maternal love emanates as much from the vale as even from Dorothy: 'It loves us now, this Vale so beautiful I Begins to love us!'97 Scant wonder that in this overwhelming locus of Wordsworthian gladness nothing whatever remains to be desired. It is total presence; nothing is absent: What want we? have we not perpetual streams, Warm woods, and sunny hills, and fresh green fields, And mountains not less green, and flocks, and herds, And thickets full of songsters. 98 95 'The immediate appeal of vales is constant in The Prelude, and it means, I have suggested, that sense of the otherness of Nature for which the mother has stood in his infancy and early childhood. Present to his eyes, the vale nevertheless evokes in him preconsciously the sense of the mother now' (Onorato, 137). 96 Poetical Works, v. 317: 'Home at Grasmere', lines 110-17. 97 Ibid. 32.0, lines 179-80. 98 Ibid. 317, lines 12.6-9.

I cannot paint What then I was It is the peace that passeth understanding; gladness suffuses this prospect of heaven. 'The boon is absolute; surpassing grace I To me hath been vouchsafed'; 99 'The sunbeam said, "be happy'". 100 And happy Wordsworth is, as nowhere else in his canon. Loss is abrogated, absence is absent. From this realized vision of fullness so rapturously celebrated here flows the deep stream of Words­ worthian intensity. It flows not only in this statement but whenever his poems strike the great elegiac notes of loss. When Wordsworth is not either celebrating the presence of this intensity of feeling, trying to reclaim-or rather, one should say-succeeding in reclaiming it from the past, even if by the symbol of 'I cannot paint what then I was', or when he is not capturing the poignancy of his irreparable loss, he is not a great poet but a banal versifier. When the intensity is there, he is one of the greatest poets that culture has ever produced; when it is not there, his work is nugatory. It is from that central stream of intense feeling that all Words­ worth's great poetry flows, whatever its transformations in the particular. It was the intensity and certainty of feeling, and its form as joy, that generated the true motivation of his desire to be a poet: Of ill-advised Ambition, and of Pride I would stand clear, but yet to me I feel That an internal brightness is vouchsafed That must not die, that must not pass away. 101 It was from the certain and intense feeling of 'internal brightness' that he could so movingly nominate himself and Coleridge, at the conclusion of The Prelude, as prophets of nature: Prophets of Nature, we to them will speak A lasting inspiration, sanctified By reason and by truth; what we have loved Others will love, and we may teach them how. 102 The sense, however, that he had a truth to proclaim and a cornucopian fullness of being to dispense to others was wholly an effect of that joyful intensity whose co-ordinates are so uniquely drawn in 'Home at Grasmere': "

101

102

Poetical Works,

v., 317 lines 103-4. Ibid. 335, lines 673-6. Prelude (1805), xm. 536, lines ◄42-5.

100

Ibid. 319, line 170.

88

I cannot paint What then I was Possessions have I that are solely mine, Something within which yet is shared by none, I would impart it, I would spread it wide, Immortal in the world which is to come. Forgive me if I add another claim, And would not wholly perish even in this, Lie down and be forgotten in the dust, It must not be, if I, divinely taught, Be privileged to speak as I have felt Of what in man is human or divine. 103

Thus the inner essence of Wordsworth is presented in 'Home at Grasmere'. That essence is intensity, and with it he can do anything. At the very beginning of the poem, when he is remembering himself as a boy looking forward to the possibility of establishing his future home in Grasmere, which is 'paradise before him',1°4 even though, unlike his just claim at the conclusion of The Prelude, the remembered boy here feels himself at that early time no prophet­ 'No Prophet was he'105-he can nevertheless suddenly erupt in an exquisite paroxysm of joyful intensity:

He thought of clouds That sail on winds; of Breezes that delight To play on water, or in endless chase Pursue each other through the yielding plain Of grass or corn, over and through and through, In billow after billow, evermore Disporting. 106 One can, indeed, almost provide a kind of calculus of Words­ worth's poetry, whereby the greatest arises from proximity to the sense of 'perfection absolute' celebrated in 'Home at Grasmere', and the most desiccated occurs as he finds his experience more and more distant from such intensity. But whether in the thaliatic fullness of 'Home at Grasmere' or the blasting loss recorded by 'Ruth', it is intensity alone that generates the memorable quality of Wordsworth as a poet. 103 104 105 106

Poetical Works, v. 336: 'Home at Grasmere', lines 686-7, 690-4, 700-1..

Ibid. 313, line 14. Ibid., line 1 5. Ibid. 313-14, lines 1.5-31.

4 Wordsworth's Desiccation WHEN Wordsworth's poetry was not watered by the stream of intensity discussed in the previous chapter, it became a scraggly growth that did not bloom. No great poet equals Wordsworth in the melancholy quantity of desiccated verse nor in the forty-year death-in-poetic-life in which most of that verse was composed. It is not necessary here to rehearse the sad course of his decline. Many discussions, notably Willard Sperry's Wordsworth's Anti-Climax, 1 have said what in the main needs to be said. One wishes to emphasize only that those discussions (surprisingly numerous) that wish to deny the existence of an anti-climax or claim that banal verse is somehow true poetry should be allowed no purchase as serious criticism. 2 The anti-climax was lengthy; the examination here of the nature of Wordsworth's poetic desiccation shall be inversely brief, for criticism need not dwell on a great poet's failures except to illuminate his triumphs. But the examples of Wordsworth's inten­ sity just adduced will be given added definition by at least a short examination of the characteristics of desiccation that obtain where that intensity is absent. As a single illustration of the cleft that ultimately opened between Wordsworth's poetry of intensity and his poetry of desiccation, a comparison of two poems might prove instructive. Each poem was written about one of Wordsworth's daughters; but such a similar­ ity, which justifies aligning them in the comparison, is not main­ tained in respect to tone, texture, or achievement. The first, 'Surprised by Joy', is familiar as an elegiac formulation of matchless intensity; the second, called 'The Triad', is not familiar at all, nor does it deserve to be unless, as might be the case, it were to be identified as the most desiccated poem Wordsworth ever wrote. 1 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1935). For a single example, sec Bernard Groom, The Unity of Wordsworth's Poetry (London: Macmillan, 1966). 2

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'Surprised by Joy' is a sonnet about the loss of Wordsworth's daughter Catharine, who died when she was only three years old. The poem, which is almost unbearably poignant, exhibits even on its surface marks of singularity. John Beer has eloquently connected its phrase 'surprised by joy' with Milton's 'surprised by sin'; I myself have noted the anomaly that there is no indication whatever in the poem that reveals its subject as a child. 3 Indeed, there is no hint that the subject could not be a lover 30 years old: Surprised by joy-impatient as the Wind I turned to share the transport-Oh! with whom But Thee, deep buried in the silent tomb, That spot which no vicissitude can find? Love, faithful love, recalled thee to my mindBut how could I forget thee? Through what power, Even for the least division of an hour, Have I been so beguiled as to be blind To my most grievous loss!-That thought's return Was the worst pang that sorrow ever bore, Save one, one only, when I stood forlorn, Knowing my heart's best treasure was no more; That neither present time, nor years unborn Could to my sight that heavenly face restore.•

The perfection of statement and depth of feeling in the poem admit of no criticism; but even as we read it we realize another singular­ ity: its date of I 812 or later places it well into the period when Wordsworth's poetic voice had almost totally coarsened. It is as though his wrenching grief touched once again the spring of feeling that had gone underground, and thereby allowed him to create once more a great poetic statement, which here, as always, is necessarily an aspect of the Wordsworthian intensity. For the poem participates in the last of the three forms of Wordsworth's poetic greatness described above. It is an exquisite instance of Wordsworth's 'capturing the poignancy' of 'irreparable loss'. But how does the poem capture that poignancy? We note first of all that its absolute loss is specifically defined as the absence of the joy nominated in the first line. With supreme certainty Wordsworth places that joy in a commonplace event, one that like the 'little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love' 3

McFarland,

Originality, 83.

• Poetical Works, iii. 16.

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cannot be named or painted, but that has been experienced by everyone who has ever truly experienced joy. The word 'impatient' is simply inspired in its slight deflection-its lightening-of ordi­ nary meaning, which leads to the crucial word 'share', which in its turn is raised to transcendence by the emphasis of 'transport'. The happiness compacted into the few words from 'joy' to 'transport' explodes into the space in a reader's awareness already opened by his own memory of similar experience. After the matchless achievement of the first two lines, which are kind of ne plus ultra in their melding of the almost commonplace a and the intense happiness of anticipation, there supervenes the Wordsworthian dialectic of presence and absence: 'Love, faithful love, recalled thee to my mind- I But how could I forget thee?' The absolute loss of 'deep buried in the silent tomb', wrenchingly juxtaposed against the absolute joy of 'impatient as the Wind I I turned to share the transport', justifies the remarkable strategy of the sestet, where there occurs a fugal pattern of superlatives: 'my most grievous loss'; 'the worst pang that sorrow ever bore'; and then a totally isolating and emphasizing variation: 'Save one, one only, when I stood forlorn'. With the word 'forlorn' Wordsworth contests with the greatest of poets. Keats's 'faery lands forlorn' fascinated that master ('Forlorn, the very word is like a bell') and us too; and it echoes a still greater usage, the immortal 'And wast thou fain poor father, to hovel thee with swine and rogues forlorn, in short and musty straw' of King Lear. Yet Wordsworth's 'forlorn' is more absolute, is as it were the funnel by which the turbulence of the dialectic of presence and absence narrows down to a single white-hot jet of intensity. Standing as it does at the end of an eleven-line movement of happiness and its loss into pain, the word prepares for the supreme twelfth line: 'Knowing my heart's best treasure was no more'. What a line! 'Knowing' is a present participle that incorporates­ that fills the mind of the subject with-the specific absence of the object raised into the standing presence of an eternal absence: 'was no more'. Right in the middle of the line is the incredible 'my heart's best treasure', an expression that in another context would be so banal as to be unusable. But here, as with the never enough praised 'And never lifted up a single stone' in 'Michael', the achieved intensity of context transforms the expression. Its charge

92

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of emotion, so totally dissipated by countless casual and unfocused usages, pushed in most invocations into the realm of cliche, is restored. Its power is re-earned. Its verdigris is blasted off by the intensity channelled through the word 'forlorn', and it stands before us shining in original brightness, the highest superlative in this play of superlatives. It renders an absolute accounting of an infinite value and its infinite loss. The way in which 'Surprised by Joy' funnels down its emotion into the single jet of 'forlorn', which then reconstitutes the original awesome power of 'my heart's best treasure', is a paradigm for the structure of Wordsworthian intensity. In this poem, as in 'Ruth', irreducible human experience is summoned in words of direct confrontation, their channel cleared of all obstruction until an almost unbearable force of emotional current is set in motion, its waters flowing from the high reservoir of joy that, as seen in 'Home at Grasmere', resided in Wordsworth's most primary sense of existence. 5 But if 'Surprised by Joy' is an ultimate creation by an ultimate poet, 'The Triad' is a different matter. Composed in 1828, it was, as Wordsworth told Isabella Fenwick, an offering to 'Edith May Southey, my daughter Dora and Sara Coleridge'. 6 Interestingly enough, in a letter to Barron Field of 20 December 1828, Words­ worth said that he thought 'a great part of it is as elegant and spirited as anything I have written-but I was afraid to trust my judgement-as the aery Figures are all sketched from living origi­ nals that are dear to me'. 7 By this time, he was not even seeing by glimpses. The extreme badness of the poem is achieved in three dimen­ sions. First of all, its movement is muddy and opaque, quite unlike the sublime simplicity of Wordsworth's greatest moments; a for­ tiori unlike the compressed directness of the tremendous poem we have just examined. Secondly, it is of an irritating length. It splays 5 For the centrality and pervasiveness of stream imagery in Wordsworth's mind, see Ch. 2. above, but specifically in 'Home at Grasmere' see also: 'Is there such a stream, I Pure and unsullied, flowing from the heart I With motions of true dignity and grace?' (lines 409-u); 'Shall I reprove myself? Ah no, the Stream Is flowing, and will never cease to flow, And I shall float upon that Stream again' (lines 2.94-6). ' Poetical Works, ii. 52.2.. 7 Letters: The Later Years, 695.

I

I

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out to 217 lines, as though Wordsworth hoped that if he kept writing an authentic voice might return to him. Thirdly, it utilizes a laboured framework of banalities about classical mythology. It is revealing that when his poetic faculty was no longer kept green from the reservoir of 'Home at Grasmere', Wordsworth tended to turn to such pre-packaged modes as Romantic Hellenism or Romantic- medievalism. Both modes, so congenial to the vision of Keats, were alien to the source and structure of Wordsworthian intensity. Wordsworth did manage to achieve a modest success with the former mode in the passages in The Excursion that so intrigued Keats. And he was proud of 'Laodamia', noting significantly that 'it cost me more trouble than almost anything of equal length I have ever written'. 8 He also noted, again significantly, that it was 'written at the same time as Dion and Artega/ and Elidure'; 9 for the former is an adventure in Romantic Hellenism based on Plutarch ('Avaunt, inexplicable Guest!-avaunt' is, sadly, one of its lines), 10 while the other is a foray of :z.4 r lines into Romantic medievalism; but even at that not so egregious as 'The Egyptian Maid; or, The Romance of the Water Lily', an Arthurian piece that drones on for 386 lines. 'Laodamia' is better than all this, yet it is not only laboured, but really, one is constrained to think, not very good. It is, however, vastly better than 'The Triad'. That poem is an ornate fancy that brings forth the three maidens to display as possible brides for an imaginary youth: Show me the noblest Youth of present time, Whose trembling fancy would to love give birth; Some God or Hero, from the Olympian clime Returned, to seek a Consort upon earth; Or, in no doubtful prospect, let me see The brightest star of ages yet to be, And I will mate and match him blissfully. 11

With doting wordage substituting for intensity, of which the poem bears not a trace, Wordsworth weaves back and forth between the three real women and the elaborate mythological framework: 1 Poetical Works, ii. 5 19. 10 Ibid. 2. 76, line 8 1.

11

• Ibid. 518. Ibid. 2.92.: 'The Triad', lines 1-7.

94

Wordsworth's Desiccation I will not fetch a Naiad from a flood Pure as herself-(song lacks not mightier power) Nor leaf-crowned Dryad from a pathless wood, Nor Sea-nymph glistening from her coral bower; Mere Mortals, bodied forth in vision still, Shall with Mount Ida's triple lustre fill The chaster coverts of a British hill. Appear!-obey my lyre's command! Come, like the Graces, hand in hand! For ye, though not by birth allied, Are Sisters in the bond of love; Nor shall the tongue of envious pride Presume those interweavings to reprove In you, which that fair progeny of Jove Learned from the tuneful spheres that glide In endless union, earth and sea above. 12

Poetic diction is present, but it is the least factor m the mane assemblage of cliches: -I sing in vain;-the pines have hushed their waving: A peerless Youth expectant at my side, Breathless as they, with unabated craving Looks to the earth, and to the vacant air; And, with a wandering eye that seems to chide, Asks of the clouds what occupants they hide:­ But why solicit more than sight could bear, By casting on a moment all we dare? Invoke we those bright Beings one by one; And what was boldly promised, truly shall be done. 13

By this time the poem is irretrievably lost in falseness, and all we have to look forward to is the tedious detail with which the young women are summoned; really, it is more like a fond and doting father playing a game with his little girl and her friends than a poem of any interest to anyone else (even Sara Coleridge, though herself one of the 'bright Beings', commented on the poem that 'It is just what he came into the poetical world to condemn, and both by practice and theory to supplant. It is, to my mind, artificial and 12 Poetical Works, ii. lines 8-23.

" Ibid., lines 24-33.

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unreal.') The reader can hardly look forward with anticipation to a poetic contract that insists on not one, but three, presentations 14

such as this:

-She comes!-behold That Figure, like a ship with snow-white sail! Nearer she draws; a breeze uplifts her veil! 15 An especially interesting note of inauthenticity, which might serve as the antipode of some of the great passages of intensity noted earlier in this chapter, is struck by the invocation of Dora Wordsworth. Wordsworth calls her and she comes: -I sang; and lo! from pastimes virginal She hastens to the tents Of nature, and the lonely elements. Air sparkles round her with a dazzling sheen; But mark her glowing cheek, her vesture green! 16 Casting about for some special salutation for his own daughter, Wordsworth calmly shatters the Hellenic decorum of his poem by injecting a banal stanza of Spenserian medievalism: And, as if wishful to disarm Or to repay the potent Charm, She bears the stringed lute of old romance, That cheered the trellised arbour's privacy, And soothed war-wearied knights in raftered hall. How vivid, yet how delicate, her glee! So tripped the Muse, inventress of the dance; So, truant in waste woods, the blithe Euphrosyne! 17 'The Triad' can stand as symbol for all Wordsworth's desiccated verse. It leads one to wonder why he was so blind to his loss of 14 Sara Coleridge, Memoir, ii. 41 o. She continues: 'There is no truth in it as a whole, although bits of truth, glazed and magnified, are embodied in it, as in the lines, "Features to old ideal grace allied", a most unintelligible allusion to a likeness discovered in dear Dora's countenance to the great Memnon head in the British Museum, with its overflowing lips and width of mouth, which seems to be typical of the ocean. The poem always strikes me as a mongrel-an amphibious thing, neither portait nor ideal, but an ambiguous cross between the two . .. it 1s extravagant and unnatural as a description of three young ladies of the nineteenth century' (ibid.). 15 Poetical Works, ii. 293: 'The Triad', lines 41-3. " Ibid. 295, lines 94-8. 17 Ibid., lines 99-106.

Wordsworth's Desiccation poetic power. The answer, perhaps, is that he was not actually blind, just wishfully blind. 18 We all of us indulge in the politics of denial, and Wordsworth, self-defined as a poet, would have had to exercise heroic renunciation not to keep writing. He arose every morning, looked in the mirror, and if he did not there see a poet, he would have been forced to see only an ageing man who had outlived his cultural usefulness. So he continued to compose verse, hoping that it would prove to be poetry. The dauntless productivity was another aspect of the egotistical sublime. But after all, some poets have been able to write great poetry in old age-the Milton he so much loved, for instance. Or we ourselves can point to Yeats, who was a far truer poet in age than he ever was in youth. Wordsworth, however, who was uniquely dependent not upon poetic art but upon an originary intensity of feeling, could not do, could not possibly have done, the kind of things those other masters were able to do. At one point, indeed, his defences falter; he concedes his loss of vision by poignantly having a sudden glimpse of what once was. In a poem, probably written about 1817, called 'Composed Upon an Evening of Extraordinary Splendour and Beauty', he asks: This glimpse of glory, why renewed? Nay, rather speak with gratitude; For, if a vestige of those gleams Survived, 'twas only in my dreams. 1•

And he goes on to take specific note of the dissipation of his visionary intensity: Oh, let Thy grace remind me of the light Full early lost, and fruitlessly deplored; Which, at this moment, on my waking sight Appears to shine, by miracle restored; My soul, though not yet confined to earth, Rejoices in a second birth! 18 On some level, Wordsworth had to know that he no longer possessed the vision and the faculty divine. For a single instance, in a sonnet written on his tour of the continent in 1820, he obliquely concedes his loss of power: 'Yet why repine? I To muse, to creep, to halt at will, to gaze- I Such sweet way-faring ... that still is mine, I And in fit measure cheers autumnal days.' (Poetical Works, iii. 169: 'In a Carriage, Upon the Banks of the Rhine', lines 10-14.) 19 Ibid. iv. 12, lines 6 5-8.

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-'Tis past, the visionary splendour fades; And night approaches with her shades. 20

Night, however, was not to come to Wordsworth for thirty-three years, yet still he wrote, flailing in his long twilight. The visionary splendour faded, Coleridge no longer there to spur him and guide him, rigidity in politics and religion deadening him, still he wrote. And he irritates; for it was only by the presence of his unique intensity that he was a great poet, and that intensity gone, he scarcely deserved the name of poet at all. 20

Ibid.

12-13,

lines 73-80.

5 Perfection Absolute: The Aspiration of The Recluse 'HOME AT GRAS MERE ' was designed to be the first part of the first book of The Recluse. If, as has just been argued, the virtual entirety of Wordsworth's joy and intensity is deposited in the first few hundred lines of that poem, it is to be expected that the remainder of his vast project-the many thousands of subsequent lines-would find themselves involved in an unhappy paradox, especially in view of the tendency of his verse to become desiccated when removed from the original springs of his intensity. 1 No doubt the absolute measure of such unhappy paradox is the notorious fact that Wordsworth could not finish the poem, could not, even, truly conceive it. But there are other convolutions of paradox as well, enough to warrant resurveying the history and aspiration of the project. Though 'Home at Grasmere' in its first few hundred lines renders the subsequent aspiration of the longer poem tragically untenable, that is not to say that such a gigantic effort, in those parts that Wordsworth did manage to finish, was totally without merit. If nothing else, by heroic manipulation he managed to awaken life in certain parts of the body. He achieved this most dramatically, of course, by the insertion of 'The Ruined Cottage' into Book One of The Excursion, which was designated as the second part of the putative Recluse. If we agree with Coleridge-and I at least very nearly do-that 'The Ruined Cottage' is 'the finest Poem in our Language',2 its inclusion obviously elevated the achievement of that part of The Recluse where it holds sway. On the other hand, 1 Cf. Darlington: 'The third section of the poem, lines 875-958, probably composed after Wordsworth had learned of Coleridge's return to England, shows an abrupt transition to the proper philosophical mode' (Darlington, 18). 2 Collected Letters, iv. 564. Leavis, speaking in our own century, says 'It seems to me the finest thing that Wordsworth wrote, and it is certainly the most disturbingly poignant' (Leavis, Revaluation, 179).

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99

'The Ruined Cottage' was Wordsworth's first great poem, written when the springs of intensity were beginning to pour forth won­ ders; so it is part of the dismal paradox that its greatness in The Excursion in a sense witnesses the desiccation that had already overtaken Wordsworth by the time that poem was published. The Excursion is certainly an important poem. Its unhappy fate has been, however, that it is virtually the same poem as The Prelude, but with less intensity and urgency of statement. Keats loved the poem, called it one of the three wonders of the age, but one would like to know what his judgement might have been had he had the opportunity of seeing The Prelude. 3 Coleridge of course did know The Prelude, and he wrote: 'I cannot help regretting that Wordsworth did not first publish his thirteen books on the growth of an individual mind-superior, as I used to think, upon the whole, to the "Excursion" .'4 Coleridge was here speaking offhand­ edly many years after the event. In his great poem of 1807, 'To William Wordsworth', written after hearing The Prelude read aloud over successive nights, he gives fuller measure:

Friend of the wise! and Teacher of the Good! Into my heart have I received that Lay More than historic, that prophetic Lay Wherein (high theme by thee first sung aright) Of the foundations and the building up Of a Human Spirit thou hast dared to tell What may be told ... 0 great Bard! Ere yet that last strain dying awed the air, With stedfast eye I viewed thee in the choir Of ever-enduring men. The truly great Have all one age, and from one visible space Shed influence! They, both in power and act, Are permanent, and Time is not with them, Save as it worketh for them, they in it. Nor less a sacred Roll, than those of old, And to be placed, as they, with gradual fame 1 'I am convinced that there are three things to rejoice at in this Age-The Excursion, Your [Haydon's] Pictures, and Hazlitt's depth of Taste' (Keats, Letters, i. 2.03). 'I said if there were three things superior in the modern world, they were "The Excursion", "Haydon's pictures" & "Hazlitts depth of Taste" ' (ibid. 2.04-5). • Table Talk, 171: 2.1 July 1832..

100

Perfection Absolute Among the archives of mankind, thy work Makes audible a linked lay of Truth, Of Truth profound a sweet continuous lay, Not learnt, but native, her own natural notes! 5

The Excursion could hardly compete with that. Hazlitt, though recognizing it as an important poem, also had reservations that all must share: To conclude,-if the skill with which the poet had chosen his materials had been equal to the power which he has undeniably exerted over them, if the objects (whether persons or things) which he makes use of as the vehicle of his sentiments, had been such as to convey them in all their depth and force, then the production before us might indeed 'have proved a monument', as he himself wishes it, worthy of the author, and of his country. Whether, as it is, this very original and powerful performance may not rather remain like one of those stupendous but half-finished structures, which have been suffered to moulder into decay, because the cost and labour attending them exceeded their use or beauty, we feel it would be presumptuous in us to determine. 6 What seems to dissipate the power of The Excursion is a constant pressure to force the internal into externality, and by that one means not the externality of verse, but the externality of impersonal statement. Though the early life of the Wanderer in Book One is worthy of the greatest moments in The Prelude, later on the fragmentation and dispersion of the intensities of the Words­ worthian self into the four personifications of Wanderer, Pastor, Solitary, and Poet are attended by great poetic 'cost and labour'. The fourfold dramatization is not very successful, however, and Coleridge told the whole truth when he said that whenever Wordsworth speaks, 'though under a feigned name, it is clear that he himself is still speaking, as in the different dramatis personae of the "RECLUSE" '. 7 The shape of the whole, too, is externalized by other means than Wordsworth's 'undue predilection for the dra­ matic form', though the dramatic form, painfully without drama as it is, of itself sinks the poem below the achievement of The 5 Coleridge, Poems, i. 403-4, 406, lines 1-7, 47-60. • Hazlitt, iv. 124-5. Cf. Byron: 'there is undoubtedly much natural talent spilt over "The Excursion" but it is rain upon .rocks where it stands & stagnates-or rain upon sand where it falls without fertilizing' (Byron, Letters, iv. 324). 7 Biographia Literaria, ii. 1 oo.

Perfection Absolute

IOI

8

Prelude. But The Excursion is specifically an example, the last example that comes readily to mind, of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century intellectual form known as 'theodicy'. 9 Milton's Paradise Lost, Leibniz's Theodicee, and Pope's Essay on Man provide varying avatars of theodicic argument, argument that began after the Renaissance and Reformation had shaken Christian certainty and ceased after Darwin gave it the coup de grace. The Excursion, from the advent of the Solitary's despondency and proceeding through the attempted correction to the end of the poem, is precisely a theodicy. As such, it drains Wordsworthian intensity. That intensity, as Coleridge so beautifully says, can flow freely in The Prelude as 'a sweet continuous lay' of Wordsworthian truth, 'Not learnt, but native, her own natural notes!' To be sure, as has often been pointed out, the revisions for The Prelude, by which Wordsworth's Christian commitment becomes insistent, tend somewhat to compromise those natural notes. But this effect is far stronger and more external in The Excursion. Tennyson and Fitzgerald once had a contest, the outcome of which was so successful that both subsequently claimed the prize, to see which could 'invent the weakest Wordsworthian line imaginable'. The winning line, whichever poet should be awarded the palm, is immortal: 'A Mr Wilkinson, a clergyman'. 10 The delicious rightness of the line, in its snuffling piety and absolute stasis, says something important about The Excursion. Such a line is not actually in that poem, of course, but its parodic wit catches some of the deadening religiosity that by that time had begun to replace the Words­ worthian intensity. The fact that The Recluse is a gigantic torso allows it to take its place among other diasparactive forms produced by the Romantic experience; it testifies to the Romantic hegemony of 'incomplete8 In his Preface of 1814, Wordsworth had said that 'the first and third parts of The Recluse will consist chiefly of meditations in the Author's own person', but had then said that 'in the intermediate part (The Excursion) the intervention of characters speaking is employed, and something of a dramatic form adopted' (Poetical Works, v. 2.). Inasmuch as the third part was never written, and the first part was not finished, the proviso effectively abandoned the poem to the dramatic form. 9 This observation has also been emphasized by, among others, M. H. Abrams and Kenneth Johnston. •0 Hallam Tennyson, i. 1 5 3.

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Perfection Absolute

ness, fragmentation, and ruin'. 11 What generates its condition of incompleteness, fragmentation, and ruin, however, is not a single major factor, but two different and discrete factors. To the one noted above-that the poetic urgency of the project had already been attained in the first few hundred lines of 'Home at Grasmere', thereby desiccating possibilities for the rest of the poem-must be added a second: the influence of Coleridge. It was in the instance an alien influence. The anxiety it generated can be seen in many places. In his preface to The Excursion Wordsworth says: Several years ago, when the Author retired to his native mountains, with the hope of being enabled to construct a literary Work that might live, it was a reasonable thing that he should take a review of his own mind, and examine how far Nature and Education had qualified him for such employment. As subsidiary to this preparation, he undertook to record, in verse, the origin and progress of his own powers, as far as he was acquainted with them. That Work, addressed to a dear Friend, most distinguished for his knowledge and genius, and to whom the Author's Intellect is deeply indebted, has been long finished; and the result of the investigation which gave rise to it was a determination to compose a philosophical poem, containing views of Man, Nature and Society; and to be entitled, The Recluse. 12

The 'dear Friend' is of course Coleridge, who had been so.benign to Wordsworth's understanding of himself as a poet. When Coleridge as early as 13 May 1796 referred to Wordsworth as a friend who 'is in my opinion the best poet of the age', 13 he gained an enormous and on the whole salubrious purchase on Wordsworth's subsequent career. But this influence, so benign and so important, became alien when it led him to demand of the by then wholly acquiescent Wordsworth, 'a philosophical poem, containing views of Man, Nature and Soci­ ety'. The influence was alien, because the situation with regard to Wordsworth, in W. W. Robson's entirely accurate description, was that 'meditative as he was, his mind was radically unphilosophical'. 14 11 See McFarland, Romanticism, 5 and 11 ff. 12 Poetical Works, v. 1-2. 13 Collected Letters, i. 215. 14 Robson, 139. Cf. Leavis: 'He had, if not a philosophy, a wisdom to communicate. The mistake encouraged by Coleridge is understandable, and we can sec how The Recluse should have come to be projected-see, too, that the petering out of the enterprise in that long life docs not prove essential failure (though it proves the enterprise misconceived)' (Leavis, Revaluation, I 63 ).

Perfection Absolute

103

To understand how Coleridge's early recognition of Wordsworth as 'the best poet of the age' could lead to an authority so enormous that it caused Wordsworth to act against his own tendency and genius, we need only rehearse for ourselves the gigantic anxiety that ermeates the first book of The Prelude. For mere -it becomes clear that Worclsworthhad to define himself as a poet or fall into the abyss. He is, indeed, a poet without a poem; and his attempt to grasp at no fewer than ten abortive themes for a great poetic effort that will justify his self-definition is revealing, dramatically so. 15 Before he examines his ten abortive themes, hcinsists that he has to be a great poet and write_ great poe�ns. He speaks of hitspirit, 'singled out, as it might seem, I For holy services; great hopes were mine'. 16 Denying his anxiety, he speaks of 'A cheerful confidence in things to come'. 17 In the 1850 version he asserts that a higher power Than Fancy gave assurance of some work Of glory forthwith to be begun. 18

He says that my mind Remembering the sweet promise of the past, Would gladly grapple with some noble theme. 1•

But all this proves a kind of whistling past the graveyard. He cannot find a theme; he cannot begin a 'work of glory': Far better never to have heard the name Of zeal and just ambition, than to live Thus baffled by a mind that every hour Turns recreant to her task; takes heart again, Then feels immediately some hollow thought Hang like an interdict upon her hopes. This is my lot; for either still I find Some imperfection in the chosen theme, Or see of absolute accomplishment Much wanting, so much wanting, in myself, That I recoil and droop, and seek repose In listlessness from vain perplexity, is

17 19

16 Prelude (1805), 1. 44-6, lines 179-231. Ibid. I. 36, lines 62-3. 11 Ibid. (1850), I. 39, lines 77-9. Ibid., line 68. Ibid. (1805), I. -40, lines 137-9.

104

Perfection Absolute Unprofitably travelling towards the grave, Like a false steward who hath much received And renders nothing back. 20

At this juncture, almost by chance, W�worth stumbles upon the memories that allow him to set forth on his great autobiograph­ ical poem. But that was, in terms of the dynamics of the attempt to 'grapple with some noble theme', not enough. To be sure, we now see The Prelude as the greatest poem of the nineteenth century, the truest fulfilment of Wordsworth's genius. To Wordsworth himself, however, it-'the poem to Coleridge'-was'"iiothing of the sort; it was rather a kind of confessio� of weakness, a playing tru�t from the obligations of the 'noble theme'. 'I began the work,' he said in 1805, 'because I was unprepared to treat any more arduous subject, and diffident of my own powers. Here at least I hoped that to a certain degree I should be sure of succeeding, as I had nothing to do but describe what I had felt and thought, therefore could not easily be bewildered.' 21 But, if Wordsworth himself could find no viable 'nobl5uher_:l)e', Coleriagecould:-The- poem Wordsworth thought he needed to write must be public, not personal. (He declined to publish The Prelude for that very reason: 'it seems a frightful deal to say about one's self, and of course will never be published, (during my lifetime, I mean), till another work [The Recluse] has been written and published, of sufficient importance to justify me in giving my own history to the world'.)22 A philosophical poem on Man, Nature and Society, however, fulfilled all the requirements of a noble theme. And this was the poem Coleridge wanted. Coleridge's proselytizing was vigorous. Thus of a portrait of Wordsworth painted by Hazlitt, he comments: Sir G[eorge Beaumont] & his wife both say, that the Picture gives them an idea of you as a profound strong-minded Philosopher, not as a Poet-I answered (& I believe, truly-) that so it must needs do, if it were a good Portrait-for that you were a great Poet by inspirations, & in the Moments of revelation, but that you were a thinking feeling Philosopher habitually­ that your Poetry was your Philosophy under the action of strong winds of Feeling-a sea rolling high. 23 20 21

22 2

3

Prelude (1805), 1. 48, lines 2.57-71. Letters: The Early Years, 586. Ibid. 470.

Collected Letters, ii. 957.

Perfection Absolute

105

In another place he says that Wordsworth is 'the first & greatest philosophical Poet-the only man who has effected a compleat and constant synthesis of Thought & Feeling and combined them with Poetic Forms'.24 Since Coleridge's own endeavour was always towards philosophical system, it is not entirely surprising, however immense the burden it placed upon Wordsworth, that he 'looked forward to the Recluse, as the -first and only true Phil[osophical] Poem in existence . .. not doubting ... that the Totality of a System was not only capable of being harmonized with, but even calculated to aid, the unity .. . of a Poem'. 25 The first of these two statements was made in 1804, the second in 1815, and the comparative dates dramatize how unremitting was Coleridge's pressure. Indeed, in 1799 Coleridge had written, 'I long to see what you have been doing. 0 let it be the tail-piece of "The Recluse!" [that is, The Prelude] for of nothing but "The Recluse" can I hear patiently.'26 Even as late as the Biographia Literaria in 1817, when it should have become apparent that there was never going to be a Recluse, Coleridge was remorselessly insisting that 'what Mr Wordsworth will produce, it is not for me to prophesy; but I could pronounce with the liveliest conviction what he is capable of producing. It is the FIRST GENUINE PHILOSOPHIC POEM.'27 Along the way, Coleridge had repeatedly spoken with unbridled enthusi­ asm about the venture, and the more praise he gave Wordsworth, the stronger his influence became. To Cottle in 1798 Coleridge said, 'The Giant Wordsworth-God love him! ... he has written near 1200 lines of a blank verse, superior, I hesitate not to aver, to any thing in our language which any way resembles it.'28 In 1803, to Poole, he rejoiced that Wordsworth 'has at length yielded to my urgent & repeated-almost unremitting-requests & remon­ strances-& will go on with the Recluse exclusively.-A Great Work, in which he will sail; on an open Ocean, & a steady wind; unfretted by short tacks, reefing, & hawling & disentangling the ropes-great work necessarily comprehending his attention & Feelings within the circle of great objects & elevated ConceptionsCollected Letters, ii. 1034. 26 Ibid. iv. 574. Ibid. i. 538. See also i. 52.7. 27 Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ii. 155-6. 21 Collected Letters, i. 3 91. 24

2J

I06

Perfection Absolute

this is his natural Element-the having been out of it has been his Disease-to return into it is the specific Remedy, both Remedy & Health. It is what Food is to Famine. I have seen enough, positively to give me feelings of hostility towards the plan of several of the Poems in the L[yrical] Ballads: & I really consider it as a misfor­ tune, that Wordsworth ever deserted his former mountain Track to wander in Lanes & allies.' Still again, to Richard Sharp in 1804 Coleridge prophesied 'immortality to his [Wordsworth's] Recluse, as the first & finest philosophical Poem.'29 With this kind of pressure at least structurally coalescing with Wordsworth's own feeling that he had to compose a 'work of glory', it is hardly surprising that Wordsworth wholly accepted the noble theme proffered by Coleridge.30 To De Quincey in 1804 Wordsworth referred to The Recluse as a work to which 'I mean to devote the Prime of my life and the chief force of my mind'. He identified this work as 'a moral and Philosophical Poem'-after all, it is only fitting that the 'first & greatest philosophical Poet' should embark on such a poem31 -'the subject whatever I find 29 Collected Letters, ii. 1013, 103-4. 30 One must always remember that Wordsworth, despite his proud isolation in the Lake District, cared very much about being remembered by posterity as a great poet: 'The Poets, who on earth have made us heirs I Of truth and pure delight by heavenly lays! I Oh! might my name be numbered among theirs, I Then gladly would I end my mortal days.' (Poetical Works, iv. 75: 'Personal Talk', lines 53-6.) 11 Indeed, a recent commentator, arguing against Geoffrey Durrant's view that in Wordsworth's poetry there is 'a firm rejection of the moral and psychological "science" of Wordsworth's day', claims that something like the philosophical discourse postulated by The Recluse would have arisen in any case from Words­ worth's concerns: 'When one recognizes that Wordsworth's poems arc more than vaguely philosophical, that they had their genesis in his ongoing critical engagement with Enlightenment moral philosophy, one can begin to appreciate that the coherence of The Recluse did not lie in its formal structure, but instead in the experimental discourse that shaped individual poems. This suggests that Words­ worth would have felt it necessary to take up, in individual poems or series of poems, the topics and speculative concerns that normally fell within moral philosophy's purview.' (Alan Bcwell, 'Introduction: The Recluse as a Beginning Intention', Wordsworth and the Enlightenment; Nature, Man, and Society in the Experimental Poetry (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989) , 13) . 'The Recluse appears to have supplanted plans for a series of "essays", probably on education and moral subjects. The "eloquence" that these essays required was "carried off" to the "philosophical poems"... . The philosophical poem, then, was not a wholly new departure from Wordsworth's previous moral and political concerns; instead, it grew out of his sense of the impotence of moral philosophical rhetoric. He did not relinquish the political and ethical concerns that had occupied him for almost a decade; instead, he relinquished his earlier faith in philosophical rhetoric ...' (p. 12).

Perfection Absolute

107

most interesting, in Nature Man Society, most adapted to Poetic lllustration'.32 The talk of poetic illustration perhaps suggests at the outset an anxious difference between what Wordsworth felt he was able to do and what Coleridge wanted him to do, which was to present 'the Totality of a System'. But Wordsworth gamely tried. 'My brother,' wrote Dorothy in January 1806, 'though not actually employed in his great work, is not idle, for he almost daily produces something and his thoughts are employed upon the Recluse. '33 Indeed, Kenneth Johnston argues that he not only tried but succeeded, and that The Recluse in a sense actually exists. 'The Recluse', argues Johnston, 'exists, not as an unrealized idea, but as a coherent though incomplete body of interrelated texts, compris­ ing nearly twenty thousand lines of poetry susceptible of construc­ tive reading.'34 Johnston finds, as he says, a poem more substantial and more valuable than critical tradition has allowed, and a greater realization of their dreams than either Wordsworth or Coleridge admitted: significant forms of an immense work. 35

Johnston's arguments would have come as music to Words­ worth's ears. For he always spoke of The Recluse as the supreme effort of his life. To Tobin in 1798 he called it 'a poem in which I contrive to convey most of the knowledge of which I am possessed. My object is to give pictures of Nature, Man, and Society. Indeed I know not any thing which will not come within the scope of my plan. '36 Whenever he spoke of The Prelude, it was not that poem but always The Recluse that occupied the pedestal of honour. To Sir George Beaumont in 1804 he said: I do not know if you are exactly acquainted with the plan of my poetic labours it is twofold, first a Poem to be called, 'The Recluse' in which it will be my object to express in verse my most interesting feelings concerning Man, Nature, and society; and next, a Poem (in which I am at present chiefly engaged) on my earlier life or the growth of my own mind taken up upon a large scale; this latter work I expect to have finished before the Month of May; and then I purpose to fall with all my might on n Letters: The Early Years, 454. H Middle Years, I. 2.. 35 Ibid., p. xii. J< Johnston, p. xi. 3' Letters: The Early Years, 2.12..

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the former which is the chief object upon which my thoughts have been fixed these many years. 37

To De Quincey he said that he was also engaged on a narrative poem [The Excursion] and 'a Poem on my own earlier life'; but that the poem 'on my own life' was 'the least important of the three'.38 Still again, to Wrangham in 1804 he says that 'I have great things in meditation [i.e. The Recluse], but as yet I have only been doing little ones. At present I am engaged in a Poem on my own earlier life . . .'.39 That the aspiration of The Recluse was encumbered not only by the fact that the Wordsworthian intensity was deposited before the poem properly began, not only by its commitment to an unhappy form of externalization, but also by the philosophical insistences of Coleridge, is not, however, the whole story. To these three major sources of disruption must be added a fourth, the daunting precursorship of Milton. The Recluse would have to stand compar­ ison with Paradise Lost as a public poem upon a noble theme, a true work of glory. Like Paradise Lost it would be a theodicy and in some manner justify the ways of God to man. Such a comparison exactly accorded with the requirements for the philosophical poem Coleridge had in mind, for he said of his friend that Wordsworth had 'more of the genius of a great philosophical poet than any man I ever knew, or, as I believe, has existed in England since Milton'.40 The Miltonic precursorship is especially evident in the stately entrance arch to Wordsworth's putative master-work, for 'The Prospectus' that he published along with The Excursion in 1814 is marked by Miltonic cadence, by Miltonic diction, and even by the characteristic Miltonic verse paragraph. 'The Prospectus', indeed, is subliminally fitting for all aspets of Wordsworth's conflicts about the poem. It tacitly recognizes that the beginning paradoxically occurs after the Wordsworthian lode of intensity runs out; for the Wordsworthian intensity, as we have seen, occurs at the beginning of 'Home at Grasmere', and 'The Prospectus' is taken from the end of that unpublished poem-the first line of 'The Prospectus' is actually line 754 of 'Home at Grasmere', and the 107 lines of 'The Prospectus' are actually the last 107 lines of 'Home at Grasmere'. The liminality of 'The Prospectus' separates the Wordsworthian 38 Ibid. 454. 37 Letters: The Early Years, 518. 40 Table Talk, 171: 2.1 July 1832. Ibid. 436.

39

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Perfection Absolute

intensity in the opening of 'Home at Grasmere' from the vast diasparactive reality-incompleteness, fragmentation, and ruin­ that ensues. It forms a threshold that can be crossed in either of two opposed directions. It can either be entered from the back, and then it leads to the inchoate intensity of the opening of 'Home at Grasmere'; or it can be entered from the end of 'Home at Grasmere', looking from there through to the hoped-for reality of The Recluse as a supposed whole. In that direction it serves in Wordsworth's words as 'a kind of Prospectus of the design and scope of the whole Poem'; 41 and it is prefixed to a poem, The Excursion, of which its own author says that 'this is only a portion of a poem; and the Reader must be here apprised that it belongs to the second part of a long and laborious Work which is to consist of three parts'.'42 Though it is a doorway to incompleteness, fragmentation, and ruin, the entrance arch of 'The Prospectus' is by that very fact extraordinarily interesting. It attempts to deal with The Recluse's Coleridgian anxiety by making gestures toward 'the Totality of a System' desiderated by Coleridge; it attempts to deal with Paradise Lost by setting out prepositional phrases, 'On Man, on Nature, and on Human Life', that clearly invite comparison with the prepositional grandeur of the opening of Paradise Lost: 'Of Man's First Disobedience', and so forth. It might be instructive to examine its ornate architecture more closely: 'On Man, on Nature, and on Human Life, Musing in solitude, I oft perceive Fair trains of imagery before me rise, Accompanied by feelings of delight Pure, or with no unpleasing sadness mixed; And I am conscious of affecting thoughts And dear remembrances, whose presence soothes Or elevates the Mind, intent to weigh The good and evil of our mortal state. -To these emotions, whencesoe'er they come, Whether from breath of outward circumstance, Or from the Soul-an impulse to herselfI would give utterance in numerous verse. Of Truth, of Grandeur, Beauty, Love, and Hope, •• Poetical Works, v. 2..

•2

Ibid. 1.

110

Perfection Absolute And melancholy Fear subdued by Faith; Of blessed consolations in distress; Of moral strength, and intellectual Power; Of joy in widest commonalty spread; Of the individual Mind that keeps her own Inviolate retirement, subject there To Conscience only, and the law supreme Of that Intelligence which governs allI sing:-"fit audience let me find though few!" 'So prayed, more gaining than he asked, the Bard­ In holiest mood. Urania, I shall need Thy guidance, or a greater Muse, if such Descend to earth or dwell in highest heaven! For I must tread on shadowy ground, must sink Deep-and, aloft ascending, breathe in worlds To which the heaven of heavens is but a veil. All strength-all terror, single or in bands, That ever was put forth in personal form­ Jehovah-with his thunder, and the choir Of shouting Angels, and the empyreal thrones­ I pass them unalarmed. Not Chaos, not The darkest pit of lowest Erebus, Nor aught of blinder vacancy, scooped out By help of dreams-can breed such fear and awe As fall upon us often when we look Into our Minds, into the Mind of ManMy haunt, and the main region of my song.'43

The sense of beginning is very strong in these opening 41 lines; but so is the anxiety. Elsewhere I have spoken at length of some of its factors: The anxiety of the Miltonic precursorship is everywhere apparent. What does a poem by William Wordsworth legitimately have to do with shouting Angels and empyreal thrones, not to speak of the darkest pit of lowest Erebus? The answer is of course nothing; such figments are invoked out of the anxiety of setting forth upon an epic beginning under the awesome historical eye of Paradise Lost. Other indications of Wordsworth's anxiety are his actually taking over phrases from his predecessor; his 'numerous verse' of line 13 is from Book Five of Paradise Lost (1. 150), the 'empyreal thrones' of line 34 are from Book Two of Paradise Lost (1. 430), and his •

3

Poetical Works, v. 3-4, lines 1-41.

Perfection Absolute

III

'fit audience let me find though few' of line 2.3 is of course from Book Seven of Paradise Lost (II. 30-31), as is the Urania of two lines farther down.'"

The anxiety of the Miltonic precursorship, together with the anxiety engendered by Coleridge's philosophical demands, seems to have relevance to such diction in the first forty lines of 'The Prospectus' as 'terror, single or in bands' and the 'fear and awe I As fall upon us often when we look I Into our Minds, into the Mind of Man- I My haunt, and the main region of my song'. Anxiety at the prospect of Coleridgian depths and Miltonic heights seems especially palpable in the fervour with which Wordsworth invokes the aid of the muse: Urania, I shall need Thy guidance, or a greater Muse, if such Descend to earth or dwell in highest heaven! For I must tread on shadowy ground, must sink Deep-and, aloft ascending, breathe in worlds To which the heaven of heavens is but a veil.

Though the beginning of 'The Prospectus' is immersed in Mil­ tonic attitudes and language, it is fractured and disrupted in a way that the beginning of Paradise Lost is not. In fact it is quite remarkable how turbulent and littered the opening of 'The Prospec­ tus' reveals itself to be. In the same discussion to which I have just referred I speak of the matter in this way: When Milton begins Paradise Lost with his prepositional inversions, he sets in motion a fugue-like progression that does not come to a full stop until the end of the sixteenth line, with the statement that his poem 'pursues I Things unattempted yet in Prose or Rhyme'. Along the way, the deferred Latinate verbal structure of 'Sing Heavenly Muse' does not occur until line six, so that a wonderful extension occurs between 'Of Man's First Disobedience' and 'Sing Heavenly Muse'. Wordsworth, however, comes to a full stop at line nine, comes to a full stop again at line thirteen, and does not get around to 'I sing' until the end of the third sentence. The result is that the 'I sing' has no reference to 'On Man, on Nature, and on Human Life'. And yet the triple phrase supposedly represents the theme of which he sings. Indeed, at line 753 of 'Home at Grasmere' we read that 'A Voice shall speak, and what will be the Theme? I On Man, on Nature, and on Human Life I Musing in Solitude.' But having the 'I sing' at the end of 44

McFarland, 'Wordsworth on Man', 605-6.

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the third sentence seems to show in the 'Prospectus' that Wordsworth does not really want to sing about Man, Nature, and Human Life, or at any rate that the indefinite 'Voice' that shall speak is not his own voice. Instead, his 'I sing' refers to another prepositional inversion: 'Of Truth, of Grandeur, Beauty, Love, and Hope, I Of blessed consolations in distress; I Of moral strength, and intellectual Power; I Of joy in widest commonalty spread' is what he will sing about.45 In other words, the opening lines contain two discrete realms of discourse. As I remarked of them:

the beginning has been broken in two; the first part, which represents Coleridge's philosophical program, has been respectfully invoked but sealed off, and the second part, which is what Wordsworth seems really to intend to sing about, are the quintessentially Wordsworthian topics of 'Of Truth, of Grandeur, Beauty, Love, and Hope ... Of joy in widest commonalty spread' and so forth. I say quintessentially Wordsworthian, for it is one of the great poet's idiosyncrasies, that he, and almost he alone, is repeatedly able to reanimate the great monolithic abstractions so worn down for most of us by daily usage. Wordsworth, almost alone among poets, can move us by simply invoking the word 'Truth' or the word 'Love' or the word 'Power'; indeed, he can move us even by the still more abstract word 'something'. No one has ever been able satisfactorily to elucidate the secret of his unique gift for making these dry bones live, but none of us can read his poetry without realizing that he does so over and over again.••

If one should wish to accord a comparative ranking to the four sources of encumberment for The Recluse's possibilities it seems not unreasonable to think that the depositing of the bulk of Wordsworthian intensity before the poem gets structurally under way is the most important. Probably the second most important factor is the alien philosophical insistences of Coleridge; and the third is the daunting priority of Milton. The fourth is the undue predilection for the dramatic form. Yet none of the four sources should be underestimated. The Coleridgian influence does seem, however, to have been even more constraining than the necessity to emulate Milton. Whenever Wordsworth veers toward the actual necessity of for­ mulating 'the Totality of a System', his dependence upon Coleridge becomes almost frantic: 45 McFarland, 'Wordsworth on Man', 610.

46

Ibid.

Perfection Absolute

II3

I am very anxious [he writes to Coleridge] to have your notes for the Recluse. I cannot say how much importance I attach to this, if it should please God that I survive you, I should reproach myself for ever in writing the work if I had neglected to procure this help. 47 This was in March of 1804. In December 1805 Dorothy wrote to Lady Beaumont about William's progress: He is very anxious to get forward with The Recluse, and is reading for the nourishment of his mind, preparatory to beginning; but I do not think he will be able to do much more till we have heard of [from) Coleridge. 48

It is interesting to note that both these statements openly declare that Wordsworth is 'anxious'. But their anxiety pales before the virtual terror of Wordsworth's letter to Coleridge of 29 March 1804: Your last letter but one informing us of your late attack was the severest shock to me, I think, I have ever received ... I will not speak of other thoughts that passed through me; but I cannot help saying that I would gladly have given 3 fourths of my possessions for your letter on The Recluse at that time. I cannot say what a load it would be to me, should I survive you and you die without this memorial left behind.Do for heaven's sake, put this out of the reach of accident immediately.•• To call upon Coleridge to do anything at all immediately was to court disappointment. But in this case Coleridge may fairly be thought to have outdone himself in procrastination. The letter of 29 March 1804 was not answered until 30 May 1815. 50 On that date, some eleven years after Wordsworth's request, Coleridge wrote down for his friend the putative content of The Recluse: I supposed you first to have meditated the faculties of Man in the abstract, in their correspondence with his Sphere of action, and ... to have laid a solid and immoveable foundation for the Edifice by removing the sandy Sophisms of Locke, and the Mechanic Dogmatists, and demonstrating that the Senses were living growths and developements of the Mind & Spirit in a much juster as well as higher sense, than the mind can be said to be formed by the Senses-. Next, I understood that you would take the Human Race in the concrete, have exploded the absurd notion of Pope's 48 ., Letters: The Early Years, 452. Ibid. 664. •• Ibid. 464. 5 ° Coleridge did claim in Malta in 1805 that he had complied with Wordsworth's request but that 'My Ideas respecting your Recluse were burnt as a Plague-garment, and all my long letters to you and Sir George Beaumont sunk to the bottom of the Sea!' (Collected Letters, ii. 1169.)

Perfection Absolute Essay on Man, Darwin, and all the countless Believers-even (strange to say) among Xtians of Man's having progressed from an Ouran Outang state-so contrary to all History, to all Religion, nay, to all Possibility­ to have affirmed a Fall in some sense, as a fact, the possibility of which cannot be understood from the nature of the Will, but the reality of which is attested by Experience & Conscience-Fallen men contemplated in the different ages of the World, and in the different states-Savage-Barba­ rous-Civilized . . . and not disguising the sore evils, under which the whole Creation groans, to point out however a manifest Scheme of Redemption from this Slavery, of Reconciliation from this Enmity with Nature .. . and to conclude by a grand didactic swell on the necessary identity of a true Philosophy with true Religion . .. in short, the necessity of a general revolution in the modes of developing & disciplining the human mind by the substitution of Life, and Intelligence . .. for the philosophy of mechanism which in every thing that is most worthy of the human Intellect strikes Death ... In short, Facts elevated into Theory­ Theory into Laws-& Laws into living & intelligent Powers-true Idealism necessarily perfecting itself in Realism, & Realism refining itself into Idealism.Such or something like this was the Plan, I had supposed you were engaged on-.51

To read this prospectus is to understand why Wordsworth found it so difficult to proceed. Coleridge's plan, though perfectly coher­ ent, would have taxed the powers of Hegel himself to effectuate­ and in fact the bit about Idealism perfecting itself in Realism, and Realism refining itself into Idealism, is exactly congruent with Schelling's argument in the System des transscendentalen Idealis­ mus. 52 No doubt all the things that Coleridge said in this letter had been communicated, in whole or in piecemeal, many times before to Wordsworth in conversation; they certainly justify the fervour of his appeal for help to Urania or a greater Muse, as 51 Collected Letters, iv. 574-5. 52 Indeed, Schelling, in his ldeen zu einer Phi/osophie der Natur of 1797, had said that 'das System der Natur ist zugleich das System unseres Geistes'-'the system of nature is at the same time the system of our mind' (Schelling, ii. 39). At the end of that treatise he had proposed a programmatic formula: 'Die Natur soil der sichtbare Geist, der Geist die unsichtbare Natur seyn. Hier also, in der absoluten Jdentitiit des Geistes in uns und der Natur ausser uns, muss sich das Problem, wie eine Natur ausser uns moglich sey, auflosen'-'Nature is visible mind, mind invisible nature. Here, therefore, in the absolute identity of the mind in us and of the nature outside us, must the problem be resolved of how a nature outside us is possible' (ii. 56).

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they show why he had the feeling that he was going to 'tread on shadowy ground', and 'must sink Deep'. The triple phrase 'On Man, on Nature, and on Human Life' is here much expanded and ramified, but it is none the less clearly discernible in Coleridge's projection. Wordsworth's 'On Man' corresponds to Coleridge's 'first to have meditated the faculties of Man in the abstract'. The third part of Wordsworth's formula, 'on Human Life', corresponds to Coleridge's understanding that 'you would take the Human Race in the concrete'. And the middle term of Wordsworth's progression, 'on Nature', is served by Coleridge's plan for 'Recon­ ciliation from this Enmity with Nature', as well as other statements not quoted from the letter. By the opening phrase, 'On Man, on Nature, and on Human Life', the entrance arch provided by 'The Prospectus' becomes in its liminality actually a kind of casement high and triple-arched. The tripartite phrase certainly encompasses the scope of 'the Totality of a System'; but in terms of the technical details of such a system, it is somewhat askew. We note at the outset that it tends to be pleonastic, for 'man' is tautologous to 'human life'. Of course Wordsworth in his letters refers to the formula as 'Nature, Man, and Society', which is somewhat more legitimately differentiated. Coleridge, too, always symbiotic with respect to Wordsworth, 53 planned a huge poem called 'The Brook', which was to contain 'impassioned reflections on men, nature, and society' -clearly an alternate version of Wordsworth's prospects for The Recluse. 54 Still, what Wordsworth actually did write in 'The Prospectus' was not 'Man, Nature, and Society', but the imprecise formula 'On Man, on Nature, and on Human Life'. The turbulence of the formula, however, is still more extreme with respect to the actual possibility of a philosophical system. In my earlier address to these matters I said: even had he written 'On Man, on Nature, and on Society', such a tripartite formula would have still been askew with respect to the possibility of philosophical system. Wordsworth probably could not have known this, but Coleridge, as an enormously well-informed student of such systems, knew it very well. The unwritten 'The Recluse', of course, not only 53 See McFarland, 'The Symbiosis of Coleridge and Wordsworth', 56-104. ,. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, i. 196.

Romanticism,

II6

Perfection Absolute

challenged Coleridge to write the companion unwritten poem called The Brook'; but also 'The Recluse' was an alternative version of Coleridge's own never-to-be-finished philosophical magnum opus. In abandoning serious poetry because, as he said, Wordsworth, in showing him what true poetry was, had made him know he was no poet, Coleridge took his revenge by depositing his own poetico-philosophical aspiration on Words­ worth's shoulders. 'I abandon Poetry altogether,' he wrote in 1800, 'I leave the higher and deeper Kinds to Wordsworth.' Such a bequest was to doom much of Wordsworth's later poetic possibility, for the higher and deeper kinds, in Coleridge's view, necessarily entailed a commitment to philosophy. 'No man', wrote Coleridge, 'was ever yet a great poet without being at the same time a profound philosopher.'"

That The Recluse-as Coleridge conceived it, and really it was as Coleridge conceived it that the poem was to have had any formal philosophical validity at all-was to have been a symbiotic version of Coleridge's own magnum opus, was explicitly stated by Coleridge in some recollections about The Recluse recorded in 1832: the plan laid out, and, I believe, partly suggested by me, was, that Wordsworth should assume the station of a man in mental repose, one whose principles were made up, and so prepared to deliver upon authority a system of philosophy. He was to treat man as man ... in contact with external nature, and informing the senses from the mind, and not compounding a mind out of the senses; then he was to describe the pastoral and other states of society, assuming something of the Juvenalian spirit as he approached the high civilization of cities and towns, and opening a melancholy picture of the present state of degeneracy and vice; thence he was to infer and reveal the proof of, and necessity for, the whole state of man and society being subject to, and illustrative of a redemptive process in operation, showing how this idea reconciled all the anomalies, and promised future glory and restoration. Something of the sort was, I think, agreed on. It is, in substance, what I have been all my life doing in my [own] system of philosophy.56

But Coleridge knew very well that the tripartite phrase 'On Man, on Nature, and on Human Life' was not exactly fitted to rendering a system of philosophy. Though when caught up in his symbiotic sympathies with Wordsworth, he can for his alternative poem speak of reflections on 'men, nature, and society', when he actually 55 Mcfarland, 'Wordsworth on Man', 6u. 56 Table Talk, 171: 21 July 1832.

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II7

addresses the formula in the fragments of his magnum opus the wording changes significantly. The tripartite theme now becomes not man, nature, and society or human life, but man, nature, and God. Considered as strict philosophy, the magnum opus, as Coleridge explicitly said, was to be 'A f>ystem of Truths, respecting Nature, Man, and Deity, evolved from one Principle' . 57 Again, he calls it, 'researches and reflections concerning God, Nature, and Man'; 58 still again, 'God, Nature, and Man: A System'. 59 The changes were dictated by the ontological requirements of a system. As I observed in my first essay on this problem: There is obviously nothing to keep one from writing impassioned reflec­ tions on men, nature, and society if he so desires, or from musing on Man, on Nature, and on Human Life. But if one speaks of a 'System of Truths', or wishes to achieve the ·Totality of a System', then the formula, for good and proper reasons, must change to man, nature, and God. As Hegel, the greatest of all philosophical systematists, remarks in the preface to the second edition of his Wissenschaft der Logik, 'Die Philosophie iiberhaupt hat es noch mit konkreten Gegenstiinden, Gott, Natur, Geist, in ihren Gedanken zu tun'-philosophy in general occupies itself with three concrete objects, God, Nature and Mind. Hegel's 'Gott, Natur, Geist' is precisely equivalent to Coleridge's 'Nature, Man, and Deity', and it is this triad with which systematic philosophers concern themselves, not with Man, Nature, and Human Life. It is indeed instructive to note that Hegel classes 'God' as a concrete object of the philosopher's attention, for in both his formula and Coleridge's, it is the God of the philosophers, not the anthropomorphic old man with the white beard, that is invoked. For systematic philosophizing, even an atheist would have to think about the problem of God.•0

Why the formula has to change from Man, Nature, and Human Life to man, nature, and God-what 'the good and proper reasons' are-will inevitably appear to anyone who thinks about the matter closely. To spare my readers the perhaps lengthy meditation, however, I shall proffer an analysis from my own Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition: if we agree with Aristotle that all philosophy begins in wonder, we must grant at the outset that we are beginning with two irreducible-or at any rate basic-elements: someone to wonder, and something to wonder at. 57 58

MS of the so-called 'Opus Maximum' at Victoria College, Toronto. •0 McFarland, 'Wordsworth on Man', 612. Ibid. s• Ibid.

II8

Perfection Absolute

As Jacobi says, . . . 'I realize that I am, and that something is outside me, all in the same indivisible moment.' All philosophical systems, in short, involve an account of the relation of the wonderer-the self, the ego, the individual consciousness-to the wondered at-the objective, the external, 'things'. From the interaction of wonderer and the wondered-at, a third basic category inevitably arises; from, on the one hand, the limitation of the wonderer's knowledge ('who am I?', 'why am I here?', 'where am I going?'), and on the other, the limitations inhering in the wondered-at ('what is it?', 'where did it come from?', 'why is it here?'). This third basic category of necessary philosophical involvement, arising as unbidden question from our immediate sense of limitation in our knowledge and our situation, constitutes that area of human concern termed the religious; and the most extended hypothetical answers to the totality of questions arising from these primal limitations are grouped under the symbolic term 'God'. 'To believe in a God,' says Wittgenstein simply, 'means to see that the facts of the world are not the end of the matter.' Thus all systematic philosophy must account for the status and interre­ lations of three entities, the ego or subject, the external or object, and the questions arising from the defining limitations of both subject and object, or the question of God.61

In light of these considerations, it becomes clear why no system­ atic philosophical accounting could arise from the Wordsworthian triad, Man, Nature, and Human Life. The logic is irrefragable by which the triad must instead be reformulated as man, nature, and God. As the influential academic philosopher Christian von Wolff wrote in a Latin treatise of 1728 called Discursus praeliminaris de philosophia in genere, or 'Preliminary Discourse on Philosophy in General': The beings that we know are God, human souls, and bodies or material things. If we examine ourselves, we find that whenever we are conscious of things outside ourselves acting upon our sensory organs we are also conscious of ourselves. That in us that is conscious of itself is called the soul. Extended things, which differ from each other in figure and magni­ tude and which we intuit outside ourselves, are called bodies. Thus we admit a twofold genus of beings, namely, bodies and human souls. And as soon as we have seen that bodies and human souls are not independent beings, that is, they do not arise and persevere by their own power, we have also admitted an Author of both bodies and souls, by whose power both of these genera of being were produced. This author of the things 61

McFarland, Coleridge, 54-5.

Perfection Absolute

II9

whose existence we know we call God. Therefore the beings that we know by examining ourselves before we philosophize are God, human souls, and bodies. 62

It would appear, then, that to the four reasons heretofore noted for the broken aspiration of The Recluse, a fifth must be added. For though Wordsworth looked longingly toward the production of 'a philosophic song of Truth', 63 in no formal way was that possible under the terms of a discourse emanating from the tripartite formula 'On Man, on Nature, and on Human Life'. The tripartite formula is an outstanding illustration, however, of the chief contention presented in M. H. Abram's Natural Super­ naturalism. Abrams argues that a central characteristic of Roman­ tic conceivings was to depress the traditional threefold scheme of God, man, and nature into a merely twofold alignment of man and nature. As he says, 'Much of what distinguishes writers I call "Romantic" derives from the fact that they undertook, whatever their religious creed or lack of creed, to save traditional concepts, schemes, and values which had been based on the relation of the Creator to his creature and creation, but to reformulate them within the prevailing two-term system of subject and object, ego and non-ego, the human mind or consciousness and its transactions with nature'; 6-4 'the general tendency was, in diverse degrees and ways, to naturalize the supernatural and humanize the divine.' 65 But despite this important insight, and notwithstanding the fact that Abrams makes Wordsworth's 'Prospectus' the foundation text for his book and even thinks of his whole argument as being a kind of 'freely discursive commentary' to the 'Prospectus', 66 he surpris­ ingly takes no notice that Wordsworth's triple phrase, with its tautology of Man and Human Life, is itself a rich example of the very point he is making. For three-term, man-nature-God conceiv­ ing is in Wordsworth's skewed formula forced down into the linearity of two-term, man-nature conceiving. A second philosophical programme enunciated by 'The Prospec­ tus' also, like the tripartite formula, becomes bogged down in logical difficulties. In some of his best-known lines Wordsworth asks: 62 Wolff, Preliminary Discourse, 33. 63 The phrase and its context are at Prelude (1805), 1. 46, lines 228-31. 66 Ibid. 31. 65 Ibid. 68. .. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, 13.

120

Perfection Absolute Paradise,- and groves Elysian, Fortunate Fields-like those of old Sought in the Atlantic Main-why should they be A history only of departed things, Or a mere fiction of what never was? 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. 67

Wordsworth continues by saying that he 'Would chant ... the spousal verse I Of this great consummation.'68 Departing from the beautiful metaphor, however, he then takes the idea into the formal realm of philosophy. He says that my voice proclaims 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. 69

Wordsworth has here broached an important philosophical topic, one that frequently occupies philosophers in our own day. In Wordsworth 's era, as prologue to the programmatic efforts of Schelling noted above, it had been one of the subjects of an important treatise by the Polish logician and philosopher Salomon Maimon. The treatise was published in 1790 and was called Essay on Transcendental Philosophy. It discussed precisely the question of how the individual mind fits the external world and how the external world fits the mind. The binding principle that Maimon sought, and that he called the problem of quid juris?, logically entailed the introduction of a third entity standing over the individual mind and the external world. 70 So in this second 67 68

Poetical Works, v. 4, lines 47-55.

69 Ibid. 5, lines 62-8. Ibid. 4-5, lines 57-8. 70 Maimon takes up the problem in the course of a dose examination of the critical philosophy of Kant. He argues that that philosophy, which distinguishes things from thoughts about things, cannot explain how or why thoughts about things coincide with things. 'Wollen wir die Sache genauer betrachten,' he writes, 'so werden wir linden, daB die Frage quid juris? mit der wichtigen Frage die alle Philosophen von jeher be�chaftigt hat, namlich die Erklarung der Gemeinschaft zwischen Seele und Korper, oder auch mit dieser, die Erklarung von Entstehung der

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philosophical formulation, too, Wordsworth could not have suc­ cessfully progressed in the terms he set forth. But why did Coleridge, who knew all these things, allow Wordsworth to substitute the man, nature, human life phrasing for the traditional man, nature, God formula? Indeed, Coleridge not only did not challenge his friend's phrasing but actually adopted it for his own symbiotic plans for 'The Brook'. Any answer must be speculative, but after much opportunity for reflection I find myself still satisfied by the earlier answer I gave. I wrote that Coleridge's tolerance of the substitute phrase actually witnessed his respect for Wordsworth as a social thinker. 'The French Revolution', as Shelley said to Byron, was 'the master theme of the epoch in which we live'; and Wordsworth, alone among the major romantics, had actually experienced the French Revolution at first hand, a fact that greatly impressed Coler­ idge-and does me as well. As Coleridge writes in his poem composed after hearing The Prelude recited, Wordsworth speaks 'Of more than Fancy, of the Social Sense I Distending wide, and man beloved as man, I Where France in all her towns lay vibrating I Like some becalmed bark beneath the burst I Of Heaven's immediate thunder,' and he then says of Wordsworth, 'thou wert there, thine own brows garlanded I Amid the tremor of a realm aglow, I Amid a mighty nation jubilant, I When from the general heart of human kind I Hope sprang forth like a full-born Deity!' Immediately thereafter Coleridge hails Wordsworth in awed tones: Welt (ihrer Materie nach) van einem lntelligenz; einerlei ist' (Versuch uber die

Transscendentalphilosophie mit einem Anhang uber die symbolische Erkenntnis und Anmerkungen (Berlin: Christian Friedrich Voss und Sohn, 1790), 62). 'How', he asks, 'is it conceivable that forms a priori should agree with given things a posteriori?' 'How can the mind subject something that is not in its power (the given objects) to its power (the rules)? According to the Kantian system, which regards sensibility and understanding as two quite different sources of our knowledge, this question is, as I have shown, quite unsolvable' (p. 63). 'I rake up, for example, the concept of cause; that is, the necessity of the consequence of b upon a. According to the Kantian system it is inconceivable; with what sort of justification do we join a mental concept (Verstandesbegriff)-that is, necessity-with determinations of an intuition-that is, chronological order?' (p. 64.) Because in Kant's philosophy intuitions are different from mental concepts, the problem cannot be solved in that philosophy; it can, however, be solved, says Maiman, by the assumption of an 'infinite mind' that contains both our finite minds and the things we think about: 'Wir nehmen an (zum wenigsten als !dee) einen unendlichen Verstand, bei dem die Formen zugleich selbsr Objekre des Denkens sind; oder der aus sich alle moglichen Arrcn, van Beziehungcn und Verhiiltnissen der Dingc (dcr ldeen) hervorbringt. Unser Vcrstand ist cben derselbc, nur auf eine eingeschriinkte Art. Diesc Idec ist erhaben, und wird, wie ich glaube, (wenn sie ausgefiihrt werden wird) die grosste Schwicrigkeit dieser Art heben' (pp. 64-5).

122

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'O great Bard I Ere yet that last strain dying awed the air I With stedfast eye I viewed thee in the choir I Of ever-enduring men. The truly great I Have all one age, and from one visible space I Shed influence.' 71

This, I still believe, is the most likely reason for Coleridge's acceptance of the intensive tautology of man and human life. Wordsworth's privileged social perspective allowed a special lic­ ence for any talk from him of human life or society. Be that as it may, the five blocking factors here discussed all exist under an overarching condition that of itself compromised the possibility of any greatly extended and externalized statement such as The Recluse would have had to be. For the intensive manifold that Wordsworth glimpsed in 'Home at Grasmere' under the phrase 'perfection absolute' must of necessity have been dissipated by any attempt to render it as an extensive manifold. What Wordsworth glimpses in his version of 'perfection absolute' is paradise itself, and in paradise there will be no need for poetry (it is not wholly fanciful to recall that the intensity of 'Home at Grasmere' exists virtually outside any structural definition as a poem). Wordsworth himself spoke of 'the affinity between religion and poetry ... between religion-whose element is infinitude ... and poetry­ ethereal and transcendent, yet incapable to sustain her existence without sensuous incarnation.' 72 And he says that 'Poetry is most just to its own divine origin when it administers the comforts and breathes the spirit of religion.' 73 The intensities realized in the early portions of 'Home at Grasmere' come very close to the divine origin of poetry, and they thereby work to annul the possibility or even the need for the gigantic externalized extension envisioned in The Recluse. So The Recluse, its true urgency rendered null and void by Wordsworth's prior poetic apprehension of perfection absolute, remained a legendary hope, a noble aspiration, and a noble ruin. 71

McFarland, 'Wordsworth on Man', 616. 73 Ibid. 64. iii. 65.

n Prose,

6

The Prophetic Stance As a vast exercise in futurity, The Recluse by its very conception was at odds with Wordsworth's fundamental tropism toward the past. The last line of The Excursion, which was to be The Recluse's second part, looks to a continuation that 'My future labours may not leave untold' . 1 As emphasized in the preceding chapter, it was mainly by heroic mining of his own poetic past, in the transposition of 'The Ruined Cottage' to the first book of The Excursion, that Wordsworth was able to achieve for a portion of The Recluse that absolute poetic authority that he so frequently achieved in the backward-looking Prelude. And it is no accident that in the eighth and ninth books of The Excursion, where his social sense receives some of its fullest expression, the necessary futurity attendant upon a view of social improvement rendered the poetry jejune and bare. But though futurity was not the direction of Wordsworth's deepest poetic intuition, it did relate to one part of his visionary commitment, that in which he assumed the stance of prophet. In moving lines at the end of The Prelude he calls Coleridge and himself 'Prophets of Nature' and asserts a pedagogic agenda that will necessarily involve his efforts in futurity:

Prophets of Nature, we to them will speak A lasting inspiration, sanctified By reason, blest by faith; what we have loved, Others will love, and we will teach them how. 2 Coleridge too seemed to be willing on occasion to think of Wordsworth as more a prophet than a poet, because he calls The Prelude a 'prophetic Lay' created not by a poet but by a sage:

Friend of the wise! and Teacher of the Good! Into my heart have I received that Lay More than historic, that prophetic Lay. 3 1

Poetical Works, v. 312; The Excursion, bk. IX, line 796. Prelude (1850), XIV. 537, lines 444-7. 3 Coleridge, Poems, i. 403-4, lines 1-3.

2

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The Prophetic Stance

Coleridge knew his friend well; for the idea of being a prophet and uttering sacred truths was not only co-ordinate with Wordsworth's sense of his vocation as a poet, but arguably even prior to it: to the open fields I told A prophecy: poetic numbers came Spontaneously, and clothed in priestly robe My spirit, thus singled out, as it might seem, For holy services: great hopes were mine.•

The prophetic stance rather than the stance of the artist was congenial to Wordsworth because of the curious simplicity of his poetic intent, where he seemed to look toward the bypassing of art in the quest for truth. It is no accident that in 'Home at Grasmere' he explicitly says that he lives not to write poetry but simply 'to register the truth'.5 In the 1805 Prelude, again, Wordsworth says to Coleridge that 'I speak bare truth, I As if to thee alone in private talk.' 6 The prophetic stance, moreover, though at least on the surface it seemed not to accord with Wordsworth's idiosyncratic valuation of the past, had a long tradition as a possibility, and even a desideratum, for other poets. 'Among the Romanes,' writes Sir Philip Sidney, 'a Poet was called Vates, which is as much as a diviner, foreseer, or Prophet.'7 The conception, as the statement indicates, is an ancient one, and occurring as it does in Sidney's Defence of Poesie, which was a clearing-house and funnel for Renaissance theory, it has maintained a peculiar vitality and authority into more recent times. From the Messianic Eclogue of Virgil to the Prophetic Books of Blake, from Tennyson's 'Locksley Hall' to Yeats's 'Sailing to Byzantium', the poet has repeatedly presented himself, sometimes explicitly, at other times implicitly, as a prophet; and in doing so has consistently reaffirmed a central function and orientation of poetry. Poets, as Shelley urges, 'were called, in the earlier epochs of the world, legislators or prophets: a poet essentially comprises and unites both these characters. For he not only beholds intensely the present as it is, and discovers those laws according to which present things ought to be ordered, but he beholds the future in the present, and his thoughts are the germs of • Prelude (1805), 1. 36, lines 59-63. 6 Prelude (1805), x. 42.0, lines 372.-3.

7

' Poetical Works, v. 314, line 47. Sidney, iii. 6.

The Prophetic Stance

125

8

the flower and the fruit of latest time.' 'Poets', says Shelley again, 'are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration, the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present'.9 In terms of this tradition of theory and practice, Wordsworth does seem an anomaly. To prophesy, in the most public and immediate meaning of the phrase, is to foretell the future. That Blake should write prophetic works seems in this respect eminently fitting in that, as he so hauntingly says of himself, 'My heart is full of futurity.' 10 But Wordsworth's heart was full of the past.For him 'The thought of our past years in me doth breed I Perpetual benediction.'11 Indeed, his very theory of poetry was an apotheosis of the past, for to Wordsworth poetry 'takes its origin in emotion recollected in tranquillity'.12 The point can hardly be overemphasized. It is not the prospect of the future but the sense of the past that repeatedly stirs Wordsworth to his deepest utterance: 'How shall I seek the origin? Where find I Faith in the marvellous things which then I felt?' 13 Again and again he expresses in his greatest moments the sense of having gone past in time the experience of true being: 'I cannot paint I What then I was ... That time is past, I And all its aching joys are now no more' .14 And the inadequacy of both present and future is only emphasized by longing glimpses of what is past: Those shadowy recollections, Which, be they what they may, Are yet the fountain light of all our day Hence in a season of calm weather Though inland far we be, Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea Which brought us hither, Can in a moment travel thither, And see the Children sport upon the shore, And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore. 15 10 9 Blake, 729. Ibid. 140. • Shelley, vii. II2. Poetical Works, iv. 283: 'The Immortality Ode', lines 134-5. Prose, i. 148. 13 Prelude (1850), 11. 93, lines 346-7. Cf. the 1805 version: 'How shall I trace the history? where seek I The origin of what I then have felt?' (lines 365-6.) 14 Poetical Works, ii. 261: 'Tintern Abbey', lines 75-6, 83-4. 15 Ibid. iv. 283-4: 'The Immortality Ode', lines 150-2, 162-8. 11 12

The Prophetic Stance

I26

In short, it is scarcely an accident that modern commentators­ W. L. Sperry, M. H. Abrams, Christopher Salvesen, and Laurence Lerner come readily to mind-have compared Wordsworth to Proust; for to Wordsworth as to Proust temps perdu was the deepest awareness of life, and temps retrouve its continuing

agenda. Even on those occasions when Wordsworth did invoke the name of prophet, he somehow seemed to turn away from the future. The six-years' child of the 'Immortality Ode' is hailed as 'Mighty Prophet! Seer Blest', but the meaning of the appellation is vitiated

I

by the succeeding specification: 'On whom those truths do rest, Which we are toiling all our lives to find, In darkness lost, the darkness of the grave.'16 Here the child does not actually look to

I

the future, but enjoys fullness of being in his present state. The

future brings adulthood, which is 'darkness ... the darkness of the grave'. A more striking example of Wordsworth's reluctance to turn a prophetic gaze towards the future is afforded by a crucial passage in the first book of The Prelude. As the poem begins, Wordsworth is looking ahead, to the future; ana early expresses 'A . cheerful confidence in things to come'. 17 But no subject for a great · poem presents itself. After a Beethoven-like groping towards themes and prospects, however, Wordsworth finally says, in seem' ing confirmation of his confidence in things to come, that 'The road lies plain before me'.18 Before him? Not at all. He has made a

on -h�

"I

complete turn and is looking directly behind, that is, into the past. The list of possible subjects has given way to a definite choice, and the definite choice has followed hard upon a chance remembrance of his childhood:

Oh, many a time have I, a five years' child, In a small mill-race severed from his stream, Made one long bathing of a summer's day. 1•

No sooner has this memory been invoked than the tentativeness of tone disappears, to be replaced by the deep and calm organ peals of Wordsworthian certainty: 17 Prelude (1805), I. 36, line 67. 16 Poetical Works, iv. 2.82., lines 115-18. 19 Ibid. (1850), I. 51, lines 2.88-90. 18 Ibid. 1. 70, line 668.

The Prophetic Stance

127

Fair seed-time had my soul, and I grew up Fostered alike by beauty and by fear: Much favoured in my birth-place. 20

In such persistent and characteristic preoccupation with his own past, Wordsworth might seem to forfeit all claims to the honours afforded by the conception of poet as prophet, and thereby to lose his place among those of 'the first and most noble sort' whom Sidney says 'may justly be termed Vates'.21 Yet Wordsworth is none the less and incontestably one of the greatest poets in English or any other language. As the paradox is unique, however, so is its resolution, which can be attained by addressing ourselves to three propositions. First, we need to understand that prophecy does not essentially depend upon futurity. As Angus Fletcher has noted, in his book called The Prophetic Moment: An Essay on Spenser, 'The modern era, begin­ ning with the sixteenth century, sees the term "prophecy" gradually pick up a connotation which the critic of Spenser will have to reject: the notion that a prophetic utterance gives a sharp, unequivocal vision of the future. '22 As corollary to this, we need to realize that futurity itself is dispelled by prophecy. Secondly, we need to understand that Wordsworth's idiosyncratic poetic stance allowed him to use the past as other prophetic writers use the future. And thirdly, we need to understand that Wordsworth was in fact deeply preoccupied with the future, but in an emphasis defined by his involvement with the past. With respect to the first proposition, that is, that prophecy does not essentially depend upon futurity, and as corollary, that futurity itself is abrogated by prophecy, both Nietzsche and Augustine provide useful commentary. Observing that prophecy is an attempt 'to bind the future', Nietzsche proposes an equation: 'Sich prophez­ eien !assen', he says in La Gaya Scienza, is 'sich etwas bestimmen lassen'-'to have something prophesied is to have something defined'. 23 But the future as such is an enigma, a total obscurity and indefiniteness {'The future', said Hazlitt, 'is like a dead wall or a thick mist hiding all objects from our view'); 24 when confronted

20

22 24

21 Ibid., lines 301-3. Sidney, iii. 23 Nietzsche, ii. 94. Fletcher, 3. Hazlitt, viii. 2. 5.

IO.

128

The Prophetic Stance

by prophecy it is therefore, by Nietzsche's analysis, denied rather than confirmed by the act of prophecy. The future is, as it were, divested of its ontological core; it becomes an aspect of the present. Augustine maintains the same truth in an elaborate series of paradoxes. He asks whether what we learned when boys, that there are three times, past, present, and future, might not be false; that there may be 'present only, because those two are not'. If future becomes present, 'Does it come out of some secret place?' Where do they who have foretold things see them, if they are not yet? For that which is not, cannot be seen. And they who describe things past could not describe them if in mind they did not discern them. If they were not, they could not be discerned.

He continues: If times past and to come are, I would like to know where they are ... But wherever they are, they are not there as future, or past, but as present ... In whatever way a secret fore-perceiving of things can take place, only that can be seen which is.But what is, is not future but present. For example, I see the daybreak; I foresee that the sun is about to rise. What I see is present. What I foresee is to come. Not the sun, which already is; but the sun-rising, which is not yet. Yet if I did not in my mind imagine the sun rising, I could not foretell it.Future things then are not yet: and if they are not, they cannot be seen. Yet they may be foretold from things present which already exist and are seen.25

If the prophetic future is actually a mode of the present, as is the persistent drift of Augustine's paradoxes, and if to apprehend the future in the present is to bind the future, as Nietzsche says, it would seem to follow that futurity as such is radically dissipated by the prophetic vision. Indeed, inasmuch as none of us can live at all without a future, such universality would of itself prevent the future from being the essence of prophetic utterance, which is a special, not a commonplace, manner of communicating. As Words­ worth says, ...Poets, even as Prophets, each with each Connected in a mighty scheme of truth, Have each for his peculiar dower, a sense 25

Augustine, Confessions, bk. XI.

The Prophetic Stance

129

By which he is enabled to perceive Something unseen before.26

What then, if not futurity, is decisive for the prophetic mode? A threefold criterion for identifying the answer presents itself. First of all, prophecy must have a certain gravitas-a weight, an urgency, a. high seriousness, a connection not with the common­ place and mundane, but with the extraordinary and supra­ mundane: it shall be my pride That I have dared to tread this holy ground, Speaking no dream, but things oracular; Matter not lightly to be heard.27

In order of priority, this gravitas, this sense of 'things oracular, matter not lightly to be heard', must always take precedence over any orientation to the future as such. Fletcher notes that 'As the name prophet, from pro-phemi, implies, he always "speaks out" for something. He teaches and preaches sublime interpretations of the meaning of life.' 28 De Quincey, as so often, makes the point with precision: Though a Prophet was not therefore and in virtue of that character an Evangelist, yet every Evangelist was necessarily in the scriptural sense a Prophet. For let it be remembered that a Prophet did not mean a Predicter, or Foreshower of events, except derivatively and inferentially. What was a Prophet in the uniform scriptural sense? He was a man who drew aside the curtain from the secret counsels of Heaven. He declared, or made public, the previously hidden truths of God: and, because future events might chance to involve divine truths, therefore a revealer of future events might happen so far to be a Prophet. Yet still small was that part of a Prophet's functions which concerned the foreshadowing of events; and not necessarily any part. 29

Still again-for the point is very important-a respected twen­ tieth-century Bible commentary may be summoned: Divination ... and all allied practices were sternly discouraged by Jeho­ vah's revelation of Himself to Israel; and as time went on the work of the true prophets became more and more ethical and spiritual ... The popular 26 28

17 Prelude (1805), XII. 504, lines 301-5. Ibid. 502, lines 250-3. 19 De Quincey, iii. 4 5 2 n. 1. Fletcher, 5-6.

The Prophetic Stance

130

definition of a prophet is 'one who predicts the future' ... But such a view is narrow and misleading. The prophet is 'one who speaks with God'-a forth-teller rather than a mere fore-teller ...The prophets were men who claimed to have received from Jehovah the truths which they spoke in His name.30

In such a context Blake, whom we may keep before our minds as an example of the unequivocally prophetic poet, is simply asserting his prophetic gravitas, his status as a forth-teller rather than a fore-teller, when he writes to Butts that 'I am not ashamed afraid or averse to tell You what Ought to be Told. That I am under the direction of Messengers from Heaven Daily & Nightly.'31 Wordsworth, again, is doing precisely the same when he says that 'I shall continue to write with I trust the light of Heaven upon me.'32 Indeed, one of the functions of Wordsworth's 'egotistical sublime' was to assert his prophetic gravitas as forth-teller, as someone presenting, in Fletcher's words, 'sublime interpretations of the meaning of life'. As Hazlitt observed: He is the greatest, that is, the most original poet of the present day, only because he is the greatest egotist ... He sits in the centre of his own being, and there 'enjoys bright day'. He does not waste a thought on others.33

A second aspect of the threefold criterion is that the 'oracular matter' of prophetic utterance is marked by a certain indistinctness. Such a characteristic enhances both its vertical and its horizontal dimensionality. In terms of the latter, the indistinctness is an emblem of the fact that though prophecy attempts to bind the future, the future is nevertheless not wholly graspable. And in terms of the former, the indistinctness honours prophecy's largest concern, that is, the pointing to a higher and fuller reality than the one we experience in daily life. In mundane existence, as Paul says, 'we know in part, and we prophesy in part'.34 Thus Angus Fletcher notes that Spenser accepts the dictum of Saint Paul in the first Epistle to the Corinthians ... the prophet sees 'through a glass, darkly', per speculum in aenigmate. Truth comes to him only through 'obscure presentations'. Because he knows in part, he can only prophesy in part.A final apocalyptic light may at the last end all prophetic doubt, but such permanent wisdom 30 33

Dummelow, p. xii. Hazlitt, viii. 44.

1

•

31 Blake, 724. I Corinthians r 3: 9.

32 Middle Years, II. 187.

The Prophetic Stance

131

is not given to the seer while he lives and prophesies in this uncertain world. 35

Again, Fletcher emphasizes that 'The prophetic poet is uniquely sure of himself, and this he shows by allowing his utterance to be enigmatic and obscure on the surface, knowing that the immediate surface of the riddle is supported by an underlying clarity.' 36 In the context of this second aspect of the threefold criterion, accordingly, Blake is rendering obeisance to prophetic indistinct­ ness when he writes that 'You ought to know that What is Grand is necessarily obscure to Weak men. That which can be made Explicit to the Idiot is not worthy my care. The wisest of the Ancients considered what is not too Explicit as the fittest for Instruction because it rouses the faculties to act.' 37 Wordsworth, for his part, constantly asserts the indistinctness of those things towards which his backward-looking gaze is turned. 'The soul,' he says, 'Remembering how she felt, but what she felt I Remembering not, retains an obscure sense I Of possible sublimity.' 38 The fountain light of all our day is paradoxically 'those shadowy recollections' celebrated by the 'Immortality Ode'. Indeed, we must not forget that Wordsworth in his own era was repeatedly reproached with obscurity, as, to cite a single instance, in Byron's question: 'Who can understand him?-let those who do make him intelligible.-Jacob Behman-Swedenborg-& Joanna Southcote are mere types of this Arch-Apostle of mystery & mysticism.' 39 The threefold criterion is completed by a definition of the way in which futurity can be said to be only one part of prophecy's concern. Prophetic utterance, in its largest description, can be viewed as an attempt to integrate human existence-to see it whole (we recall Wordsworth's phrase about 'Poets, even as Prophets, each with each I Connected in a mighty scheme of truth'). In such integration, however, present, past, and future, the mundane experience and the ideal possibility, are all necessary components. Because both future and past are aspects of an existence taken in its totality, prophecy's concern for the future can be no more important than its concern for the past-and in fact is linked to it. The divine perspective, which is that assumed by prophecy, is one that sees time from the standpoint of eternity, that is, it sees 36 Ibid. 3 7. 37 Blake, 702.. is Fletcher, 4. 39 '" Prelude (1805), 11. 90, lines 334-7. Byron, Letters, iv. 32.4.

The Prophetic Stance

132

present, past, and future in one unified-vision.Isaiah is the prophet of a God who declares 'the end from the beginning, from ancient times what is still to come'.40 'God', says Plato, 'holds in his hands beginning, end, and middle of all that is.'41 As Fletcher notes, 'Prophetic utterance ... is manifested as "historicism " ... History is useful and necessary to the prophet because it presents him with \ a theoretical wholeness of past, present, and future.'42 Such a theoretical wholeness is necessary to any complete view of man's life, which is characterized, in Hamlet's words, by 'such large discourse Looking before and after'.'Emphatically may it be said of the Poet,' agrees Wordsworth,'... "that he looks before and after." He is the rock of defence for human nature.'43 Accordingly, any prophecy that restricts itself merely to the future lacks resonance, as does any poetry that assumes the same restriction.'Locksley Hall' presents an explicit vision of what is to come-'l dipt into the future far as human eye could see, Saw the vision of the world and all the wonder that would be'; 44 but 'Locksley Hall' is not a truly reverberating poetic statement, not the least of the reasons being its weak observance of the threefold prophetic criterion of gravitas, indistinctness, and interpenetration of past, present, and future.On the other hand, the golden bird on Yeats's golden bough, in singing of 'what is past, or passing, or to come', achieves the true prophetic perspective. And Blake's 'awful vision' is one in which'I see the Past, Present & Future, existing all at once'."'5 It is the wholeness of life that both poet and prophet seek: 'The life', to use Wordsworth's own beautiful expression, 'where hope and memory are as one'.46 'What now is clear and plain,' concludes Augustine,'is that neither things future nor things past are. Nor is it properly said, "There be three times: past, present, and future." Yet might it perhaps be said, "There be three times: a present of things past, a present of things present, and a present of things future." '47 If prophetic utterance is a binding of both future and past into a present rather than a simple foretelling of the future, the second of our main propositions, that is, that Wordsworth was able to treat

I

I

42 Fletcher, 5. 40 Isaiah 46: 10. • 1 Plato, Laws, 715 E. 41 44 · Prose, i. 141. Tennyson, 90: 'Locksley Hall', lines 15-16. 45 Blake, 159. 46 Poetical Works, v. 87: The Excursion,' bk. Ill, line 400. 47 Augustine, Con(essions, bk. x1.

The Prophetic Stance

133

the past as though it were the future, is thereby validated. Where all components are necessary, none has more than an optional primacy. For instance, though we are accustomed to think of the messianic futurity of Isaiah, or the apocalyptic futurity of John as the greatest prophetic moments of the Bible, theologians illustrate what they call the 'prophetic present' by a passage that binds together not present and future, but present and past. The words are those of Jesus himself, in rebuke of the Pharisees, and they plumb the depths of prophecy: 'Art thou greater than our father Abraham, which is dead? ... Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Before Abraham was, I am.'" 8 Both future and past are related to 'now' in the common form of 'then', and it would accordingly be as possible to bind 'now' and 'then' as present to past as it would as present to future. Such was Wordsworth's own understanding.'I look into past times,' he says, 'as prophets look I Into futurity.'49 The last of this chapter's three main contentions, that is that Wordsworth was in fact occupied with the future, is readily documented by his poetry. He knew that 'we live by hope I And by desire; we see by the glad light I And breathe the sweet air of futurity.'50 Yet, though the binding of past and future into the present is as characteristic of Wordsworth as it is of any other prophet, the specific form of his concern with the future is dictated by the structure of his concern with the past. Specifically, Words­ worth does not search the future for reassurance in the present; rather he looks to the past for reassurance in the future. He is almost always, and certainly in his deepest apprehensions, con­ cerned to know that 'The future cannot contradict the past.'51 There is a peculiar but inexorable logic that compels this Wordsworthian idiosyncrasy. If, for Wordsworth, the earliest part of life was the state of fullest being ('trailing clouds of glory do we come I ... Heaven lies about us in our infancy'), and the process of growth was accompanied by a loss of being ('Shades of the prison-house begin to close I Upon the growing Boy'), it follows •• John 8: 53, 58. •• Poetical Works, ii. 480. 50 Ibid. v. 287: The Excursion, bk. IX, lines 23-5. And of course he knew that 'our being's heart and home, I Is with infinitude, and only there; I With hope it is, hope that can never die, I Effort, and expectation, and desire, I And something evermore about to be.' (Prelude (1850), VI. 239, lines 604-8.) 51 Poetical Works, v. 174: The Excursion, bk. v, line 664.

134

The Prophetic Stance

that the worst of all possible states in life must be the extreme future, where the process of diminution has reached the nadir. It is this special anxiety about an ultimate loss of being that provides the substratum of Wordsworth's pervading interest in derelicts and lonely people, particularly the lonely aged-'the sole survivor' such as Simon Lee. As Socrates says to Cephalus, 'I enjoy talking with the very aged.... For we have to learn from them as from wayfarers who have preceded us on a road that we too, it may be, must eventually take-what is it like? ...ls it a hard part of life to bear?'52 For Wordsworth, the answer is sombre: the prospect of the future echoes with the loss of joy experienced in the past. For instance, in 'Tintern Abbey' the poet's attention moves from the 'aching joys' and 'dizzy raptures' of the past to a future when 'solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief' might be one's portion.53 One of the most revealing of the treatments of the problem of futurity as an index of diminished being is presented in 'Resolution and Independence'. The Old Leech-Gatherer is the ultimate in age-'The oldest man he seemed that ever wore grey hairs'-and at the same time the ultimate in isolation.54 But when the old man reveals himself as stoically enduring, as having lost neither his humanity nor his sanity, the observer's anxiety is almost explos­ ively dispelled: I could have laughed myself to scorn to find In that decrepit Man so firm a mind.55

It is apparent, none the less, that Wordsworth's need for reassur­ ance about what one may call the liveability of the future is directly involved with his orientation towards the past; for from the perspective of the past he here sees, as he does in 'Tintern Abbey', future prospects of intolerably diminished being:

But there may come another day to me­ Solitude, pain of heart, distress, and poverty

52 53 54 55 5

6

We Poets in our youth begin in gladness; But thereof come in the end despondency and madness. 56

Plato, Republic, 32.8 D-E. Poetical Works, ii. 2.61, 2.63: 'Tintern Abbey', lines 84, 85, 143. Ibid. 2.37: 'Resolution and Independence', line 56. Ibid. 2.40, lines 137-8. Ibid. 2.36, lines 34-5, 48-9.

1 35

The Prophetic Stance

Although concern with the future is necessary to a full resonance

of concern with the past, it is the laner that elicits the prophetic, as

contrasted with the stoical element-the Leech-Gatherer, the Old Cumberland Beggar-in Wordsworth's attitudes. Wordsworth's

paradise was the past (even when miraculously restored to the present of 'Home at Grasmere'); it was the heaven that lies about us in our infancy. But that fact of itself made the future a fearsome

I We wear a face of joy, because I We II think of thee with many fears I For what may be thy lot in future threat: 'often, glad no more,

have been glad of yore'; 57 'O blessed vision! happy child ...

years'. 58 In Wordsworth's universe of values the course of exist­

ence, as such quotations indicate, offered the prospect not of an

accession but of a deprivation of being: 'Life's autumn past, I stand on winter's verge;

I And daily lose what I desire to keep.•

5

�

And the

Solitary, commenting on the happiness of a 'cottage boy', says, 'Far happiest ... If, such as now he is, he might remain !'60

I

So Wordsworth, though validly assuming the prophetic stance

by which

gravitas

and fullness informed his poetry, was a prophet

turned not toward anticipation of the future but toward regret for the past. He was a prophet of the past. Such was the actual phrase

acutely used by a commentator named Hengist Horne in 1844: 'He

is a prophet of the Past,' said Horne,

His 'future' can be but the past. He dictates, he does not predict: he is a teacher and a preacher in the highest sense, but he does not image forth the To-Come, nor sound the trumpet of mighty changes in the horizon. 61 A single concluding passage from Wordsworth himself puts the

keystone in the arch. The lines are from the twelfth book of the 1850

Prelude-'that

prophetic Lay', as Coleridge termed it-and

are focused on the past:

The days gone by Return upon me almost from the dawn Of life; the hiding-places of man's power Open; I would approach them, but they close. I see by glimpses now; when age comes on May scarcely see at all; and I would give, " Ibid. iv. 72.: 'The Fountain', lines 46-8. 51 Ibid. i. 2.47: 'To H. C. Six Years Old', lines II, 12.-13. 59 Ibid. v. 128: The Excursion, bk. 1v, lines 6II-12.. 60 • 1 Home, 190. Ibid. 81: bk. 111, lines 207-8.

The Prophetic Stance While yet we may, as far as words can give, Substance and life to what I feel, enshrining, Such is my hope, the spirit of the Past For future restoration.•2

In the weight and dignity of these words, probing to the dawn of life, we hear the prophetic tone. In the indistinctness of their glimpsing vision, we encounter the characteristically prophetic way of seeing. In the sacred binding together of present, past, and future-the enshrinement of 'the spirit of the Past I For future restoration'-we behold prophecy's celebration of a higher and fuller reality. Although the haunting lines converge upon the past, their being is that of prophecy, and they accordingly admit Wordsworth, easily and honourably, to the company of those poets of the first and most noble sort whom the ancients called Vates. More than that, even more than that, the prophetic stance assumed by Wordsworth and exemplified in this passage was not fortuitous; rather it was theoretically necessary to sustain the oracular fullness and weight of his vision. Planted in all three dimensions of human existence, present, past, and future, the prophetic stance alone could aspire to bear the gigantic gravitas flowing from the molten depths of the Wordsworthian intensity. 62

Prelude (1850), XII. 483, lines 277-86.

7

The Play of Absence: The Borderers and the Winds of Culture THE RECLUSE, more than any other Wordsworthian statement, was to make use of the prophetic stance. 'Descend, prophetic Spirit! that inspir'st I The human Soul of universal earth, I Dreaming on things to come; and dost possess I A metropolitan temple in the hearts I Of mighty Poets', wrote Wordsworth in 'The Prospectus'. 1 But the prophetic stance is entirely absent in another Wordsworthian statement, The Borderers, which, it will be argued in this chapter, is rather a necessary psychological clearing of the ground before the prophetic stance can be assumed. And if The Recluse, despite Kenneth Johnston's sympathetic arguments by which a kind of existence is claimed for it, remains in terms of its declared aspiration a melange of presence and absence, with absence being the category of its largest cultural reality, The Borderers engages the category of absence in another and more powerful way. The Borderers is a bad play, a dramatically undra­ matic, an almost unwatchable play. It nevertheless has increasingly drawn the attention of critics and scholars of Wordsworth. In recent years a performance was given in the Lake District, and another one at Yale. An issue of Studies in Romanticism has been devoted to its reassessment. It occupies its own large volume of 8 r 5 pages in the Cornell Wordsworth. In short, whatever its longueurs as a presented drama, as a cultural artefact The Border­ ers is proving of lively interest and continuing durability. It will be the argument of this chapter that the play generates such interest, despite its inadequacies as drama, because it too presents a lode of Wordsworthian intensity. But this intensity does 1 Poetical Works, v. 5, lines 83-7. The phrase, 'Dreaming on things to come', was lifted bodily from Shakespeare's Sonnet 107, and that fact, along with its dispensability in Wordsworth's statement, makes it an index of the high degree of anxiety as Wordsworth sets himself in the prophetic stance to assume the greatest poetic burden of all.

138

The Play of Absence

not come to view in great statements that seek to render the sense of perfection absolute; it rather is buried in cultural debris made up of what Wordsworth rejected, not what he espoused. Astrono­ mers say that perhaps 90 per cent of the matter in the universe is thought to be absent from our observation. It can only be inferred, not seen by optical telescopes, or infra-red telescopes, or radio telescopes, or other techniques of observation. It is a gigantic absence that nevertheless is of the most profound importance in the history and fate of the universe. To extrapolate such astronomical concern for our own end, The Borderers is replete with dark matter of the Wordsworthian intellectual cosmos. This chapter will argue that it is in the consideration of this play, much more fittingly than in the consid­ eration of 'Tintern Abbey', that the concept of absence as a critical relevance should be invoked. It is interesting to note at the outset that the play occupied Wordsworth's energies at the same time as his greatest early poem, 'The Ruined Cottage', and that like that poem and other major statements, continued to command his revising attention until late in life. As Robert Osborn says:

William Wordsworth's play The Borderers, a tragedy in five acts, was composed in 1796 and 1797 and remained in fair-copy manuscript form for 'more than a generation of years'. In its early version it was entitled simply A Tragedy. It was eventually named The Borderers and published, after much revision in 1841 and 1842, in Poems, Chiefly of Early and Late Years (1842) ... The Borderers was Wordsworth's first major work, and stands at the threshold of the 'great decade' (1797-1807). In the course of its composition in 1796 and 1797 he achieved the beginnings of a breakthrough to the blank-verse style and the dominant themes that characterize the outstanding long poems that followed it-The Ruined Cottage (1797-98), The Pedlar (1798-1802), and the two-part Prelude (1798-99).2 Osborn argues that the play 'deserves greater recognition as a literary achievement than it has been given', and even urges that it be considered 'as one of the neglected masterpieces of the English Romantic movement, in the "closet drama" genre of Byron's Manfred and Shelley's Prometheus Unbound'. 3 2

Osborn, p. ix.

3

Ibid.

The Play of Absence

139

That, however, will not be the viewpoint set forth in this chapter. Rather than thinking of The Borderers as a neglected masterpiece or as a literary achievement, this chapter, to take up again the astronomical metaphor, will approach it as a heap of debris. But a heap of cultural and personal debris, in terms of the total compo­ sition of the Wordsworthian cosmos, can be as rewarding an object of investigation as can the most beautiful planet of a solar system. In that context, it is important not to be led astray by the hope of presenting The Borderers as a 'masterpiece', neglected or other­ wise. 'Tintern Abbey' is a masterpiece, and it was argued in the first chapter of this book that the poem must be critically and literarily approached in that matrix. It was argued that Marjorie Levinson's approach by means of a discourse of absence actually obscures the nature of the poem as a masterpiece. But if a discourse of absence, because of its unavoidable tendency to bypass the literary quality of a text, is not suitable to 'Tintern Abbey', it is entirely suitable to The Borderers. That play is deeply interesting. But its interest resides far less in its literary quality than in its subliminal connections with Wordsworth's attitudes and with the course of history. The winds of culture blow across the linguistic landscape of The Borderers. In such an apprehension, the preface for the version of 1797 acts as a kind of tunnel that augments the force and velocity of those winds. It is a remarkable document, for it urgently relates to what Wordsworth was not and could not let himself become, and it relates to cultural concerns of vast import from antiquity to the present day. It is a discussion of the character of Rivers, the play's villain, and it displays his villainy as a philosophical position, not as a mere dramatic convention, though clearly he harks back also to Iago, Bosola, and other great philosophical wrongdoers of Jacobean drama-Machiavellians all, as Mario Praz has elucidated that Elizabethan conception. 4 The depth of Rivers as evil-doer perhaps accounts for the curious fact that Wordsworth, despite his predilection, his undue predilec­ tion in Coleridge's opinion, for the dramatic form in his poetry, never wrote any other play; though his Romantic compeers, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats, all wrote more than one. And • See Mario Praz, '"The Politic Brain": Machiavelli and the Elizabethans',

Flaming Heart (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1958), 90-145.

The

The Play of Absence though Wordsworth never got around to publishing The Prelude, it seemed important that he publish this play, this event to be faced once and only once, and get it right. 'Having,' he said in 1842, '... impressions upon my mind which made me unwilling to destroy the MS., I determined to undertake the responsibility of publishing it during my own life, rather than impose upon my successors the task of deciding its fate.' 5 The play, in short, constitutes a high and exposed centre of turbulence in the progress of Wordsworth's life and attitudes. In devoting an entire preface to Rivers, and in making it the kind of psychologically and philosophically probing preface that he does, Wordsworth seems really to be talking about possibilities in his own largest vision of reality.6 For above all else, Rivers is a rejected version of Wordsworth's own self. Rivers is a mind actuated by pride and feelings of superiority, by contempt of society and society's mores: he has 'shaken off the obligations of religion and morality'. 7 He is first and foremost not a mindless villain. Central to his character is reason. 8 He is a philosopher of evil. 'In his retirement, he is impelled to examine the reasonableness of established opin­ ions and the force of his mind exhausts itself in constant efforts to separate the elements of virtue and vice.' 'The general moral intended to be impressed by the delineation of such a character is obvious: it is to shew the dangerous use which may be made of reason when a man has committed a great crime.'9 Rivers employs 'sophisms in support of his crimes which it would be difficult to answer'. 10 If Rivers is dangerously characterized by reason, he is also dangerously characterized by imagination: His imagination is powerful, being strengthened by the habit of picturing possible forms of society where his crimes would be no longer crimes, and s Poetical Works, i. 34:z.. 6 For a collateral view see e.g. Nicholas Roe, Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 38-4:z..' 7 Osborn, 66. • He is a reasoner in the play as well as in the preface: 'Yet reasoner as he is, his pride has built I Some uncouth superstition of its own.' (Osborn, 2.06. The Borderers, Early Version, 111. iv. :z.5-6.) 9 Osborn, 6:z., 67. 10 Ibid. 68.

The Play of Absence he would enjoy that estimation to which from his intellectual attainments he deems himself entitled. The nicer shades of manners he disregards, but whenever upon looking back upon past ages, or in surveying the practices of different countries in the age in which he lives, he finds such contrarieties as seem to affect the principles of morals, he exults over his discovery and applies it to his heart as the dearest of his consolations. 11

Rivers, in short, is with his commitment to reason and imagina­ tion philosophically admirable, no matter how anxiously Words­ worth stigmatizes him as evil. 12 'Such a mind cannot but discover some truths,' admits Wordsworth, then hastens to say exorcisti­ cally, 'but he is unable to profit by them and in his hands they become instruments of evil.' 13 Still, as Blake insists, 'Active Evil is better than Passive Good.' 14 However much Wordsworth tries to dissociate Rivers from himself by insisting on his evil, this villain in fact is a Romantic rebel of the order of Satan, Cain, and Prome­ theus: 'He has rebelled against the world and the laws of the world and he regards them as tyrannical masters; convinced that he is right in some of his conclusions, he nourishes a contempt for mankind the more dangerous because he has been led to it by reflexion.' 15 Indeed, Rivers in this description might well have auditioned for the leading role in Shelley's great lyrical drama of defiance, even though he would not have been given the part: The only imaginary being resembling in any degree Prometheus, is Satan; and Prometheus is, in my judgment, a more poetical character than Satan, because, in addition to courage, and majesty, and firm and patient opposition to omnipotent force, he is susceptible of being described as exempt from the taints of ambition, envy, revenge, and a desire for personal aggrandisement, which, in the Hero of Paradise Lost, interfere with the interest. The character of Satan engenders in the mind a pernicious casuistry which leads us to weigh his faults with his wrongs, and to excuse the former because the latter exceed all measure.1'

11

Ibid. 6-4-5. As Shelley says, 'The imagination is a faculty not less imperial and essential to the happiness and dignity of the human being than the reason' (Shelley, vii. 107). 13 Osborn, 6 5. •• Blake, 5 9 2.. 15 Osborn, 6 3--4. " Shelley, ii. 171-2.. 12

The Play of Absence Like Satan, like Rivers, Wordsworth too, as has been repeatedly pointed out in recent years, nourished a contempt for mankind. 17 As David Ferry has written, 'Wordsworth is not a great lover of man but almost a great despiser of him.' 18 Another commentator, David Perkins, has spoken of the long tradition, from Hazlitt on, by which 'critics have tended to deny that Wordsworth possessed much sympathetic receptivity to the life around him. If it existed at all, it was certainly selective in accordance with his own intense preoccupations, directed only to some things, and specifically to nonhuman identities.' 19 And underneath Wordsworth's poetically declared philosophy of joy, there worked forces in no way less dark than those ascribed to Rivers. As I have elsewhere stressed: Again and again we see that Wordsworth's 'cheerful faith that all which we behold I Is full of blessings' is an attempt to assert mastery over fears to the contrary. Though 'The thought of our past years in me doth breed I Perpetual benediction', other Wordsworthian testimony allows us glimpses of unease beneath this serene fa�ade-as when he speaks of the occurrence in childhood of 'terrors, pains, and early miseries, I Regrets, vexations, lassitudes interfused I Within my mind.' Elsewhere he records that his mother had said that the only one of her five children about whose future she was anxious, was William; and he, she said, would be remarkable either for good or for evil. The cause of this was, that I was of a stiff, moody, and violent temper; so much so that I remember once going into the attics of my grandfather's house at Penrith upon some indignity having been put upon me, with an intention of destroying myself with one of the foils which I knew he kept there. There is assuredly nothing in that memory to 'breed I Perpetual benediction.'20

If his mother's recognition of a capacity for either good or evil in Wordsworth, and his 'stiff, moody, and violent temper', rein­ force our sense that in talking about the psychological and philo­ sophical make-up of Rivers he is really talking about himself, however strong his disclaimers, we may say exactly the same about

17 Cf. De Quincey's wry comment: 'Never describe Wordsworth as equal in pride to Lucifer: no; but, if you have occasion to write a life of Lucifer, set down that by possibility, in respect to pride, he might be some type of Wordsworth' (De Quincey, Recollections, 381 ). 18 Ferry, 52. 20 McFarland, Romanticism, 160-1. 1• Perkins, 51-2..

The Play of Absence

his preoccupation with similar dark matter in 'Lines Left upon a Seat in a Yew-tree'. There Wordsworth is led to remember the man who 'piled these stones and with the mossy sod I First covered, and here taught the aged Tree I With its dark arms to form a circling bower.' This man, it turns out, is a passive version of Rivers, and by that same token is a rejected possibility for Wordsworth's own overweening sense of self: 'He was one who owned No common soul.'21 The Yew-tree man

I

to the world went forth A favoured Being, knowing no desire Which genius did not hallow; 'gainst the taint Of dissolute tongues, and jealousy, and hate, And scorn,-against all enemies prepared, All but neglect. The world, for so it thought, Owed him no service; wherefore he at once With indignation turned himself away, And with the food of pride sustained his soul In solitude.22 It seems clear enough that the Yew-tree man's proud and indignant retreat into solitude was parallel to a strong impulse in Wordsworth himself. What the man in the poem was prepared to find in the great world-'the taint Of dissolute tongues, and jealousy, and hate, And scorn'-is exactly what Wordsworth is prepared to find there as expressed in 'Tintern Abbey': 'evil tongues, Rash, judgments . . . the sneers of selfish men, greetings where no kindness is.'23 But having projected his own possibility on to the man in the Yew-tree poem, Wordsworth hastens to dissociate himself from the man's lonely fate, and points a warning moral:

I

I

I

I ...

Stranger! hencefonh be warned; and know that pride, Howe'er disguised in its own majesty, Is littleness; that he who feels contempt For any living thing, hath faculties Which he has never used; that thought with him Is in its infancy. The man whose eye 21 Poetical Works, i. 92: 'Lines Left upon a Seat in a Yew-tree .. .', lines 12-13. 22 Ibid. 92-3, lines I 5-24. 21 Ibid. ii. 262: 'Tintern Abbey', lines 128-30.

I44

The Play of Absence Is ever on himself doth look on one, The least of Nature's works. 2•

If the Yew-tree man's contempt turns back upon himself, that of Rivers is directed outward:

He presses truth and falshood into the same service. He looks at society through an optical glass of a peculiar tint: something of the forms of objects he takes from objects, but their colour is exclusively what he gives them, it is one, and it is his own. Having indulged a habit, dangerous in a man who has fallen, of dallying with moral calculations, he becomes an empiric-and a daring and unfeeling empiric. He disguises from himself his own malignity by assuming the character of a speculator in morals and one who has the hardihood to realize his speculations. 25

Wordsworth's remarkable, and to the character of Rivers irrele­ vant, observation, that 'something of the forms of objects he takes from objects, but their colour is exclusively what he gives them, it is one, and it is his own', pertains directly to a Wordsworthian characteristic noted by critics early and late. For a single instance, Hazlitt pointed out that Wordsworth 'attaches the deepest and loftiest feelings to the meanest and most superficial objects'.26 And Wordsworth himself, as recorded by Henry Crabb Robinson, said that the 'poet first conceives the essential nature of his object and strips it of all its casualties and accidental individual dress, and in this he is a philosopher; but to exhibit his abstraction nakedly would be the work of a mere philosopher; therefore he reclothes his idea in an individual dress which expresses the essential quality, and has also the spirit and life of a sensual object, and this transmutes the philosophic into a poetic exhibition.'27 Rivers is in every way a larger figure than the Yew-tree man­ 'the grandest Poetry is Immoral the Grandest characters Wicked', asserts Blake 28 -and by that fact a greater threat to Wordsworth. The date of the Preface, 1797, marks it as immediately following the profoundest kind of disruptions in Wordsworth's own attitudes toward the world. (It is interesting to note that Wordsworth recalled that the play 'was composed in I 79 5-6', 29 but, as Osborn pointed out, 'he dated the play one year too early'30-that is, his unconscious mind placed it closer to his time of post-revolutionary 24

25

28

Poetical Works, i. 93-4, 'Lines Left upon a Seat in a Yew-tree .. .', lines 50-7. 27 26 H azlitt, ix. 243. Robinson, i. 89. 30 29 Poetical Works, i. 341. Osborn, 3.

Osborn, 65. Blake, 634.

The Play of Absence turmoil.) Indeed, Wordsworth implies that The Borderers was written precisely to purge the moral perplexities engendered by the Revolution: The study of human nature suggests this awful truth, that, as in the trials to which life subjects us, sin and crime are apt to start from their very opposite qualities, so are there no limits to the hardening of the heart, and the perversion of the understanding to which they may carry their slaves. During my long residence in France, while the revolution was rapidly advancing to its extreme of wickedness, I had frequent opportunities of being an eye-witness of this process, and it was while that knowledge was fresh upon my memory, that the Tragedy of 'The Borderers' was composed. 31

In simplest terms, The Borderers, as the vehicle for expelling the anti-humane philosophy of Rivers, almost had to be written if Wordsworth were to become a great poet. For the mighty intuition that propels Wordsworth's greatest and deepest formulations is that 'we have all of us one human heart'.32 His 'theme', he says, is 'No other than the very heart of man' .33 What then, of the French Revolution, which brutally denied that vision, which demonstrated that 'man' was not, as Wordsworth said he was, 'dear to man'?34 Scant wonder that for Wordsworth the result was, as he sadly says, a 'loss of confidence in social man'. 35 Profoundly shaken by the events of the French Revolution, which brought into his ken human possibilities never dreamed of by the boy in the paradisal Lake District, shaken by his own guilt over Annette Vallon, Wordsworth, like Rivers, had become for a time 'a speculator in morals'. As he says in The Prelude: I pushed without remorse My speculations forward; yes, set foot On Nature's holiest places. Time may come When some dramatic story may afford Shapes livelier to convey to thee, my Friend, What then I learned, or think I learned, of truth, And the errors into which I was betrayed

11

Poetical Works, i. 342.

Ibid. iv. 239: 'The Old Cumberland Beggar', line 153. 33 Prelude (1805), XII. 500, lines 239-40. 34 Poetical Works, iv. 239: 'The Old Cumberland Beggar', line 147. 35 Ibid. v. 117: The Excursion, bk. 1v, line 261. 12

The Play of Absence By present objects, and by reasonings false From the beginning. 36

A speculator in morals, too, was another great nineteenth-century protagonist, one propelled likewise-with his constant references to Napoleon-by the moral turmoil initiated by the French Revo­ lution. For Raskolnikov, dallying like Rivers with moral calcula­ tions, shows that Wordsworth was not the only artist of supreme world rank to set foot on nature's holiest places. 'Dallying with moral calculations' like Rivers, looking 'at society through an optical glass of a peculiar tint', Wordsworth in his speculations with morals pushed himself close to the brink: So I fared, Dragging all precepts, judgements, maxims, creeds, Like culprits to the bar; calling the mind, Suspiciously, to establish in plain day Her titles and her honours; now believing, Now disbelieving; endlessly perplexed With impulse, motive, right and wrong, the ground Of obligation, what the rule and whence The sanction; till, demanding formal proof, And seeking it in every thing, I lost All feeling of conviction, and, in fine, Sick, wearied out with contrarieties, Yielded up moral questions in despair. 37

He had reached, as he says, 'the crisis of that strong disease'; 38 he had reached 'the soul's last and lowest ebb'. 39 It is important that we realize how very serious the situation was. This was no momentary depression or passing vagary; this was rather a moment when the whole course of Wordsworth's existence hung in the balance. The poet, as he records, was saved, pulled from the depths, by his relationship to other human beings, specifically by the love of Coleridge and of Dorothy: Ah! then it was That thou, most precious Friend! about this time First known to me, didst lend a living help To regulate my Soul, and then it was '

6

Prelude (1805), x. 450, lines 877-85.

Ibid. (1850), x,. 453, lines 2.93-305. " Ibid., line 307. '" Ibid., line 306.

7 '

The Play of Absence That the beloved Woman in whose sight Those days were passed, now speaking in a voice Of sudden admonition-like a brook That does but cross a lonely road, and now Seen, heard and felt, and caught at every turn, Companion never lost through many a league­ Maintained for me a saving intercourse With my true self.•0

1 47

To the agency of Coleridge and Dorothy in this redemption from despair, Wordsworth also adds the agency of his beloved Nature: And, lastly, Nature's self, by human love Assisted, through the weary labyrinth Conducted me again to open day, Revived the feelings of my earlier life, Gave me that strength and knowledge full of peace, Enlarged, and never more to be disturbed, Which through the steps of our degeneracy, All degradation of this age, hath still Upheld me, and upholds me at this day In the catastrophe.4 1

But what if Coleridge and Dorothy, assisted by Nature, had not been there to lift Wordsworth out of 'the weary labyrinth'? Where would his steps have taken him? The answer, it seems clear, is that he would have become an advocate for, rather than a rejecter of, the philosophical nihilism of Rivers. After all, nihilism was a word and a concept that first appeared in the Romantic era. And if we think a character in a bad play hardly can be held up as a pattern of possibility for the man who became the greatest poet of the age, then we have sorely failed to plumb the iconographic depth of Rivers. Yet if one should wish to insist that Wordsworth and a hypothetical character can hardly seem comparable, are we pre­ pared to maintain a similar position with regard to Wordsworth and a great philosopher? What, in short, should be our conclusion with respect to Wordsworth and Nietzsche? For Wordsworth's projections into the character of Rivers pre­ cisely parallel the activities of the philosopher who, more than any other, affected the mind of the twentieth century. The greatest anti­ moral movement of our century, Nazism, was the unintended child •o Ibid. (18o5), x. 454, lines 905-16.

1 •

Ibid., lines 922.-3 1.

The Play of Absence of Nietzschian thought; and Nazism as-a philosophy of action was little more than the viewpoints of Rivers writ large. Just as with Rivers, who exulted 'whenever upon looking back upon past ages, or in surveying the practices of different countries in the age in which he lives', he found 'such contrarieties as seem to affect the principles of morals', 42 so too with the author of Beyond Good and Evil. Paul Deussen recalls of their school-days at the Schulp­ forta gymnasium that Nietzsche composed 'a long, scholarly Latin essay' on the subject of the literary composition of Theognis' poems, in which the words 'good' and 'bad' are synonymous with 'aristocratic' and 'plebeian', respectively. Everyone knows how much these impressions, which were the topic of our daily conversation, influenced Nietzsche's later moral views. 43

Nietzsche, in short, became as did Wordsworth and Rivers, 'a speculator in morals'. And he learned, as Wordsworth expressly says he himself did, that the foundations of conceptions of good and evil rest upon sand. Nietzsche washed away the moral glue that held society in bounds; treatises such as The Genealogy of Morals encouraged intellectuals into daring speculations that scorned conventional moralities and disclaimed any innate good­ ness in the structure or origin of society. 'Let us speak out this new demand: we need a critique of moral values, the value of these values is for the first time to be called into question.' 44 'Suppose there lurked in the "good man" a symptom of retrogression, such as a danger, a temptation, a poison a narcotic! ... So that really morality would be the danger of dangers?'45 Nietzsche devastat­ ingly rejected Rousseau's conception of a social contract and substituted instead an origin by brute force: the fitting of a hitherto unchecked and amorphous population into a fixed form, starting as it had done in an act of violence, could only be accomplished by acts of violence and nothing else-the oldest 'State' appeared consequently as a ghastly tyranny, a grinding ruthless piece of machinery, which went on working, till this raw material of semi-animal populace was not only thoroughly kneaded and elastic, but also moulded. I use the word 'State'; my meaning is self-evident, namely, a herd of blonde beasts of prey, a race of conquerors and masters, which with all its war­ like organization and all its organizing power pounces with its terrible 42

Osborn, 6 5. .. Nietzsche, ii. 768.

43

Gilman, 15 . 45 Ibid.

The Play of Absence

149

claws on a population, in numbers possibly tremendously superior, but as yet formless, as yet nomad. Such is the origin of the 'State'. That fantastic theory that makes it begin with a contract is, I think, disposed of. He who can command, he who is a master by 'nature', he who comes on the scene forceful in deed and gesture-what has he to do with contracts?••

The great philosopher, of course, did not foresee and can hardly be held responsible for the use others made of his compelling insights into human history and society. 47 But in terms of our argument here, it is clear that he, as a speculator in morals, remained in the labyrinth and went even further than Rivers. For his part, Wordsworth says that 'I drooped', Deeming our blessed reason of least use Where wanted most: 'The lordly attributes Of will and choice,' I bitterly exclaimed, 'What are they but a mockery of a Being Who hath in no concerns of his a test Of good and evil; knows not what to fear Or hope for, what to covet or to shun.••

Wordsworth had Dorothy and Coleridge to rescue him from his dark ruminations. But Nietzsche had no human lifelines to succour him. He had no Dorothy, no Coleridge, only a corroding isolation similar to that of the Yew-tree man. As Thomas Mann observes in a notable essay on Nietzsche: 46

Ibid. 826-7. Certainly Hitler was a grotesque parody of what Nietzsche had in mind, but when National Socialism first began to take shape, it is equally certain that what Nierzsche said would seem directly to pertain to the Fiihrer and his remorseless agenda: 'This man of the future, who in this wise will redeem us from the old ideal, as he will from that ideal's necessary corollary of great nausea, will to nothingness, and Nihilism; this tocsin of noon and of the great verdict, which renders the will again free, who gives back to the world its goal and to man his hope, this Antichrist and Antinihilist, this conqueror of God and of Nothingness-he must one day come' (Nietzsche, ii. 837). As a commentator rather wryly notes of two scholars of the Nazi era: 'Baumler contributed a postscript to each volume of Kroner's pocket edition of Nietzsche's works, Oehler compiled the indices of both the major collected editions, the second of them ... comprising two and a half volumes. Neither needed to pose as a "Nietzsche expert" but really was one; and herein lay the fatality for Nietzsche's reputation-for if the compiler of a two and a half volume index to Nietzsche's writings does not know what they contain, who does? It was because the leading Nietzsche scholars inside Germany said that Nietzsche was four-fifths a Nazi that the Nazis themselves believed it' (Hollingdale, 194). •• Prelude (1850), XI. 453, lines 307-14. 47

150

The Play of Absence

a delicate, fine, warmhearted soul in need of love, formed for noble friendships and not at all made for solitude. And upon this soul deepest, coldest solitude, the solitude of the criminal, was imposed. Here was a mind by origin profoundly respectful, shaped to revere pious traditions; and just such a mind fate chose to drag by the hair, as it were, into a posture of wild and drunken truculence, of rebellion against all reverence. This mind was compelled to violate its own nature, to become the mouthpiece and advocate of blatant brute force, of the callous conscience, of Evil itself.• 9 Nietzsche's isolation was in fact legendary. None of the human supports that saved Wordsworth was there to save Nietzsche. As his boyhood friend Deussen reflected after visiting him in 1889 at the onset of his insanity: No one can say to what extent the seeds of insanity were already present as a disposition in this highly talented mind. But if Nietzsche had not diligently separated himself from human society, in which he occupied such an honourable position, if he had kept his position, established a family, and allowed the fruits of his mind to mature slowly, instead of pursuing his thoughts in solitude with ascetic over-exertion of his energies on tiring walks during the day and at night compelling elusive sleep by stronger and stronger narcotics-who knows whether he might not still be living with us in full health.so As Mann laments, 'starting from such solid footing, how he was driven forward into pathless wastes. Like the Alpinist who climbs too high among the glacial peaks until he reaches the point of no return where he can move neither forward nor backward, he overreached himsclf.' 51 Nietzsche, in short, to exchange Mann's metaphor for another one, pursued his wide-ranging path in the weary labyrinth until he fell into the pit at its centre; and in that pit dwelt Rivers. The sentiments and even the diction of Rivers are startlingly proleptic of those of Nietzsche. 'Solitude! The eagle lives in solitude-', exclaims Rivers. 52 'On the tree of the future build we our nest', exults Nietzsche, 'eagles shall bring us lone ones food in their beaks! . . . And as strong winds shall we live above them, neighbours to the eagles, neighbours to the snow, neighbours to

I

s, Mann, 143. so Gilman, 226. •• Mann, 142. 52 Osborn, 212. Early Version, 111. v. 53-4.

The Play of Absence the sun: thus live the strong winds.'53 'Compassion! pity! pride can do without them, I And what if you should never know them more!', says Rivers.5