Ceaseless Music: Sounding Wordsworth’s The Prelude 9781474232784, 9781474232807, 9781474232814, 1474232787

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Ceaseless Music

BEYOND CRITICISM Taking advantage of new opportunities offered by digital technology and new insights from contemporary creative practice that take us from abstract theory back to literature itself, Beyond Criticism explores radical new forms that literary criticism might take in the twenty-first century. http://thebee.buzz Series Editors: Katharine Craik (Oxford Brookes University, UK), Simon Palfrey (University of Oxford, UK), Joanna Picciotto (University of California, Berkeley, USA), John Schad (University of Lancaster, UK), Lilliana Loofbourow (University of California Berkeley, USA). Published Titles: Macbeth, Macbeth, Ewan Fernie and Simon Palfrey The Winnowing Fan, Verse-Essays in Creative Criticism, Christopher Norris Forthcoming Titles: Blank Mount, Judith Goldman Character as Form, Aaron Kunin Desire: A Memoir, Jonathan Dollimore Just Play: Theatre as Social Justice, David Ruiter Orpheus and Eurydice: A Graphic-Poetic Exploration, Tom de Freston with Kiran Millwood Hargrave

Ceaseless Music Sounding Wordsworth’s The Prelude Steven Matthews

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square 1385 Broadway London New York WC1B 3DP NY 10018 UK USA www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 © Steven Matthews, 2017 Steven Matthews has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4742-3278-4  ePDF: 978-1-4742-3280-7 ePub: 978-1-4742-3281-4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Series: Beyond Criticism Cover design: Alice Marwick Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

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This book is in memory of Ronald Arthur Arnold Matthews (1929–2011) and is for Thomas, Sam and Elleke

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CONTENTS Preamble viii

1 The Prelude alone; alone with The Prelude 1 2 ‘Ceaseless musics’ 59 3 Fantasia: Rememberable things 145 4 Reflections 201

PREAMBLE Ceaseless Music is a reflection upon poetry’s place in the world, and celebrates how poetry presents an energetic and consistent thread and recourse across lifetimes. Poetry alters, changes, as we alter and change. This book considers how the revolutionary autobiographical epic, The Prelude, altered and changed in its author William Wordsworth’s own mind. It shows how the poem changed the minds of his readers and of authors across the centuries since he wrote The Prelude, and how it has remained present in the mind of the reader and writer now responding to it with recollections in various forms from across a life. Our selves, who we are, are partly made of what we have read. This book shows how what we have read alters through phases of greater and lesser prominence and memory across our life, how poetry especially alters our perspectives on the world. Our reading is part of how we read and perceive ourselves, and those others we encounter. The Prelude is made up of a series of scenes and ideas presented by Wordsworth through the recreation of, and reflection upon, moments in his past life. Ceaseless Music revisits those self-reflections, and consequent reflections upon Wordsworth’s achievement in the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It offers a fantasia upon the images and ideas from the poem as they recur in writing over the past two centuries. Further, it presents its own reflections upon The Prelude in the shape of a new memoir, poems and commentaries, out of the conviction discussed and demonstrated throughout the book, that the reading of poems finds its most intent response through the creation of new work.

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To this end, Ceaseless Music asks and shows how it is that poetry sounds out the world, how it sounds out of the world, how it demands attention as a way of understanding who we are, where we are. It especially presents these questions at a moment like that from which Wordsworth wrote his poem. With exponential expansion of new technologies, and new threats to self, to community and to our relation with the natural world, we are in danger of going astray, and of making tragic misreadings both of our place in the world and of our selves. Amid this plural uncertainty, poetry offers a unique, direct and singular means to engage with the world; it offers other ways of becoming. How, this book asks, does Wordsworth’s poem help us read the world? How does it enable us to create our own versions or stories of the world and of who we are? How does reading poetry, living with it, enable us to listen freshly to the world, or to rewrite experience in our own words? The Prelude is an uncompleted text. It exists in three (some claim in four) ‘versions’, and seems never to have been declared absolutely ‘finished’ by Wordsworth, even though he worked on it in periods of greater and lesser focus and intensity for roughly forty years.1 Work on the poem came in fits and starts across Wordsworth’s life. One particular, relatively early, moment in its creation, however, is emblematic of much of what this book has to say. In the Spring of 1804, the days were unusually hectic at Dove Cottage, Town End, Grasmere. The Wordsworth family was living in cramped conditions. William’s wife, Mary, was pregnant with their second child. His sister, Dorothy, was employed fully on tasks around the house, in the kitchen and in the garden. She acted as nurse to the couple’s first child; she prepared meals from

Stephen Gill’s two chapters on The Prelude in his Wordsworth’s Revisitings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) provide the most eloquent mapping of the poet’s re-engagements with the work at distinct moments of his life.

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the ingredients kept in the Cottage’s cold store, with its underrunning stream from the hillside; she washed linen and sheets. Across the previous winter, visitors had typically stayed for long periods of time at the Cottage. These visitors included Mary’s sister, Sarah, and the family’s especial friend, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Coleridge, on the last stay before he departed on a trip to the Mediterranean, in the most recent attempt to recover his health, had left on 9 January. But now, at Coleridge’s suggestion, these Spring days at the Cottage were finding a new impulse and impetus. The hope was that, before Coleridge should embark for Malta on 10 April, copies would be made of all those recent poems Wordsworth wished him to carry aboard. The copies might serve both as a trove of love, joy, and inspiration to be turned and returned to in the rough days and nights of the journey, and as an anthology for Coleridge to meditate upon, and to review his friend’s recent progress as a poet. The anxiety, that Spring, was to get the works assembled, sometimes even to get them completed, and fair-copied, before the ship departed. The most substantial part of the work copied that Spring was the more or less complete first five books of what was then, around Dove Cottage, familiarly known as the ‘Poem for Coleridge’. This was the basis of the epic work of selfreflection which was subsequently – yet only forty-six years later – published as The Prelude. In four separate packages across those Spring months, the poems which Coleridge was to take with him, and which he was to have bound together as one manuscript book when he arrived in Malta, arrived at Coleridge’s London lodgings. The texts of the poems had been assembled out of many loose and ragged sheets containing drafts of passages or single stanzas, or out of the pages of work which had been accumulating in Wordsworth’s pocket notebooks, across several years. The poems brought together in the manuscript book, alongside the roughly 8,000 blank verse lines from The Prelude, covered several major forms. Many sonnets were included, as well as two of Wordsworth’s greatest odes, the ‘Ode to Duty’ and the ‘Ode: Intimations of

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Immortality’, which were completed across these Spring days, in order for them to be sent to Coleridge. Further lyrics, such as ‘Daffodils’, were newly composed and added to the book. The assembly and ordering of fair copies were made under Wordsworth’s constant superintendence by Dorothy, Mary and Sarah Hutchinson. All of these different poem texts, finally, were given further sequential shape at some point, when Coleridge himself numbered some of the loose pages. As can be imagined, the preparation of the copies of the poetry for Coleridge became a key focal point for those days in Dove Cottage. It was a labour of love involving Wordsworth alongside the women of the house, all worried for their ailing friend who, as it turned out, was to look futilely for a final resolution of his various woes in the sun of the South. The manuscript book which resulted from their labours is frail and tentative. The handwriting in it is small and neat, but passages have been scored out and altered, so that the poems might, even at this pressing moment, be presented in their most completed form. The relatively small book of 207 leaves astonishingly survived storms at sea, the loss of all of Coleridge’s papers at Leghorn, Italy, and a boarding of Coleridge’s ship by Spanish brigands on his return journey, along with the depredations of intense sunlight. Coleridge returned the now bound manuscripts to Wordsworth in 1806, and they were seemingly used, together with another copy made by Dorothy, Mary and Sarah, as they were preparing the Coleridge poems, by Wordsworth as source texts for his later publication of some of the poems it contained.2

The handmade notebook of verse returned by Coleridge to Wordsworth in 1806 is held at the Wordsworth Trust, Dove Cottage, Grasmere, DC MS 44. This account of the Spring days at the Cottage and their aftermath is assembled from letters by Wordsworth and by Dorothy at that time. See Letters of William Wordsworth, edited by Alan G. Hill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 65–93; Wordsworth: A Life in Letters, edited by Juliet Barker (London: Penguin, 2003), pp. 78–80.

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This brief account of one moment in Wordsworth’s writing life serves as a kind of parable, one with wide resonance for the reflections upon The Prelude, and on writing lives lived in its wake, that concern and impel Ceaseless Music. Those reflections include passages of new writing on the self, and new poetry, created out of close consideration of the energy and sounds of Wordsworth’s unprecedented epic poem on the self. This short parable from Spring 1804, I think, demonstrates the vulnerability of poetry, the voyages it makes outwards into worlds remote and unknown to its creator. Poetry sounds the world, sounds it out, and makes returns to the poet in terms of her or his own altering achievement and ambition.3 The parable also shows the labour and makeshift of creating poetry, its frequent assemblage from ragged scraps of experience written out in pocket notebooks at the time, or recollected later. Poetry is rarely seen at the moment of its creation as a unified, singlepurposed ‘message’ relayed in a certain form and definite style from poet to informed and understanding audiences. Poetry takes time, and makes time, in its circuits of realization and vocal address. Poetry depends upon chance and mischance for its making; it easily goes astray, readily gets lost from its origins, but sometimes survives as a summation of life lived, emotion felt, as a best gift.4 The ‘Poem for Coleridge’, The Prelude as we know it, was Wordsworth’s attempt to narrate, for his friend, and for his family who were integral to its creation, the ‘story’ of It seems that another ‘family copy’ of The Prelude underwent its own adventures while Coleridge was in the Mediterranean with his copy. For some reason, it was sent on 14 December 1805 to Mary, who was staying away from home. But the package was lost from the Carrier’s cart, only miraculously to reappear in late January 1806, ‘rain-soaked but otherwise uninjured’. See Mark L. Reed, ‘Introduction’, The Thirteen-Book Prelude Volume I (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 58. 4 Dorothy Wordsworth describes how, in February 1804 as he began again to compose The Prelude. Wordsworth walked out alone in all weathers, yet ‘brings us in a large treat almost every time he goes’. See Wordsworth: A Life in Letters, p. 79. 3

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roughly the first twenty-five years of his life, from his birth at Cockermouth in Cumberland in 1770. The chronological space of the work takes Wordsworth up to the mid-1790s, the years when the energetic impulse of the French Revolution, of which he was initially a supporter, petered out in terror and bloodshed. The Prelude is the first sustained autobiographical poem in English. When it became known after Wordsworth’s death, its narrative of ‘the growth of a poet’s mind’, of its formation and development, had profound reach. The work’s procedures and ideas recur, not just in subsequent poetic autobiography, but in prose narrative, memoir, and philosophical self-explorations, from the mid-nineteenth century into the early twenty-first. Wordsworth’s model of the self and ‘mind’ as having their origin in early childhood, but undergoing multiple revisions in the light of maturing experience – of self as an unfinished entity constantly at sway of the changes in the world outside of it – has obvious resonance within a later world of psychology, existentialism and the current vogue for ‘life writing’. Wordsworth’s challenge is that it is only a direct experience of the natural world which can take us beyond everyday custom and ordinariness, as that experience is remembered, recreated, in the poetry. The world of the early books of the poem is the locale of the specific natural world where Wordsworth was brought up, and lived his mature years.5 It is the place of The Prelude, what it has to say about issues of the self, of the self in history, of the self in nature, that this book will think about and reflect upon. This book will also attend to the things that the history of The Prelude’s creation have to tell us about the bases of radically innovative and challenging new writing from and about the self, from the point when it was first published in 1850 to now. The creation of new poems in the wake of The Prelude, and of reflections on the process of their creation, is The Prelude was, over twenty years ago, identified as a crucial text in environmental, or eco-political, literary criticism. See Jonathan Bate, Romantic Ecology (London: Routledge, 1991), Chapter One.

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a key facet of this attention. As we shall see, one of the main contentions of Ceaseless Music is that the ideal, most insightful, response to the poetry of The Prelude is the further poetry that we might be sparked to create in its aftermath – that is what it is to sound this work fully. One of the issues which this book considers is the fact that the poem did exist in a ‘finished’ state at a relatively early moment in Wordsworth’s own thinking, but a state which he immediately moved on from. The Prelude is self-haunted, in other words, each later version somehow incorporating, but taking a differing pattern to, the others. It even incorporates that ‘Five-Book’ version which seemed complete to Wordsworth briefly in 1804, but which wasn’t.6 For one of the remarkable features of the parable of the Coleridge voyage, his reading of the Wordsworth poems in the dim and turbulent ship cabin, is that this first five books of the manuscript of the ‘Poem for Coleridge’ on the voyage is not the same five books which had, only a week or so before he received it, seemed finished to its author. Its last two books are different from what Wordsworth had originally prepared for sending. This hauntedness, this changeability in and through The Prelude, is what manifests its openness, its allowance of new poetry to be created and entered as a response to its key images and ideas, including the new poems made for this book. The story of Wordsworth’s change of mind about whether the five books he initially completed amounted to a finished work is complex, but might be told something like this. Mark L. Reed, editor of the Cornell edition of what became The Thirteen-Book Prelude, suggests that in early March 1804 Wordsworth returned to a four-book version of a poem about his early life which he had prepared previously, and ‘drawing upon an accumulation of meditative and other fragments’ of poetry he had written, for what he thought were other Wordsworth wrote to Francis Wrangham c24 January to 7 February 1804: ‘At Present I am engaged in a Poem on my own earlier life which will take five books or parts to complete.’ See Wordsworth: A Life in Letters, p. 78.

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purposes, assembled the whole into the five-book text. This was by 10 March or so. The last book of this five-book ‘complete’ version contained an earlier-written passage (from a ‘two-book’ version of an autobiography) about the benefit of what Wordsworth called ‘spots of time’. These were particular moments of remembered transcendence in Wordsworth’s life, which might serve as a model for how we all look back to certain scenes in our lives for their significance as turning points that created who we are. But now, this March 1804 Book V also came to include a culminating newly composed ‘spot of time’ passage, recalling an ascent Wordsworth made of Mount Snowden in Wales, and elucidating the significance of that for the development of his imagination, towards his present self as poet. So, this five-book poem on the poet’s life was nearly complete, not quite though, by 10 March.7 However, at some point between 10 and 18 March 1804, the scheme for the last two books of this version changed in Wordsworth’s mind. He decided to expand some parts of the last book, cut out others, including the ‘spots of time’ and Snowden, and reserve them for a larger version of the work. The five books of the poem which were copied and sent off to Coleridge by 18 March resemble closely the five books of what then subsequently became known as the ‘1805’ version of the poem. (Typically, Wordsworth immediately had further thoughts even about this belated version, and sent Coleridge a letter with corrections to the new version of the poem on 29 March.) Wordsworth had realized that there was in fact much more to be added before the poem could be actually finished: of the letter written on 29 March with corrections, Reed remarks ‘by that time he was once again composing originally and toward a poem of undetermined bounds’. Those ‘bounds’ were not reached despite the major phases of work Duncan Wu is one scholar who, controversially, has published a version of The Five-Book Prelude as it stood in mid-March 1804 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997) – even though its claims for completion and authorization by Wordsworth are at best tentative and presumptive.

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on the poem which would and had taken place in 1798–9, 1804–5, 1819, 1831 and 1839.8 Even by the time he was leaving port, then, Coleridge’s ‘Poem’ had become something other than what Wordsworth in early March, and again by 18th, had purposed it to be. These versions have a momentary existence, which once again shows the fragility, but also the self-generating energy and shape-changing nature of poetry. Poetry displays consistent determination to develop as something other, but also to learn from itself and to become more.9 When is a poem ever finished? The sheer complexity in piecing together the process of assemblage and accumulation which evolved as The Prelude – a piecing together which took over sixty years of textual scholarship – writes these issues large. They display a poet constantly reinvigorated by reflection upon the materials from his past he is giving new presence to. The scraps of verse on loose pages, the notebooks, that life inscribed in the poetry, constantly remakes poetry from within, often after a break of years. The Prelude continued to alter as Wordsworth himself altered; it was a necessary poem to his life, and to the lives of those who shared his life with him. It continued even after the absence of its addressee: Coleridge died in 1834, yet, the scholarship suggests, Wordsworth carried through his last major work on The Prelude in 1839. Coleridge’s death is not incorporated in that late version, the so-called ‘1850’ text prepared and published in the months after Wordsworth’s death. This poem of a life contains, as we shall see, many deaths. The silence around Coleridge’s death in the 1850 publication is remarkable, in a text which continues with

Mark L. Reed, ‘Introduction’, The Thirteen-Book Prelude Volume I, p. 39. For the dating of phases of work on the poem, see Gill, Wordsworth’s Revisitings, pp. 83–154. 9 In later life, Wordsworth recollected his favouring of, and delight in, the Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses over other Latin writers he studied at school. See Stephen Gill, William Wordsworth: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 27. 8

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its accounts of his friend’s illnesses, its allusion to the 1804 voyage, and which, to Wordsworth’s end, speaks to Coleridge as if he were still alive. That interplay of presence and absence underpins this new book about Wordsworth’s major work.10 The attention in its own structure and chronicle which Ceaseless Music pays to the fleeting, five-book versions of Wordsworth’s poem, also pays tribute to the haunting, unformed nature of poetic creation. It is attentive to poetry’s stops and starts, to its assuming one form then becoming something other, with the earlier versions shadowing and continuing within the latest version of the text. My book is a tribute to the fugitive nature of poetry and of human understanding, to the way The Prelude has moved through various minds and found its own echoes and incitements in them, even when it is not specifically mentioned as a ‘source’ text for those later writings. The themes and images of that glimpsed ‘complete’ Five-Book 1804 version – early life, encounters with nature, education, loss, unexplained absence, the emergence and drainings out of maturity – resonate behind Ceaseless Music, find different form and shape within it.11 The Prelude is Wordsworth’s ‘hidden’ text, not prepared for publication until after his death by his wife Mary and his amanuensis and helper, John Carter (his wife gave the poem its title, even). Hidden, but not hidden, of course. The poem had quietly drawn in to its span early work such as ‘There was a boy’, but Wordsworth also allowed passages, including the extensive French love story, ‘Vaudracour and Julia’, and a longish passage on the imagination from Book XI, to appear during his lifetime, in the latter case to help Coleridge with copy for his journal The Friend. In each case, however, these extracts appeared without reference to their actual provenance – although the fact that they could be so extracted goes along with a broad sense that The Prelude is a work of phases, turns and returns, editings together of other texts. 11 Reflecting upon Ronald Johnson’s Radi os – a remaking of the first four books of Paradise Lost – Guy Davenport noted cheekily that ‘a poet usually finds his poetry in another poet. … It was long ago discovered that emulation is one of the most revolutionary forms of originality. The word invention, which once meant finding rather than making from scratch, now means finding again. Look at Eliot, Ives, Pound, Joyce, Picasso, Stravinsky.’ See ‘Afterword’, Radi os (Chicago: Flood Editions, 2005), p. 93. 10

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This book is an attempt to respond to the prompt which The Prelude, in its unfixity, gives, a prompt which leads to a visiting and revisiting of Wordsworth’s impulses and method, and to the consistent challenge which his poem offers. The book shows the continuing importance to current thought of a work such as Wordsworth made, that major poetry predicts much about later worlds which struggle to keep up with it, in the realm of literature, but also in science and philosophy.12 The Prelude tells us much about the way a self in formation, and a self-becoming formed in writing, has a political and social vitality in our current world, where so much of our selfhood is threatened and debarred from us; my book echoes something of that contentious energy. Taking its instigation from The Prelude, this book finds liberty in accumulating lives, deaths, earlier voices and writings, into its course. Remembering, writing and reading as a way of remembering, are hauntings from which The Prelude resonates beyond its own moment (or moments). As Chapter 3, on Wordsworth’s ‘Rememberable Things’, recounts, the poet found that the act of writing about his past self created a curious ‘vacancy’ in time, and in his sense of who he was: The vacancy between me and those days Which yet have such self-presence in my mind That sometimes when I think of them I seem Two consciousnesses – conscious of myself And of some other being. (II, 29–33) Wordsworth is both the ‘self’ in the present, writing about his past, and the ‘other being’ in that past re-becoming, being recreated, at the moment of writing. And yet he is not. He is alien to that past being as well, different from the ‘self’ there. Geoffrey H. Hartman thought that the future of Wordsworth study would arrive when he could be taken seriously as a philosopher. Ceaseless Music traces some of the philosophy written in the aftermath of The Prelude. See Hartman, The Unremarkable Wordsworth (London: Methuen, 1987), p. xxvii.

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Ceaseless Music’s reflections upon Wordsworth’s contention extends the notion of ‘two consciousnesses’ to include all encounters which arise through the creation of new work, encounters in which past poems and writers arise in and through that process of new creation. It contends that the recreation of past consciousnesses through the consciousness of the new work is how new poetry happens, that new poetry is an extension of the way in which we all think about our past selves, remake them across our lives, in different versions at different moments. Ceaseless Music’s attempt is not just to claim, but to perform, these things, through its creation of new poems, and its reflections upon how they came to be what they are. To this end, Ceaseless Music in particular attends to sound, which Wordsworth claimed in The Prelude had instigated his life as a poet, and his accounting for it in his epic poem of self. Wordsworth was acute about the sounds which poetry might make. He was attentive to the ways those sounds in poetry might appropriate and accommodate the sounds – steadying or disturbing – to which he was attentive from his early childhood, sounds which underscored his life. The earliest drafts towards The Prelude find Wordsworth asking himself to what purpose the ‘ceaseless music’ made by the River Derwent, as it ran behind his childhood home in Cockermouth, had made itself heard to him: For this, didst thou, O Derwent, travelling over the green plains Near my ‘sweet birthplace’, didst thou, beauteous stream, Make ceaseless music through the night and day Which with its steady cadence tempering Our human waywardness, composed my thoughts To more than infant softness. (Book I, 277–83) Had the ‘music’ of the River determined his calling as a poet? This book of reflections upon Wordsworth’s self-questioning is, therefore, principally about Wordsworth and sound, about

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the distinctive sound-world of this great epic of the self. It is about the significance of sound, and the sounding of poetry, for better becoming and understanding what we are.13 Sound, ‘music’ as Wordsworth calls it, underscores the thinking in his founding poem and across his life, his morality, ethics, politics. Ceaseless Music, in its turn, thinks about how poems read poems, but, more especially, about how reading and writing poems tunes us into, and attunes us to, the potentialities within this world which now, perhaps more than ever, seeks to drown poetry out. This is a book about quietness and LOUDNESS. The Prelude returns upon itself in various ways, considering and reflecting upon the memories and vocabulary of its autobiographical moments. In this way, The Prelude is poetry which sounds itself, listens to its substance and techniques as a self-educative text. It contains several moments of selfdoubt, in which we see Wordsworth anticipating the voice of the critic: ‘If this be error … | Yet were I grossly destitute of all | Those human sentiments which make this earth | So dear’, as the peroration for the second part of the 1799 version has it (line 465ff.). The ‘philosophy’ of the poetry derives from these turns and returns; it provides, in other words, the grounds for reflection and criticism of itself, and of the self within it. My book, whose new lyric poems by the author are integrated within its movement, cannot repeat the procedures of the epic, The Prelude, in that sense. It offers instead, in Chapter 4, a series of thoughts and commentaries upon those lyrics, which regather the instincts and thoughts generating the new poems to Wordsworth’s themes and images. Ceaseless Music tries to reflect The Prelude, its unexpected switches of direction and attention from sentence to sentence, from verse paragraph to verse paragraph, more directly in To this end, as part of the project towards creating Ceaseless Music, I have been involved with a composer friend in creating sound-recordings of key sites for The Prelude. A recording of the River Derwent as it flows behind Wordsworth’s birthplace in Cockermouth can be accessed at the free website address http://aporee.org/maps/work/?loc=30556.

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other senses. Ceaseless Music seeks to mimic the sonic and musical possibility, as also the constant re-beginning and reflections of The Prelude, in several ways. As you move through the book, you will ‘come upon’ or ‘find’ diverse materials lodged within its flow – new poems by this author; poems and prose by a range of writers from several cultures written through history since The Prelude; quotations from brain scientists, social scientists, philosophers, many others. Also, you will discover here an experiment in self-writing which asks questions of both self and of the ability to write it, an ability which so often now seems presumed. The Prelude undoes our established sense of who we are and of what the world is, together with how we sound to ourselves and to each other, and how the world sounds to us. The polyvocal text in Ceaseless Music hopefully directs us towards a confrontation with and dismantlement of the manoeuvres of detachment which sometimes blight study and critical writing. The book asks a renewed engagement with the implications of poetry, its ways of sounding.

Note on the text and Acknowledgements Since The Prelude did not appear during Wordsworth’s lifetime, there exists, as it were, no unedited or definitive text; the initial printing of the 1850 ‘version’ was prepared by Mary Hutchinson and John Carter, the poet’s long-term amanuensis. All quotations from The Prelude in this book, unless otherwise noted, are from the 1805 version. They have been checked against two source texts; the Penguin ‘Four Texts’ edition edited by Jonathan Wordsworth (London: Penguin, 1995) and the Cornell The Thirteen-Book Prelude Volume II C-Stage Reading Text edited by Mark L. Reed (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). In a few cases, in order to aid understanding, the Cornell punctuation has been accepted over the Penguin. All book and

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line numbers for quotations relate to the Penguin text, for ease of readers’ reference, since the Cornell volumes tend only to be available in research libraries. Book numbers are given first in Roman numerals, followed by line numbers. The poem ‘Emerson at Rydal Mount’ included in the book appeared in my poetry collection, Skying (Hove: Waterloo Press, 2012). A version of ‘Perspective’ appeared in Stand, Vol. 13 (2) in 2015. References to the Oxford English Dictionary are to the Second Edition, 1989. Abbreviations used to refer to other Wordsworth materials L

Letters of William Wordsworth, a Selection edited by Alan G. Hill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984).

MW

William Wordsworth, The Major Works, edited by Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

SP

William Wordsworth Selected Prose, edited by John O. Hayden (London: Penguin, 1988).

I am grateful to several people for their advice and support during work on this project: to my Bloomsbury Beyond Criticism series editors, John Schad and, particularly, Katherine Craik for their warm and inspiring advice on a draft of the text. I am also grateful to Katherine for her careful discussion and suggestions about aspects of what the book is saying. All thanks to the composer Paul Whitty for his interest in the project, and for his patience and support in accompanying me to Grasmere to record the ‘sounds of Wordsworth’ which are linked to the website which accompany this book, and which can be heard on the ‘Beyond Criticism’ website. Jeff Cowton, curator at the Wordsworth Trust Dove Cottage Museum, was very kind with his conversation about the project, and in thinking creatively about how it might be deployed to bring people to hear Wordsworth anew. My friend Ashley Taggart

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first led me towards some of the nuances and possibilities of brain science which inform the book – I am in his debt for that as for so much else. Elleke Boehmer, in difficult busy times, provided extremely thorough and insightful readings of drafts of the text and the poems; readings which were always attentive to problems, but which always saw the energy and hope in what I am struggling for. I am as always deeply grateful in every sense to her. VERTIGO ON YOUR BIRTHDAY TRIP TO TINTERN The land sodden; our walk across the Wye via the Mill Bridge was slow and slippery. The steep woods dripped overnight rain from leaves turning orange, red, beige towards winter. The green river swelled, raced beneath the bridge a rushing devastation; the silence in the valley was interrupted by the drone of chain-saws thinning the tree-steads, persistent ghost-voices from summer’s bees. Shouts of fans and footballers shivered nerves when they broke from the pitch beside ruins in a field outside the Abbey’s fenced bounds. Looked back to, fractured slate-grey walls, empty windows framed a threatening sky. The clouds, static, seemed drawn down to the river’s thread. Brown mud stood thick on the pathway upward through the weeping woods, towards the rampart, the broken leaf-strewn mound of Offa’s dyke on top of the hillside. We slithered on, grabbing at springy saplings for balance, determined to achieve high perspectives on the ancient buildings, the scope of land and the tree-line’s ridge beyond, into hills like ripples resonating from this source.

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Then, suddenly, we came upon a small, flat plateau, the mud shelving steeply down openly into a stark drop. Trailing at the back of our group, knees giving way, mind reeling forward into the valley, embedded shale dislodging and skiting, my nerves teetered at the brink of cascade; shoes starting to lose grip, skid on the edge, I could neither turn on myself nor step out across the open slide to safety amongst the dense trees forty yards ahead. As I crouched to the ground, to clasp fingers into the unsustaining mud, your firm hand under my elbow drew me back upright and along the dangerous path, the view down across to the Abbey steadying now, the scene’s beauty settled back into place.

1 The Prelude alone; alone with The Prelude

I take it that you do not know who I am. I have always found it difficult to make myself heard. As a working-class boy at a state grammar school, the first ever to have made it from my council estate primary school into that grammar school, teachers could not understand my accent – a mixture of my mum’s Cockneyinflections and the local Essex ones round where we lived. ‘Stop muttering Matthews,’ I recall one brutal Latin teacher shouting as I faltered while answering a question. ‘Why do you never speak properly to me?’ People continue to find it hard to pick up what I’m trying to say. I used to pass it off by saying that they couldn’t understand, those in the worlds I now move in, my Essex accent. I used to excuse the peculiarities of my written prose, the oddities of syntax in my poems, by saying it was simply ‘the Essex’ coming through. Now I am not sure. It might be a fault in me. Only when I read my poems aloud do I not make a slip, do I hear myself speaking boldly – no syllable elided, no word dreadfully mispronounced and no falling embarrassedly flat on my face in dreary monotones. Why, given this, should I be the one reflecting on The Prelude? By what right? I am a reader of Wordsworth and the Romantics since my mid-teens, but I am not known as a scholar of them (‘you don’t know anything about Wordsworth,’ someone told me after hearing out my enthusiasm in telling

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her about this book: ‘It’s not your field.’). Hubris would say, well, Wordsworth himself was unknown when he began work on The Prelude in 1798–9. He had published only ‘his’ section of Lyrical Ballads, the book co-authored with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in its first edition. The sales of Lyrical Ballads were bad for a long time. As he began writing The Prelude, the poem on his life, moreover, Wordsworth felt that he did not have anything to tell: he wrote in a letter of 1801, ‘In truth my life has been unusually barren of events.’1 More significantly, he did not know whether he would or could be heard. The signs were unencouraging. Reviews of Lyrical Ballads, particularly the one by Francis Jeffrey in The Edinburgh Review, then a key arbiter of taste, were hostile. How could Wordsworth know that he should be doing this, writing this life of a man brought up remote from ‘centres’ of civilization, and writing of his special insight, as someone particularly blessed with ‘imagination’ and a ‘poet’s mind’? How could he claim to know what such a written life might be, enough at least to spend years writing out himself to that purpose? He was aware of the unprecedentedness of this turn to autobiography, ‘that a man should talk so much about himself’, when he completed his draft of 1805.2 The answer to these questions partly lies in the fact that he did it. He wrote the poem regardless of the circumstances, regardless of what anyone else outside of his immediate family and close friends such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge – addressee of the verse letter that The Prelude is – might think. Another answer as to ‘why this book on The Prelude’, is in the nature of its recurring emphasis on sounds and sounding. As a poet with a firm interest in music, attentive to the interplay of sounds which poems can make, what has always taken me about The Prelude is that it is about how sounds Quoted by Stephen Gill, William Wordsworth: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 1. 2 Wordsworth: A Life in Letters edited by Juliet Barker (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 84. Letter to Sir George Beaumont, 1 May 1805. 1

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give tempo, rhythm and structure, both in a life, and in writing out of that life. Sounds order it, pace it, pull it back to key moments and themes.3 As we shall see, Wordsworth predicated his sense of what poetry does, and of how it registers in the world – its thought and moral implications – upon the sounds which he heard around him in the particular landscapes of his childhood. Those sounds were, ideally, quiet; his rivers murmur and mutter as they travel over the stones and rocks on their river-beds. The Prelude in particular requires our attentiveness to the noises in the world around us; it scores its version of a life, and of the emergence of a selfhood, upon asking us to hear what Wordsworth heard. The quietness of those sounds means that we need to strain our hearing to catch them, to attune our ears to the movements of sound the poetry alerts us to. A recent book on listening by Peter Szendy asks whether it is in fact possible to hear someone listening? The question is important, since one of the things that makes us individuals is how we hear, how we tune in differently, to everyone else. Szendy asks further, with some ‘vexation’ at the difficulties of this, ‘Can one make a listening listened to? Can I transmit my listening, unique as it is?’4 Szendy’s exuberant answer to these perplexities, as this book’s also is, is that the only way to display your listening is through creating your own sounds (new works of music, new poems). Those new works show that you have listened, and how you have. What it is you hear: previous musical scores or poetry as having heard. The best ‘answer’ to a piece of music is a new piece of music; to the sounds of a poem

John Hollander warned in Vision and Dissonance about the dangers of the ‘vague metaphors’ of musical analogy for poetry. Terms such as ‘cadence’, ‘melody’, ‘dissonance’, when applied to the mechanics of verse, are, as he points out, no better than ‘impressionistic’ (Vision and Resonance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 22). This book will only use ‘music’ in order to seek to decode Wordsworth’s application of the term. 4 Peter Szendy, Listen: A History of Our Ears (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), p. 5. 3

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is a new poem. This book, Ceaseless Music, moves always towards the possibility of making new poems within lives out of The Prelude – including my own new poems which you will come across as the book proceeds. As selves, we are partly made up of what we have lived, which includes what we have read, and what we strive to write (‘accomplishment of verse’, as Wordsworth would later claim, is dependent upon ‘culture’, and ‘the inspiring aid of books’5). New poems carry the immediacy of that reading, that listening, back into the world, as other forms of writing (including academic criticism) cannot. The Prelude conveys Wordsworth’s uniqueness, his self, through the ‘ceaseless music’ which it makes in response to the sounds heard in the world. The sounds of the poetry gesture towards the sounds of the world, point us to how sound leeches into poetry, into its speaking voice, into the sounds it makes – Muttering, murmuring, quietness. These are the sounds Ceaseless Music seeks to attune us to. So what kind of a book is this response to The Prelude, this Ceaseless Music? My least hope is that it might show certain things clearly – things that are at the brink of being lost or forgotten about ourselves. In this, as in everything, The Prelude serves as a template for the kinds of things this book includes and shows. This book is a record of how and why The Prelude speaks today, and speaks to me: what there is to hear in it. Wordsworth’s poem is particularly attuned to the historical moment in which it was principally being written, 1804–5. But it is also aware of the fact that that moment is a particularly imperilled one, not just through uncertainties on the continent of Europe around the rise of Napoleon, but also through the advent of new systems of education, new technologies, new threats to nature and the landscape, new ways of interacting with other human beings and the world around. These new ways were alien, impersonal, destructive of true intimacy with, and alertness to, the other person. In this sense, writing

The Excursion, Book I, line 83.

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his own life was a means for Wordsworth to cast that life as representative of his times; Wordsworth saw that, in politics, in our loss of connection to nature, in our denying of freedom for children to discover the world on their own terms, primarily in our loss of connection to our own pasts, we are in danger of losing our best selves, all that individuals and communities had evolved towards through history. The spirit of such sentiments is perhaps Wordsworth’s prime inheritance to subsequent writers and generations. It was already evident in the effect Wordsworth’s writing had in the work of the popular writers who succeeded him, poets who grew up literally under his aegis, the so-called second generation of Romantic poets. ‘Is it not better … to be alone, | And love Earth only for its earthly sake?’ asks the protagonist of Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, for instance. But then, he notably transposes this question into Wordsworthian territory: I live not in myself, but I become Portion of that world around me; and to me, High mountains are a feeling, but the hum Of human cities torture. ‘Are not mountains, waves, and skies, a part | Of me, and of my soul’, he goes on to ask, in a philosophical aside from the narration of his travels through Europe. It is when we are alone, in solitude, that ‘we are least alone’, for it is then that we are open and attentive to the ‘tone, | The soul and source of music, which makes known | Eternal harmony’, a harmony which cheats death through its persistence, its ceaselessness.6 All of this sense of the threat from the ‘hum’ of cities, from our modern technology, its ubiquitous computer screenlight, speaks directly now to us, in Britain, and in the ‘global’ context – a context in which the word ‘global’ often seems

Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage Canto III, ll. 680–4, 760–2, 842–8.

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to mean little beyond the verbal tick, the ‘global’ gesture to something vague beyond locale and nation. Unless we are city entrepreneurs, ‘global’ means little to us other than the passivity forced upon us by twenty-four-hour ‘news’ or the vicarious pleasures, the yammering porn, of the internet. The vested interests in the world, the capitalists and their stooges on right and left of most political systems, have the planet and humanity in their grip as never before, and are destroying everything good in both. Fracking (now even under our National Parks and places of natural beauty) and other new mining and industrial ‘advances’, the building of vast new faceless housing and shopping projects, threaten to undermine the relationship between humans and natural contexts in the West, in India and Africa, and in the still largely undiscovered parts of the world around the North and South Poles. The seasons seem increasingly erratic here in England under burgeoning climate change; it rains tempestuously in Spring and Summer, and it is rarely really cold or snowy in Winter. Meanwhile, the gap between the wealth of the richest nations and that in the poorest continues to broaden (as does that gap within countries), at the same time as Western conglomerates are seizing upon new market opportunities in Africa and India. Meanwhile, technologies such as mobile phones and tablets, new modes of ‘communication’ such as Facebook and Instagram, threaten permanently to undermine the human reality of personal and face-to-face interaction and connection.7 Personal Readers and Kindles are losing for us the physical actuality of reading a text, much of which is now beamed onto screens; eyesights are being destroyed and our

Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less from Each Other is eloquent about the paradoxes of virtual ‘connectedness’: ‘In the half-light of virtual community, we may feel utterly alone. As we distribute ourselves, we may abandon ourselves. Sometimes people experience no sense of having communicated after hours of connection. And they report feelings of closeness when they are paying little attention.’ (New York: Basic Books, 2011), pp. 11–12.

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ability to reflect upon what is in front of us eroded. The World Wide Web threatens to reduce all knowledge and all memory to something pixel-thick; the decades of thought and reading that used to be involved in learning and deep experience of any subject is reduced to a few clicks on Google Search – which yields little, because the ‘knowledge’ contained there is unexperienced, uncatalogued and its prominence again largely controlled by financial and commercial forces. In the process, the question of what ‘education’ is, what is valuable and important for humans to know and to pass on across the generations, feels particularly contested now. My conviction therefore with regard to Wordsworth and to The Prelude, is that we are, as was the case at the time in which Wordsworth wrote The Prelude, particularly in danger of losing ourselves. We are losing who we are, where we came from, how we might connect to others and offer them something. We live increasingly vicariously, through the lives of other people who we feel we come to know about through TV documentaries or the most popular forms of publishing. We get our ‘excitement’ and ‘kicks’ through the ‘extraordinary’ experiences of others; we rarely, in our safely cocooned Western lives, go out there and find them ourselves. Every week in the bestseller lists of non-fiction books (which easily outsell the fiction ones, let alone the poetry ones), there are the ‘Autobiographies’ of celebrities, sports stars, or actors. Even in the realm of more ‘literary’ work, memoir is currently thriving on the most-read lists. Helen MacDonald’s H is for Hawk, an extremely well-written book which crosses genres of literary criticism, memoir, grief-account and nature writing is but the most notable recent example of this kind of publication. We seek for authenticity, in other words, as a reading and viewing public body – but that authenticity is sought in the quick-fix world, the easily delivered world, which everyone seems to have given in to. And that authenticity is also somehow other people’s, rarely our own. We rarely seek ‘authenticity’ in ourselves. And yet that is what The Prelude has largely to teach us – that by learning of ourselves through formulating

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what it is that has led us to be who we are, we become our better selves. But we also learn that the very notion of selfhood is transient, arbitrary, fictional, constantly under threat and to be renewed. My book, therefore, primarily seeks to show how, through thinking about and meditating upon how The Prelude does this, we can learn to become closer to this complex sense of selfhood, and thence closer to others – to the world around us, at a moment when we have forgotten so much. Wordsworth’s poem, as I’ve said, largely provides a template for predicting and presenting the kinds of social, political and technological trauma which have become borne out in the twenty-first-century present. Yet, in the attention which he pays to words and to the world, he has lessons for us about resisting the forces which threaten to undermine us personally and in communities, the regulating and requiring of particular forms of response from us which go against what we would naturally want to offer. The Prelude teaches us to trust responses to the world which we have become fearful of giving. We are afraid for our jobs, afraid we will be shown not to be ‘up to date’, afraid not to be seen to buy into the convenience culture of the moment. This book therefore is about resisting those trends, finding ways of standing out against the tide, and standing up for what we might most want to claim as ourselves and our own. Wordsworth, despite his sense of his own undevelopedness and voicelessness, stands out against the tide by thinking in his own ways, by thinking differently, almost, you might say, by thinking about thinking itself differently. As a poet, he is fascinated by how it comes to be that he can exert power over words and through words, that he can almost make things happen with them, that he can move someone else with them, that he can change lives with them. At moments in The Prelude, as we shall see, he indulges the sense that words have a magic to them, that he is a kind of Prospero-like magician wielding them; he is literally spell-binding us. More significantly though, he is also a writer who is absolutely distrustful of words; words, after all, are what limit our thoughts into certain channels, and set certain ideas upon us which we find difficult to resist

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or break out of. We should resist clichés, resist the ways journalism, politicians and propagandists try to tell us ‘truths’ which we have no measure of checking against any reality, including the reality of our own natures. But poetry offers precisely an illustration of how complex our engagements as humans with reality and the world can be – how formulating a narrative of a life in verse is always a question of adjusting and readjusting our interconnections (‘interfusion’ is Wordsworth’s word) with the world. As the title of this book shows, Wordsworth sought to locate the essence of his poetry, and of the poetry telling his life, outside of himself. It is the ‘ceaseless music’ of the River Derwent, which ran past his birthplace in Cockermouth, Cumberland, England, that made him the writer and the person that he is. This book, then, will make a claim that we should be thinking about our words not simply as ‘communication’, but as telling us something about our necessary attention to the world around us, an attention often dulled and distracted in the look-down world of mobiles and tablets, the constant ‘need’ to tell people where we are, what we’re doing, and when we’re not really spending proper time to be anywhere or do anything. Pressures of the world and people around us at the moment can demand that we have a single story to tell, when we don’t yet have one. WHATEVER COMES IN Dove Cottage Arbour The cloud below the peaks, rain squalls edging across the lake. Above the hunched white house, the garden’s steep opens wide views across the slated roof; its wooden arbour’s peace a look-out keeping home under sight, calm of day’s routine, the stream preserving fresh from under the buttery’s floor larders of peas, cabbages from the neat squared off vegetable plot, and provender from fells around. But also concentrated here is prospect towards whatever comes in,

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that rain now spattering the chestnut’s leaves, myriad drops sounding streams overhead, the lavender prinking waves in the breeze. 13.7.15 This book seeks to show the importance of spending time with words, which means spending time with ourselves and so with others. Spending time with words is what Ceaseless Music does; it shows how there can be many hopeful and inspiriting things drawn out of reflection upon how words sit alongside each other. Spending time with words might also be a definition of what poetry does, since it pays attention to the resonances in and around words, and sets them in motion. In ‘Canto the Third’ of that semi-autobiographical epic, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage – an epic which partly tracks his own emergence as a writer – Lord Byron directly equates writing with the achievement of a fuller selfhood: Tis to create, and in creating live A being more intense, that we endow With form our fancy, gaining as we give The life we imagine, even as I do now. What am I? Nothing; but not so art thou, Soul of my thought! With whom I traverse earth Invisible but gazing. (III., 46–52) Writing, and writing in the moment of movement, of traversing the earth, writing as a means of traversing the earth, is to the end of being able to ‘live | A being’, to become who we are; it is the story we all have within us.8 This is an acknowledgement which seems to have been a facet of the selfunderstanding of the writer who was closest to Wordsworth personally, and one shared among those poets he knew intimately. When contemplating what would eventually become his ‘autobiography’, Biographia Literaria, Coleridge reflected in a notebook: ‘Seem to have made up my mind to write my metaphysical works as my Life, & in my Life’ – , as though his philosophical insights might only evolve through telling the story of himself. See George Watson, ‘Introduction’, Biographia Literaria (London: Dent, 1975), pp. xi–xii.

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This book hopes to show how poetry happens. More to the point, it hopes to show how by paying attention to another’s words, the words of The Prelude, it is not only possible to think of words musically, to think differently – but also to find out of that reading a way of rethinking who we are and the means to express those selves. We can learn to make ourselves heard by tuning into, by spending time to tune into, the words of a work preoccupied by these things like The Prelude. We can learn our own stories from it, and find a way to voice them. In its own poetry heard out of Wordsworth’s poetry, adopted and adapted to the present moment, this book shows how it is possible to become something else, something truer, to find a poetry in a contemporary world which seems not to want to hear it, which wrongly feels it has not the time to pay attention. The book also asks what we mean by life writing, that current vogue, and by autobiography. The English poet and journal-keeper R. F. Langley has important things to say about how autobiography travesties the life that it ‘tells’, important things that chime with my comments about authenticity earlier on. Waking in the small hours one night in 2002, Langley reports himself as having the words from Hamlet ‘The rest is silence’ in his mind. It sets off reflections upon the nature of words, and the using of them to tell some kind of story: To fit them into any kind of scheme instantly seemed to melt them into a phoney glamour, make them part of a poor sort of drama, the sort that an audience at a reading of an autobiography would enjoy, smiling and nodding and exclaiming that the writing was beautiful. Langley’s Journals makes a complex kind of resistance to this kind of popular, self-gratifying self-biography, which he sees as a ‘capitulation’. Notably, this passage from the edited version of his journal comes after an entry reflecting upon his arachnophilia, as he reports himself watching insect life under a railway bridge as rain drizzles all around. One spider moves incredibly slowly, another turns back and back

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on itself, another still resists moving in one direction but seems to be ‘passionately searching in all directions’. Racked by what all of this can be taken for, Langley fixes on the Latin word ambulans. All of these spiders are variously walking; ‘that is what there is to be said about it. On a journey, with no intention’.9 His own writing is like the progress of all of these spiders, of course; at another moment he celebrates, for example ‘the inconspicuous, the exact. To slow you down and wipe your eye.’ What it refuses to deliver is the swift hit of a story of a life for the satisfaction of an autobiography-hungry audience in bookshops or at the wearyingly numerous and expensive literary festivals. This, of course, does not stop Langley from registering elsewhere in his Journals one feeling that we all have, and a sense of the difficulty of having such feelings and trying to convey them in words. Sometimes you coincide with yourself, and there is a feeling of contact and immediacy. Contact with your environment, with no ghost between it and you. Most of the time, nowadays, this is not so. Exigencies, circumstances, are directing a ghost. The self is in suspense, held back and closed off, watching. In such a state of ‘contact and immediacy’, you call to the world, the world to you; you become aware that ‘there is another song going on in the background’ other than your own thoughts, ‘calling on you to get out of yourself, to open the window a little further’. In this case, it is a nightingale’s song Langley records himself as having heard, which makes him look up, away, which removes the ‘ghost’ between him and the world. Words have a part to play in all of this, because, as Langley concludes right near the end of this Journal, ‘Once

R. F. Langley, Journals (Exeter: Shearsman Books, 2006), pp. 99, 100.

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you have said to yourself that these things are so, they are so.’10 I’d say as well that reading is a way of being made to ‘coincide with yourself’, when you recognize that something in what you are reading ‘is so’ for you also. One way of overcoming our consistent current ghostliness is by slowing things down, wiping our eyes (in every sense), and getting into proper contact with the voices of the writers we most love reading. We love them because they speak to us. If reading is one version of how we might extend beyond ourselves, writing is more so. This book is also a way of enjoining more writing – something also becoming lost as a practice through which we might connect, make ourselves heard. This thought is perhaps most strongly developed out of an American tradition of philosophy, one which extends the Wordsworthian and Romantic equation of language and selfhood as a way of relating to the world into considering the practical implications of such possibilities. The contemporary American philosopher Stanley Cavell has increasingly, in the latter part of his career, turned to autobiography as a way of coming to terms with the grounds of his thinking. The Prelude forms one text he is aware of, as a model for his enterprise. But Cavell is alert also to the generic difficulties that Wordsworth’s epic of self poses to other disciplines. Pondering the possibility of creating a text which ‘tells the writer’s story of the life out of which he came to be a (his kind of) writer’, Cavell is drawn up short: ‘But Wordsworth showed that that story had to be told in poetry – or rather showed that the telling of that story was the making of poetry.’ As a philosopher, Cavell must resign himself to using in his own mode ‘the language of the everyday, or ordinary language’, so that ‘I speak philosophically for others when they recognize what I say as what they would say, recognize that their language is mine, or put otherwise, that language is ours.’ To write our own

Ibid., pp. 79, 89–90, 139.

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story, is, because of this, and ‘however limitedly’, to write the ‘autobiography of the species’, since others can and will find themselves in our language, in our story.11 Writing autobiography is about finding a voice, and speaking with that voice to others. Cavell shares with one of his great American precursors, Ralph Waldo Emerson, a ‘horror’ at the possibility of having no voice, of failing to make a voice that can be heard: ‘Emerson’s response to conformity is perhaps a kind of horror at the willingness of human beings to have no voice in their words, which for him suggests an unearthly, haunted existence.’ Rather, Cavell reverts to the example of his other great American precursor, Henry David Thoreau, in suggesting that life and writing must be brought into absolute proximity with each other. I suppose the obvious example of this is Thoreau’s Walden, in which the labours he describes carrying out around his small house next to Walden Pond (bean-planting, surveying work) are labours also of writing down his activity. For Cavell, ‘Thoreau pictures … living wherever you are, something he describes in effect, or allegory, as writing that life, which is as much as to say, autobiographizing, signing the world.’12 Writing carries us beyond ourselves, out into the world to be recognized by others; through writing we show others our story, even when seeming not to. Language, putting words down, inevitably puts our name on the world. Which raises Stanley Cavell, Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), pp. 5–6. In an extremely complex sentence in an earlier book, Cavell had about covered all the inflections of this argument. The gist is that Cavell sees the ‘mission’ of Romanticism more broadly, as being constituted by the ‘conviction that autobiography is a method of thought’. It is a method through which, and therefore through ‘one’s own writing’ that the otherwise contested areas of philosophy, religion and politics might be given a ‘field’ for expression. See Stanley Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 43. 12 Stanley Cavell, A Pitch of Philosophy: Autobiographical Exercises (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), pp. 162, 37. 11

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the question as to what it is I, as a later part of the ‘species’, recognize in the autobiographies of Thoreau, Emerson, Cavell – or Wordsworth. What is it in The Prelude that speaks to me, that I find there? Cavell is aware that speaking in this way is to adopt a kind of ‘posture’, since, after all, the ‘species’ is not all one thing, and he probably has Western, privileged, readers in mind; the increasing gap between rich and poor in this world means that illiteracy rates do not allow for this luxury of positing ‘the reader’ and ‘reading’. Such a concept of ‘reader’ and ‘writer’ also ignores history, not least the history of a twentieth century in which, as Cavell acknowledges, outrages of oppression have been more prevalent than philosophical contemplation. And yet, keeping these acknowledgements in play, what do I/we recognize in The Prelude? How does its ordinary language speak to us? One obvious thing to say would be that the work has escaped the occasion of its writing. Wordsworth thought that he needed to understand better his own ‘growth’ into poetry through writing The Prelude because he was about to embark upon a work of philosophical poetry (The Recluse), which would supersede the current one and which would form his life’s masterpiece.13 In fact, The Prelude allows for the fact that it is the writing of the life, the emergence of writing as the life, which is its most sustained and achieved attainment. It further, through Wordsworth’s revisions of The Prelude across his lifetime, allows for the fact that the work’s attainment has itself to evolve and develop within a life. In Cavell’s (and

In similar vein, Ludwig Wittgenstein saw self-contemplation as a lever towards philosophy. He chided Bertrand Russell in one letter: ‘Perhaps you regard this thinking about myself as a waste of time – but how can I be a logician before I’m a human being!’ Wittgenstein later considered writing his autobiography, and kept journals at various points in his life. See Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (London: Vintage Books, 1991), pp. 97, 311.

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Thoreau’s) sense, the writing and the living follow each other and are in some sense at one. The Prelude, as we shall see, offers a sense of the self as an entity formed by sudden hesitations, losses of direction and certainty, by sudden new bursts of energy and memory which re-galvanize the self when it flags. It is a writing which repeatedly stalls, and then finds new purpose, new attention, new possibility, often by returning back upon itself, by pausing to make a ‘Retrospect’ as it calls it in the title of Book VIII. That aspect of the poem speaks strongly to me/ us, in a world where it is consistently less possible to hold on to a single thread of thought or attention, where we are constantly distracted from ourselves, not just in the facile ways of screens and consumerist acquisition, but also in the ways that the 24/7 unsleeping world makes demands on us. It is harder every day to stay in command of our purpose and direction. Wordsworth shows us similar disruptions, but also offers counterexamples of illumination, of understanding or discovering a consistency which allows us to retain a world of our own inside ourselves. One that we can stick to. One that, by writing, and especially by writing our selves, in poems ideally but also in other genres, we might draw out of ourselves and put on show, ‘signing the world’. Cavell’s acknowledgement that it is through poetry that the self is realized is both exact and intriguing with regard to The Prelude. It is as though poetry’s particular listening in to language, and sounding of the world, sounding of its own sounds against the world’s, brings writing closer to the self through the attention it calls for. That to shape a poem, listen in to it, is to shape a self that is otherwise elusive. That it is only poems that can hear and bring out the full potential and multiple resonance of what a self is. The Prelude reminds us of those moments in our pasts and presents in which we have been specially and properly attuned to the world around us, to its shocks and surprises, but also to a feeling for how those moments continue to reside within us, and allow us to speak out of a truer sense of the

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self than the constantly artificial voices we have to put on to ‘comply’ each day with others’ voices. Wordsworth’s dislike for ‘custom’, staleness, is something we should all wake up to; it is the same as Emerson’s horror that we like to remain voiceless. The Prelude’s attention to the wider world, to nature in its largeness and multitudinous glory, suggests that it is incumbent on us to become larger selves, to break free of the thoughts and meekness that enchains.

Alone with The Prelude, 11.04 am, 12/04/15 I am looking at the title page of my Penguin ‘Parallel Text’ edition of Wordsworth’s The Prelude, at the rounded lettering and almost unrecognizable, immature, hand which inscribes it ‘SJMatthews July 1981 at Grasmere’. I recall that day vividly. My mum had announced during a regular Sunday phone call, that I always made from the downstairs booth at the bottom of the stairwell in the new block at College, that they had booked a week’s holiday in the Lake District with my younger sister during July. As there would only be the three of them, they were to stay in a couple of small cottages, with only two bedrooms, in different places in the Lakes for a few days each. These short leases made the cost of the trip manageable. I remember my outrage on the phone that Sunday morning, the fact that the family had chosen to take their first holiday with any kind of literary association during the summer of my first year as an undergraduate student in English Literature, and that they had not thought to include me! And they knew that the Lake District was the magnet for my imagination at that point. For my eighteenth birthday present, I had asked for and been given the cumbersome two-volume Penguin edition of Wordsworth’s Collected Poems, in which my parents each wrote, and which Dad, ever-brilliant at turning his large hands to delicate tasks, had covered with sticky plastic to protect

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them for ever. Their pages yellowy-brown with age, but their covers still strong and bright, they stand on my bookshelf near me as I write. So annoyed was I about this exclusion, but also so excited about the possibility of time in the Lakes, that I demanded that Sunday morning that I be taken along on the trip. This demand so surprised but persuaded Mum that, apparently, the next day she wrote to the landlord of each of the cottages asking whether a put-up bed might be supplied for the son who had unexpectedly invited himself to stay, so that I could sleep in each cottage’s living room. Perhaps because of the annoyances and extra arrangements which so marked the origins of the trip, and the tensions caused by the unexpected configuration of the family going on it, the holiday was fractious. The put-up beds were deeply uncomfortable, and I was to get little sleep in the odd mixture of cooking odours and damp furniture that pervaded the living rooms of the small and ill-maintained cottages that Mum and Dad had managed to afford to rent for a few days each. Added to this, it was a difficult moment for my sister. Her ‘A’ Level grades had come in, lower than expected, earlier in the month. One grade, for music, had been registered as an ‘unresolved’ one, as the Exams Board were conducting an enquiry over possible cheating during the oral element – the result of improper administration of the exam by an ageing teacher at my sister’s school. While the inquiry was ongoing, my sister’s chances of securing a university place were receding by the day, since she could not present herself through the University Clearing system, having failed to meet the requirements for her selected universities and courses, without a fully resolved set of marks. More immediately, the fraught situation around the music mark meant that Dad, with his rough poor background always a nervous and unhappy communicator, especially on phones and to people he did not know, was deputed to trudge each evening of the first days of our stay in the Lakes across several hillsides to the nearest village with a public telephone, to contact parents back in Essex for updates on the situation.

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He was away for over an hour each time; the atmosphere back in our cottage was glum and edgy. The different situations between me, the son who had sailed into Cambridge on a scholarship (it was from my Cambridge College that I phoned home once a week), and who was only there in the Lakes in their view as some kind of casual literary tourist, and my sister, now struggling even to find a place in Higher Education, was stark. Mum was tetchy, seeing any comment I tried to make, even ones about the injustice being enacted by the system, as condescending. We all kept silent waiting for Dad; Mum’s anger was often immediately turned on him as he came back through the door saying that again there was no news, and no news expected for ten days. How could there be no news that affected her daughter’s future? He must phone again the next evening, just in case. His head hung at the thought of being made to make another intrusion into the middle-class homes of the parents in my sister’s class at school, an intrusion that he knew would bring nothing, and which would make him look the more foolish and inadequate through some stumbling mis-locution. Encounters, even only through phone wires, with those who saw themselves immediately as above him because of his heavy quiet local working-class voice, always left him visibly shrunken into himself, at a loss. As a result of all of this, on the day I bought this particular copy of The Prelude in Grasmere, I was, as I was on several of the other days during that depressed week, alone. My parents and sister had decided to go to a Lakeland Fair and Sports Day to take their mind off of things, to distract them before Dad’s desperate evening walk. (I did not know it then, but of course such fairs had been a feature of the annual rhythm of Lakeland life for centuries; they are mentioned, after all, at the opening of Book VIII of The Prelude itself). Since I noticed on the map that they had to go past Grasmere to get to their day-out venue, I asked if they could drop me off on the way, and pick me up at a designated time on their way back. It was an awkward arrangement; without direct communication, what if their fair was uninteresting, and they wanted to leave

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earlier to travel further off into the Lakes? What if the fair was absorbing enough to make them want to stay longer than the time for picking me up? I offered to sit by the roadside for as long as it took; such was their understandable annoyance at, and dislike for, me, by this stage in the holiday, that they agreed to risk the fact that the Fair might be dull, perhaps to be rid of me for several hours. I’m not even sure now if the major Wordsworth site, Dove Cottage, was open in those days of the early 80s. I know that I did not visit it – but such was my immaturely sneering attitude to the touristy aspects of literary heritage that I might not even have looked for it. I was there in Grasmere for the place, for the setting, for the atmosphere, which I naively presumed to be somehow continuous with the one that the Wordsworths had lived within. I do remember excitement at finding the copy of The Prelude in the small bookshop and handing over my £2.25p for it. I do remember spending an hour or so sitting near the row of slate-grey graves of the Wordsworths in the church graveyard near the stream. But, most I remember getting some sandwiches in a little tea shop and carrying them and my prize book out along a footpath away from the village, up into the hills – although I could not now recover the path or the spot where I sat for hours on the golden grass in the sunshine overlooking the village and Grasmere Lake, reading. Only occasionally – something unlikely to happen now that the Lakes have become even more of the tourist heaven that Wordsworth feared and prophesied that they would – was I distracted from the book by passing walkers. I was there all day, only coming down from the hills at the last moment to be in place to meet the Ford Escort as Dad drove it round the curve into the village. My sun-struck, ecstatic day I kept largely to myself. It was an elation, though, not totally blanked by my rejoining up with them; their day at the fair and games had proved fun and relieving. There was a momentarily greater lightness between us all for several hours after the drive back to the holiday cottage, before things closed in again as Dad set off after dinner across the hillsides still radiant in the evening sun.

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I think that, by that point, I must have known that there were several versions of The Prelude. Part of the excitement of finding the Penguin ‘Parallel Text’ version (although surely I must have come across it at Heffer’s in Cambridge, or the nice little bookshop I hung around in in Colchester, my home town?) was the thought that I held both the so-called 1805 and the 1850 version in my hand. That with each turn of the page I could compare how Wordsworth had changed the poem across a forty-five-year span. I remember being absorbed in the process of comparison at a literal level, rather than in weighing and judging the different texts. Certainly, I did not come to the conclusion, on these first hours with the poem, that the 1850 text was inferior to that tentatively concluded by the thirty-five-year-old poet in 1805, something which is a critical conclusion shared by Wordsworth’s greatest admirers. I’m not sure that I registered from J. C. Maxwell’s introduction to this edition that there might be extant earlier version or versions of the poem to the 1805 one; I’m not sure if there was a 1799 ‘Two-Book’ version then popularly available. The new Penguin edition which superseded Maxwell’s in 1995, sees its editor, Jonathan Wordsworth contentiously claiming that there was an even earlier, 1798, text which Wordsworth had seen as relatively complete, and so presents ‘The Four Texts’ of the poem. And the Cornell editions of The Prelude, their bulky grey-green covers around immense numbers of photo-reproductions and reading texts directly taken from Wordsworth’s manuscripts of the poem, now elaborately and magnificently reveal the incredibly complex, both intense and sporadic, process of work which led down to the posthumously published 1850 edition of The Prelude. By way of further complication beyond that authoritative and conclusive mapping of the poem in the Cornell, there is the question of the validity of The Five-Book Prelude, as edited by Duncan Wu. Wordsworth had rushed to complete the poem as he then saw it in 1804, in order to provide a copy which, along with his other poems, Coleridge might take with him as he headed abroad, and, presumably, comment upon – as

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the Preface here narrates. Wu, and others, have decided that, by mid-March 1804, Wordsworth had expanded his 1799 two-book version to his satisfaction into the longer five-book poem, which Wu’s edition reconstructs. Although Wordsworth rapidly decided that the poem needed to expand further, and so dismantled the Spring 1804 version as he reworked the poem across over a year to May 1805, Wu and others demand that we see the 1804 version as an integral work – one which, the back cover of his edition indeed claims as ‘likely to become for many the “Prelude” of choice’.14 Unaware of such impossible complications, the ‘Parallel Text’ I had on the hillside in July 1981 conveyed an excited sense of the poet, himself at work amid nature, often out of doors, revelling from the beginning of Book I in the freedom and inspiration which his arrival in the Vale at Grasmere gave him, as he set out to try and compose a narrative of himself that in its turn would ‘explain’ how it was that he had come to be here in the first place. The ‘Glad Preamble’ to The Prelude finds the poet escaped from the city walls by which he had been ‘pent’, ‘telling’ a ‘prophecy’ to the open fields (‘my own voice cheered me, and – far more – the mind’s | Internal echo of the imperfect sound’ (64–5)). He walks on, sits beneath a tree, then lies on the ground ‘Passing through many thoughts, yet mainly such | As to myself pertained’ (80–1). This was the moment at which he claims, in the real time of the poem, to decide that he will choose the ‘sweet vale’ of Grasmere as the place to set up home with his sister, Dorothy, and to set himself to poetry, the poetry which I was then reading was one immediate consequence. Circles within circles. I had been turned towards the possibilities and excitements of literature suddenly at the age of sixteen, partly after being directed by a teacher towards D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, and, subsequently, to James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I was already familiar with the self-reflexivity William Wordsworth, The Five-Book Prelude, edited by Duncan Wu (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997).

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of the kind of writing I was now discovering in The Prelude, as it had manifested in those early twentieth-century novelscum-memoirs. I was even aware that Joyce’s text had also an extant early version, which I’d bought in that Colchester bookshop, Stephen Hero. I was prepared for a writing of self that was hesitant, a stop-start thing of different shapes and beginnings. Wordsworth’s way of thinking the self therefore felt both familiar and alien, premonitory of later writing which had excited me, yet oddly from a different mode of relating to time and circumstance, arriving from out of a different set of procedures and ideas to the ones I felt comfortable and familiar with. But I was dazzled by Wordsworth’s celebration of a coming into his natural self near the spot where I was sitting reading, and by the thought of his writing that experience somewhere in his own cottage in the village below. The map inside the front cover of my Maxwell edition allowed me to orient myself from my spot on the hillside. There and then, here and now, the scene thrills me. That sunlight was carried through the rest of my reading of the poem, which I’d finished by the time, at the holiday’s end, we set off nervously South to confront the full facts of my sister’ situation. It carried me again when I reread the poem the next term in Cambridge, walking back and forward in my college room uncharacteristically driven to read the lines aloud as I paced. So far as I recall, though, that first reading on the hillside above Grasmere was in some senses extracurricular, and set in train a trend which I have largely followed since. Our Romantics tutor at university was a medievalist masquerading as someone with an amateur (but sufficient for the job, as the system saw it) knowledge of Wordsworth, Coleridge and the younger Romantics. He sought to distract us students from his disengagement by always asking us what films we’d seen, concerts we’d attended during the week since our last tutorial. My fellow students were more than happy to banter; I seethed, finding my real energy and exhilaration at what we were reading draining with each wasted moment. A few

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tutors saved my time at Cambridge, a few lecturers sustained my interest and showed what it might be to read texts from the position of a lifetime’s saturation in them. However, my reading of The Prelude in my Cambridge room was ‘extracurricular’ to the extent that I did not then write my weekly essay on it, and avoided answering on it during the Finals Exams. Those poems which are dearest and closest to me are the ones I’ve always avoided engaging with in an academic context; what critical writing and reviewing I have done has always had, for me, something of that distanced, off-hand, quality. The works I have discussed in these contexts are held within what I’d see as a kind of writing that is ‘professional’, not personal. It is done to fulfil certain requirements, not least the requirement to make money, pay off debts initially, then pay my bit to support our family, through finding a job and sustaining it. Such writing only obliquely engages me; there is interest in performing a particular set mode or task, particularly after you’ve gained experience of it, and it seems therefore less scary. I know how to research to write articles, essays, longer texts. I approach it as I approach other aspects of my daily job, it is another function, one which I try to complete as fully as possible, but which, like the many other constraints around a job, sometimes gets rushed and squeezed by other demands. What such writing omits, however, is a way of articulating what happens in those poems and passages in novels which are closer, which mean more, which somehow take me outside of the rhythms of the everyday. Wordsworth (perhaps chased close by D. H. Lawrence) is to me the most telling confronter of this kind of issue, the most aware of the ways in which we need to break the fetters of our everyday lives and to try and think beyond them. That ‘glad preamble’ to The Prelude, which I first encountered on the hillside above Grasmere, speaks of ‘that burden of my own unnatural self, | The heavy weight of many a weary day’ (23–4). Book V of the poem, ‘Books’, meditates about the joyful release for the imagination in reading and in reciting aloud favourite verses, ‘Here, nowhere,

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there, and everywhere at once’, as such release speaks to ‘that most noble attribute of man’ That wish for something loftier, more adorned, Than is the common aspect, daily garb, Of human life. (557, 599–601) Articulation, the problems of saying, are, of course, at the heart of the issue here. As we are ‘adorned’ merely by the words which are themselves mundane, everyday, how can we fulfil a ‘wish’ for something other, something more in tune with the nobility and higher aspirations which we share. Wordsworth’s recourse to images of clothing here, of adornment that is not ‘garb’, is striking. His distrust of gaudiness and frippery riddles The Prelude, even down to his recommendation of a simple diet – ‘frugal, Sabine fare’ – as part of his hymn to the most intensively and completely imaginative time of his life, the early childhood and ‘School-Time’ of Books I and II of the poem (II, 82). Loftiness, uncommon adornment – even the words and images which Wordsworth chooses to try and describe what transcendence might amount to are tainted by danger, by the fact that they might lapse back into common inadequacy. Once again, although seemingly eloquent, the ambition is largely gestural on Wordsworth’s part: that ‘something’ which we take to be loftier measures the limits of the power to say, even in a poem which celebrates those moments of transcendence as its core ambition. What is the ‘something’? It’s self-reflexive again, the ‘something’ is the ‘thing’ which the poem has led up to, achieved poetry about the achievement of poetry in a life. Ultimately, the ‘something’ is a ‘thing’ which we must feel, rather than something that the poetry can say.15 Alone on the hillside above Grasmere, surrounded by sunshine and the scenes amid which The Prelude as a more The poet-critic William Empson is the pioneer of a way of writing about such moments in Wordsworth which displays the frustrations of trying to disentangle Wordsworth’s syntax and verbal gesture. See Seven Types of Ambiguity (London: Penguin, 1973 edition), pp. 180–3.

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expansive account of early life firstly was written, the quiet then rarely broken by passing walkers or lorries navigating the small roads in the valley – such complications were remote. And yet they were an aspect of what had brought me to that place and at that time, aged twenty and seeing the immensity of such a landscape for the first time. Year after year, we had taken a caravan in a bleak park on the edge of the flatlands and sand-dunes near Great Yarmouth in Norfolk as our affordable holiday each May half term. Our family had never been abroad, could not afford it, we had not travelled even to the Scottish mountains; the rolling hills of Somerset, which, I remember being vaguely aware had a connection to Wordsworth and Coleridge, had been the highest I had previously climbed, the greatest scope of landscape I had previously seen.

Incommunicable powers Multiple voicings have always seemed to me to be gathered in The Prelude. The poem is integrally a verse letter, a bonding letter, from Wordsworth to Coleridge, with whom he shared so much of his sense of what poetry might be. In one of the several passages of direct address to his friend, Wordsworth sets out the scope of the poem in ways attuned to many of these trends and tensions. It is a moment of self-catching up, a moment when Wordsworth steps back from the flow of what he has been writing and seeks to articulate what the poetry might amount to, his hopes for it. ‘Of my own heart’ he has been speaking, Wordsworth tells his friend, and of ‘[my] youthful mind’. Yet he acknowledges that, ‘in the main’, such things lie ‘far hidden from the reach of words’. However, he immediately catches himself up from such complacency, Points have we all of us within our souls Where all stand single, this I feel, and make Breathings for incommunicable powers. (III, 186–8)

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What had been ruled to be ‘far hidden’ from language, through feeling, is made into the highly enigmatic yet still powerful ‘Breathings’ – the breath taken as the lines of poetry are uttered. The enigma is turned from a question of how to speak the heart and mind to recognition of our own unique singleness as humans, and thence to enlivenment, the breathing which gives life, the bodily action that keeps us what we are. And then, in the next line, in another stunning reversal, Wordsworth states directly ‘yet each man is a memory to himself’ I am not heartless, for there’s not a man That lives who hath not had his godlike hours, And knows not what majestic sway we have As natural beings in the strength of nature. (191–4) From the burden of articulacy, to the supreme democracy and holiness of each of us as we ‘stand single’. Heartedness and hopefulness acknowledge that all humans are sovereign when seen within, and echoing, the force and power of nature. Alone on the hillside above Grasmere, it is something of that specialness that I remember, of being empowered by reading in The Prelude – or so I have written myself into seeing it now. ‘Each man is a memory to himself’ is fantastically complex in its simplicity; we each carry within us the ghosts of what we were, we can only think of ourselves as memories of what we are, only achieve the necessary distance upon what we have become in that way. Wordsworth claimed that an intent instinctiveness towards this is what makes a poet, whose mind is ‘beset | With images and haunted by itself’ (VI, 180–1). And what we are is also occluded by that distance, by the attempt to narrate and to make ‘Breathings for incommunicable powers’. That is the paradox amid which we all struggle because we all have such moments of ‘higher’ thought and feeling, ‘godlike’ but never ‘godly’. PERSPECTIVE The clear notes of the song of a blackbird on a summer’s evening, the orange light

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purpled beyond the meshed fence, repeated notes focus receding daytime, chorusing light through sound, lamenting perfections lost to time. And to return to this, this moment again and again, this captured soundscape, withdrawing light, the acceding chill, again across decades, to pitch the self on that garden bench, to hold the seen and sung in that set perspective, the scene unmoved, the birds’ notes ever-renewed, opens space in the mind, vanishing point of memory’s imaginings, the lure of their constant call. It is this feeling that we can never say, but that we can know and feel, what such experiences are, which leads me finally to try and write something about The Prelude. The remit of the Beyond Criticism series, in which this book appears, seems almost to challenge to be so, to require it. This is not least because Wordsworth’s place within discussions of the limits of imagination, and of the limits which academic criticism comes up against when trying to weigh imaginative work, is central. When writing up the results of a recent project about remaking past poetry in new poetry for the twenty-first century, Redcrosse, Ewan Fernie, sought to articulate the inadequacies of academic reading. He argued for the distinctiveness of his project’s approach, as it tried to remake the allegory of the Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser for the twenty-first century. Fernie notes that Redcrosse started as an academic project and ‘we murder to dissect’, as Wordsworth puts it in his poem ‘Tables Turned’, but criticism needn’t be an exclusively analytical vocation, always following creativity. … Literary scholarship can be creative, storytelling infused with critical energy.16 Redcrosse: Remaking Religious Poetry for Today’s World, edited by Ewan Fernie (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), p. 9.

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Fernie’s syntax here is emblematic, that ‘and’ in his opening phrase showing how far Wordsworth is taken to have once and for all articulated the problem of one kind of ‘academic’ approach in criticism – the fact that, in order to adopt a critical stance in the first place, you have in some sense to stop or kill your subject matter, which, by implication, has a life and a continuation, a growth if we but leave it alone. ‘We murder to dissect’ – I remember Chris Barlow, the English teacher who pointed our class towards reading the semi-autobiographies of Lawrence and Joyce, hissing this out, maybe signalling his own dislike for the activity which he was employed to encourage us towards, the activity which he had to hone in us so that we could get to places like Cambridge University to study English. ‘We murder to dissect’; I remember using the phrase as a selfexculpation when I feel that impatience and resentment towards the necessity to produce something academic in response to intricate and enigmatic, unresolved, literary work, the kinds of resentment which, as suggested above, continues to dog me to this day. And how, hubristically and pathetically, I still seize upon such seeming corroboration for that attitude among great writers and thinkers. Nietzsche, for instance, makes it the core of his own selfhood: ‘The scholar … ends up losing the ability to think for himself. He responds to a stimulus … he ends up just reacting … he himself no longer thinks.’17 The drift of such arguments with regard to academic criticism is clear. The text, it might be claimed, always exceeds the critical activity of making it ‘mean’, since the latter drains away those other qualities the text instils as it is experienced: physical response; the rendering of the world, framing of it, in words. But, more vitally, the imaginative scope opened in the reader by the words on the page, the vistas of memory established, the futures envisaged, more crucially, the poems to be written. That necessary contact with words and the world through language can only be dissipated by a response limited to making the words themselves into an interpretative ‘sense’. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 31.

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Of course, set Wordsworth’s line, ‘We murder to dissect’, in its original context, and even the decisive notion that ‘we murder to dissect’ takes on its own inarticulacies and frustrations. ‘Tables Turned’ stages a conflictual scene between a scholar and a speaker who urges the educational force of the outdoors world (‘Let Nature be your teacher.’). Books are relegated through seeming to contain a knowledge that is dead; they are the matter of the ‘meddling intellect’ (‘intellect/dissect’), which cannot capture the ‘spontaneous’ ‘impulse’ of birdsong or of reviving nature in springtime. Books, unlike the trees they are made from, are ‘barren leaves’, infertilities which entomb heart and mind. As Lord Byron affirms in ‘Canto the Fourth’ of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, ‘I have been accustomed to entwine | My thoughts rather with Nature in the fields, | Than Art in galleries’(ll. 545–8). Such sentiments are consonant with Wordsworth’s frequent dilemma around this dichotomizing of ‘Nature’ and ‘Art’ or ‘Poetry’, as he expresses it most trenchantly in ‘Tables Turn’d’. The poem’s final injunction, ‘Come forth, and bring with you a heart | That watches and receives’, seeks to reconcile the internal/external, interior/ exterior, conceit which governed the whole poem. The heart is contained in its bodily darkness, but, if made intent upon the vivifying qualities of nature and the external world, can also take into itself those impulses and powers necessary to ‘health’ and ‘chearfulness’ (MW, 131). At its own heart, of course, the poem is deeply paradoxical; it is a text in a book which offers warnings about the killing effect of texts published in books. Taken together with the preceding poem with which it is always grouped, ‘Expostulation and Reply’, ‘Tables Turned’ seems to celebrate bodily sensation and feeling, together with the power of dreams and imagination lived in the outdoors. Presumably the implication is that poetry is somehow exempt from the kinds of publication more connected with ‘science’ and study. This is so, particularly for poetry such as this, where the small-staged scenes and encounters provide a kind of parable which by implication must lead on to action in the world. Study brings a kind of deadness to the reader equal to the deadness of the subject (‘we murder to dissect’). Poetry, when spoken,

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especially when spoken out of doors, is not barren in these kinds of way.18 Its musicality (and the Wordsworthian allegory in The Prelude about the music of life, the music of poetry, is alert to this, as we shall see) of course is integral to the ‘escape’ that poetry seeks to make from the traps of ordinary ‘meaning’. In her book of recollections of the natural world, Findings, the Scots poet Kathleen Jamie does not dismiss the powers of rationality or of the critical voice, but establishes a useful distinction and time-lag between them. We need sometimes ‘to hush the frantic inner voice’, she says, when experiencing something as amazing as being surprised by a heron flying overhead: You can do the organising and redrafting, the diagnosing and identifying later, but right now, just be open to it … hold it in your head, bring it home intact.19 I like the idea that the lank commonplace of holding something in mind can, in these exceptional instances, take on an almost physical reality. It is this kind of ‘holding’ that I think poetry is particularly good at. Bringing something home is also part of it; translating into a poem the ‘intact’ experience filtered through the mind from the world out there, finding a music and an image for it which are themselves an intact part of the original experience, and which play their own variations upon it subsequently. A critical eye, ‘organising and redrafting’ is an essential part of this creation, since it is aimed towards ensuring the uttermost possible ‘intactness’ of the experience through the poem. It is integral also towards achieving that necessary discovery of an appropriate music to bear the content and the expression of that experience to others. At such moments, the decision from the moments of experience to making a poem of it is immediate, the suggestion of an appropriate music for the experience is also often already Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals several times refer to Wordsworth’s writing, reciting, and reading outdoors. See for example the entries for 12th and 16th August 1800. The Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals, edited by Pamela Woof (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 17. 19 Kathleen Jamie, Findings (London: Sort Of Books, 2005), p. 42. 18

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‘there’. Lines, rhythms, drift into the mind as the eye is witnessing the event in the world which becomes the poem. And yet few of us can carry through to its necessary limit that music at first go – redrafting, properly organizing and shaping the experience in and through the poem – is about finding that consistency and appropriateness already instilled within it, but which is sometimes initially blurred. The process of making poems is a process of cutting away, cutting out one word to put in another that better fits the experience and better finds its place within the vowel and consonantal music, and the rhythm of the poem. The experience itself does need, however, to be brought home, held, intact, as, and in, itself, if there is to be any measure of success for the poem. The critical and editorial process is about being sustained between sounding, and sounding out, presenting, the experience, and also in finding what it has to say. R. F. Langley has a beautiful rendition of this in a passage from his poem ‘Touchstone’. In a short sequence of measurings of the ‘truth’ or otherwise of certain philosophical, religious, or scientific, archetypal opinions, Langley finds a unique way of speaking back to the mind/body tension proposed by Descartes: Descartes was wrong. The decision to sing is the first note of the song. It discovers the bird there on the line-post, as it is already being sung. The quick flexing of the legs is unexpected. There is no estimation of the hawthorn and its forty feet away.20 Here, a deliberate mental choice to do something is already that something; there is no division in time, or between the R. F. Langley, ‘Touchstone’, in Complete Poems, edited by Jeremy Noel-Tod (Manchester: Carcanet, 2015), p. 110.

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rational mind and the senses, which separates the thought of singing from the singing itself. And the bird becomes the singing. Something new comes into the world (‘It | discovers’), and the world changes; the ‘unexpected’ arrives in the mundane happenings of the day, as the song, and the other striking aspects of the world, or measures (‘estimation’) of distance or worth, recede before the new event. Against the wearied plotting of the modern world as a self-divided place by such as Descartes, the poem shows us something ordinary but miraculous, and sings it. The bird is sung, just as the poet is in his measures, and as the poem is from the page.21 Stanley Cavell is but the latest in a philosophical lineage stretching back to Schopenhauer to understand this. In aesthetics, Cavell claims, ‘the feeling, as it were, comes first, and its putative grounding concepts (the reasons for the judgement) await determination in, let me say, acts of criticism’. Yet music forms a privileged instance of this general case: Music, like infancy, marks the permanence of the place of understanding as before what we might call meaning, as if it exists in permanent anticipation of – hence in permanent dissatisfaction with, even disdain for – what can be said.22 Philosopher Stephen Davies, writing about the expression of emotion in music, points out that we cannot go to music seeking particular emotion or understanding. The music does not ‘speak’ in predictable ways in that sense, but is, rather, more involved with ‘presenting emotion characteristics in appearances’. In an analogy handy to our purposes, he points out in this regard that ‘the river does not move, but is constituted by the motion of water it contains’. See Musical Meaning and Expression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), pp. 228, 235, 239. 22 Cavell, The Pitch of Philosophy, pp. 149, 160. An article by Alexander Freer on the philosophical origins of Wordsworth’s aesthetics draws a similar conclusion: writing of the response made to nature in Wordsworth’s writing of the early 1800s, Freer proposes that ‘perhaps the speaker learns to see nature more fully … because he has been taught how “to look on nature” by “hearing oftentimes the still, sad music of humanity”’. ‘Musicality and the Limits of Meaning in Wordsworth and Kant’, Paragraph 36, no. 3 (2013), p. 336. 21

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Yet Cavell’s equation of music with infancy is emblematic for this book. That sense of a pre-existence to ‘meaning’, as it were, is something which The Prelude is constantly seeking to adjust itself to and to tune into. The poetry records an awareness of the fact that it is the extra-linguistic aspects of the world, as captured in the music of its sounds, or through the experience of the infant and young child, which lie ‘before’ what meaning it is that the poet, in his early 30s composing The Prelude, can make of them. Rather than being, so to speak, ‘Beyond Criticism’, poetry is in a real sense a sounding ‘Before Criticism’. But the words of the poem can only circulate around this fact. Consultant psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist, when considering the asymmetries between the hemispheres of the human brain, equates those physical asymmetries with the different nature of experience of the world that goes on in them: The brain has to attend to the world in two completely different ways, and in so doing to bring two different worlds into being. In the one [i.e. in the right hemisphere], we experience – the live, complex, embodied, world of individual, always unique beings, forever in flux, a set of interdependencies, forming and reforming wholes, a world with which we are deeply connected. In the other [the left hemisphere] we ‘experience’ our experience in a special way: a ‘re-presented’ version of it, containing now static, separable, bounded, but essentially fragmented entities, grouped into classes, on which predictions can be based. This kind of attention isolates, fixes and makes each thing explicit by bringing it under the spotlight of attention. In doing so it renders things inert, mechanical, lifeless.23 In this sense also, as Wordsworth understood, our minds are ‘haunted’ by themselves. We can already know things before 23 Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), p. 31.

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we ‘know’ them, out in our daylight consciousness, where they are always already murdered, killed by our need for survival to ‘understand’ them.24 It might be fanciful to equate Wordsworth’s two sides of the argument in ‘Tables Turned’, ‘science’ versus ‘nature’, with McGilchrist’s hemispherical model for human experience and culture – except that, later in his book, McGilchrist himself does this. Of course, the ‘argument’ in this poem, as in that of ‘Expostulation and Reply’, is an argument which seems comprehensively won by the need to ‘attend’ (in McGilchrist’s sense of the word with regard to brain function) to the wholeness of the natural world as lived, as opposed to an attention which is ‘scientific’ and fragmenting (‘we murder to dissect’). In McGilchrist’s terms, ‘There is an intuitive relationship between cutting things up and depriving them of life, but it is the left hemisphere alone that codes for non-living things.’25 The human brain is involved in a process of constant mourning between its two ‘sides’. And yet there is ample evidence in Wordsworth’s life and writings that the disparity between ‘dead’ study, books, categorization and living nature, was not so easily resolved. Stephen Gill’s biography of the poet, for instance, points to Wordsworth’s having been steeped in Euclidean mathematics (one of the ‘Books’ mentioned in Book V), and Newtonian physics, partly as a requirement for the Entrance Examination for Cambridge at that time. Yet Gill also perceives that Wordsworth responded to such ‘study’ imaginatively, recording as he does, for instance, his admiration for the beauty of In an earlier book, Iain McGilchrist had held up Wordsworth as the exemplar of this aspect of poetry: ‘Wordsworth’s greatest poetry … is a thing, a physical being, not a commentary on things and beings; it is the greatest example of poetry that is not a criticism of life.’ Against Criticism (London: Faber, 1982), p. 177. Simon Jarvis agrees, seeing Wordsworth’s insistence that ‘to desire and fear is part of what it is to think’ as part of the ‘possibility which repeatedly reopens thinking’ that is Wordsworth’s particular achievement. See Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 169. 25 McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary, p. 55. 24

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geometry, as an ‘independent world | Created out of pure intelligence’ in Book VI of The Prelude.26 McGilchrist’s point, however, would be that Wordsworth is one of those who is himself particularly alert to the fact that what should be balanced in human perception is in danger of not being so in the overly rationalistic modern world. The ideal balance between experience as wholeness and interconnectedness to the world, and ‘experience’ – our ability to stand back and to analyse the world, as in non-imaginative literature – has gone out of joint. What evidence exists outside of Wordsworth’s own published works about ‘cutting up’ and the taking of any critical perspective on his work suggests that he was at the very least sceptical about the value of this kind of activity. Christopher Wordsworth, his nephew, published his Memoirs of William Wordsworth Poet-Laureate D.C.L. in 1851, the year after the poet’s death. The opening pages of the Memoirs record conversations that Christopher Wordsworth had had in the latter years of the poet’s life about the possibility of a biography. William Wordsworth seems to have been antagonistic (‘a poet’s Life is written in his WORKS’), and also to have seen biography as another facet of merely critical approaches to that ‘WORK’. This attitude, and Christopher Wordsworth’s respect for it, brings generic complications to his particular enterprise: [The present work] does not claim for itself the title of a Life of Wordsworth. Nor, again, does it profess to offer a critical view of his Poems; or to supply an elaborate exposition of the principles on which those Poems were composed. Mr Wordsworth has no desire that any such disquisition should be written. He wished that his Poems should stand by themselves, and plead their own cause before the tribunal of Posterity.27 Gill, William Wordsworth: A Life, p. 46. Christopher Wordsworth, Memoirs of William Wordsworth Poet-Laureate D.C.L. (London: Edward Moxon, 1851), Volume I, p. 2.

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Wordsworth’s view that the poems must stand for themselves, without advocates or explicators, is consistent and adamant. Christopher Wordsworth manoeuvres to claim that, as the poems refer to moments in the ‘Life’ (he offers short but informative comment on the newly published Prelude), the poems in fact can be set alongside a delineation of the Life given chronologically. This does appear to go against his uncle’s wishes to a large extent, certainly the emphasis on the fact that the poems might derive from a Life. They must also be treated as poems, William Wordsworth in this light insists, since the ‘Life’ is, once and for all, ‘written in’ the ‘WORKS’. Christopher Wordsworth’s attempt to negotiate the intransigence of the poet’s view opens the way for the encrustation of Wordsworth’s work with the critical views and biographical renditions which have followed over the intervening century and a half and more. It might also signal the kind of approach to what poetry is and does that yielded, in the twentieth century, such poetic trends as ‘confessionalism’, the sense that the life of the poet, particularly in its traumatic and depressive aspects, authorizes, glamourizes the notion of what poetry can be. With views such as Christopher Wordsworth’s, the ‘cult’ of the poet, whose writing (somehow) emanates from a special ‘Life’, often one lived at the extremes of experience, came to be. In fact, Christopher Wordsworth’s gambit becomes prototypical of our degraded, modern, version of memoir, the ghosted biographies of rock stars or of minor TV ‘personalities’. From this perspective, Wordsworth’s constant attention to that which is ‘incommunicable’, or ‘hidden’, from language, takes on further resonance. The right hemisphere in the human brain cannot, as it were, ‘speak’ its experience in the same way as the left hemisphere can. The left hemisphere operates, McGilchrist claims, ‘focally’ with regard to words, ‘suppressing meanings that are not currently relevant’. In contrast, the right hemisphere works with ‘looser semantic associations’, makes ‘infrequent or distantly related word meanings available’. The right hemisphere shows us ‘presences’ in the world, ‘because its language roots things in the context of the world, it is

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concerned with the relations between things’. Yet, it is always the case that the right hemisphere has less to do with language than the left, it perpetually suffers from what McGilchrist calls ‘language inferiority’ compared to it. The left hemisphere’s constant placing of limitation upon attention in order to direct attention to the moment, to the particular responses the world demands of us there, means that the right hemisphere’s response is often not allowable in any situation.28 Wordsworth’s poetry continually brings us up against this barrier, which it can only gesture beyond: we ‘know’ what he means, we all in some sense experience the kinds of experience that he speaks about. But we are all, like him, ultimately unable to tell what it means, even what it is. This is where The Prelude is ‘beyond criticism’. It is also where the creation of new poems, in the wake of work such as The Prelude, gains renewed impulse, as it does in this book. Rather than translating his words into some equivalent ‘meaning’ through a critical response, new poems attend to what is not said, but what is sounded, gestured to. Poetry finds its instigation through the new listening encapsulated within, listening to the rhythms and music of the original. McGilchrist’s example for such multiple hemispheric distinctions is a passage in Book XI of The Prelude, where Wordsworth talks about his visionary nature, his sense that he has ‘hiding-places’ of power which yet remain inaccessible to him – the ‘hiding-places’ ‘Seem open; I approach, and then they close’ (376–7). McGilchrist relates these lines to earlier moments in the poem, such as the ‘There was a boy’ narrative in Book V: there, with finger interwoven, both hands Pressed closely palm to palm and to his mouth Uplifted, he as through an instrument Blew mimic hootings to the silent owls

McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary, pp. 42, 50, 51.

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That they might answer him. And they would shout Across the watery vale, and shout again Responsive to his call… …. And when it chanced That pauses of deep silence mocked his skill, Then sometimes in that silence while he hung Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise Has carried far into his heart the voice Of mountain torrents; or the visible scene Would enter unawares into his mind. (V, 395–410) McGilchrist sees Wordsworth, here and elsewhere, as ‘talking about the relationship between the two hemispheres – paradoxically, “it is only when our intentions are fixed on something else that we can see things as they really are”’.29 The left hemisphere is distracted by a deliberate activity, the decision of the boy to mimic the owls. He is like a painter who has set up the easel before a landscape or model, or a poet setting out with a voice/echo, call/response idea for sounding out nature. McGilchrist’s point is that, while this conscious activity is occurring, something much vaster is also being allowed to take place and to enter into the poem. If you deliberately try to discover the ‘hiding-places’ of the impulse to writing using left-hemisphere consciousness, you are denied it. Perhaps the ‘Boy’s early death in The Prelude version of his story signals this – in the Lyrical Ballads version, he does not die. Yet the boy remains a poet in that he feels ‘the gentle shock of mild surprise’. Of course, it would be impossible to decode what a phrase like ‘carried into his heart the voice’ really means – the heart being an inarticulate organ which, I’d surmise, is being somehow equated here to the inarticulate yet infinitely sensate right hemisphere of the human brain. It is only possible to access that experience in moments of ‘surprise’, when the set

Ibid., p. 376.

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single intention, or particular ambition or attitude towards the world (here, the boy’s hooting to provoke response from the owls), has led to an opening outward to the world which then unexpectedly lends access to the inexpressible side of experience. We seek one thing, and a larger, ‘loftier’, but more integrative, experience happens to us and within us; we are altered by it. It is to such moments of becoming that Wordsworth’s poetry particularly attends; such is the attention of poetry, where something happens when the apparent content and attitude of the poem is towards something else.

The Prelude alone The sense of the necessary exposure of the self to the world beyond books plays a complicated role in the origins of The Prelude itself. William and Dorothy Wordsworth had gone, in September 1798, with Coleridge to Germany. Coleridge was eager to become more familiar with the German language and thence with the philosophy which he considered integral to his own thoughts. But the Wordsworths found the country difficult, the language hard to grapple with (although Dorothy succeeded in translating some German poetry). Their lack of attachment to any institution (Coleridge attended lectures at the University of Gottingen), and lack of funds, meant that they felt they had to separate from their friend, and seek lodgings in the relatively cheap town of Goslar. During an exceptionally harsh early winter, and in the absence of very much reading matter, Wordsworth drafted the first passages towards what he did not know then would be The Prelude, including the passage beginning ‘Was it for this?’, the boatstealing episode, the skating one, and the passage on ‘spots of time’. These passages were written, together with some other of the now most famous poems of his earlier work, such as ‘Nutting’ (which at some point seemed to be a part of The Prelude), and some of the Lucy poems. Isolated, and literally

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thrown back upon himself, and in the precious company of his sister Dorothy, whose centrality to Wordsworth’s poetry at this stage had recently been confirmed by the ‘Tintern Abbey’ poem written soon before the departure for Germany, Wordsworth more directly than previously sought to explore in his poetry those aspects of his earlier life that had, as he thought, cast him into such difficult but exhilarating circumstances. Away from the conversation of Coleridge, away from books, Wordsworth had what he carried in his own mind and memory as the only thing to rely upon, together with the necessity to redeem something of the journey which had become desperate, but which had been entered upon with hope that it would enhance his and his friend’s scope and ideas. As he wrote in a letter about this experience, and about drafting those early passages of his self-epic, ‘As I had no books I have been obliged to write in self-defence.’30 ‘Self-defence’ is an intriguing way of putting it: defending himself presumably against the voices of criticism he heard in his head about the indulgence of the Germany trip, and so proving its ‘validity’ through writing. But, and also, drafting a self which might stand as the one he presented in the world, perhaps even a defence of that self against the self he also felt himself to be, a sceptic about the whole ambition of poetry. ‘Was it for this?’, the epic question which he confronted himself with, and which headed the 1799 version of The Prelude, gives the poem a different tenor to that provided subsequently by the so-called ‘Glad Preamble’ which headed the poem from 1804 to 1805. That Preamble was composed as early as November 1799, after the return from Germany and during Wordsworth’s journeying to the Vale of Grasmere on 18–19 November in order to rent Dove Cottage. This was the first settled home that he and his sister enjoyed together – and where they were resident when he worked on the 1804–5 expansions of The Prelude. ‘Was it for this?’,

Quoted by Kenneth R. Johnston, Wordsworth and The Recluse (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), p. 54.

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though, resonates within and across the subsequent revisitings to, and reworkings of, the poem. A perilous self-confrontation; a self-doubting, and a self-challenge. A defence of, demand for, a better self to counter despair, lost hope. To an extent, the ‘Goslar moment’ offers a repetition through Wordsworth of a kind of Romantic philosophy which values the exposure of the self through words, unaided by other sources. ‘Myself alone’, Jean-Jacques Rousseau declares at the start of his Confessions; ‘I feel my heart and I know men.’ Yet he is clear that this self, this coming into feeling, is obtained and thrilled most by a writing that is independent of others, independent, even, of his past self: ‘I write entirely from memory, unassisted by mementoes or materials of any sort. There are events in my life that remain as present to me as if they had just happened; but there are voids and lacunae, too, which I can fill only with the aid of anecdotes as confused as the memory that remains of them.’ Memory is selective and unpredictable, it affects the kinds of writing that we can do, which must range from the vivid to the confusedly anecdotal (‘Was it for this?’); but that is true to who we are, brings writing close to the history of our selves. Such oscillations enable Rousseau to develop his important later persona, that of a philosopher on the roads, of thinking and the thinker in movement. There is a tension between the intensity of the lived moment on foot in nature, and the act of writing, however, one which will recur later in this book, as it was experienced by Wordsworth. Rousseau puts it like this: What I regret most about the details of my life whose memory is lost to me is that I did not keep a journal of my travels. I have never thought so much, existed so much, been so much myself, if I may put it thus, as during those journeys I made alone and on foot. There is something about walking that animates and activates my ideas; I can hardly think at all when I am still; my body must move if my mind is to do the same. The pleasant sights of the countryside, the unfolding scene, the good air … all of this releases my soul.

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Further down this same page, however, Rousseau turns back on himself, resisting the notion of writing as a putting of a barrier between himself and his own experiences: ‘Why deprive myself of present joys simply in order to tell others that I have enjoyed them?’31 Writing stands in the way of experience, like R. F. Langley’s ‘ghost’. It stands in the way, almost as much as it performs a function in capturing those lost moments when we are most ourselves. The correlation between physical and mental movement is what enables Rousseau, as also Wordsworth, a later solitary walker, as we’ll see, to keep all of these possibilities around writing in play. We can keep a journal, we can also not do so; what remains important is that we look to our past self in order to understand who we are. For Wordsworth at Goslar, and as he worked further on The Prelude when he returned to England, firstly in the West Country and then on his gradual return to the Lakes, that past self was partly one he’d already captured in the ‘journal’ that had been the passages of poetry he had drafted but left unedited, ungathered into complete works. These leaves of paper made up part of the manuscript in ‘such wretched condition’, that it required ‘William’s almost constant superintendence’, according to Dorothy Wordsworth, as she, Mary and Sarah Hutchinson undertook the ‘tedious’ task of copying the ‘verses for Coleridge’ in Spring 1804.32 Composition as a return upon the self in times of extremis, but also as the writing of passages which are uncertainly related, and which find their place, as it were, across a process of years’ thought, underwrite the poem from the outset. The Prelude is notably a vortex, which drew into itself as Wordsworth composed and recomposed it. For instance, The Prelude drew into itself a whole previously published poem (‘There was a boy’ had appeared in Lyrical Ballads) or completed drafts of what seem to have been Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions, translated by Angela Scholar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 5, 127, 158. 32 Wordsworth: A Life in Letters, edited by Juliet Barker, p. 80. Letter by Dorothy Wordsworth to Catherine Clarkson, 25 March, 1804. 31

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complete poems which remained unpublished – the so-called ‘The Discharged Soldier’, which became lodged in Book IV is the prime example of this. But the poem also drew into itself as it developed draft lines originally intended for other work, such as those derived from a manuscript worked and reworked as ‘The Pedlar’.33 Some parts of this poem are therefore coalescences from what we would call a method of cutting and pasting, the positioning of successful lines, passages and poems originally conceived to have a different nature, within the evolving ‘story’ of the poet’s self. Such incorporation of different bodies of text into the fabric of the seemingly settled versions of 1805 and 1850 has something to do with the restlessness of the poetry, its constant state of alteration and re-beginning from verse paragraph to verse paragraph. This is especially so in the earlier books, which only came into settled shape out of the felt need to provide Coleridge with manuscript copies for his voyage to the Mediterranean. The poem, in fact, continues to harp upon the issue of the deadening and ‘meddling’ intellect precisely by presenting the whole notion of beginning as elusive. ‘Who shall out | His intellect by geometric rules’, Book II asks: Who that shall point as with a wand, and say ‘This portion of the river of my mind Came from yon fountain?’ (208–9; 213–15) The syntax and phrasing, together with the ‘yon’, suggest the archaic, the idea that, in order to be able to distinguish the indistinguishable, to discover the one true source of the origin of the individual mind, one has to render it once and for all as ‘the past’. The whole of The Prelude exemplifies the ways in which the past actually remains with us, and that we keep coming across it anew as life, and writing or narrating a life, progresses. ‘Each man is a memory of himself.’ The seemingly partly disordered nature of the poem, its resistance The Prelude 1798-1799, edited by Stephen Parrish (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 19, 29.

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to any one ‘narrative’ – whereby, for instance, the scenes around the father’s death appear in different contexts as a result of the 1804–5 expansion – is a tribute to the way in which the necessary continuation of the ‘life’ of the poem resists the deadening confinement of it to a mere chronological story. The poem speaks to us as being radically modern in its restlessness, its unexpected jumps from scene to scene – but also in the processes of its production, where key scenes are lifted and represented as the poem itself alters, from 1798–9 to 1804, from 1804 to 1805, from 1805 to 1820, from 1820 to 1839, and from 1839 to 1850.

Engraven words Death is inevitably very much a part of the story The Prelude tells. This inevitability can be more fully understood from other of Wordworth’s writings of the first decade of the nineteenth century. In his series of prose ‘Essays upon Epitaphs’ of 1809–10, Wordsworth raised the possibility that language, which might otherwise seem irrevocably dead, and of death, might live. Wordsworth is preoccupied by the particular kind of inscription that is involved in creating epitaphs on tombstones, the way in which the character of the letters testifies ‘with what slow and laborious hand they must have been engraven’. The grave itself is a ‘tranquilising object’; it quiets us to reflect upon the lost. In such circumstance, which enjoins a particular kind of writing to a particular kind of reading, resides for Wordsworth ‘one of the main reasons why epitaphs so often personate the deceased, and represent him as speaking from his own tombstone. The departed Mortal is introduced telling you himself that his pains are gone.’ Through the words of the epitaph the absent person achieves presence, is ‘personated’ (but not impersonated). The reader of an epitaph, and its ‘speaker’, are involved in a fiction of communication, which momentarily yet ‘harmoniously unites the two worlds of the living and the dead by their appropriate affections’ (SP, 335). Wordsworth

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calls this advent of the imagination, which sees the graveyard as an exemplary scene of reading, as a ‘shadowy imposition’, one necessary to the consolation of the reader before the fact of death, the ‘departed Mortal’. But the ‘engraven’ epitaph also confers a kind of afterlife through and in the writing, the prospect that it is only through epitaphs that the words of the dead might live, as they must, on the lips of the living. If all of this seems ‘unWordsworthian’, then we are caught up short at several moments in The Prelude by the fact that he does display a punning audacity around such things. In Book X, visiting the grave of a former teacher at Hawkshead School who had died while Wordsworth was a pupil there, the speaker’s thoughts are drawn to Thomas Gray’s Elegy in an English Country Churchyard, which had celebrated the simplicity of lives such as the teacher’s had been. The thought cheers Wordsworth’s speaker, alters his mood, so that, in another of the circuits becoming familiar around this book’s notion of poetry as a reflection upon a reflection, I thought with pleasure of the verses graven Upon his tombstone, saying to myself ‘He loved the poets’. (508–10) The Oxford English Dictionary is complex about ‘graven’. There was once a verb ‘to grave’, which included the sense of ‘to bury’, ‘to place a body in the ground’, along with the sense of ‘to carve or engrave’ – Milton’s ‘new Stars graven in heaven’ is included among the citations. Then there is also an entry for ‘graven’ itself as a quasi-substantive, which includes the meanings ‘carved on a surface, engraved’. Joanna Baillie in 1821 is cited as the first deployer of the term in this sense; The Prelude, unpublished of course in 1805, would seem to have pre-empted this. Tombstones are our last pages, beneath which we are graved. Yet they cheer the living through their appropriateness, their bringing poetry to bear upon us. Words also disturb the living. One of the most noted features of the poetic aftermath of The Prelude is that of its iconic

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formulation of the idea of ‘spots of time’. This is Wordsworth’s notion that poetry isolates moments which the memory has itself isolated from experience, that it replays them at moments when we have lost energy, insight, lost our way: There are in our existence spots of time Which with distinct pre-eminence retain A vivifying virtue, whence, depressed By false opinion and contentious thought, Or aught of heavier or more deadly weight In trivial occupations and the round Of ordinary intercourse, our minds Are nourished and invisibly repaired. (XI, 256–63) Thereafter we are drawn back into the living stream of things, attentive to new moments of beauty or possibility. The burden, its ‘deadly’ weight, is eased. And yet, in context, the ‘spots of time’ ‘message’ from the poem occurs at a supremely bleak moment – or moments, as the passage is shifted across Wordsworth’s various versions. The sequence of incidents surrounding it in the 1799 ‘First Part’ of the two-part poem runs: scene in woods reaffirming nature’s power over the mind – body found in Esthwaite Lake – ‘spots of time’ – coming across gibbet of a murderer during a riding trip – vision of woman with a pitcher at remote tarn – Christmastime death of speaker’s father. The equivalent ‘narrative’ sequence in Book XI of the 1805 version (Book XII of 1850) slightly alleviates this, and runs: paean to Wordsworth’s wife Mary Hutchinson and reflection again on own development as ‘creative soul’ – ‘spots of time’ – gibbet – woman at ‘naked pool’ – longer reflection – father’s death – eight line address to Coleridge – end of Book XI. At the very least, this reordering, and seeming uncertainty in Wordsworth’s revisions around his ‘spots of time’ ‘argument’ (one of the first passages towards The Prelude to be drafted, after all), reveal that there is something complicated here going on about the relation of men to women. The murderer

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whose gibbet this is has killed his wife – one of the many incidents of violence towards women, or desertion of them, in Wordsworth’s output. The predication of the 1805 version of all of this upon an extended paean to the poet’s wife offers some reassurance before the nightmare that these passages around the ‘spots of time’ then entails – to the boy recalled in them, as to the man writing them. But what remains more tellingly unresolved is the significance of all of this to the ‘Imagination, How Impaired and Restored’, the title of 1805’s Book XI. Also there is something complex being half-said about guilt and death, the murderer’s gibbet appearing so proximately to the death of the father in both versions. The little boy figured at this moment in The Prelude, the speaker’s earlier self, with his ‘compensatory’ (we might say) vision of the beautiful woman, ‘and her garments vexed and tossed’, feels somehow trapped among all of this. But Wordsworth’s attempts to render the scene or the ‘spots of time’ between 1799 and 1805 precisely draw the issue of writing and the ‘graven’ into their orbit. In 1799 we are told of the gibbet Mouldered was the gibbet-mast; The bones were gone, the iron and the wood; Only a long green ridge of turf remained Whose shape was like a grave. I left the spot. (I, 310–14) 1805 takes away the perhaps over-exaggerated and emphatic ‘grave’ shape suggestion, but replaces it with something much more portentous: The gibbet-mast was mouldered down, the bones And iron case were gone; but on the turf Hard by, soon after that fell deed was wrought, Some unknown hand had carved the murderer’s name. The monumental writing was engraven In times long past, and still from year to year By superstition of the neighbourhood

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The grass is cleared away, and to this hour The letters are all fresh and visible. Faltering, and ignorant where I was, at length I chanced to espy those characters inscribed On the green sod. Forthwith I left the spot. (XI, 290–301) The 1850 version notably speeds up this moment, as though anxious to get past it; it therefore manages to elide the sequence of passive verbs about writing ‘carved … engraven … inscribed’ to give only the one, although it retains the pun on monumental/massiveness: ‘The monumental writing was inscribed’ (241). We might note that the leaving of ‘the spot’ occurs in both instances very soon after we’ve been told about the imagination’s creative focus upon ‘spots of time’. This is the imagination becoming a place, a site, seemingly randomly come upon in an iconic moment in childhood, during a horseriding outing. ‘Naming’, death, writing as a graven-ness; writing as a product in nature, ‘on the green sod’. And of course, we are not told the murderer’s name in the poem; the identification is withheld even as the lines point to identity as grounded in writing. Writing as an object of superstition, but one which draws the community together to preserve it against the elements. An analogy which comes to mind is that of the villager’s annual ritual to clean the chalk-white horses and giants which occur within the English landscape. The writing is ‘monumental’ in the memory of the child’s response, but recurring as a pun. The reader as cast in the poem here is ‘faltering, ignorant’. In a passage which is particularly attentive to the time sequence in which writing occurs and is preserved (‘In times long past, and still from year to year’), the time sequence of the verse here appears to be out of kilter. We learn the ‘story’ of the randomly discovered gibbet and the writing before ‘at length’ the speaker ‘espies’ it. ‘Espy’ is a strange word here. The OED thinks that the meaning of the word as simply ‘to perceive’ is an obscure usage; ‘to discover’ is one available alternative, but complicates the sequence. To recast Wordsworth’s phrase, ‘at length I chanced

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to discover’, takes away from the poetry’s unexpectedness. ‘Espy’ primarily carries its obvious sense of holding secret knowledge, finding out hidden information. The clash with the fact that the letters here are ‘monumental’, ‘all fresh and visible’, goes against this, unless the poet is meant here to be holding special access, to be the one for whom the ‘truth’ of seeing the murderer’s name is available where it might not be to others. The relation of reading (or simply spying) the letters and leaving is important as well; the speaker takes away his knowledge from the scene. The poetry, after all, does not tell us what this meaning is; it reports a scene of death and reading and care over writing commemorating a dreadful event – the murder of a woman and subsequent hanging of the perpetrator. But, beyond the fact that we presume the incident is being given in all versions of The Prelude as an example of what a ‘spot of time’ is, and thence what the ‘Imagination’ is, the writing in and on nature remains hidden and enigmatic. We move rapidly forward in the poem, as the speaker does, to the erotics of the woman carrying her pitcher of water at the ‘naked pool’, and again the connection of this to the writing by the gibbet is left for us to decode. We sense a strangeness, an eeriness, perhaps a real trauma which underlies and impels the writing and reorganization of its passages and phases across The Prelude’s versions. But exactly what is being said or shown, although ‘the letters are all fresh and visible’, is not to tell. The presence of ‘Anon’, referred to as one aspect of the kinds of writing in ‘Essays on Epitaphs’ is important here also. The author of the writing on gravestones is someone but no one, someone not to be known. It is ‘some unknown hand’ who has carved the murderer’s name in the turf. In terms of ‘espying’ the writing through this odd process, the fact that the author of the letters is her- or himself not ‘named’ is surely vital. We can only ‘discover’ the writer in the writing so indelibly (through the intervention of the superstitious local community) marked on the landscape. John Keats famously branded Wordsworth as the perpetrator of ‘wordsworthian or egotistical sublime’ in poetry, mediating the world, raising it to philosophy, through

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his own experiences and sense of self.34 Had Keats known it, The Prelude would have been the supreme example, when looked at in these terms, the ‘proof’, of his radical perception. And yet, in this ‘faltering’ moment by the gibbet, Wordsworth is fascinated by the possibility that writing brings a selflessness into being; this is the fascination of epitaphs also, that they are similarly ‘carved’ on tombstones by unknown hands, and that they are words literally standing over someone who is also not present, alive, any longer. Both the author and the subject of the epitaph are absent, as they are from these ‘monumental’ letters. The deadly or deathly pun on tombstones is of course lurking in that ‘monumental’, as in ‘monumental masons’, the carvers of tombstones, a pun further emphasized by the crushing ‘engraven’ – carving as entombing – in 1805. ‘Espy’ confers a specialness on the perceiving speaker as particularly attuned to the aura which letters convey; that ‘unknown’ suggests that there continues an anxiety about the continuing presence or immortality of the writer, of the name of the person doing the writing. ‘Superstition’ becomes ultimately the word around which all of this pivots; its connection with ‘irrational’ belief, even pagan and idolatrous worship, was current during Wordsworth’s day; the word carried a wholly negative charge. And yet, it is through ‘superstition’ that the words are kept ‘all fresh and visible’; writing benefits from local beliefs in the magic power of letters which keep memory of ‘fell deeds’ current, both as warning and as tribute to tragic event and justice enacted by humans in the landscape. (Notably, however, in this light, the Wordsworth graves in Grasmere Churchyard bear only the main Christian and surname of the buried, together with the death-year (followed by a full-stop). No epitaphs speak). We mustn’t, in the earnestness of such decoding of the words of an incident like this in the poem, blind ourselves to the wittiness also on display, a wittiness which has something to do with that overloading of even such a key passage as this Letters of John Keats, edited by Robert Gittings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 157. Letter to Richard Woodhouse, 27 October 1818.

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at the gibbet-side with puns precisely about the ‘graveness’ of the moment. There is a humour in much of this which counters the normal sense of the serious sage, Wordsworth, who reflects upon time and mortality in a melancholy way, in such images of him as the portrait by Benjamin Haydon of the poet in old age. He stands, in a rocky mountainous landscape, arms folded, his black coat blending into the dark background, his eyes down, seemingly captured by the flow of his own thoughts. Or, at least, a humour is perceptible in such a model of reading, as in that which prioritizes the epitaph and the graveyard as the ideal mode and scene of writing and reading. The speaker of Samuel Beckett’s novella, First Love, for instance, makes play upon the pun in ‘graven’ or ‘engraven’ in ways that we can suspect also hovered behind Wordsworth’s earnest encapsulation (‘For the date of my own birth … I have never forgotten, I never had to note it down, it remains graven in my memory, the year at least, in figures that life will not easily erase’35). And yet another tenor out of Wordsworth’s reflections upon the slow carving of epitaphs is directly taken up by Basil Bunting, in the opening section of his autobiographical poetic sequence Briggflatts, itself heavily influenced by Wordsworth, where the person of the writer once again finds an alter ego in the figure of the stone-mason: The mason stirs: Words! Pens are too light. Take a chisel to write. Every birth a crime, every sentence life.36 Samuel Beckett, The Expelled/The Calmative/The End & First Love, edited by Christopher Ricks (London: Faber, 2009), p. 61. 36 Basil Bunting, Briggflatts (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 2009 edition), pp. 15–16. Bunting felt that The Prelude was a poem like Ezra Pound’s Cantos, however, that could not be seen to constitute a single coherent poem. See Richard Burton, A Strong Song Tows Us: The Life of Basil Bunting (Oxford: Infinite Ideas, 2013), p. 390. 35

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Ideas and images about living and dead language are integral, then, to the question of what it might mean to consider The  Prelude from a position ‘beyond criticism’. They are also integral to questions of self-knowledge, the developing of an ‘understanding’ of who we are through language that is integral to The Prelude. As Stanley Cavell puts it, ‘It is in recognizing this abandonment to my words, presaging the leave-taking of death, that I know my voice.’37 People speaking the same language share words, they do not own them; and they will lose them in the silence of the grave. But it is out of that ‘recognition’ that we come to hear what is different about ourselves, what makes our voice and signature, while also knowing that the words will carry on in other mouths beyond our own end. In the encounter with language, most intense in poetry, then, we come to meet ourselves, but also the fact of our own deaths. This might feel like a specious theorizing or philosophizing of something which, in the hands of a writer who uses for the most part ‘simple’ words, like Wordsworth, is much more unquestioning. And yet, across Wordsworth’s work, and particularly in The Prelude, there is an awareness of these issues surrounding words and death which is extended elsewhere in his work in a series of metaphors about how we engage with the world and with books. Across his writing early and late, as we have seen, a certain kind of reading, scholarship, ‘science’ and study is equated with barrenness and death; a certain state of being in nature, and in communion with a nature which reflects our better selves, is equated with life. The question then to be asked of an attempt to view The Prelude in the way promoted by Ewan Fernie, one which promotes the creative potential within a study of the poem, is a question about how to keep the poem alive, precisely to keep it outside of a critical/ creative rhetoric. This is to keep it alive as poetry, but also in poetry, in new writing. This new writing gestures back towards The Prelude, but does not in any sense violate the sense that Cavell, The Pitch of Philosophy, 126.

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the poem breathes what is ‘incommunicable’. Such writing must respect the final ‘hiddenness’ of much of what the poem utters, but be that ‘shadowy imposition’ which renders the poem’s presence as fully as it is possible for the writer to be able to do.38 To approach the monumental writing which is The Prelude in any lesser spirit, is to desecrate the monument, fritter its command and resonance. Something about the origins of the poem speaks to these issues. At the most obvious biographical level, the poem draws into itself many of the strains of that attention to ‘the two worlds, the living and the dead’. There are deaths recorded in the poem: that of the ‘Dame’ who fostered the young Wordsworth and his brothers when they attended Hawkshead School, and who receives a brief eulogy at the beginning of Book IV (‘while my heart | Can beat I never will forget thy name’ – the name which the poem again keeps hidden from us, as it does not appear there). The ‘boy’ who hoots to the owls dies in this Prelude version (he doesn’t in Lyrical Ballads), partly to create a bridging passage which leads us back from the Hawkshead graveyard to the adjacent School, so that Book V can return to its theme of education. There is the dead man whose body is recovered from the lake during Wordsworth’s first week at the school. But, most tellingly, there are the family deaths; the recollection of the sudden death of his mother narrated in Book V, the oblique and afflicted reference to the death of his father while he was at school (an episode which is the last full one in the so-called 1804 Five-Book version, and Alfred Lord Tennyson’s elegy ‘In Memorium A.H.H.’ takes up something of these aspects of language and nature in response to his friend’s death. At moments, Tennyson lapses into a pathetic fallacy, in which the loss of the friend blights nature itself (‘all the phantom, Nature, stands – | With all the music in her tone, | A hollow echo of my own’.) At other points, though, the speaker recognizes the danger of such identification, the ways in which it disarms the poet: ‘I sometimes hold it half as sin | To put in words the grief I feel; | For words, like Nature, half reveal | And half conceal the soul within.’ (Selected Poems, edited by Aidan Day (London: Penguin, 1991), p. 133).

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so that work’s ‘culmination’, but which forms a much more complex relation to the poem’s disquisition on Imagination in Book XI of 1805). In shadowy presence, further, there is the death of the Wordsworths’ loved brother Jonathan in a shipwreck on 5 February 1805 – a shocking event which halted temporarily Wordsworth’s composition of the last three books of the poem. These books carry that punning assertion that the imagination, as it realizes itself in recounting those ‘spots of time’ in life which endure, retains a ‘vivifying virtue’ (XI, 260). The 1799 version of the poem (and Wu’s 1804 one) had the adjective as ‘fructifying’, the bringing to fullness at the end of things. Wordsworth’s 1805 revision counter-asserts the continuing and positive force of the imagination (the change again in 1850 to ‘renovating’ carries something of the same force, but is fusty, not life-driven). In this narrative of how he came to be what he was, therefore, one element that Wordsworth points us towards is his own orphaned nature: the death of the mother in March 1778 when he was aged eight was one reason Wordsworth and his brothers attended Hawkshead School; the unexpected death of his father on 30 December 1783, when he was thirteen, confirmed the uncertainty of his future, and his and his siblings’ dependence upon the wider Wordsworth family. In both cases, the deaths of the parent form a subtle role in the complex compensatory patterns which run across The Prelude, whereby the poetry is constantly catching itself up or readjusting itself between extremes of emotional or intellectual implication. The death of the mother is not mentioned until mid-way through Book V of 1805 and 1850, and arrives weirdly as part of a discussion of the fact that the poet is grateful for his own education, which allowed for him freely to roam the landscape and discover the natural world, unlike those modern children who are reared under an ‘evil’ educational system, which enforces learning by rote from books. (V, 228) The mother’s death raises questions of nurture which look back to Book II, and the hymn there to the ‘blessed’ baby feeding

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at its mother’s breast. But it rapidly veers away into further attack upon the modern education system, and its rearing of such as the so-called ‘Infant Prodigy’, a ‘worshipper of worldly seemliness’ (298), in an extended satiric passage. This in turn gives way to the celebration of the dawning of creativity in the ‘There was a boy’ passage, in which the mimicking of owls’ hootings attunes the boy to the echoes between his own making of sound and the soundings of the natural world – which then is undercut with news (added, as mentioned above, from the original printing of ‘There was a boy’ as a separate poem in Lyrical Ballads) of the death of the boy who was thus aware. This then returns upon itself with a further encomium to the speaker’s actual education at Hawkshead, which gives way to the passage on the raising of the body of the dead man from Estwaite Lake. And so on. Under the general title of Book V, ‘Books’, from the 1805 Prelude on, then, we have the presence of death as an underwriter to broader considerations of the kinds of reading and education through nature and experience which have created the poet himself, along with a countering dismissal of those more recent versions of education which, by implication, would have thwarted the memory and imaginative recreation exemplified in and through the poem. Such intricacies of organization and recasting of material leave criticism inadequate and silent before the occasion of The Prelude. It is not just the epic scope and ambition of the poem which means that any attempt to encapsulate it is inevitably insignificant. Nor is it that the ubiquity of the poet both within and behind his poem, anticipating responses and constantly self-correcting, means that criticism is in some way disabled. The Cornell editions of the 1799, 1805 and 1850 Preludes assemble from their mass of photo-reproductions adequate reading texts of the poem, together with transcriptions of related materials not included within it. However, the editions cannot begin to come to terms with the motivations behind this particular assemblage and creation of materials, nor for the decisions involved in the reorganization, even suppression, of material, from version to version. In a sense, it is the

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ubiquity of the poem, in Wordsworth’s life, but also in our awareness of its being ‘Here, nowhere, there, and everywhere at once’, which means that it remains, paradoxically, beyond comprehension. But the poem remains to be traced in other work written in its wake (as this book maintains), but not visible through a criticism which seeks to isolate any one aspect for study, to separate it from the tumult which carries on through and around it. To that extent, therefore, The Prelude is a test case for the fallings-short of the critical act more generally, and perhaps particularly so with regard to the study of poetry: there is something about the resonances in language which are made active through poetic form, and which are experienced as taking place simultaneously by readers, which means that any prose delineation of those resonances, of ‘what has happened’, inevitably loses the experience in the trying to account for it. Criticism is never the best, or the most natural response to a reading of a work such as this, since the overall experience, the full encounter of the reader’s mind and sensibility with the text, would not normally find its response translated into the rhetoric and vocabulary of criticism, which in some way slows, and ‘meddles’, with the directness of that experience. If poetry is about (loosely) finding an adequate musical organization for experience, the processes underlying the poem, more than in any other poem in English, reveal the quixotic and laborious struggle towards that organization which is never finally settled. Such is the nature of the reorganizations that we begin to be able to say, for example, that Wordsworth increasingly ‘espies’ the counter-assertion that ‘spots of time’ make in the face of death for the orphaned mind. Yet even so tentative a conclusion is overwhelmed by the tumult of the verse and by the revisioning of each passage. The ‘spots of time’ had seemed the idea towards which the 1799 Prelude moved, just as ‘Was it for this?’ had begun it; by 1804, all had utterly changed, the imagination was valorized in different ways as new memories entered the poem, in a sense of constant alteration and re-beginning.

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THE FIRST TRACES I have in mind the model of starting and struggle in the film La Belle Noiseuse; the shots of the artist, the sandpaper rasps as that firm hand runs down thick pages in the old notebooks, as he limbers to address the proposed new, the numb crumpling as he flicks between the absorbent sheets like a sail thwacking a mast in a wind, weighing the gestures he had made before. But also the sly and deft camera moves the director makes, as the actor’s hand is swapped for the artist’s, as ‘he’, readied to draw now, mulls and moves his skilled fingers choosing between charcoal sticks, thicknesses of brushes. He dips one in the water, shakes it off, gathers some black paint, the actor’s eyes now raised to the now posed stilled body, the artist exposing form through tentative, confident, swift-sketched lines.

2 ‘Ceaseless musics’

Was it for this That one, the fairest of all rivers, loved To blend his murmurs with my nurse’s song, And from his alder shades and rocky falls, And from his fords and shallows, sent a voice That flowed along my dreams? For this, didst thou, O Derwent, travelling over the green plains Near my ‘sweet birthplace’, didst thou, beauteous stream, Make ceaseless music through the night and day Which with its steady cadence tempering Our human waywardness, composed my thoughts To more than infant softness, giving me Among the fretful dwellings of mankind A knowledge, a dim earnest, of the calm Which nature breathes among the hills and groves? When, having left his mountains, to the towers Of Cockermouth that beauteous river came, Behind my father’s house he passed, close by, Along the margin of our terrace-walk. (I, 272–89) In this 1805 version of these crucial lines from The Prelude, Wordsworth asks himself, confronts himself, about the course of his life through a distant literary echo, a translation. He wonders about the poetic and ethical implications of the fact that he was born in a particular place, in hearing range of the River Derwent as it flows through Cockermouth. But

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he alludes to the Roman poet Virgil Aeneas’s rebuke to his mother, the goddess Venus: ‘Hoc erat …?’ ‘Was it for this, mother, that you brought me through spears and fire – so that the enemy could rampage in our house?’1 The resonances of the original Virgil passage are of desertion; the son feeling exposed in the absence of parental guidance and aid, even near ‘my father’s house’. The goddess seems to have turned from him. In his picking up of the Virgilian resonance here, the orphaned Wordsworth is seeking to find a destiny not through patriotic or political ambition, but by returning and retuning himself to the place and sounds of his early life. Those sounds underscore his poetry, its musicality and tonality, and so give an order and a ‘steady cadence’ to the perceptions of human error (‘waywardness’) and of unhappiness and stress (‘fretful’) of which Wordsworth claims he was early aware. Nature’s breath, the river’s ‘ceaseless music’, if held at the centre of a life’s attention, brings purpose and meaning in a world of uncertainty and doubts, losses and absences. This 1805 version of these lines varies slightly from the 1799 version, which had opened the so-called ‘Two-Part Prelude’. The 1805 version, more than the 1799, emphasizes the proximity of the River Derwent to Wordsworth’s birthplace: it is both ‘close by’, and ‘along the margin’ of the terrace-walk which runs at the end of the house’s neat garden. The ‘ceaseless music’ of the river could have been no closer, is heard day and night, plays beneath all other human musics, such as the nurse’s songs to the young Wordsworth brothers and sister. It offers a constant measure of beauty partly derived from the setting and origin of the river, partly – and more importantly for a poet concerned with rhythm and sound – from the constant and regular aural potential it signalled to the child. The repetition ‘beauteous stream … beauteous river’, together with the idea that the river’s ‘cadence’ composes Daniel Robinson, Myself and some other Being: Wordsworth and the Life Writing (Iowa: University of Iowa Press, 2014), pp. 37–8, discusses some of the contemporary promptings of Wordsworth towards this Virgil passage.

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thought, despite ‘our human waywardness’, looks forward (as other moments in the poem do) to the great culminating image of The Prelude, with its hymn to how the mind of man becomes A thousand times more beautiful than the earth On which he dwells, above this frame of things (Which, mid all revolutions in the hopes And fears of men, does still remain unchanged) In beauty exalted, as it is itself Of substance and of fabric more divine. (XIII, 446–52) The river by the birthplace sets a thread weaving across the poem which links beauty, mind, and divinity in humankind. Yet it is the sound of the river which enters these conceptions into poetry. The ‘fairest of all rivers’ ‘murmurs’, has a ‘voice’, makes ‘ceaseless music’. If we extend the perspective from the Virgil translation underpinning the ‘Was it for this?’ passage, we might assert that what the end of the poem has come to understand is that the goddess Venus has returned as Nature. Wordsworth casts himself and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in these culminating lines, as ‘Prophets of Nature’. They are in her service, teaching the people about the means towards transcendence in the human mind when living attentively to her: ‘What we have loved | Others will love’ (444–5). This process of ‘becoming’, at the end of the poem as in the ‘Was it for this?’ passage, is a matter of syntax and grammar. We hear, and we ‘see’, ‘how the mind of man becomes’, as we shuttle back and forth through the lines, and negotiate a complex syntax at the end of which we have come to a different thought to that with which the sentence set out. The final sentence of The Prelude negotiates its way towards the ‘more divine’ past those ‘revolutions’ (political also, we presume), which have threatened stability. Its connectives adjust and readjust our sensibility locationally and almost physically before they arrive at presence and authority (‘on … above … mid … it is’). Correlative to the river pattern described,

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the earlier ‘Was it for this?’ passage has a syntax that is about wandering and returning, about pausing and taking up the strain with new energy. It acts as an echo-chamber, in which repeated words, parallel phrasing at important moments in the rhythmical pattern, give energy to the questioning, redoubling it – ‘was it … was it’; ‘And from … And from’; ‘didst thou … didst thou’; ‘beauteous stream … beauteous river’.2 In a passage whose energy is derived from the many qualifications and sub-clauses scored and timed by the placement of the commas, as the speaking voice needs to adjust and readjust to the differing qualities described (almost like the river sounding over its courses of stones on its bed), there is a lovely luxuriance in coming across the two-and-ahalf lines which have no pause or qualification, the lines which carry the burden of the whole passage: Make ceaseless music through the night and day Which with its steady cadence tempering Our human waywardness, … The regular iambic beat of the middle line indeed ‘tempers’ the awkward ‘Our human waywardness’. The ‘ceaseless music’ stretches through time across its entire line. The connectives across the passage carry a lot of strain themselves: ‘for’, ‘that’, ‘which’, ‘among’, ‘which’, ‘when, having’. They are used slightly ungrammatically to pick up the pace again, or to seek to hold together what, fretfully, and under the stress of the emotion driving the questionings, threatens to come apart. There is an assertion of continuity which the ‘ceaseless music’ brings, but it is a vulnerable continuity, one that needs constantly refreshing, re-beginning. The 1850 version, in seeking to vary the vocabulary, and to avoid repeated terms such as ‘beauteous’, only succeeds in weakening the rhythm: ‘For this, didst thou, | O Derwent! Winding among grassy holms | Where I was looking on, a babe in arms, | Make ceaseless music that composed my thoughts | To more than infant softness.’ (275–9).

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The sound of the river provides, however, a metaphor for all subsequent thought and thence of poetry for the mature Wordsworth, as also his own political faith; it ‘composed my thought’ and ‘tempered’ it. Only a couple of verse paragraphs below this, the musical metaphor is extended, in ways that again look forward to the end of the poem. The terminology of the ‘Was it for this?’ moment is taken up again: The mind of man is framed even like the breath And harmony of music; there is a dark Invisible workmanship that reconciles Discordant elements, and makes them move In one society. (I, 351–5) This 1805 version is more Miltonic (playing on Milton’s sense of ‘dark materials’) than the 1799 one, which had simply ‘The mind of man is fashioned and built up | Even as a strain of music.’3 The 1850 version, strikingly, emphasizes the vulnerability, even desperation: the mind’s workmanship against elements of discord ‘makes them cling together | In one society’. In each case, though, we can see the Derwent’s music transposed as a model of the workings of mind. ‘Breath’, the idea of blending what is inharmonious, is carried over between this and other passages. As previously, Wordsworth’s imaginative leap is premonitory of twenty-first-century understandings of how the brain works, particularly in response to positive stimuli. The neurologist Antonio Damasio, who is the scientist in his field most oriented to the cultural and emotional importance of recent brain science, writes of the ‘continuous musical line of our minds’. Having asked his readers to imagine lying on a quiet beach in warm weather, in order to illustrate how happy feelings unite Manuscript V towards the 1799 version has the mind compared to a ‘song’, as though the ‘nurse’s song’ remembered from childhood acts like a variation on the world around, just as the human mind does. See The Prelude 1798-1799, edited by Stephen Parrish (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 225.

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pleasurable physical sensation to mental well-being, Damasio celebrates ‘the appearance of thoughts with themes consonant with emotion; and a mode of thinking, style of mental processing, which increased the speed of image generation’. The better to explain his point about the ‘blending in harmony’ of body and mind at such moments in our mental histories, Damasio quotes Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’, with its own blending of ‘sensations sweet felt in the blood’ with the ‘purer mind in tranquil restoration’.4 We will return to this ‘blending’, as figured by Damasio, in Chapter 3 of this book. The mind as a musical thread responds to the ‘voice’ which comes to it from the world beyond. Most notably, for the Wordsworth early cast upon the world without parents, such restoration is to be recreated in those moments of remembered protection and harmony, playing on the terrace-walk with Dorothy, hearing the nurse’s singing counterpointing the constant flow of the river a few yards away.

Ceaselessness As we saw, it is the ‘ceaselessness’ of The Prelude which renders it exemplary of the ways in which poetry, and poetry as a way of thinking, remains ‘beyond criticism’. But it is also a ceaselessness which is not simply about Wordsworth’s inability to leave the poem alone, but which inheres in the cumulative ceaselessness of the episodes, of the turns and returns of the poem’s movement. One aspect of Wordsworth’s constant revisiting of the text, of course, is derived from its not being published during the poet’s lifetime – it existed in manuscript form, could be amended and recopied across his lifetime, because it was never given the settled form of publication (although Wordsworth, as Gill shows more broadly in Antonio Damasio, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain (London: Vintage, 2004), pp. 3, 84.

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Wordsworth’s Revisitings about his output, was an inveterate alterer, even of those poems which had appeared in print for decades unaltered). ‘Ceaselessness’. In 1804, as he was finishing the so-called Five-Book Prelude, Wordsworth wrote to Thomas de Quincey that ‘this Poem will not be published these many years, and never during my lifetime, till I have finished a larger and more important work to which it is a tributary’ (L, p. 72). That larger work, The Recluse, was the huge ‘philosophical poem’, which Wordsworth planned with Coleridge, yet of which only one part, The Excursion, was ever completed, and published in 1814. The Prelude is (in a term which continues the idea of the poem as river or stream) a ‘tributary’, or, in the words of another letter, ‘a sort of portico’, to the main body of the work (the Gothic church metaphor for this relationship is the one continued into the ‘Preface’ to the published The Excursion itself) (L, p. 85). The implication is clear, if not wholly explicable in our terms. Only once the larger, philosophical, poem on ‘Nature, Man, and Society’, which the Recluse project was to be, was complete, could the epic poem on the poet’s own life become warranted as publishable. The poet’s own ‘mind’, and its ‘growth’, could only become of significance once the ‘philosophy’ is fully articulated. This is odd, as though once the philosophy has been given, the sources for that philosophy in the individual who wrote it somehow becomes relevant, but only then. At some level this is about what Wordsworth considered to be measures of artistic success. On completing the 1805 version, Wordsworth wrote to Sir George Beaumont to register his disappointment with it, a disappointment which was of various kinds. The poem was not as good as he’d hoped, but it also reminded him of the unlikeliness of his ever completing The Recluse. Moreover, its completion reminded him heavily of the fact of his brother Jonathan’s death, for he would have loved to have shown the poem to him (the brothers and their sister were often parted after the death of their parents, and so presumably in some sense the poem fills in a story about William’s own upbringing

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which his siblings were not wholly acquainted with) (L, pp. 83–4). Personal despair, and the failure of one version of literary ambition, dog, then, the achievement of The Prelude, at least in the poet’s own view. But it remains intriguing that Wordsworth’s repeated insistence was that The Prelude was only relevant if the larger ‘philosophy’ was achieved. His autobiography might only be read from, and in the aftermath of, that other achieved context. One model for this sequencing of things was obviously provided by the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose later works, Confessions and Reveries of a Solitary Walker, were both derived from the response to his radical philosophy, and from his being hounded across the Continent by those who felt that his philosophy made him into a subversive who could not be allowed to live in various cities or states. These late works, in some way, are Rousseau’s attempts to justify the philosophy through a direct account of his own experiences, a firm sense that the life lived had governed the thoughts thought, and the writings which arose from them (we will encounter Rousseau’s work in this light again in Chapter 3). Wordsworth’s early poems in the three editions of the Lyrical Ballads (1798–1802) had met with hostility, particularly when he wrote, at Coleridge’s suggestion, the attempt at explanation in the ‘Preface’ added to the 1800 second edition. Further, he was, by the time of writing the autobiographical The Prelude, the author of letters and of a politically radical – but unpublished – ‘A Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff’, which, in the fervent times of the Revolutionary Wars, would have been considered subversive. Certainly, one aspect of the casting of The Prelude as a prolonged verse letter to the sympathetic Coleridge is, as the poem declares, that, in an atmosphere of judgement, he will receive a rare proper hearing from his addressee: he expects no ‘harsh judgments’ from that quarter, whatever the progress the poem makes (I, 658). There is a safeguard here: Wordsworth claims that the writing of his life will not result in something ‘tedious’ for a friend who would wish to know everything about it. Wordsworth’s personalizing

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of the address of his autobiographical narration is, therefore, one step beyond Rousseau’s justification for autobiography, that to understand or at least know the man is to come closer to appreciating the nature of the philosophy, the experiences upon which it is founded. For Wordsworth, the writing of The Prelude is – particularly given the way that it was not then published during his lifetime – a further confirmation of the surety of his close circle, his family and a few friends, as the place where his poetry receives its most understanding hearing. This is the ‘one society’ which provides the model for the orderly mind, threaded upon the musical strain as he conceives it in Book I. The complications, inconsistencies, the unsettledness of the poem, derive partly from that sense of a close sharing also, one in which Dorothy, Wordsworth’s wife Mary, her sister Sarah Hutchinson, for instance, are each involved in copying out the poem’s text in fair copies, and also in making and sewing the manuscript books into which the poem is put (the Cornell edition contains much on the kinds of sewing which went to putting these amazing artefacts together). There is even a suggestion that, in a minor way, lines from The Prelude were composed by members of this group. Dorothy’s journal for 26 December 1801, for instance, record that ‘Mary wrote some lines of the 3rd part of Wm’s poem which he brought to read us when we were home’. The journal’s editor speculates that these lines are the opening lines to the third book, ‘recalling’ the poet’s arrival to study at Cambridge.5 Mary’s being sparked into poetry by memory of Wordsworth’s telling her the story of his arrival in the university town then returns to the poem, when it needs a new start in January 1804, as Wordsworth decides to dismantle the 1799 ‘Two-Part Prelude’ to accommodate that fuller sense of who he has become. Memories are recirculated in his domestic group, recast, and not just by Wordsworth himself alone.

Dorothy Wordsworth, The Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals, edited by Pamela Woof (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 53.

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The Prelude is ‘beyond criticism’ in this sense also, therefore, that it is a private document which, in the environment that it existed in while he was alive, does not need to excuse itself. In a letter of 1801, Wordsworth lamented that ‘in truth my life has been unusually barren of events, and my opinions have grown slowly and, I may say, insensibly’ (L, p. 45). His poem’s focus upon the ‘slow’ evolution of his thoughts and opinions, the casting of himself as a hero for whom little is remarkable other than the natural and geographical circumstances amid which he was reared, and where he now resides, derives its confidence from its likely small and sympathetic audience. Only in the poet’s absence, after his death, does it become known to a public, and its ‘prophetic’ mission is revealed. ‘Ceaselessness’. It is crucial, from such passages as ‘There was a boy’ and myriad other instances, that sound and sounding, sounding the self, and sounding the landscape, or sounding fellow humanity, are integral to the ‘narrative’ that The Prelude has to present. One emblematic moment casts this literally as a matter of instantaneous translation. In Book V’s dream sequence, an Arab presents a stone to the speaker (representing, the dreamer knows, Euclid’s Elements), and a shell, which also in some way contains books. When that speaker holds the shell to his ear, he heard that instant in an unknown tongue, Which yet I understood, articulate sounds, A loud prophetic blast of harmony, An ode in passion uttered, which foretold Destruction to the children of the earth. (93–7) In a sense, a similar act of translation is what the poem The Prelude utters, making its articulate sounds out of the ‘unknown’. The shell prophesies the ending of the world in a flood, the sweeping away of all that is known. It is a fantasy of reading the world, decoding it through a hearing that this speaker is uniquely placed to undertake. The Arab presents him with the emblems of the two sides of human cognition,

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the rational or mathematical Elements, and the messages and ‘unknown’ ‘sounds’ which he is enabled to render ‘articulate’ – the poetry spoken in and through ‘passion’ which carries its own understanding, in distinction to a Euclidean one. Poetry as a way of sounding the world through the particular means of hearing it. The opening of Book VII in the 1805 version takes these issues to the heart of the sources of creation. Narrating the fact that he has taken a break in his composition of the work across the summer of 1804, Wordsworth looks back to the early origins of The Prelude across the Goslar winter, and scores his restarting in October 1804 out of that reminiscence. In 1799, Wordsworth asserts, ‘I sang | Aloud in dithyrambic fervour, deep | But short-lived uproar’, an eruption of poetry like ‘a bursting cloud | Down Scafell or Blencathra’s rugged sides, | A waterspout from heaven’ (4–9). This poetry, the tentative first steps towards his self-epic, is both local and blaring, a noisy breaking out like that, later in poetic history, of Rilke’s composition of his Duino Elegies or Sonnets for Orpheus. Soon, Wordsworth tells us, the ‘interrupted stream’ was on its way again, before stalling at the start of this past summer. Now, however, in October, he hears a ‘voice that stirred me’, a ‘choir’ of robins which indicate to him the near onset of winter, a breath of inspiration towards the work again. He ‘half-whispers’ to the robins that ‘ye and I … | Will chant together’. He walks out onto the hillside, and sees ‘beneath a dusky shade’ a solitary glow-worm – a ‘voiceless worm’, he calls it – and the inspiration is enhanced, as ‘Silence touched me here | No less than sound had done before’. Essentially, he narrates a coming-back into his own again, as he feels from these encounters with the sound and soundlessness of the world ‘fit … for the poet’s task’, renewed in his writerly self (23–54). What the passage narrates in little is a re-becoming through sound, pitching poetry to birdsong. To this end, the tense in the passage is odd: is it the historical present? The poetry is speaking in the moment (‘through the whole summer have I been at rest’) while also speaking

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of someone other than himself who is already in the past, hearing a ‘voice that stirred me’. He is, after all, performing the ‘poet’s task’ even as he describes how that ‘task’ came upon him after the various ‘interruptions’. The instigation from nature is both of the present, and held permanently within it. The process of The Prelude is this double one of capturing the moments of its own creation; a curious, and hard to hear, sense of the immanence of the poetry from out of the poet, through the voices which he mediates out of the world. The action of writing is always immanent in the inclination towards it. All good poetry is intent towards the sound it makes; the particular achievement of Wordsworth’s poetry is that it points us towards sounds in the world, speaks of them and to them, in ways which show poetry to be a part of that specific environment in that specific moment, as also to have been inherent in that place. It is its own past and present at once, ‘blessed’ in that sense. The Victorian writer Walter Pater, in an appreciation of Wordsworth’s achievement, found something of a similar emphasis. ‘Clear and delicate at once, as he is in the outlining of visual imagery,’ Pater wrote, ‘he is more clear and delicate still, and finely scrupulous, in the noting of sounds.’ Sound in Wordsworth, as Pater thinks, is continuous with human progress, and is actually – here I’d disagree – ‘profaned’ by the visual facets of colour, form and image. Wordsworth’s religion then tunes into those local sounds, mediating the ‘natural oracles’ and ‘sanctities’ in the voices of the world in ways that the Christian Pater (reading the more ‘Christian’ 1850 version of The Prelude, of course) finds disturbing. Wordsworth, he concludes, is too tied to ‘that old dream of anima mundi’, of the world as a place of spirit and religious power. What remains intriguing, though, is Pater’s attunement to Wordsworth’s attunement: despite his attention to the sounds of the world, Pater often finds Wordsworth ‘prosaic’ and ‘conventional’ as a writer. Yet this also, in another turn, makes Wordsworth an ideal test for the reading of all poetry, to learn to tell the ‘real’ from the mere repetition of cliché and of others’ thoughts and

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responses.6 My readings of Wordsworth across this book, by contrast, will aim to show how the ‘conventional’ and the humdrum rhythms amid which we all live our lives are the necessary part of poetry, the necessary means to the achievement of those moments of insight and self-transcendence that poetry can also show us models of, provoke us towards. We cannot be much other than we are, which for the most of the time is not ‘poetic’; but the mundane times spent towards becoming who we might be are equally included in that ‘higher’ potential we all have within us. ‘Ceaselessness’. The Prelude is a blank verse monologue whose antecedents are clearly among the dramas and soliloquies of Shakespeare and other Early Modern playwrights (The Tempest and Hamlet haunt the early books). The poet exploring the nature of creativity draws upon the figure of Prospero, Shakespeare’s late (self-) incarnation of the figure of the poet. The other obvious source is the epics by Milton, Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, the former of which provides multiple echoes within the vocabulary, sound patterning and phrasing of the poem. Wordsworth also wrestles with the essences of pride and sin in the self-mockery which enters sometimes, and in such passages as the boat-stealing episode, where the act of transgression brings, through nature, in the young poet’s mind, retribution which derives from divine sources. In a lovely slip of the pen in one of the drafts for the 1805 version of the poem, Wordsworth mis-spells ‘influence’ as ‘infulnence’.7 His own poetry here consciously resonates with that fullness of past examples and models and intonations, as we shall see. To an extent, however, and despite these precedents, the blank verse of The Prelude might seem to be an inadequate response to the ‘ceaseless music’ of the River Derwent, in that blank verse limits the musicality of the poem. Yet this seems to Walter Pater, ‘Wordsworth’ (1874) in Appreciations, with an essay on style (London: Macmillan, 1910 edition), pp. 41, 45, 50. 7 The Thirteen-Book Prelude, Volume II, edited by Mark L. Reed (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 253. 6

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have been far from Wordsworth’s sense of it. In 1815, in a letter which was partly motivated by a charge that the similar blank verse of the recently published The Excursion was monotonous, Wordsworth asserts rather, in response to a complaint about his verse that had been passed on to him, ‘that the Excursion has one merit if it has no other, a versification to which for variety of musical effect no Poem in the language furnishes a parallel. … Tell Patty Smith this … and exhort her to study with her fingers till she has learned to confess it to herself’ (L pp. 171–2). Wordsworth’s reference to fingers presumably is an injunction that the reader might ensure that each blank verse line does have the ‘correct’ number of ten syllables within it, even though some lines might seem to contain more, and some less, as a result of the different types of phrasing (and necessarily language and sound patterning) within it. What measures the poem’s achievement in this sense is the variety and variation it brings to the shuttling of the verse lines. Perhaps in order to further this sense of the drama and variation inherent in his work, Wordsworth saw that the best conditions for poetry were to be achieved through a speaking or recitation of it alone or in public, and more often than not out of doors – the evidences are multiple that this is how he ‘composed’ the verse.8 But there are statements in his prefaces which suggest what he felt the nature of ideal recitation to be. Referring to the way in which, in ‘modern times’, lyric verse particularly had been accompanied in performance by music from a harp or lyre, Wordsworth argues, in the ‘Preface’ to Poems (1815) that: I require nothing more than an animated or impassioned recitation, adapted to the subject. Poems, however humble ‘Walked backwards & forwards with William [by the lake side] – he repeated his poem to me – then he got to work again & would not give over’. Or, ‘We walked a long time in the Evening. … I left William writing a few lines about the night-hawk & other images of the evening. … We walked backwards & forwards a little, after I returned to William.’ Dorothy Wordsworth, The Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals, pp. 93, 109.

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in their kind, if they be good in that kind, cannot read themselves; the law of long syllable and short must not be so inflexible, – the letter of metre must not be so impassive to the spirit of versification, – as to deprive the Reader of all voluntary power to modulate, in subordination to the sense, the music of the poem; – in the same manner as his mind is left at liberty, and even summoned, to act upon its thoughts and images. (SP, p. 376) While the argument here is specifically about lyric music, it is notable that when considering poetic effect elsewhere in this ‘Preface’ Wordsworth turns to lines from Paradise Lost, and when discussing sound in poetry in relation to the natural world, he first quotes a blank verse line from his own ‘Resolution and Independence’. The format of the blank verse line clearly gives him a flexibility with regard to sound which the lyric requirement to think of immediate musical accompaniment does not. Indeed, Wordsworth’s use of the word ‘liberty’ to describe this ambition echoes Milton’s politically charged defence of his ‘neglect of rhyme’ in casting Paradise Lost. It is a ‘neglect’ which, Milton claimed, marked ‘the first in English, of ancient liberty recovered to heroic poem from the troublesome and modern bondage of rhyming’.9 ‘Poems … cannot read themselves.’ Poems demand recitation; interestingly, in thinking about the situation of the reader/performer, Wordsworth introduces the flexibility of poetic quantity – the length or brevity of the syllable – into his opposition of ‘the letter of metre’ with the ‘spirit of versification’. The performer has that Miltonic quality, ‘liberty’, to modulate the ‘music’ of the poem in order to ‘animate’ it, to bring out the passions which have driven it. Line length must be observed, but, within it, the performer is free if, without contorting or destroying the sense, she or he varies and inflects the sounds in the line to bring out what the 1815 letter calls their ‘variety’. John Milton, Paradise Lost, edited by Alistair Fowler (London: Longman, 1971), p. 39.

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Read back into the opening lines of the 1799 Prelude on the ‘ceaseless music’ of the Derwent, we might perceive the ‘steady cadence’ of the music of the river as sustaining an almost religious force – ‘human waywardness’ being the equivalent of the sinfulness of Adam and Eve and their consequent expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Music tempers that propensity, but thereby gives insight into the wider rhythms through which nature tempers and patterns the world. This does not constrain the individual performer-poet who can play her or his own variations upon, or modulate, that music, according to the particularities of their own speaking voice. In fact, it is recitation of the poem’s lines which enables readers to make them their own, just as, the ‘Was it for this?’ passage proclaims, Wordsworth himself has been made by them. Coleridge has interesting misremembering on these matters in his autobiography, Biographia Literaria. At one point he quotes his own poem ‘To William Wordsworth’ back at himself, as expressing a model of what poetry might achieve, but which his own writing too often fails at. In praising the unpublished The Prelude, Coleridge remembers himself, in Biographia, as having written: An orphic tale indeed, A tale obscure of high and passionate thoughts To a strange music chaunted.10 His memory of the praise in this prose autobiography, Biographia, however, is more interesting than what his poem had actually stated (‘An orphic song indeed, | A song divine of high and passionate thoughts | To their own Music chaunted!’11). The Biographia Literaria version of the lines perhaps reflects Coleridge’s actual experience of hearing Wordsworth read 10 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, edited by George Watson (London: Everyman, 1975), p. 165. 11 Coleridge’s Poetry and Prose, selected and edited by Nicholas Halmi, Paul Magnuson and Raimonda Modiano (New York: Norton, 2004), p. 201.

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his poem through the night to him better than the slightly platitudinous ‘poetic’ response: the obscurity of Wordsworth’s meaning (its ‘dim earnest’) noted in Biographia captures better the difficult experience of trying to grasp Wordsworth’s melding of personal experience, and abstract reflection upon that experience, in the poem. The ‘strange’ nature of the chanting in this reminiscence perhaps comes closer to capturing the unique inflections of Wordsworth’s recitation better than the sense that, in his great work, Wordsworth did indeed find appropriate ‘music’ for his thoughts. ‘A tale obscure’ brings in all manner of hiddenness, not least the oddity and uniqueness (‘their own music’) of The Prelude on Wordsworth’s own lips. The Biographia version catches something of the unpredictability of the experience, its uncanniness in actuality. Reading poetry aloud, being spoken through by a poem, in other words, brings us into alignment with the process of becoming our truer selves. Accounts of Wordsworth reading or reciting his poetry, by such as the American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose encounter with Wordsworth will be taken up later in this book, or by the English essayist William Hazlitt, concur on this point. ‘His manner of reading his poetry is particularly imposing,’ strikes out Hazlitt, in a passage which is insightful on all of these matters: In his favourite passages his eye beams with a preternatural lustre, and the meaning labours slowly up from his swelling breast. No one who has seen him at these moments could go away with an impression that he was a ‘man of no mark or likelihood’. Perhaps the comment of his face and voice is necessary to convey a full idea of his poetry. His language may not be intelligible; but his manner is not to be mistaken. It is clear that he is either mad or inspired. In company, even in a tête-à-tête, Mr Wordsworth is often silent, indolent, and reserved.12 William Hazlitt, ‘Mr Wordsworth’ (1825), in Selected Writings, edited by Jon Cook (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 353.

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Wordsworth comes alive when reciting his poetry. In a theme which resonates across this book, his words don’t always seem ‘intelligible’ in his poetry, yet there is no doubting their purpose and ambition. When not reciting he is quiet, morose; when reading aloud he is more than himself, ‘preternatural’, more a force than a person. Hazlitt’s allusion in saying that you could not mistake him as a ‘man of no mark’ is playful around this. In Shakespeare’s 1 Henry IV, King Henry is chiding his son Harry (the later Henry V) that he spends too much time with ‘vulgar’ lowlifes and in boisterous rowdiness. He should learn from his father, who kept himself apart from the mob: ‘A fellow of no mark nor likelihood. | By being seldom seen, I could not stir | But, like a comet, I was wondered at’ (iii. ii. 44–6). In his praise of Wordsworth’s reading aloud, Hazlitt is perhaps slightly mocking the poet for pomposity, and for his determinedly ‘obscure’ life in the Lakes, while also acknowledging the power of his separateness and uniqueness. Wordsworth is himself when you are in his presence and he is being himself as a poet, relishing the power in the turn of his best ‘favourite passages’. You could not mistake him. Hazlitt’s linking of presence (face and voice), to language (comment) is particularly perceptive in this. Coleridge’s poem ‘To a Gentleman’, about hearing Wordsworth reciting The Prelude through one night in 1807 remarks on the resonance of Wordsworth’s ‘deep voice’. His poem culminates upon that voice’s cessation at the end of his recital: And thy deep voice had ceased – yet thou thyself Wert still before my eyes … Scarce conscious, and yet conscious of its close I sate, my being blended in one thought (Thought was it? or Aspiration? or Resolve?) Absorb’d, yet hanging still upon the sound – And when I rose, I found myself in prayer.13

Coleridge’s Poetry and Prose, p. 203.

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Coleridge’s ‘hanging still’ upon the sound of Wordsworth’s voice, even once it is ceased, is reminiscent of The Prelude’s famous moment when the poet as a child went egg-stealing, ‘hung | Above the raven’s nest’, and hearing the ‘strange utterance’ of the ‘loud dry wind’, as it ‘blew’ through his mind (II, 341–8). ‘Scarce conscious … and yet conscious’; the ‘being blended in one thought’: the hearing of the poem in Wordsworth’s own voice, Coleridge intimates, was a blessing, but also a realization of other modes of being. Another contemporary, Thomas de Quincey, who idolized Wordsworth, saw this as perhaps his most unique quality – ‘W., by the by, is the only poet I ever met who could read his own verses,’ we are told; Wordsworth wrote in ways uniquely attuned to his voice as it could make sound, speak out, be attuned to who he was.14 Inevitably, we hear resonances of that presence when we take on Wordsworth’s words in our own voice, encounter them, adopt their ‘slowness’ in our world where ‘meaning’ is all too speedily to be obtained by the megabite, but where the extraordinary and the ‘preternatural’ are rarely to be encountered.15 Wordsworth’s insistence upon the products of his compositions being spoken aloud reiteratively takes us back to the heart of the difference between a musical expression and a

Thomas de Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater, edited by Althea Hayter (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), p. 99. 15 There is an obvious sense, however, in which most of us are unable to accommodate Wordsworth’s ‘voice’: the fact that it would have included strong dialectal sounds. A later Northern poet, Basil Bunting, was adamant ‘about Wordsworth, that he didn’t speak “standard” English but Westmoreland’. See Richard Burton, A Strong Song Tows Us: The Life of Basil Bunting (Oxford: Infinite Ideas, 2013), p. 438. Bunting would have learnt from Wordsworth, along with Ezra Pound, however, that poetry must be sounded out loud. Of his autobiographical sequence, Briggflatts, Bunting wrote: ‘Briggflatts is a poem: it needs no explanation. The sound of the words spoken aloud is itself the meaning, just as the sound of the notes played on the proper instruments is the meaning of any piece of music.’ Briggflatts (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 2009), p. 40. 14

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linguistic or textual one. As Carl Dalhaus has pointed out, ‘To grasp the meaning of a literary work, a reader need not bring to mind the phonetic form of the words, nor even know that form. … Musical meaning, in contrast to written meaning, is only to a slight extent, if at all, detachable from the sounding phenomena. To become musically real, a composition needs interpretation in sound.’16 That ‘musical meaning’, Dalhaus claims, while it might acknowledge the ‘inwardness’ of music, the way it speaks past other languages, and past our conscious mind to our emotions, pays attention also to the form through which the music is expressed in order to understand fully how it is that we are affected in particular ways by particular compositions. Wordsworth’s sense of the necessity of performance and interpretation through recitation involves that formal and therefore that aesthetic element (Dalhaus claims that attending a performance brings ‘awakening attention’ to the musical piece ‘as a sounding object fit for esthetic perception’17). Wordsworth’s drawing of our attention, in his 1815 ‘Preface’, to the length of syllables within a poetic line again looks forward to the kinds of modernist poetics which would underwrite the ‘experimental’ writing of such as Ezra Pound. But it should give us a pause here. Blank verse is usually scored as a vehicle for the speaking voice; its music frequently overlooked. But then, just consider four of the lines quoted above: O Derwent, travelling over the green plains Near my ‘sweet birthplace’, didst thou, beauteous stream, Make ceaseless music through the night and day Which with its steady cadence tempering. Much could be made here of the modulations between, for example, the various ‘e’ and ‘a’ sounds, as they move through Carl Dalhaus, Esthetics of Music, translated by William Austin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 12. 17 Ibid., p. 55. 16

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each other in the description of the river’s own music. ‘Derwent’, in its repeated ‘e’s, signals what is coming: ‘green’, ‘near’, ‘sweet’, ‘stream’, ‘ceaseless’, ‘steady’, ‘cadence’, ‘tempering’. There are parallelisms being set up, even, arguably, between ‘Derwent’ and ‘tempering’; the long ‘e’s of ‘green/sweet/stream’ emerge in ‘ceaseless’. For the ‘a’ sounds there are ‘travelling’, ‘plains’, ‘Make’, ‘day’ (two nice open ‘a’ sounds at start and close of the line), ‘cadence’. There are also nice alliterative or consonantal interplays – aural and visual: ‘birthplace/beauteous’; (a key one) ‘ceaseless/steady’; ‘sweet/stream/steady’ ‘travelling/ tempering’; the unexpected alteration of movement in ‘Which with’. Such a careful hearing of sonic possibilities within the poetry makes variation within the rhythm inevitable. While the basic iambic pattern of the blank verse is sustained in the strict ten-syllable lines, the vowel lengths and echoes, together with the punctuation determined by the rhythm and sub-clauses, allow for a dwelling and a pausing in the lines that brings out and enhances their quiet consonance. While it might be possible to make too much of this – we tend to read and to hear blank verse rapidly for its sense, primarily – it is interesting what Wordsworth achieves, along with his precursors Shakespeare and Milton, in bringing out a musicality in the sounding of his lines. Obviously, this is to an extent staged – the lines selected to serve this musicking work are an apostrophe which is seeking to signal the very issue of the musicality in nature which lies behind the poem’s own musical ambitions. This is one way in which the poem is ‘true’ to its primary lesson, that early life lived amid the hills and streams gives an energy, articulacy, and imagination, which never recedes with the wearinesses and torpor of life. Yet it is important, once we slow Wordsworth’s lines, pay attention to their careful modulations of sound, that we can witness in process the ‘ear’ which he constantly urges us to develop with regard to the natural world. That ‘ear’ is very much one that is inherent to both the content and the making of the poetry. This is another way, in other words, that the poem educates us – it trains us to listen, and to interpret, the score laid down.

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The audiological pioneer R. Murray Schafer feels that we have lost our ability to listen in a world which is polluted increasingly by environmental and undistinguished noise. Everyone, he feels, must work to retrieve that ‘significant aural culture’ we have had as a feature of our humanity since ancient times, when our ancestors began using objects in the world around them to make beats, rhythms, to play with different pitches and tones. This retrieval still, perhaps ever the more urgently, demands a fundamental shift in our attention to the world which we need to make (Schafer was writing in 1977). It is a shift which Wordsworth had signalled, and which The Prelude still urges, as vital. Key to that shift, Schafer feels, is an alteration of perception and understanding, and he casts that advocacy in Wordsworthian terms: we must, he says, ‘regard the soundscape of the world as a huge musical composition, unfolding around us ceaselessly’.18 Of all poems in Wordsworth’s wake, the contemporary English poet Alice Oswald’s book-length text Dart (whose foreword tells us that all this poem’s ‘voices should be read as the river’s mutterings’) is the one which takes the ideas of Schafer most to its heart. Oswald’s is a polyvocal testimony to the sounds of the voices of those whose lives are lived along the riverside in Devon; it gathers ancient and modern voices into its course. But the book also scores those voices alongside the persistent sounds from the river itself, what the opening page calls ‘this long winding line the Dart || this secret buried in reeds at the beginning of sound’. Across the piece, we hear what is called ‘this jabber of pidgin-river | drilling these rhythmic cells and trails of scales’. The whole text is adrift, directionally afloat, with the objects and lives accumulated in the Dart’s course from source to estuary, yet all of those moments and items are pointed to one end. There is at one point the voice of a stonewaller, who carries his stone round in

R. Murray Schafer, The Tuning of the World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977), pp. 205–6.

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a ‘clinker-built’ boat, but who is currently unemployed, the old trades becoming more and more redundant in the new world of industry the book also registers along the banks of the river. The stonewaller’s self-lament, though, is typically attuned: I dream my skin’s flaking off and silting up the house; because the boat’s my aerial, my instrument, connects me into the texture of things, as I keep saying, the grain, the drift of water which I couldn’t otherwise get a hold on.19 For the true craftspeople captured in Oswald’s poem, the tools, riverboats, fishing lines are a way of tuning into the world; they take the temper of the sound and physical circumstance (its ‘drift’ but also its ‘grain’). To that extent, they are all heralded by the poem as poets, their instruments as truly connecting them to the river as the poet Oswald’s words about them do. Dart is a poem of ‘one society’ in that sense, a capturing of idioms and intonations, a creation of a sounding of the river itself; it presents the Wordsworthian vision as a true democracy for those with the ears to attend. This is the ‘jabber’, but also the ‘secret’ which is buried, but consistent, beneath the distractions and chaotic screechings of the modern world. ‘Ceaselessness’. It is significant that, when speaking of the attention to the world which the ‘music’ of the river instilled into Wordsworth at the house where he spent his early years, that attention attuned itself to the ‘quiet’, or scarcely heard, sounds made by the world around. Scarcely heard: it is notable that in the Book I passage on the way in which the music of the River Derwent has lived along the poet’s dreams (and poems), the ‘ceaseless’ sound is described as a ‘murmur’ – the river ‘loved | To blend his murmurs with my nurse’s song’. This is the primal instance of harmony to the poet’s ears, one presumably now that he seeks to repeat in an achieved poetry. There is no

Alice Oswald, Dart (London: Faber, 2002), pp. 3, 15, 34.

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‘foreground’ and ‘background’ to the sound here or elsewhere: it is not that the primal river sounds play ‘behind’ whatever is being sounded at each moment in later life. The river sound is always ‘blended’ within them, always its own presence there. Wordsworth’s use of the word ‘murmur’ seems to accommodate two senses of the Oxford English Dictionary definition: ‘1. Subdued continuous or continuously repeated sound, now rare except in the murmur of (a brook, the waves etc)’ and 4. ‘A softly or gently spoken word or sentence; subdued or nearly inarticulate speech.’ Once you notice that the Derwent ‘murmurs’ as it scores the music of Wordsworth’s lifetime, you cannot ignore the fact that the word is repeated in both senses throughout the poem. Book IV, for instance, shows the speaker’s loyalty to his dog during his first summer vacation from Cambridge, as he walks the public roads of the Lake District near Hawkshead ‘busy with the toil of verse’. Composing his poems aloud as he walks, in other words, as he did across his life. The dog warns him to shut up, and saves him embarrassment, when someone approaches, as he ‘sauntered, like a river murmuring | And talking to itself’ (110–11). Later in Book IV, when he narrates the incident of coming unexpectedly upon the discharged soldier at a turn in the highway, the speaker ‘peruses’ him for a long time, but is fixated by the sound he makes: ‘From his lips meanwhile | There issued murmuring sounds, as if of pain | Or of uneasy thought.’ From time to time the soldier, sagged against a milestone, ‘sent forth a murmuring voice of dead complaint’ (421–2; 431). When he seeks a roof for the night for the soldier in a labourer’s cottage, the speaker reassures him that it will be no trouble to the labourer, even if he’s asleep, for ‘he will not murmur should we break his rest’.20 This whole scene of the soldier is set on a road that glitters so in the moonlight that it looks like a stream ‘in silent lapse’ Another OED reference (2) points to this element of potential complaint in the word, one often suppressed by Wordsworth, but lurking somewhere within his repetition of this key word. There is something rebellious here. 20

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down the hill ‘to join | The brook that murmured in the valley’ (l. 374–5). This world is alive with murmurings, both nature’s and humans’: that is what brings the two together. In his footnote to these latter lines, Jonathan Wordsworth in his edition of The Four Texts of the Prelude cross-refers us to an ‘origin’ in Adam’s description of paradise in Book VIII of Milton’s Paradise Lost: about me round I saw Hill, Dale, and shady woods, and sunny Plains, And liquid Lapse of murmuring Streams; by these, Creatures that liv’d, and mov’d, and walk’d, and flew. (261–4)21 The mention of ‘Plains’ conjures the ‘green plains’ in Wordsworth’s Book I apostrophe to the Derwent. Adam is supremely unself-conscious, of course, at this stage in Milton’s poem: Myself I then perus’d, and Limb by Limb Survey’d, and sometimes went, and sometimes ran With supple joints, as lively vigour led: But who I was, or where, or from what cause, Knew not; to speak I tri’d, and forthwith spake, My Tongue obey’d and readily could name Whate’er I saw. (267–73) For Milton’s Adam, bodily vigour leads to articulacy and to a direct naming of the things of the world, once and for all (Wordsworth’s lyric ‘Expostulation and Reply’ has set up a similarly Adamic situation, as ‘William’ chants that ‘The eye it cannot chuse but see, | We cannot bid the ear be still; | Our bodies feel, where’er they be, | Against, or with our will’

John Milton, Paradise Lost, edited by Christopher Ricks (London: Penguin, 1989), p. 182.

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MW, p. 130). The hidden clew though is in the ‘liquid Lapse’ of those ‘murmuring Streams’. The seemingly ‘innocent’ fall (‘Lapse’) of the waters is premonitory of the Fall of Mankind, even as Adam uses language for the first time. Yet it remains true that there is something directly Adamic about Wordsworth’s relation to the world of the nature in the Lake District, and to his expression of that world, particularly in these early books of The Prelude. However, that revelling is itself tempered by the sense that it does not include everyone encountered in the poem, such as the exhausted soldier. The soldier’s ‘murmurs’ include something other about experience which they make the poet attentive to. Wordsworth’s encounter with the discharged soldier carries this awareness of fallen-ness. Here is an encounter with a man utterly ruined by his experience and inducing sympathy. It is the ‘murmurs’ of the soldier’s voice, echoing the murmuring river of the poet composing in flight, which manifests his worthiness but also his destined vulnerability. Those murmurs, we might note, are to be heard throughout Wordsworth, including across many of the famous early poems. In ‘Nutting’, for example, that poem at one point intricate with The Prelude manuscript texts, we hear ‘fairy water’ breaks which ‘do murmur on | Forever murmur … murmuring sound’. In ‘Three years she grew in sun and shower’, the child ‘lean[s] her ear’ as ‘rivulets dance their wayward sound | And beauty born of murmuring sound | Shall pass into her face’. In ‘Home at Grasmere’, we hear ‘the murmuring streams | The many Voices’. In ‘Michael’, a cottage seen (and heard) from outside, ‘murmurs’ with industry, and so on (MW, pp. 153, 155, 191, 225). Human and natural action and poetry are interlinked by this particular denomination of a kind of regular sound which exists at the edge of hearing, which is hard to grasp, while leading us to bend our ears to it, pay it careful attention. The idea that the attentiveness that the poet gives to the world from the outset is towards its quiet, ‘scarcely heard’ end of the aural spectrum – that this is what ‘tempers’ and

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‘steadies’ the music of a life as it does the music of this poetry – does not exclude the possibility of the opposite reach of the spectrum playing, as a result, its full disturbing part in the poem. The sounds of the world in The Prelude are also loud at key moments. The ‘loud prophecy’ erupts from the shell given to the speaker by the Arab in the dream sequence of Book V. It is as though the dream allows for the intensity, the ‘ode to passion’, which has to be suppressed so much within the everyday world, and it is that which makes the passage emblematic for the poet. ‘Real world’ sounds, as it were, often echo and lend access to the loudness of imagined peaks of emotion. The ‘growth of the poet’s mind’ is pivoted around this notion of listening, and the world imposes surprising loudness upon that mind when it is unguarded, unpatrolled, lacking its true temper and tonality. The important moment here is in Book VI, where the poet and his companion take the wrong path during their walk across the Alps, and are told by someone they meet on this wrong path that they have in fact already crossed the mountain range. The walkers retrace their steps, find the proper path, and begin to descend by the route they had originally intended to take. The poem, at the point at which the ‘peasant’ tells them that they have crossed the Alps, itself pauses, and offers a eulogy to the ‘Imagination’. The ‘Imagination’ is posited as though in compensation for the fact that, as it were, the revelation to be had by following the ‘correct’ path has been accidentally denied: ‘the light of sense | Goes out in flashes that have shown to us | The invisible world’ (534–6). What is notable, however, is that the episode leads to heightened sensory awareness. As the travellers retrace their steps and begin down the riverbed where their missed path in fact lies, the writing opens to The rocks that muttered close upon our ears, With dull reverberation never ceasing, Black drizzling crags that spoke by the wayside As if a voice were in them, the sick sight

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And giddy prospect of the raving stream, The unfettered clouds and region of the heavens, Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light – Were all like the workings of one mind. (562–8) This is an increasing disorientation of the talking voice’s senses by a speaking landscape, one that moves from the inarticulate and barely audible ‘muttered’ with ceaseless ‘reverberation’ to the ‘raving’ stream, in a few lines. The ‘workings’ of the ‘mind’ which all of this represents (we are told that there are, in this landscape, the ‘types and symbols of eternity’) are full, not just of the contrasting elements upon which the passage settles, but also of the voices through which they ‘speak’. In an extraordinary further leap, this passage is rounded off as the travellers arrive at their place of stay for the night, the ‘inn, or hospital (as they are named)’ only to find that the fabric of the ‘dreary mansion’ itself has become a sounding chamber (a kind of inner ear) for this momentousness. The ‘high and spacious rooms’ are ‘deafened and stunned | By noise of waters’, and so ‘innocent sleep’ is rendered impossible there (574, 578–9). All this sounding, then, comes to a fascinating point at which The Prelude has once again unexpectedly swallowed Shakespeare. Macbeth, bursting from the chamber of Duncan, after he has murdered him: ‘Methought I heard a voice cry “Sleep no more! | Macbeth does murder sleep”, the innocent sleep, | Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care, | The death of each day’s life’ (II, ii, 33–6). The travellers in Wordsworth’s ‘deafened and stunned’ inn are transgressors, they have killed what they should most respect and hope for by going astray on their journey, and the malign ‘noise’ of the world makes its retribution. As a poet, the speaker needed to ‘have his experience’ of the sublime by taking the proper route through the Alps, but he has stupidly missed it. The passage on the Imagination is a poor corrective, maybe an afterthought, but it does not relieve the speaker of a harrowing which tests his vocation. It is almost as if, like Macbeth’s King Duncan, the companions are, in the ‘stunned’ house, in their graves, since

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the denial of ‘innocent sleep’ there makes them ‘lie melancholy among weary bones’. The moment immediately passes with the night – the travellers set out in the morning to other Eden-like scenes amid the Italian Lakes, scenes which obviously, such is the back-to-front aspect of the ‘narrative’ of The Prelude, in time predict the opening of the poem, and its arrival amid the scenes of the English Lakes. In Italy, we are told, ‘tones of learned art and nature mixed’ to ‘frame an enduring language’ (604–5). This will be the language of the poem itself, newly released as Wordsworth moves towards Dove Cottage in the Glad Preamble. The ‘deafened and stunned’ inn is, indeed, a ‘hospital’ (as it is named), taking those who have experienced the ‘sick sight’ and the ‘raving’ stream, and, through its own literal embodiment and sounding of the experience, sending the travellers away in some sense healed, open to the new experience: ‘our journey we renewed | Led by the stream’, then by ‘a lordly river’, ‘dimpling along in silent majesty’. The king restored, that lovely intransitive ‘dimpling’ setting the land as a human body revivified, enjoining love (the contrast might be Macbeth’s smearing the king’s blood falsely to indict the grooms). Yet sleep is vital to Wordsworth, its loss the most destructive threat to his well-being and to its correlative quietness. The loss of way in crossing the Alps which disturbs him in Book VI predicts the political traumas of Book X. There, the massacres of rebellious Frenchmen by the army in 1792 come back to disturb Wordsworth’s sleep on a later visit to Paris. He tells us of his saying to himself them: ‘Day follows day, all things have second birth; The earthquake is not satisfied at once!’ And in such way I wrought upon myself Until I seemed to hear a voice that cried To the whole city ‘Sleep no more!’ (73–7) Just previously, he says that he has heard of these awful events through ‘tragic fictions | And mournful calendars of true history’,

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which perhaps prompts his recourse to the ‘tragic fiction’ of Macbeth as the apocalyptic messenger of, and exacerbation of, the trauma of personal and national usurpation. Once again, it is the imagination, the world of dreams, which is most affected by this disturbance. Later in Book X, the speaker records his ‘melancholy’ at the atrocities, at the way in which the liberal aspirations of the French Revolution rapidly became the reality of recrimination, imperial ambition, and blood in the streets. Turning typically to Coleridge (‘o friend’), the speaker adopts a private language as the only way to convey the horror of the generational catastrophe for those, like the two poets, who had themselves felt freed by the uprisings in France: (I speak bare truth As if to thee alone in private talk) I scarcely had one night of quiet sleep, Such ghastly visions had I of despair, And tyranny, and implements of death, And long orations which in dreams I pleaded Before unjust tribunals, with a voice Labouring, a brain confounded. (371–8) ‘Melancholy’ at events puts his own voice, its fluency, under threat; the ‘ghastly visions’ and notion that he must be answerable to what has happened, like so many other ‘traitors’ in Paris under Robespierre, not only confuses him in this account, but challenges his ability to express himself. In both cases, it is the voice apocryphally heard, the sounds of his own voice in some Kafka-esque nightmare, which are the foci of the relation of historical trauma in which he is caught up. At stake here is the clash between his generation’s political and philosophical idealism, the feeling cast aside by the brutal inhuman humanity of his times. What it emerges as is a hearing, a listening, the ‘labouring’ for breath of his own voice at a moment and in a context where a voice can cry to the whole city, delivering its eternal insomnia – ‘Sleep no more!’ By killing calm, quiet, the ‘steady cadence’ of

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nature that ‘flows along dreams’, human kind is threatened by voicelessness. ‘Quiet’ sleep, the reduction in volume, here, as at Wordsworth’s birthplace, restores.22 It is the sounds of the world, and the sounds of the voice, his own and others’, then, which educate the true poet. It is to them, soft or loud, that she or he must (to adopt McGilchrist’s sense of the function of the brain’s hemispheres) be vigilant and attentive. One of the readjustments that The Prelude is involved in, outside of the allegories that McGilchrist offers for this reader of it, is one in which the audible is rendered as significant as the visual, the ‘sick sight’ of despair alongside ‘the raving stream’. In this, also, The Prelude is prophetic. Jacques Attali has put the matter at its starkest: For twenty-five centuries, Western knowledge has tried to look upon the world. It has failed to understand that the world is not for beholding. It is for hearing. It is not legible, but audible. With this adjustment, the art form which speaks sound takes, in Attali’s view, priority: ‘Music is prophetic. Its styles and economic organization are ahead of the rest of society because it explores, much faster than material reality can, the entire range of possibilities in a given code. It makes audible the new world that will gradually become visible, that will impose itself and regulate the order of things.’23 In order to understand our future, we need to reverse the relative speeds of light and sound. Hear first, see after.

Very striking in this regard then is the opening retrospect of Book VII of The Prelude, which describes the initial 1798–9 period of its composition as ‘deep | But short-lived uproar, like a torrent sent | Out of the bowels of a bursting cloud’ (5–7). Dorothy’s The Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals are repeatedly drawn to link Wordsworth’s periods of composition to illness – ‘William working at his poem all morning. … W very sick & very ill.’ p. 30. 23 Jacques Attali, ‘Noise: the Political Economy of Music’, in The Sound Studies Reader, edited by Jonathan Sterne (London: Routledge, 2012), p. 29. 22

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From the perspective of Sound Studies, Wordsworth seems a particularly radical thinker and hearer, in that he is interested in the total environment of sounds. The sound artist Francisco Lopéz has pointed to the importance of recognizing how our attention to such things as the sound of birdsong involves an arbitrary selection and isolation of that particular sound ‘from the “background” sound of its environment’. We make that selection out of a fuller apprehension of the sonic environment than such mechanical devices as microphones are able to register: I don’t believe there is such a thing as the ‘objective’ apprehension of sonic reality. Regardless of whether or not we are recording, our minds conceptualize an ideal of sound. And not only different people listen differently, but the very temporality of our presence in a place is a form of editing. The spatial, material, and temporal transfigurations exist independently of phonography. Our idea of the sonic reality, even our fantasy about it, is the sonic reality each one of us possesses.24 Our attitude to the sound environment, in other words, creates who we are at any one moment, establishes our re-becoming or reconnecting to the world, its ‘temporality’, or place in time. We become other selves, we change ourselves, as we adapt our ways of listening. Wordsworth’s ‘Boy’ mimics the owls, listens to their responses, but then ‘hears’ the silence, and the torrents; we can see his editing of attention through the poetry, just as Wordsworth always and frequently brings us back to how we hear the world. It is definitive of our moment, and of our place in history. It’s ‘our decision’, Lopéz continues, ‘subjective, intentional, non-universal, not necessarily permanent – that converts nature sounds into music’, as Wordsworth does in Francesco Lopéz, ‘Profound Listening and Environmental Sound Matter’, in Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, edited by Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner (New York: Continuum, 2004), p. 85.

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The Prelude (its ‘ceaseless music’) and across his writing. This musical state, if we can attain it, comes from ‘profound listening, an immersion in the inside of sound matter’. We so often now are trapped on the outside of things, things whose essence seems to be thinned-out or voided before we come to pay attention to them. To that extent, we are shut outside, contemporary sound artists affirm, of our own place in the moment, and so in the history, of our world. That history is there for us to listen deeply into, even if the greatest difficulty is involved in trying to recapture it (partly, as this book shows, that history is resonating all around us in the etymologies of the words that we choose to put into the air). In his survey of the history of sound, Sinister Resonance, David Toop has noted that ‘places are saturated with unverifiable atmospheres and memory and these are derived as much from sound as from any other sensation’. As the title of his book suggests, however, those ‘atmospheres’ are often associated for him with a hauntedness that is frightening. Why is it, he says in his own ‘Prelude’ to the book, that ‘the various modalities of sound – from silence to noise – [are] associated so frequently with disquiet, uncertainty and fear, with childhood terrors and a horror of the unknown?’25 We are reminded that one of the things Wordsworth draws upon from Edmund Burke is that the ‘sublime’ is dependent not just upon the beautiful but also upon terror, upon the ‘beauty’ and the ‘fear’ which Book I of The Prelude claims particularly ‘fostered’ the poet in his native landscape and birthplace (‘I grew up | Fostered alike by beauty and by fear, | Much favoured in my birthplace’ (307–9)). Burke’s definitions of ‘beauty’ and ‘fear’ are useful for this meditation generally: ‘Beauty is, for the greater part, some quality in bodies, acting mechanically upon the human mind by the intervention of the senses.’ ‘Fear being an apprehension

David Toop, Sinister Resonance: The Mediumship of the Listener (London: Continuum, 2010), pp. 7–8.

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of pain or death, it operates in a manner that resembles actual pain.’26 The bodiliness and mimeticism of this is something that will be a continuing preoccupation here, but the relation of beauty and fear to sound, in the way that they are extrapolated by Wordsworth in The Prelude, is our immediate concern. For, we are further reminded, that just as the fact of the uniqueness of the birthplace in Book I has been stated, the speaker recalls his first transgression, the stealing of birds from other people’s traps. The retribution resonates forward, five books later, to the scene about missing the way in the Alps and its aftermath: when the deed was done I heard among the solitary hills Low breathings, coming after me, and sounds Of undistinguishable motion, steps Almost as silent as the turf they trod. (I, 328–32) Those steps look slightly forward to the ominous appearance of the mountain behind the mountain that seems to ‘stride’ after the poet in the more silent ‘boat-stealing’ passage. We encounter ‘Breaths’ and breathings again – but also the ‘almost-silence’ of a world which frighteningly does its own ‘tempering’ of those who do not obey its laws.

Sound may say Of course, beyond a merely descriptive, in itself gestural, notion of Wordsworth and sound, there exists a silence. We can never know what sound meant to him, or what sound his poetry of sound (its modulations) made at the moment of its Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of Sublime and Beautiful and other Pre-Revolutionary Writings, edited by David Womersley (London: Penguin, 1998), pp. 146, 101.

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creation, in his head, on his tongue. David Toop is especially sharp and reflective about the issues here: Notions of authenticity are built upon such partial material, but the transposition is awkward. Ways of hearing are notoriously subjective. We have mechanisms for comparing sounds by scientific testing and anecdotal evidence, but no way of knowing exactly what another person is hearing at any given moment. Each person’s brain adapts auditory input to a template particular to the individual, so if one person were suddenly to inhabit the body of another, what they heard would be unfamiliar. The further back in time we travel, the less certainty can be ascribed to the way people once listened, what it was they heard, and what it was they believed they heard.27 We would never be able to hear what Wordsworth was hearing; he could not even himself rehear it, even if he conjures it in memory, and in poetry. On the other hand, reading (or, better, reciting) Wordsworth is a kind of embodiment which, like all such encounters, is a way of hearing the ‘unfamiliar’ inside our own mind’s- or our physical ears. Toop’s weird and scary idea of suddenly inhabiting the body of someone else, and then hearing in an unpredictable, unprecedented, way is what in a sense later poets and poems do to earlier ones. They take on the shape or form or intonation of preceding examples, and make, more than any other medium, something out of that strange music. We are perhaps the more sensitive to this, since Wordsworth so frequently enjoins us to listen, and the story of his life that he has to tell in The Prelude is, in some strains, a history of his listening in, to the particular places that he locates himself within. There is an important conjunction in a poem Wordsworth wrote in 1828–9, ‘On the Power of Sound’. In

Sinister Resonance, p. 33.

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addressing the reader, the poem calls ‘To life, to life give back thine ear’, since ‘the swell of notes’ is vast, and can contain things like ‘terror, joy, or pity’. By implication, the fear is that the ‘ear’ has been given ‘to death’, or has become deadened: there is an inherent haunting to all of this, as both a positive way of hearing the past, and as a kind of anti-poetry, a spirit that kills.28 But the poem ‘On the Power of Sound’ is also about the need for perfectibility: O for some soul-affecting scheme Of moral music, to unite Wanderers whose portion is the faintest dream Of memory! (MW, p. 313) The speaker asks for sight to be coupled in ‘precious chains’ in order that this might come about, so that ‘truth’ might ‘tell | Of the Unsubstantial’. ‘Faint’ sounds are here attached to memory, the almost-inaudible resonances from our own pasts which we find it so hard to capture (I take ‘moral’ here to perform much the same function as that ‘tempering’ of mankind effected by the River Derwent in The Prelude Book I). How do we tune into ourselves, how do we recover the sounds of the past through which we have lived, and so become anew what we were and what we might be? Sound as making ‘Each man’ a ‘memory to himself’. We might note here the limitedness of the vocabulary in English to capture sound. The OED entry meaning one for ‘murmur’, as noted above, sets the word’s first meaning as now ‘rare’. It has become a mere poeticism ‘normally’ associated with ‘brooks’ or streams, although we also noted that it could contain a positive resonance, by looking back to Adam’s description of Eden in Paradise Lost. Wordsworth does find original descriptors for sound (we’ve had ‘breathings’, ‘muttering’ rocks, a ‘raving Geoffrey Hartmann has some important pages on this haunting, and ‘On the Power of Sound’, in his The Unremarkable Wordsworth (London: Methuen, 1987), pp. 96–102.

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stream’). But, at other moments, his vocabulary can be as generic as his gestures towards the landscape even of his Lake District (‘hills’, ‘vale’, ‘mountains’, ‘meadows’, etc). There is something non-specific and known in all of these terms; they await the moment when true insight through the ‘dream of memory’ can break through. This does not prevent, of course, any place from being as it were its own history of such sounds – in other words, Toop’s assertion that sound forms a kind of haunting, across a life and between lives, through time: Sound may say – these are the invisible traces of memories that have collected over centuries; this is the unique atmosphere of this precise spot, too humble to be noticed in the rush of ordinary life. The revelation comes through pausing, listening.29 Toop’s argument here, as elsewhere in Sinister Resonance, is about the Gothic, haunting, implications of the survival of sound in places, its chilling effect. What springs to mind here is the opening of the American poet Elizabeth Bishop’s semi-autobiographical short story, ‘In the Village’, where an unidentified scream, or the echo of a scream, hovers over a small Nova Scotian settlement: The scream hangs like that, unheard, in memory – in the past, in the present, in those years in between. It was not even loud to begin with, perhaps. It just came there to live, forever. The scream, the story hints, is a marker of the insanity of the narrator’s mother; it is unleashed by her because of her unhappiness at the shape a new dress is taking. Yet it scares and haunts the child narrator, who is compensated by her love

Sinister Resonance, p. 58.

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for the ‘beautiful, pure sound’ which she is drawn to in the village smithy, the sounds made by her surrogate parent, the blacksmith Nate.30 In the story, we are in the village, under the scream, in the unexplained trauma, which we only exit from, as does the girl storyteller, on the story’s last page. Bishop was particularly susceptible to such sounds overhead, and filtering down to earth, and to their aftermath. In an early prose piece, ‘From “Time’s Andromedas”’, she recalls hearing the ‘multitude of small sounds’ which she comes to realize are the wing-beats of the birds migrating south as they pass overhead, but also the pauses between the sounds, as ‘the interspaces moved in pulsation too catching up and continuing the motion of the wings in wakes, carrying it on, as the rest in music does’. The wing-beats offer up ‘time patterns’, ‘a static fact of the world, the birds here or there, always’. It is ‘hurry’, but also ‘infinite’; it haunts the prose intonations of Bishop’s piece, and stands as a model for her poetic ‘time patterns’ later on.31 Wordsworth was alert to similar haunting to that ‘In the Village’ at similar moments of recalled trauma. In the section of The Prelude that was most moved around between versions down to 1805, the poet in its Book XI recalls waiting, sheltered by a stone wall, for an ostler to bring the horses that were to take them back to home in Cockermouth from school at Hawkshead for Christmas. They were excited, although ‘Twas a day | Stormy, and rough, and wild’. Yet, within ten days, their father would be dead, an event which the speaker attributes to the boys’ selfish desires at that season. However, the poetry continues, since that event, ‘all the business of the elements, | The single sheep, and the one blasted tree, | And the bleak music of that old stone wall, | The noise of wood and water’ – all those ‘spectacles and sounds’ – have come back to him (376–9). From 1805, this is the final of the ‘spots of time’ in Elizabeth Bishop, Prose, edited by Lloyd Schwartz (London: Chatto and Windus, 2011), pp. 62, 77. 31 Ibid., pp. 466–7. 30

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this preliminary disquisition among the final books of The Prelude, on the ‘Imagination’.32 At key traumatic moments in the life, as at moments of inspiration, it is the sound which continues into the future, ‘bleak music’, mere ‘noise’, within the setting of the scene. But again the poem moves forward. Toop’s sense of ‘pausing, listening’ to the past, is one way in which Wordsworth’s poem operates. But part of its ‘ceaselessness’ is that it is a poetry of movement, of walking. There is the initial walk into Grasmere Vale, other incidents on ‘the public roads’ such as the meeting with the discharged soldier. There is the ‘military march’ undertaken with Robert Jones across revolutionary France, the Alps, and into Italy, in Book VI. There is the climatic night walk up Snowden, which came into the poem in Spring 1804, and remained the ‘end point’ to the poem from then on. As illustrated in the crossing-the-Alps passage, the process of walking also adapts our sense of the sound landscape. Toop’s ‘haunting’, we might note, is very place-specific, but other writers on the theory of sound have pointed to the freedoms brought by the changing of sound that movement brings. Shuhei Hosokawa has quoted Michel de Certeau to this effect. The listening adjustments made as we walk today around a town or city alter our attitude and mood, in ways similar to how we manipulate speech and language: The act of walking is to the urban system what enunciation (the speech act) is to language or the system of available utterances. At the most elementary level it has a triple ‘enunciative’ function: it is a process of appropriation of the topographical system by the pedestrian (in the same way that the speaker appropriates and assumes language for himself); it is a spatial realization of place (as the speech act is sonorous realization of language); and finally it implies certain relations between differential positions, that

Note on where passage had occurred before.

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is, certain pragmatic ‘contracts’ in the form of movements (in the same way as verbal enunciation is an ‘allocation’, a ‘positioning of the other’ in relation to the speaker, and establishes a contract between speakers).33 When he encounters the discharged soldier, we might remember, the poet is composing his own verse aloud on the road; the incident with the soldier becomes an odd, ‘instantanteous’, incorporation of the event into the ‘new’, or succeeding, piece of poetry (despite the fact that the incident had in fact been composed years earlier, in 1798, and is now incorporated into this context). The walk, in other words, bridges time, speakers, through the kinds of reorientation through voicing and enunciation that it involves and necessitates. It also silently performs an act of self-instantiation, linking the speaker ‘now’ to her or his ‘own’ past, by linking back into the ways that the self has been expressed, and has expressed its relations, to ‘the world’ previously. Enunciation is about various kinds of incorporation, but it is movement which enables all of this in the poem – the movement of the voice, the movement of the speaker through time, the movement through space. ‘Ceaseless music’, in other words, is echoed by the poem’s ceaseless movement across life and landscapes, all of which involves it in hearing the sounds of, and in sounding, and echoing its own sounds back into, the world around. I am minded here of Krzyztof Kieslowski’s film The Double Life of Véronique. Music is at the heart of the movie; the Veronika figured at the start of the film lives in Prague, but travels to a regional town where her unusual singing voice, her natural ability which does not match the conventional canons of performance, is deployed at a concert. But she suffers from heart problems, and dies on stage making her debut singing the soprano solo in a piece which then resounds across the rest of the movie. Her ‘double’ in France, Véronique, is a

Shuhei Hosokawa, ‘The Walkman Effect’, The Sound Studies Reader, p. 112.

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music teacher who suffers also, we surmise, with a congenital heart problem. This French Véronique experiences the intense ‘loss’ of someone as Veronika dies. Véronique yearns for a puppeteer who visits the school she works at, a puppeteer who is also a successful writer and children’s author. Intriguingly, he lures Véronique to Paris by sending her through the post an unexplained tape recording of the sounds of the place at a railway station, where he situates himself in order to wait for her. It is a test of her hearing and listening to discover him, by interpreting the everyday sounds that he gifts to her. Eventually, she works it out, travels to the station café where he is, but is doubtful about it all (clumsily the puppeteer seems to suggest, when they do meet, that it has all been a mindgame, an experiment to see if she will really follow the trail in sound). Véronique, upset, tries to run off; he discovers her hiding in a hotel lobby; they become lovers and the existence of her ‘double’ is unwittingly revealed. What is exciting about the film is that it makes no attempt to explain itself, or to accept any given form. We are asked to accept the two musical central female characters, and the fact of their odd ‘feeling’ for the existence of the other, or at least of an other out there somewhere in the world. Primarily, though, what is powerful in The Double Life of Véronique is the sense of being haunted and led by sound, that Véronique is particularly susceptible to the puppeteer and the magical transformations he brings to the puppets in his show, because she is a talented musician. The visual surface of the film, which is very rich, and often sensual, ultimately gives way before the fact of sound, the translation of a setting and circumstance onto a recorded tape. She is pulled to her lover by a thread of sound (‘both’ Veronika and Véronique play with a woven thread at various moments in the movie). The film’s refusal to explain or to mediate all of this to its audience, to resolve itself, protects its own orchestration and musicality against the ‘normal’ defences of cinema, its painterliness and narrative orderliness. It is something of this that I am trying to say about the musicality of The Prelude, its unsettledness, and its

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transitoriness and transitional spacing between an unresolved version of ‘self’ and the world. Like the ‘Wanderer’ in the later The Excursion, what we have through this musicality is ‘a Being made | Of many Beings’.34 In his A Philosophy of Walking, Frédéric Gros affords Wordsworth a special place in the history of a certain kind of liberation. Wordsworth was, according to Gros, the first to conceive of walking as ‘a poetic act, a communion with Nature’ – and the first to take the rhythm of walking as the score for his writing: ‘His poetry is infused with a walking rhythm, steady, monotonous, unshowy … walking contains this huge power of repetition, repetition of the Same.’ For Gros, the time of the walk (the time of all our walks) is a time out of time, an escape from the everyday to which we know we will have to return, but an escape that, through such monotony of, and repetition in, the body, liberates the mind into thought, undirected, musing. Walking also liberates language. In the everyday world ‘Our language is tailored to the conventions of things, predictable gestures, normalized behaviours, received attitudes … in the silence of the walk, when you end up losing the use of words because by then you are doing nothing but walk … in that silence you hear better, because you are finally hearing what has no vocation to be retranslated, recoded, reformatted.’ Gros’s philosophy sees such moments as existential, a way of escaping ‘identity’ into an exploration of the ‘outer limits of the self and of the human’.35 Such ideas take on their own history, in different times and zones, including those outside the philosophical remit of Gros’s polemic. The American poet Wallace Stevens, for instance, wrote in an ‘Autobiographical Statement’ that ‘a great deal’ of his poetry had been ‘written’ while he was ‘out walking’. ‘Walking helps me to concentrate and I suppose that, somehow or other, my own movement gets into the movement of the The Excursion, Book I, l. 430–1. Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking, translated by John Howe (London: Verso, 2014), pp. 209, 212, 62.

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poems.’ He jots down notes along the way as Wordsworth had. But Stevens then hands them in to a stenographer once he arrives at his place of work, the insurance office, since the stenographer ‘frequently’ does a better job at ‘deciphering’ the notes than Stevens claims he himself could.36 This is all witty but emblematic. The poems are ‘written’ out of bodily movement; they are made up of ‘notes’ (think of the title of Stevens’s verse autobiography, ironically Notes towards a Supreme Fiction). But the ‘notes’ are indecipherable to their inventor; only on his return with them to the ‘real’ world of work in the office can they be handed over to the person officially responsible for making something acceptable and publicly legible of them, the stenographer. The poet will then edit the stenographer’s version into something which ‘satisfies me at the time’, and which can be published. Walking, like reading, is a freeing of the self from the everyday, from other people (it is solitary walking we are talking about, for Gros and Stevens, as for Rousseau and Wordsworth). It is a freedom from convention, not least from the conventions and suppressions we impose on ourselves, partly to cope with, and survive in, the everyday. At one point, Gros fantasizes about just walking out one day and not returning, disappearing. But he worries that this might limit the chance to revel in the walk, which, in the history of philosophy, by Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Thoreau, has gained something of its freedom from being in parenthesis, as it were, in a time outside and beyond. Gros includes among the damned and damning everyday world, which the walk frees us from, static scholarship, academe, ‘books made from other books’. While walking, you are dependent upon the memory which you carry with you; like Wordsworth arriving in the Vale of Grasmere, you are ‘free of bonds’.37

Wallace Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, edited by Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson (New York: Library Classics, 1997), p. 871. 37 Ibid., pp. 16, 19–20. 36

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Although Wordsworth happily incorporated phrases and passages from Shakespeare, alongside others on nature from such as Thomson and Cowper, into The Prelude, it is not a literary text. Wordsworth’s ideal person, despite his own ‘task’ as a poet, and enquiry into how that came to be so, is someone like the pedlars on the roads, or the shepherds on the hillsides – indeed, draft passages from a project for a poem called ‘The Pedlar’ are among the works ‘cut and pasted’ into the body of The Prelude text. These models bear reflection. In another early draft called ‘The Ruined Cottage’, which eventually became Book I of The Prelude’s sister work, The Excursion (1815), a pedlar, his past, and his situation as a favourite within the education provided by living in nature, forms the main character. Stephen Gill notes of this that Wordsworth as an old man saw himself in the pedlar figure – had he not received the ‘liberal education’ he had, Wordsworth might have become the pedlar or beggar represented by him in the poetry, who is ‘an idea of what I fancied my own character might have become’ (MW, p. 686). Pedlars, out in every kind of weather, solitary, treading the hard roads, seeking to make an existence out of the wares they can carry. The poet as itinerant, constantly needing to stay in motion in order to be able to present his goods to new people, to find new ways of giving what he has. The poet exposed, and needing to mediate what he has in order to ensure that he can sell it. The poet as a stoical figure – ‘we die, | My Friend, nor we alone’, as the Pedlar in ‘The Ruined Cottage’ has it (MW, p. 33). It is notable even of this figure, however, that he has received something at least like a ‘liberal education’. In making his own commentary upon the brevity of life, he is particularly attuned to the ‘elegies and songs’ of the (classical) ‘Poets’, ‘Lamenting the departed’. Although his own ‘lament’ is more ‘tranquil’, a reflection of his ‘meditative mind’ as it ponders these losses and so ‘grows’ them ‘with thought’, this Pedlar is particularly alert to the tradition within which his story of the tragic Margaret, and of the family which once inhabited the now-ruined cottage, fits (MW, p. 33–4). Wordsworth, walking the roads and field-ways, the orchard paths of his

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‘sweet’ valley, composing his works in notebooks which are then edited and transcribed in the woods or at home, by his sister, wife, sister-in-law, and later by an amanuensis, seems particularly to take upon himself a character and a figure like the Pedlar’s. Experienced through his exposure to the weathers, to the sad stories of humanity which he derives from the sights and encounters he has along the way, Wordsworth’s poetry is similarly reflective, meditative, to this speaker in ‘The Ruined Cottage’. Like the Pedlar, Wordsworth pays his own tribute to the Classics, as precursors for the kinds of pastoral and often elegiac poetry with which he is creating. Yet he sustains also the sense that there is a more calm, less literary, approach to be taken to the narration of these tragedies which have occurred in the local landscape, the specific sites such as the road where he meets the discharged soldier, or the cottage well where the Pedlar finds energy to tell of Margaret. In Book VIII of The Prelude, Wordsworth tells of his early susceptibility to ‘images of danger and distress’, the Lear-like ‘men suffering among awful powers and forms’; he had, he tells us, ‘heard and saw enough’ of such suffering himself. He was told the tales by the ‘dame’ he lodged with at Hawkshead, Ann Tyson. Then, as in the present of the poem, such stories made and make his ‘imagination restless’ (212–21). It is out of such restlessness that the unresolved music of his own poetry arrives. Walking out from Grasmere in July 1981, the Maxwell ‘Parallel Text’ edition of The Prelude in my hand, proved the power of that rebellion, and of the aftermath of that moment as a form of entering into responsibility. The trucks still meander revving through the valley, birds still call to each other across the hillsides. Clouds still shadow the land. Walking out alone with The Prelude, with The Prelude alone. Subsequent life has been a quest for such moments of unlocking, freeing, being surprised by others as they in turn make the world resonate, including the surprises created in this regard by our young sons. As though in unconscious preparation for the sounding and thinking in this piece, the opening moments of writing this book,

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the poem previously drafted in the poetry notebook in which I’ve also made my notes on Wordsworth is one recalling the walks I took as a parent along a canal path to our second son’s school, particularly those walks during the harshness of winter: SOUNDING THE CANAL Five harsh days of hard frosts, the canal path a glistening ribbon of solid mud, the canal’s crystalline surface parading the canal-bed’s detritus – logs, branches, a bike frame, rocks of clumped earth, a tracery of skeletal leaves bolted into the solid substance. Only when you began prising small pebbles out of the path from their thumb-print mud pebble-beds, and skimming them swiftly across the frost-icinged canal surface, was life to be re-heard: dull-zingings, light dashes of sound sounded deep through the canal’s base echoing beneath and beyond the canal bridge, disturbing the out-of-their depth, ice-bewildered geese to clatter into the air.

… sent a voice … The poet who was particularly and directly preoccupied, at least in one phase of his career, by certain of the acoustic and technical aspects of Wordsworth’s writing, was the late Irish writer Seamus Heaney. Heaney was particularly attuned to

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Wordsworth’s outdoor rhythms, and to their political and metaphysical reach. That attuned-ness begins the ‘Introduction’ to a little selection he made, The Essential Wordsworth, by mentioning sound: ‘As a child, William Wordsworth imagined he heard the moorlands breathing on his neck.’ This is nice, not just because it links the ‘low breathing’ the child-poet felt ‘coming after’, and sounds of ‘undistinguishable motion’, in to the imagination. Heaney also draws outer hearing and inner hearing together. But the extension Heaney makes to the lines he is remembering – ‘on his neck’ – words not in the Wordsworth, adds a physicality, a frisson. Heaney soon links these moments to a Freudian uncanny, in the personal response to sound which is there in Wordsworth, but which is drawn out further in Heaney’s own poetry. The Essential Wordsworth reprints ‘The Two-Part Prelude’ entire, together with selected passages from the 1805 version. But Heaney’s comments on the long ‘ceaseless music’ passage, which he quotes in his Introduction, are lovely in the way they emblematize this moment, and, by implication, carry Wordsworth’s practice of sounding into his own attention as a poet: Here we are immediately in the presence of much that is especially characteristic of Wordsworth’s verse: its fluvial procedures, its murmur that does not preclude declarativeness, its onwardness that does not preclude sidewinding. It is necessary to concentrate attention on the project of his syntax, but it is also essential to allow the sensation which emanates from the undersong of narcotic vowels and pliant consonants to possess the ear.38 Heaney’s insights here recall his own earlier meditations on Wordsworth’s distinctive sound-world in his 1978 lecture, ‘The Makings of a Music’. ‘The more attentively Wordsworth listens in,’ Heaney challenges, meaning a listening ‘in’ to the The Essential Wordsworth, selected by Seamus Heaney (New York City, NJ: The Ecco Press, 1988), p. 8.

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sounds of the world and to the sounds of his own voice, ‘the more cheerfully and abundantly he speaks out.’ ‘The Makings of a Music’ quotes some wonderful reminiscences about the poet composing aloud, which Canon Rawnsley had gathered from local residents: ‘thear was anuder thing as kep’ folks off, he hed a terr’ble girt deep voice. … I’ve knoan folks, village lads and lasses, coming ower by t’auld road … flayt a’most to death there by t’Wishing Gate to hear t’girt voice a goranin’ and mutterin’ and thunderin’ of a still evening.’ Heaney also picks up on Hazlitt’s essay ‘My First Acquaintance with the Poets’, with its account of the Wordsworth voice, and of his habit of composing in the open, ‘(if he could) walking up and down a straight gravel walk, or in some spot where the continuity of his verse met with no collateral interruption’. All of this in service of Heaney’s key point, that ‘the paraphrasable content of Wordsworth’s philosophy of nature would remain inert had he not discovered the sounds proper to his sense’. Those sounds are the wind through the trees, birdsong, and, primally, the ‘ceaseless music’ of the Derwent.39 The ‘Essential’ Wordsworth is, therefore, in Heaney’s view, the sound of his poetry, but it is a sound which persists through the complications of syntactical structure and thence of the structure (sidewinding occasionally) of his thought. Heaney is laying the ground for his sense, even in hearing the poetry, of a ‘double’ aspect to Wordsworth, of an attention to politics and to nature, to religion and to the details of the everyday world. Attention, indeed, is once more what Wordsworth has to teach a poet like Heaney, alongside that ‘undersong’ which so blends with the nurse’s singing and with the river’s sounding. In Stepping Stones, for instance, the series of interviews which stand in for Heaney’s autobiography, he praises Wordsworth’s phrase from the Preface to Lyrical Ballads about the poet needing to develop ‘habits of meditation’. Heaney falls in with Wordsworth Seamus Heaney, ‘The Makings of a Music: Reflections on Wordsworth and Yeats’, in Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968-1978 (London: Faber, 1980), pp. 63–4, 67.

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in seeing the thought extraneous to poetry – the thought of ‘how to live properly, I mean’ – as sharpening those ‘habits of meditation’ and disposition and temperament. But, ‘when it comes to the actual doing’ of making poems, ‘all you really have is your temperament, your disposition, your impulse’.40 In these comments, as in the Introduction to The Essential Wordsworth, what Heaney emphasizes is the ‘enjoyment’ or the ‘chearfulness’ which resonates from the haggard complication and trauma of that ‘double’ attention in Wordsworth: ‘Chearfulness’, a robust, committed, and justifiably positive attitude in the face of evil and injustice, a comprehension that could acknowledge the ubiquity and affront of pain while yet permitting itself to be visited without anxiety by pleasure – this was the goal of Wordsworth’s quest in the 1790s and its meaning for our lives in the 1980s.41 ‘Chearfulness’ might be what Heaney was having to sustain most determinedly in his work of the 1980s, as Ireland’s ‘Troubles’ reached ever new calamitous depths. What continues to hold about Heaney’s poetry of this period particularly, though, is its attentiveness to the ear as what orients us, once the terms and grounds of our sense of self have been removed by horror of circumstance. As he puts it in a generalized way in ‘Parable Island’: To find out where he stands the traveller has to keep listening – since there is no map which draws the line he knows he must have crossed.42 It is at the end of this period, in Heaney’s best book Seeing Things, that all of this comes together, in a sturdy sense that it Dennis O’Driscoll, Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney (London: Faber, 2008), p. 452. 41 The Essential Wordsworth, p. 12. 42 Seamus Heaney, The Haw Lantern (London: Faber, 1987), p. 10. 40

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is through the ear that the various harrowings of personal life and of contemporary history can be confronted and withstood, and that hope stands envisageable beyond the present: Was music once a proof of God’s existence? As long as it admits things beyond measure, That supposition stands. So let the ear attend like a farmhouse window.43 Remain open, in other words, and listen or attend (that word runs through this book – pay things the time they deserve). The steadiness of the life of the farm and of tradition can still be heard beneath the overwhelming violence on the city streets; the metaphysical, or spiritual, actuality is still allowable if the continuing sounds are attended to, and listened for in the poetry. Even when, in this time of difficulty, poetry opts for the declarative and rhetorical note more concertedly than it might naturally wish to do (‘So … window’). It is this that the ‘ceaselessness’ of the model provided by Wordsworth gives to the otherwise very different Heaney, from otherwise unrecognizably other religious and historical perspectives. Models. From this certain perspective, it seems that Seamus Heaney adopts a Wordsworthian ‘attitude’, and arguably something of his syntax – although Heaney’s poetic periods are not as sustained or interfluent or intertwined as Wordsworth’s could be, in the sustained blank verse passages and paragraphs of longer works such as The Prelude and The Excursion. But Heaney shares also the sense that this Wordsworthian music derives from a particular place and ‘society’ which has its parallel and origins firmly in non- and anti-literary models of ‘how to live properly’. Wordsworth attends to the poor and itinerant, the figures moving through the country landscape, not just because, as he claimed in his ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads, they are more Seamus Heaney, Seeing Things (London: Faber, 1991), p. 106.

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‘philosophical’ in their language. It is more because he saw such figures as closer to the extremes of experience than city dwellers or the higher classes in society: to life and death, to the death of children, to desire, to desertion by husbands (and wives), to the loss of home. As such, Wordsworth was firm in his belief about the necessity for social support, for a system of community and of charity which might alleviate poverty, which was often caused by circumstances outside of an individual’s control. In our post-2010 age of soup kitchens and new numbers of homeless, an assertion made by Wordsworth in 1835 (long after, the critical commonplace has it, he had become a Tory in his politics and turned upon his earlier radical self) stands as a drastic indictment to our contemporary social and political inadequacies. Reacting then against the recent Poor Laws, Wordsworth asserted that ‘the point to which I wish to draw the reader’s attention is, that all persons who cannot find employment, or procure wages sufficient to support the body in health and strength, are entitled to a maintenance by law’ (SP, p. 251). Wordsworth’s Pedlar in The Excursion, his leech-gatherer in ‘Resolution and Independence’ show living in extremis; the speaker’s act of charity, in showing the discharged soldier to lodgings, is exemplary of the concern the poet and the poetry take towards those cast in circumstances where they cannot cope. THEN THERE WAS Then there was the dustman, out all weathers wheeling heavy rubbish bins to the cart, loading them on the forks, operating the mechanism to tip them, bundling them off again, parking them by house fronts. A Council worker, part of a set team Who looked out for each other, who stood in for each other if someone tired or lagged. For thirteen years the same rhythm, early rise and on the bike to the depot, late knocking off, in darkness much of the year.

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Then the financial cuts, half of the team axed overnight, him at thirty oldest amongst them, so the first to get his cards. His wife could not stop crying, his single child, a twelve-year-old son, fretted at home, soon showed ‘behavioural problems’ at school. The dole office had him there every day, filling in forms in laboured capitals. But to no end, no one was interested. He was hassled, bullied to ‘try harder’; they threatened to cut off all dole money when he could not find work after six months. He began picking up a litre tube of superbrew, just the one, on his way back home after each latest rejection. There was no money, but a swift strong drink numbed the afternoon, just got you through it. His wife started joining in, her teared eyes gradually losing focus as the two sat there staring at each other across the silence. One tube became several; aside from milk and cereal for the boy, food was forgotten in spirits bottles. His wife got sick, took to hanging around the shops in afternoons, sometimes nicking the odd top, that red scarf that she fancied. She was out when the twelve year old came home to find the kitchen burnt out, his dad hung from the clothes line above the wheezing stove. Now the boy gets to see his mum each week when she is led forward to hug him tight during half-times at his Sunday football. When he scans for her at the matches’ end amongst the crowd of parents, she’s not there. Models. Wordsworth strikes a similar note to that of his reverence for The Excursion’s Pedlar in The Prelude, when

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hymning another group who clearly stand in as alter egos for the poet in his own mind. In Book VIII, he recalls how ‘shepherds were the men who pleased me first’: Not such as in Arcadian fastnesses Sequestered handed down among themselves (So ancient poets sing) the golden age; Nor such – a second race, allied to these – As Shakespeare in the wood of Arden placed … (181–5) These are figures ‘whose occupations and concerns were most | Illustrated by nature’. They have been stripped by economic necessity, Wordsworth claims, of their former pastoral quaintness in Virgil and Shakespeare, as exemplified now by their practical and economic role at country fairs and festivities. They are ‘unadorned … unluxuriant’ (Miltonic negatives), like Wordsworth’s verse. Yet they are ‘beautiful’ he tells us, with a ‘beauty that was felt’. (210) Book VIII of The Prelude is a ‘Retrospect’, a moment of pause in the poem before the launch into politics and a displaced story, ‘Vaudracour and Julia’, of Wordsworth’s love affair in France. This current gesture towards the ‘shepherds’ clearly therefore has in its own mind earlier moments, such as a culminating moment in Book I, when the speaker recalls looking out from the hills towards the coast of Westmoreland and Cumberland, and of how ‘they can tell How when the sea threw off his evening shade And to the shepherd’s hut beneath the crags Did send sweet notice of the rising moon, How have I stood. (596–9) It is the shepherd’s shelter which provides the possibility of the prospect of what he calls, a few lines later, ‘visionary things’. The speaker here becomes, in this moment, almost the shepherd himself, the dweller in the ‘hut’, receiving the ‘sweet notice’ sent by nature to him. ‘Notice’ here, presumably, although ‘sweet’, carries the full force of the Oxford English Dictionary’s primary meaning of ‘Intimation, information,

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intelligence, warning’. This is what the perceived coastline ‘can tell’ us. ‘Intimation’, as in Wordsworth’s title to his best Ode, ‘Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’. The OED primary definition of ‘intimation’ is ‘The action of … making known or expressing merely; an expression by sign or token, an indication; a suggestion, or hint.’ The place by the shepherd’s hut is the one where it is particularly possible to take such ‘suggestion’, to hear, read, and rightly interpret such signs, properly to encounter the ‘intelligence’ written through the world that they convey. The shepherd’s place of work, in a blunt translation, is a secular church; the speaker as pastor has his eyes to the heavens and the ‘rising moon’, but is more particularly concerned to read the signs amid a changing nature (‘when the sea threw off his’). This is nature animate, Ovidian nature, which it is the poet’s care, as ‘shepherd’, to mediate for the auditor, to see the ‘beauty’ of, to recreate it for us. Of course, by returning to Grasmere, and by memorializing the place and its neighbourhood in The Prelude and other works of the early 1800s, Wordsworth was assuming the persona of a working poet in a working environment. His inclusion of, and frequent idealization of, a range of figures such as shepherds, ferrymen, and leech-gatherers in his poetry, together with those suffering poverty through loss of employment, such as the discharged soldier, is testimony to his alertness to the worked nature of the world in which he was writing. The landscapes through which he walked or journeyed creating his poetry had been formed by centuries of fell farming which had left their marks on the landscape in the long lines of stone walls separating fields, in the shepherds’ huts and the sheepfolds where animals were penned in order to be shorn or otherwise tended to. All of these get into the poems, as does the memory of the wind through the stone wall just before the father’s death. The rhythms of the year were marked by the driving of sheep up to the high fells for pasture during the summer months, and by their return to lower-lying land during the winter. In this

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sense of the worked landscape, Wordsworth’s presence in the Lake District tuned him into a way of life which had continued for centuries, and which enables us now to tune into his own attention to the features and prospects of the particular world in which he wrote. Yes, the geological and geographical features of that landscape remain for us, in the shapes of the mountains and in the continuing presence of the forces of water; however, they have been redirected and re-contained, since his day. But it is also true that the worked aspect of the land in the early twenty-first century retains the rhythm and custom that it had at the end of the eighteenth century into the nineteenth, when Wordsworth was writing there. The Herdwick Shepherd, James Rebanks, shows himself in his memoir and working diary The Shepherd’s Life initially properly sceptical of the wearying and endless correlations between the Lake District and its famous residents and writers, including Wordsworth, Beatrix Potter, and more recently Alfred Wainwright. The tourist trade in the region enticed by these presences inevitably irritates and hampers a working farmer seeking to make a living in this tough environment. And yet, in this question of the worked landscape, and the consonance between the way of life which had evolved there across thousands of years, and which continues despite various encroachments from the modern world (some of which, such as the second-home residents, Wordsworth also resented), Rebanks is happy to include the poet as one who understood the region in ways that he can now understand it. When tracing the retreat of the last ice age northward which left the Lake District with its particular and unique beauty and difficult living conditions, Rebanks notes that ‘by a thousand years ago, the farming looks very familiar indeed. After that, the scale changes, but the structure is essentially the same. The landscape now is the same landscape Wordsworth wandered through.’44 And not just the landscape: Rebanks’s tale of the James Rebanks, The Shepherd’s Life: A Tale of the Lake District (London: Allen Lane, 2015), p. 192.

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successive farmers of the area across the generations in his family consistently describes a set of attitudes at the heart of Wordsworth’s poetry in The Prelude and elsewhere. Rebanks’s book offers a complicated and moving story of having to take on that inheritance in working conditions that have not significantly changed from those in which his grandfather, on whom he models himself, had struggled to survive. In its fierce sense of independence, The Shepherd’s Life suggests that the attitudes and stance bred in and from the Lake District, and celebrated by Wordsworth in his various hymns to the shepherds in his own day, continues. As Rebanks proclaims in the defiant last words of his ‘tale’: ‘This is my life. I want no other.’45 Who of us can say the same? Honestly, to others, or to ourselves? What is noticeable here is that the Book I prospect from the shepherd’s hut is proclaimed as unique, original, standing back from and away from any previous such renditions in literature or in the speaker’s own experience. Wordsworth’s assertion of this is remarkable, finding several new ways of affirming it for us. He is a ‘stranger’ to such sights as that of the ‘rising moon’ from this prospect out of the seashades; linking with the spectacle No conscious memory of a kindred sight, And bringing with me no peculiar sense Of quietness or peace. (601–4) The speaker cannot assimilate the experience to previous ones that can be conjured into consciousness; it is alien, but also mood changing, ‘felt’ as the shepherds ‘feel’ nature and beauty. To filter the whole thing, as might usefully be done, through Iain McGilchrist’s terms from The Master and his Emissary, this is the world of the unconscious, of ‘right hemisphere’ experience. Wordsworth’s assertion of the newness of all of

Ibid., pp. 51, 287.

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this, that it superseded the attitude with which he had arrived at the hut, makes it typical of the kinds of attention to the world involved with that right hemisphere experience. In childhood, experience is ‘relatively unalloyed by representation’, McGilchrist reminds us, and so our connectedness to our childhood selves is specifically right hemisphere oriented; Wordsworth’s relation of the ‘spectacle’ to ‘no conscious memory’ is a part of this process.46 The ‘conscious’ mind, like language, is located in the left hemisphere largely; as his book proceeds, McGilchrist is concerted in showing how the ‘new’ experiences of the right hemisphere of the brain do get sent to the left hemisphere for expression and ‘understanding’ – but then are always returned to the world of the right hemisphere: ‘Though the left hemisphere has a valuable role, its products need to be returned to the right hemisphere and once more integrated into a new whole, greater than the sum of its parts.’ It is as though it is this process of creativity which Wordsworth is exposing to us at the shepherd’s hut; the speaker tells through the poetry what the shoreline ‘can tell’, receives the ‘sweet notice’ from the world into her or himself, but then says no more than that. Such ‘recollected hours’ from childhood are ‘visionary’ – but the left hemisphere is not allowed to gloss in what that ‘vision’ might lie.47 For McGilchrist, all language is a sub-product of music; music precedes language substantially in human history and development.48 Babies sing sound before shaping words; the sound of the words does not seem to be attached to any particular ‘meaning’. So, in Wordsworth’s poetry, we hear and watch as experience, embodied and immediate experience in and of the world, emerges into language, becomes ‘conscious’, and ‘rememberable’ there, but is then returned, recedes back into a sound which does not articulate further, into music. 46 Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), p. 359. 47 Ibid., pp. 227, 206. 48 Ibid., p. 102.

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Edmund Burke, so essential to the aesthetics of The Prelude, has passages about words in his A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful which perhaps help us to think about this detachment of the idea of words as being pictures of things, into their being sound which calls for a different kind of response from their auditors or readers. In a section of the Enquiry about ‘The effect of WORDS’, Burke gives a passage of prose describing the River Danube, and comments: In this description many things are mentioned, as mountains, rivers, cities, the sea, &c. But let anybody examine himself, and see whether [in reading these words] he has had impressed on his imagination any pictures of a river, mountains, watery soil, Germany, &c. … Some words expressing real essences, are so mixed with others of a general and nominal import, that it is impractical to jump from sense to thought, from particulars to generals, from things to words. Painters are much better at conjuring images than poets for Burke; poets affect us by creating sympathy with their words, ‘to display rather the effect of things on the mind of the speaker, or of others, than to present a clear idea of the things themselves’. Yet what are the means by which poets can nonetheless create effects? Burke reminds us in several places in his book that ‘SOUND and LOUDNESS’ are also available alongside the visual image – and indeed that it is as sound that words particularly grab our attention. ‘The noise of vast cataracts, raging storms, thunder, or artillery, awakes a great and awful sensation in the mind. … A sudden beginning, or sudden cessation of sound. … The attention is roused by this; and the faculties driven forward.’ By the end of the Enquiry, sound takes some priority over meaning: ‘there is a moving tone of voice, an impassioned countenance, an agitated gesture, which affect independently of the things about which they are exerted … [which] touch and move us more’ than words

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which clearly picture and express a subject.49 Sound creates a physical response, through the ‘passion’ with which words are expressed (Burke, like the Wordsworth of the ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads, finds ‘uncultivated people’ the more direct and passionate in this sense than those who have refined views of poetry and language). ‘Tone’, ‘gesture’, in language take over from paraphrase-able ‘meaning’, and it is the token-like nature of some words (rivers, mountains, ‘&c’), which makes it so. As Martha Nussbaum has put it, the experience of listening to sounds or music is a way of ‘“reading” her own self, her inner world, and her own possibilities – … the music interposes … no texture of habitual language to make everything seem worldly or daily’. Without that ‘texture’, it is possible to hear past words to other possibilities.50 Is this process another reason why there is so much shorthand and generalizing use of ‘signs’ with regard to nature in The Prelude? The poem, as the sections quoted previously show, can advert to the names of places in the Lake District, and to its rivers and mountains – Derwent, Westmoreland, Cumberland, Scafell, Blencathra. Such markers of course have a various resonance. For readers and auditors of the poetry who do not know the landscape and geography of the Lake District, they have little ‘meaning’ beyond seeming to denominate a specific site (and so, perhaps, ‘authenticating’ the experience narrated there). Other incidents, however, are marked by a particular placelessness – the sites of their happening, such as locating the precise bit of road where the speaker encounters the discharged soldier, remain subject to later scholars’ (and walkers’) hard work and knowledge. More generally, the frequent non-specific references to ‘hills, lakes, mountains’, entertain a further sense of a nature setting which we all have access to. McGilchrist associates the left Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of Sublime and Beautiful and other Pre-Revolutionary Writings, pp. 191, 123, 198. 50 Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of the Emotions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 277. 49

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hemisphere primarily with human language, but also with ‘abstraction’, the disembodiment of experience into a subtle range of concepts.51 Often, it is as though Wordsworth’s poetry advertises this fact upon its surface; words have become tokens devoid of specificity. They do not draw attention to themselves because, in themselves, they are counters, abstractions which both derive from, and lead to, a truth which resides always just outside of articulation. Were they to have a texture or substance in and of themselves, they would distract the reader or auditor from the larger progression, the movement of the poetry onward. It is only through their music and persistence that they can be returned to a world of experience, given weight and presence as ‘rememberable things’ within the auditor’s or reader’s own self. ‘Rememberable’ as in ‘The earth | And common face of nature spoke to me rememberable things’, as we are told just after the moment at the shepherd’s hut (I, 615–6). ‘Things’ which are spoken aloud by the world, taken in from it, then given rememberably back out as poetry, shared, made ‘common’ in the best sense, common to all.

McGilchirst, The Master and his Emissary, p. 70.

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I We grew up partly as scavengers on the land. My sister and I were often, during autumn weekends, taken out into the woods and along country lanes to gather berries, nuts; at all times of the year we were on the lookout for horse manure to put around the roses, and in the vegetable garden, at home. Blackberries were turned by mum into jam for the winter; sweet chestnuts we ate, sometimes warmed in front of the coal fire at home. There was nothing like the sound of Friday Woods in the rain, the battering of the drops on the dense, fanned chestnut leaves which kept us relatively dry. The sizzle of parched leaves as they tumbled in a wind-squall across the woods’ floor. We threw sticks and broken branches clattering up into the clusters of prickly nut shell cases, trying to throw the ripest down, having gathered bags of fallen brown glowing chestnuts from the damp ground. The plum tree at home gave a store of Victorias to be blanched and sugared and stored in Kilner jars on shelves in the pantry, and got out for desserts to provide ‘vitamins’ during the hard winters, as fresh fruit was still scarce in those days, and too expensive for our relatively poor family, when it could be found in the shops. Blackcurrants, gooseberries from bushes in the garden went into further jars, now filling the old outside coal house shelves. This produce was pulled out at key meals, Sundays or Christmas. The tartness of the taste of those berries and plums when they were resurrected, the freezing glass they were suspended in, during dank winter days will not leave me. Later, elderflowers and elderberries from a huge bush at the end of the garden were put to making homemade wine; large glass vessels burbled and bubbled in that coal house before sticky and heady wine was decanted into an array of old bottles, each labelled, like the Kilner jars, with the date the operation was complete. At other points in the year, we went apple picking in the nearby countryside; farms advertising their prices for ‘pick

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your own’. When we got home, the whole family was set to wrapping each individual fruit in a piece of torn-off newspaper so that no air or light could get to it; each fruit was then carefully stored into a box which was sealed and put into the attic. The boxes were got down around Christmas, so that there was a plentiful supply of ‘fresh’ (if often wrinkled and shrunken) treats to be had, although I seem to recall several years in which the boxes were opened upon a stink of rot, a mush and pulp of brown apple flesh and newspaper. The fruit had been too mature when packed, or contained bruised apples which then turned the rest of the box. In those years we were told to make the apples last. No other fruit, beyond the interminable plums in those Kilners, was to be had for months. This now seems like an earlier mode of life; one which cost a lot of time in the late summer and autumn in order to lay in necessary healthy foods and treats for the winter. Fruits were put into hibernation in jars or boxes – later, peas and beans were blanched and put into the newly acquired and tooexpensive freezer – so that we could get by, get through. Soon after the freezer arrived, bought as a long-term money saver, Mum wept daily over her small account books, as there was not enough money to pay other bills. Thinking back, it is an attitude of mind and a set of skills, preparing and using all this produce, which comes from poverty and wartime constraint. You take from the land what the land freely gives. Where you can’t, such as with the apples, you pay what you have to and lay down the goods in storage, but rage as though cheated if the things go rotten or too shrivelled to be of much taste or usefulness. Although books of pressed flowers were sometimes made by Mum and by us as children, this was the countryside known for what could be eaten from it; plants were recognized for what they could offer. We frequently headed out on these often viciously cold days oddly armed, with a fork to dig up horseradish from beneath hard soil (Mum was the only one who liked it, but we seemed forever to be expected to get it), or a sack and shovel to collect horse manure. The whole family went together, if Dad was not doing overtime all weekend to

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get the money. Parents and children worked alongside each other both in the culling and collecting, and also in the process of heading and tailing, de-pipping, de-stringing, de-shelling which the various berries, beans, peas or nuts required. Because we went into the woodland and country for a purpose, to find the necessary trees, bushes or plants, my knowledge of other kinds of fauna is very limited. I know what a sweet and a horse chestnut tree looks like, not a larch. I can tell haws and sloes which can be turned into syrup or flavour the Christmas bottle of gin, but I can’t point to a laburnum bush. Or my knowledge is accidental. I know a poplar tree because some lined the grounds of our school and one master used to refer to them when someone seemed to be missing at the end of a breaktime (‘Is she hiding behind the poplars’?). But I have no knowledge beyond these few accidents, unlike my parents, who knew not just the nature they were seeking to gather and live from, but many many of its plants otherwise. Words, then, are never more truly and just words for me than when I ‘know’ them, but can’t equate them to their referents in nature, where a plethora of words float for me outside my knowing what they refer to. This is perhaps why I feel more comfortable with the poetry of Wordsworth than that, say, of John Clare, who more often uses very specific birds, or plants or trees as the subject of the poems, in the expectation that the audience also knows them outside the poem. Wordsworth’s largely generic ‘hills, lakes, mountains, streams’, his only rare poems on, for example, the celandine, seem less to test that sense of being closed out of a reality which I can never truly enter. It is for this reason that the words of the English poet Donald Davie’s poem ‘In the Stopping Train’ have always stayed with me. Davie has a staged encounter with his alter ego on the train, and this throws up a sense of the alienation we feel at such moments towards the language which escapes us: What’s all this about flowers? They have an importance he can’t explain, or else the names have.

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The paradox is that ‘he’ can name all of the flowers, but that he can ‘identify hardly any’, that he feels cut off from the natural world, yet not therefore void of articulacy. Davie’s sequence lurches towards a bleak hellishness (‘The dance of words | is a circling prison’) in which the divided self cannot be reconciled either to himself or to the world around.1 It feels to be a particularly modern hell, in which words themselves are the curse. Friday Woods, though, shielded other presences, beyond the natural provender that we frequently sought there across the seasons. For this was the height of the conflict in the North of Ireland, and Colchester, ancient garrison town, was the last stopping off point before troops departed for Belfast or Derry. Frequently, on our searches for nuts, horseradish, manure, chestnuts, we came across troops in twos or threes scouting the woods, or were aware of guns being trained upon us by soldiers in the undergrowth. They were training for what might lie ahead, but often also seemed lost – I remember one group, camouflaged, mud on faces, small branches threaded into helmets, stopping us and asking Dad the way to the next village. Bordering the woods also was the Detention Centre, where soldiers who jumped leave, were drunk, were caught thieving, or who had committed some other dissent or misdemeanour, were banged up, out of the hands of the civil authorities (I remember outrage in the town when a rapist was dealt with by the military, not the civil, police). Our quiet times gathering fruits were often interrupted by the wailing and distressing alarm sounding from the Centre at a breakout; an alarm immediately followed by the baying of the hounds who were kept to track down the escapee in the woods. This Victorian sound sat strangely with the other aspect of the training going on there, when our car would be suddenly stopped at a mock checkpoint, the troops lying aiming at us from the grass alongside, the nervous eighteen-year-old Geordie Donald Davie, In the Stopping Train and other poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 1977), 24–5, 28.

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asking through Dad’s lowered window where we were going, the mirrors on little poles used to look for bombs under the car; sometimes Dad being asked to open the boot to show what we were carrying. All a bizarre charade; but this was also a time of bombs, and a firebomb went off in the town’s Woolworth’s, and a car bomb blew up an officer returned from Belfast at a house a quarter of a mile along the road from ours. As we lived on the edge of the garrison and near the houses of the officers, we were nervous often. Once I was old enough to spend evenings in the pub, I avoided the local ones, for fear that something might happen there on a par with what was happening in Birmingham and elsewhere. It was a time of disturbance, in which the places nearby where we most came close to nature – Friday Woods, the small pearling Roman River running through it, the walk through the fields to the next village – were disrupted by the tensions Britain was involved with. No doubt some of those lost and uncertain young soldiers, who put on raucous shows in the town pubs and clubs I went to on weekends, and who were frequently bundled off for fighting by the Military Police, found themselves in difficulty, or were hurt, in the North of Ireland. No older than me towards the end of my time living in the town, we saw how inadequate they could be to the tough divisions I later saw myself on visits to Belfast to stay with a friend; their naivety, jumpiness at being forced into situations they did not understand, made us all on edge when we came across them on a tranquil day, the birds starting their full song for Spring, the bluebells standing awash between the trees of the Woods. That landscape just outside the town was a place of unexpected encounter, surprise, joy, but also of alien-ness.

II Yours is a family whose threads and interconnections rapidly become frayed and obscure as we go back across the twentieth

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century. Although it seems rooted, and for generations to have been associated with Colchester and North East Essex, there are blanks and absences. Previous generations on that side of your family peter from view, in uncertain associations with Methodism, the East End of London, a soldier dead on the Western Front. Your mum’s mother died when she was in her late teens, something which held up her own marriage to your dad, since she was forced to take on the house keeping for her seemingly totally incapable father, and to become a mother to her sister and much younger brother. You grew up knowing the very short and meek stepmother who her father found for himself as a replacement for his wife. Yours was a family life really not lived by this woman, who barely ever spoke when you went round there each Saturday afternoon. The sudden loud full chimes of the ironically named ‘Grandmother Clock’ always physically shocked you in the silence where you were frequently told off for knocking shoe-heels against the legs of the best chairs. But you loved the rhythm, the different kinds of thud you could make on the different thicknesses of wood as the leg tapered. But the greater mystery, the greater absence, is of your father’s father, the ‘Matthews’ who gives you your surname. He was not much spoken about. There were passing mentions of angry shouting-matches and violence between him and your nana, and of your dad, the oldest boy of two, taking up boxing to face down his own father. Rumours of that father being a drinker who made money playing the piano in pubs around town, before latterly becoming a projectionist at the local cinema – he certainly showed some of the movies you went to see as a young child. Stories of a meeting from your mum, on a station platform when she and your dad were changing trains on their way, when they were courting, to the seaside for a day. Of a man coming up to your dad and saying ‘Are you alright?’ before walking off to the other end of the platform. When your mum asked who that was, he said, ‘It’s my dad.’ Stories also of family maybe or maybe not associated with this missing grandfather. Of a crazed woman living in some woods outside

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town, maybe she was an abandoned wife who was his aunt, who spent all of her time tending chickens. Of her dirtiness and unkemptness. Stories also of a reasonably large house in the centre of town where maybe this ‘Matthews’s’ own mother lived. But there were tales that that house was known well locally as a brothel. Was she a Madam, then? Such hints go along with other rumours from your mum against your nana that she hung out a lot with prostitutes as her friends during the Second World War. These things were mentioned, yet not properly told, across your childhood, and sometimes come up now when you’re back in Essex. They never made sense; it was never clear to you up to his death how much your dad knew or was able to put the stories together to make any kind of sense. How well did he ever know these hinted about women? Did he really ever have to fight his own dad to stop him beating up his mum? Who was this grandfather Matthews who, your own mum has repeated, seemed to set up in a new house with a new woman and to have had another, larger, family with her? Did your dad ever know who his half brothers and sisters were? There was much that could not be said, should never be said – that was the atmosphere you were brought up with. It was unclear how much could ever be said. Your dad never told your mum a lot of it, so a whole hinterland remained only ever briefly and mystifyingly alluded to between them across a lifetime. While you seemingly grew up knowing who you are, then, with visits to each ‘set’ of grandparents each weekend and at Christmas, you don’t know who you are; nothing can be said about it. Adults seemed secretive to you even in their seeming openness and good treatment of you as young children; they seemed to be carrying a whole experience which could not be decoded, and it was never clear who actually held the whole story, who could put it together. There was a sense that as a child you had no right to know, or as an adult to either. It allowed for speculation, imagination. As a child, you built fantastical characters out of such few hints, and glamourize the experiences. When you learnt that your grandfather was

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probably the projectionist of the early Disney films you saw, you imagined him as holding a key to wonders way beyond the emotions and grind of your everyday school world. Yet that was just who he was, maybe a bit of a ‘character’, but poor, uneducated, maybe given to the rages you also sometimes feel at constraint of any kind. And then there was the ‘library’ in the main bedroom, upstairs in the council house, where you were sent by your nana when she thought you’d become bored by listening to the adults’ talk. It was cold for you, kneeling in the room in your schoolboy shorts. The library, maybe, was a remnant of your lost grandfather, who’d gathered together books to loan out to neighbours during the long months of preSecond World War dreariness. By the 1960s, when you knelt in front of the two small lines of books, the cold and damp of decades had seeped into the older volumes, dull red covers covering old spy novels, quaint romances. To your joy as you entered your own teenage years, the small ranks of books had been somehow supplemented by recent paperback editions of the soft porn of the day; Harold Robbins fuelled impossible excitements and desires, never to be forgotten. Yet for you it was the secretness and the specialness of the ‘library’ that led you to want to be sent to it on each weekly visit to your nana’s; you would sham boredom, dunt sandals against varnished chair legs, in order to be released into the cold dark upstairs, to flick through the dulled pages, to set the lace-tutued plastic ballerina circling in the music box on the chest of drawers above where the books were lined up. Her outrageously lipsticked miniature lips were the same red as her ballet shoes. Your fingers grappled the stiff key with its clock-winding ratchet sound, the plinked notes of a waltz setting her whirling to your ever-repeated wonder. There’s not much to be done with this. It is all unremarkable. It is a tale of various poverties but also decencies, of doing the right thing by each other, even when the circumstances were so harsh, and angers often broke through the decent surface. Things were harsh in ways you could not think of as

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having happened. Your dad told you several times in his last years that he was officially malnourished as a child, and that he had had to go to the Town Hall every week to be weighed and to be given cod liver oil and iron pills to ‘build him up’. It’s a poverty that continued into your life, Mum weeping when there was no money left to pay the mortgage and for us to eat properly. There is a lurking sense of violence across it all, of ‘taking it out’ on others when the pressures of reality are too intense – this, particularly and boringly predictably, from the men. You suppose in the end that what can be made of your story is what is made unlikely by all of this. Unlikely that there can be an articulateness. A heightened awareness of the struggle to articulate, to record something. Of silences to be overcome, and self-consciousness that expressing anything is somehow a betrayal, that whatever the story is that is told, it doesn’t say it all and can’t. An unlikeliness perhaps about writing at all, but also about being articulate about what writing might do. You remember, when a boy at the local grammar school, the embarrassing scuffing sound across the paper, as your dad slowly printed any letters or reports he was told to write in lovely but painful capital letters. Never the fluid, fluent sound of joined-up. You have an awareness that there are stories to be told, givens to be spoken and revealed. But there is also a mystery about what those stories actually are, what they are about, what you are trying to say with and by them. A sense somehow that it’s about asserting a right to speak when the culture does not expect you to, but that that can never be enough of a reason to speak. It is about overcoming the mediocre in every suggestion of that word – the mediocrity of casting it all as a series of ‘literary’ ‘scenes’, but also the mediocrity of what it is that might be said in those scenes. A refusal to measure yourself against the poets you read most attentively, and yet also a sense that it is the something which they have to say to you which makes them so important within your life, and as a ‘solution’ to the issue of mediocrity,

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the mundane and the official within and against which we all need to assert something. Or who are we? Wordsworth’s repeated ‘Was it for this?’, or ‘for this?’ is partly about this it seems to you, a kind of helplessness to understand what it is he’s supposed to make of the circumstances of his birth, when they suggest to him a kind of response and a kind of poetry which seems so unlikely, so new, so not like the poetry with which he was then familiar. Wordsworth’s interest in the Roman poet Ovid’s metamorphic world where humans can become gods of the animate natural world seems a vital aspect of this, his comparative disparagement of such commissioned and official or State poetry as that offered by the major Latin poet, Virgil. (Personally, however, you find Ovid hard to empathize with, prefer the sonorities of Virgilian verse, its limpid beauties in the original.) Wordsworth implies that it is incumbent upon him, even fated, that he should be such a poet, be just this poet. It is difficult now to discover such assurance, particularly in a mediatized world where those who so proclaim themselves as poets often display a carelessness about their language, and a mediocrity in their thinking and response to other writers which is depressing. Why speak out in such a context? Maybe just speak out, and others might hear – for those who want to listen and to hear, will. Perhaps it is Wordsworth’s supreme confidence that there is a story of his life to be woven which is the most inspiring aspect of The Prelude. In the multiple reworkings and reweavings of the fragments of his text, their combining and recombining from the notebooks and loose leaves into the sustained text from 1804–1805 onwards, it is evident that there was a pattern to be found, and that, so far as he can tell at various moments of reflection, he is always moving closer towards it. There are several aspects of this which come into focus on visiting the house in which Wordsworth was born in 1770, in the country town of Cockermouth. The first is to understand the status which his family had – the house stands on one of the entry routes into the town, and is on a grand scale. Wordsworth’s father was a trained lawyer and agent for the local aristocrat,

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Lord Lowther. The house was originally furnished in a manner befitting the Lord’s trusted man, and was the site of local dinners and parties. Yet to visit the house is also to realize something of the precariousness the Wordsworth children experienced: the house was one which went with the father’s job, and, when he died suddenly that Christmas of 1783, it was lost to them. The Wordsworth family was relatively educated and affluent; it included among its uncles and cousins lawyers, clergymen, farmers. But the orphaned children, and most notably Wordsworth’s sister Dorothy, were only able to lodge with those relatives after the father’s death, which followed the mother’s by five years. The birthplace, in other words, offers a sense of the tenuous hold upon possession which was to continue nearly into the poet’s mid-forties, when he found a longer-term kind of settlement, through his lease on Rydal Mount.2 The other thing which becomes evident from a visit to the Cockermouth house is that the ‘ceaseless music’ which, The Prelude Book I tells us, is the sound of the River Derwent which blended with the children’s nurse’s song, actually is a persistent part of the life there. In one early draft version of the ‘Was it for this?’ passage, the River Derwent behind the birthplace is heard to ‘murmur perpetual music’ in a phrase immediately scored through. The eventual word ‘ceaseless’ is more energetic, impatient, turbulent; but ‘perpetual’ carries the temporal burden of the river sound through to the present day.3 Standing on the raised terrace at the end of the garden, the rapid moil of the waters is loudly present. Against the

Even the thirty-seven settled years at Rydal Mount were once disturbed, however, in ways which clearly brought back to the Wordsworths again the tenuousness of their situation. In 1826 the owner of Rydal Mount, Lady le Fleming, seemed to be about to end the Wordsworths’ tenancy in order to move her aunt into the property – something which caused huge worry and consternation in the tenants. 3 William Wordsworth, The Prelude, 1798-1799, edited by Stephen Parrish (New York: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 141. 2

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‘fretfulness’ which this passage in Book I relates to human ‘dwellings’, including this early childhood one for the poet, the ‘steadiness’ of the churn and rush does endure. Despite changes in the 240 years or so in the area of the birthplace – in the river’s course, in the type of bank the river has (now large caged stones after floods in 2009 and again in 2015), in the nature of the river bed, in the surroundings (now a park and Veterinary Centre stand on the opposite bank to the birthplace) – the onward motion and purling skelter of the river continue. What the visit to the site of the birthplace with Book I of The Prelude in mind gives, then, is a translation of the description there of the waters, a translation into actuality and sensory physicality. Understanding shifts from a seemingly metaphorical base (one which is rapidly, as typically in The Prelude as a whole, transformed into a philosophical understanding of how nature ‘tempers’ human vagary), to a realistic and literal perception behind Wordsworth’s description of this exact spot. It is a perception which has continued across several hundred years, or one which, hearing the waters now, enables an imagining his hearing of the waters in the 1770s. Much has changed, but, in the mind’s eye, much can be taken, thrillingly, to be the same. These waters are ‘ceaseless’ because they do still send their sound out into the garden terrace. Standing there you better understood how Wordsworth could see the circumstances of the place of his birth and of his early life as a blessing and a gift, something which drew human song into connection with natural ‘music’, and which, in its turn, demanded a response from him – the poetry which he came to make of it, not just in The Prelude, but across his later career. The pedlars, the ‘solitary maids’, who figure across the work, are alter egos for that child standing up high on the raised terrace-walk feeling that he was especially called, and that he would, however unlikely it might seem, succeed in showing others what it was he had been given. Wordsworth never shows whether he was more or less attuned to these circumstances than those around him – his sister Dorothy, who played there along with him,

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of course shared many of his perceptions and put them into words – but he does more sustainedly take responsibility for making something of those circumstances than others, for realizing the music of them. In fact, the substantial terrace-walk at the end of the birthplace garden acts as precursor for the writing and reciting paths of the mature poet, including the high-up Far Terrace gravel walk which he constructed for himself at Rydal Mount. Those later paths see him both composing his work, and trying it out aloud, speaking it out to the surrounding trees, fields and hills, seeing how it resounds and takes there. The Cockermouth terrace is both lookoutpost across the river levels and towards the hills, and also a sounding station for the strains which nature has to ‘breathe’ to him, as he puts it in Book I. At Rydal, the prospect across Rydal Water and into the fells is given huge scope by the elevation of the constructed path. The sounds of the waters are absent, replaced at times of year by the sounds of the breezes in the tree leaves. They play through the imagination and through the sounding fluencies of the poems. RIVERRUN for Paul Whitty You disappear down the edge of the muddy riverbank, me fearful for you, for the expensive recording equipment, hydrophone, headphones, microphone. The day stills, river’s constant sizzle across the little reef of pebbles runs, between the banks, one sectioned concrete, the other (where we are) nettles, grass, trees that might have stood

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when he was born in the terracotta house, walked the terrace walk above us a child crying laughing singing children laughing shouting now by the Vets’ Centre opposite children carousing the swings, footballing the grass against a dilapidated brick hut, pushchairs and pensioners clanking across the wrought flaked bridge, planes for ever processing the muddied clouds overhead, runs, and the black Labrador ferrets in the rough grass nearby, the wind modulates the flow over the pebbles, (children’s shouts waft to this bank not that), then leaves it back where it belongs, 332 metres per second sounding, then rising away, losing force, slowing to approximately 34 metres per/s beyond the atmosphere gradually, lingering, following all the before noises dwelling out there, the previous sounds the sound of his voice

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III Why is he drawn recognizingly (if self-doubtingly) to the associations between writing and death which he finds so present in the metaphysics and aesthetics which The Prelude, as a narrative of the formation of the self, bequeaths to us? Partly because he has had so relatively little experience of others’ deaths at an early age, perhaps (his first grandparent died when he was in his early teens). But this is no casual association for him, and it has motivated a good deal of his own poetry, and of his impulse towards gathering and publishing that poetry. Like everyone, he had early dreams of dying, often, for him, dreams of suffocation, of sinking under what repeatedly seems to have been an ocean of stinking shit. Night after night he recalls waking distraught and rushing to his parents in the lounge, still feeling as though he was about to choke, as though he could not breathe. He remembers the gag of his breaths. It was not simply about needing comfort, more also about a genuine fear of the blackness and cold blankness of what lies ahead. He can still conjure those nightmares, the overwhelming loss of any ability to thrash his limbs or to climb out of the stench, the way his mouth could not be held clear, the fight to keep his nostrils and eyes above the surface. The equally vivid compensatory dream was of becoming an owl, of flying above long cobbled roads, and swift movement closer and closer to some kind of happiness which was not in itself ever revealed, but which was the more powerful for its hiddenness. Two other moments seem to have grounded themselves in his memory as bringing images of death and dying closer in, images which create a particular scared yet comprehending emotional response in him when he comes across this association of death and poetry, death and the imagination, as in the concluding ‘spots of time’ of The Prelude. At the age of ten, he underwent three operations at Colchester Hospital. In an hereditary quirk, which further raises questions about who the missing ‘Matthews’ grandparent was, his testicles

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had not lowered into their sack, and so he could not go into puberty until they were literally manoeuvred down. The whole thing was treated very badly by his parents and by the medical people at the time. Poor explanations were given and inept preparations made – he was taken to the doctor’s on an excuse that he seemed poorly, told to lower his shorts and pants (checked for cleanliness before he left home) for a reason he didn’t comprehend, and then a month or so later found himself at the hospital waiting for the operation. Even when telling relatives about what was going to happen, he was sent from the room, ignorant. He recalls being told to go outside to ask a neighbour for a tin of elbow grease one time; the neighbour’s baffled laugh then anger at what he presumed was a show of insolence from the child. He was off school for long periods of that operation-ridden year, unable to do any sport when there, or to play too vigorously at playtimes. The second of the three was the major operation, involving opening his torso in several places, and much stitching up internally and externally. Dissolving stitches seem not to have existed in those days, and he remembers rows of thick ragged stitches in three places on his body when he could eventually bring himself to look. But something happened in that second operation; he did not come round properly. When she phoned, as you did in those days, to see if he had returned back from the operating theatre, his mum was repeatedly told he was not yet back on the ward. The operation was at ten o’clock. One, two, three, four o’clock went by; his dad came back from work, still no word. They phoned again, threatened to just show up at the hospital and stay until more information was given them. They thought they had lost him – literally, they did not know where he was, he seemed to have slipped out of the world with no explanation. When he was eventually returned to the bright children’s ward, they were told that it had been very difficult to control his blood pressure across that day, that he had been in serious danger on a post-operative intensive care ward for hours, with someone sitting by him, that only recently had he seemed to pull round and things had

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stabilized. For weeks he could not walk, was carried to the toilet, to sit in a chair, until finally he started to feel stronger, his mind and sense of himself clearer. But he does remember things from that lost day, horror images which chill him. He remembers not being able to become conscious, struggling to wake up but not being able to do so, but also being aware of someone nearby, and not knowing who they were or whether they were there to help or hurt him. He remembers quieted sounds, muzzy. Instruments clattering a metal tray, maybe, fraught voices. A massive thirst parched him, and continued later that night, when he remembers drinking more or less a whole bottle of undiluted squash (it was normal in those days to deny water to patients for hours after operations). More particularly he has a strong image of bodies, corpses, nude, somehow being moved into and out of the wall of the room in steel drawers, the rumbling of their slider wheels, the opening and closing sporadic, but the ends of the drawers gleaming out like those rows of memorial stones you sometimes see in cemeteries, especially in European cemeteries. He could not see who was opening the drawers, they were gowned figures, but they appeared for no reason, and the corpses were exposed for a reasonable amount of time before being run back into the wall. Whenever he wants to, he can bring those images back to mind, although he does not dream them. They seem uneroded by the years, as real as they were that day, and they scare him deeply. He was lost, along with the wall-bodies, and has never truly come back. The other moment which has to do with dying and which does come back sometimes in dreams occurred much later, when he was twenty. He had gone to Paris, as you did in those pre-internet days, on a whim with a friend. They had train tickets, nowhere to stay on arrival. They came in at the Gard du Nord at roughly nine o’clock in the evening, and went to the accommodation office next to the platforms. There were few places left in the city by then; not only was this in midsummer, and tourists everywhere, but there had been protests in Paris that day against the government over low wages and

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poverty. Many had come into the city from across France, and were taking up space in the kinds of small hotel that he and his friend could afford as students. The only room available now was in the red light district near the station, a double room. They were given a sketchy map as to how to get there, and had to ask several people along the way before they found it. He was the only one of the two who could speak French, his companion not, but he was happy he had negotiated them a place to stay and that they could find the hotel. His friend had not ever been to France, as younger people hadn’t in those days (he hadn’t been abroad until he was nineteen, himself). The hotel was predictably grim, faded plush; the bathroom was quite a way along a corridor and was dirty when you got there. When his friend went off along the corridor, there was a scurry in the room – stupidly they had left the door open. He was sorting his bag, getting his washing things out with his back to the door. A shortish man was quite a way inside the room, spouting questions at him in a French accent he couldn’t quite tune in to and understand. His friend returned. The questions turned to demands for food, for money, and explanations that the man’s baby was hungry, that it was crying, that it needed help. He bantered then wrangled back – they had not much money, they were students just arrived with only enough to survive on themselves for a few days, they could not give him much. He moved towards the man, to get him out of the room, but the man started shouting, told him to sit down on the bed. As he pushed him, the man produced a gun, starting holding it up under his chin, shouting clearly now that his boy was ill, that he wanted all of their money. His friend was bewildered, upset at not understanding, panicked. Oddly, he was not scared in that moment, and kept wrangling – they had not much money on them, it was not worth what was happening, the man should find someone richer. Then, the man put the gun to his forehead and pulled back the trigger. He remembers the slide of the action, its concluding click. The man’s eyes, which he looked deep into, seemed to change; the man had moved from a strange locked-in-ness with him around

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the to-and-fro bizarre debate about whether they should hand over their money or not to another, distant, mode. The man was prepared to fire, he suddenly saw, the end of the gun against his forehead started to shake a bit, he awaited a long car-crash moment for everything to cease. ‘OK’. He got his wallet out, gave the man the cash, the man took the gun down, took the friend’s money also. The man threatened he’d come back and kill them if they told anyone. It felt like it had all moved from something human and odd to something animal, that they had moved into a possibility which held them, the man with the gun, he with its coldness against his forehead, the trigger slowly moving back under his thumb, its spring audible. Those eyes, the sense that the man could and would kill, an intentness, wide brown pupils, a kind of absence and strangeness in them which was entirely an absence of pure will. They waited a while after the man’d run off then burst down with loud stumblings to the reception desk, woke the porter who seemed to be asleep behind it, told him of what had happened. Within a few minutes what looked like an armoured car pulled up outside the hotel, men with large guns and riot helmets leaped out, detectives swarmed in from nowhere. They were questioned briefly, gave a description of the gunman, then were suddenly deserted, left alone. He told them the man had threatened to come back and get them, but no one seemed bothered, or they knew it was not likely. They slept fully clothed that night, taking it in turns to ‘keep watch’, with the grotty red paint-flaked hotel door wedged shut by a chair at 45 degrees under the handle. The next day was kind of fun. Two detectives showed up in a battered unmarked car, took them to the police station where he (again, they had no English these two) had to give a statement, clumsily and thumpingly typed out by one of the guys amid many ‘Merdes!’ at his constant making mistakes on the large typewriter. The gunman’s wife and baby were oddly in the same room with them at one point, she harrowed but lovely; yes, the baby crying. They had come to Paris to join the protests, to seek for support for their life. Torn up banners

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from the parade were littered on the desk in front of her. She had been given milk for the baby though, something the man had pleaded with him to give him money for. ‘Du lait! Du lait!!!’ She burst out sobbing at one point that they should not shoot her man, that she loved him. The baby needed him. She was led away. They spent the rest of the day (the detectives gave them twenty francs each) with them in that battered car touring Paris streets and bars. Once, the red light was produced and stuck on the roof and shrilled as they hurtled towards some or other incident. At each bar the detectives were well known – he never understood what they were looking for, what information they were after. In a lot of bars he and they were given free shots of whisky, occasionally a small sandwich. He and his friend were welcomed and honoured as police sidekicks. At the end of their day the officers dropped them back at the Gard du Nord in time for the evening train back to the ferry and to London, then to home, where their parents were astonished to see them back so suddenly and soon. The man was captured, they got court papers six months later, they were summoned to testify. But he didn’t have the heart for it, again nothing of it all was explained, and the long sobs of the man’s wife, the cries of his child, were there, heard in his head. Those eyes though, the moment of waiting for him to pull the trigger, the odd bluntness of the fact of the gun pushed into his forehead, its cold hard texture. It was a moment of knowing death as pigs and cows are supposed to know death just as the slaughterer’s arm reaches out with the pole-axe. Not really a meekness before it, more of a sense of the reality of it. There was no elation after he’d wrestled his wallet from his tight jeans pocket and given the man the franc notes in it, and the gun had been taken away as the man had turned to take his friend’s cash and then to run, after his threat of return. More the sense of a reality withdrawn, a matter-offact sense of something being withheld, for now. When he has subsequently been near those close to death, his granddad then his dad, it’s this matter-of-factness which is

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strong, whatever the horror of not being able to step in, to stop the process. But those eyes come back and back to him, the trigger-click back, confirming his own lack of importance, the irrelevance of who he might have been or might be. Whatever the script of a life might amount to, it is overwhelmed by these moments in which a more real script breaks away the ordinary world. It scares him; he can imagine his own death, in a way it has happened.

IV It is normal for me to put distance in my mind from what is going on, feel as though I’m playing a part in it all which does not touch me immediately. Perhaps also that’s why I’m drawn to Classical and early twentieth-century ideas about the need to live and be in the moment, that each day we become in a sense a different person, added to by the experience we go through across the days, months and years, yet essentially able to emerge at any point as someone ‘we are not’. The Prelude seems, from this perspective, an attempt to provide a narrative for this fact, for the sense that, looked back at, the self can be known to have been different selves across life. All those past selves are dead to us, glimpsed as ghosts in memory. But they can be imagined as if present when the occasion is staged – in day-dreams, in the stories we tell those selves. Broadly, you could say that the ‘story’ of The Prelude moves from unselfconscious delight in the place and nature of Wordsworth’s birthplace and school-time region, to a more conscious sense of the significance of those experiences in nature which might consequently be sought, in and for themselves, then to exposure to the world of education and the contemporary civilization at Cambridge and London. That exposure seems to set in train a sense of the falsity of the modern world in the city compared to the ‘reality’ of the Lakes; the poet then seeks a further possibility in the landscapes of the Continent during

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his walking tour there as a student – but, more significantly, a hope and possibility in the politics of the French Revolution. Those politics set the poet apart from his countrymen, who venture war against the new French regime. And then, that hope is destroyed in the account, in Books IX and X, of the history the Revolution entered upon, the Reign of Terror, Robespierre, and the elation at news of his death, together with scepticism at the rise of Napoleon. In the final books of the poem, the speaker’s despair at the failure of his political dream (which had included the odd transposition into tragedy of the story of Wordsworth’s own love affair and the birth of his daughter in the Vaudracour and Julia episode), gives way to a celebration of the powers of an imagination. Imagination can loop back, behind that early adult experience of various disillusions, to a sense of entitlement and power founded upon the life lived among the Lakes and nature as a child. A possible political self, a radical self which existed unpublished for Wordsworth in such prose works as the ‘Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff’ (1793), a radical self who had also experienced a transgressive sexual love, gives way in the final Books of the poem. Those Books were rapidly edited together, out of a range of scattered materials, including the still unassimilated ‘spots of time’, gibbet and father’s death phases of the abandoned five-book Prelude, after the drowning of his brother. The pattern ends upon the imaginative, emerging self of the poet, representing his childhood experience as exemplary for a new vision to replace the lost politics. Like many in my generation, such disillusion, although not of course tethered to such bloody events and stirring philosophical dawn as the French Revolution, has been real. Brought up as a working-class boy, with a long past of engagement with Labour politics on my mother’s side of the family, the early 1980s was a time which broke much of who we thought we were. There had been a growing affluence among our class in the later 1970s – I remember colour televisions appearing in terrace-housed front rooms I walked past each day. There had also been the trade union militancy

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of those years, the electricity blackouts in the evenings, the constant strikes in the car factories and in the mines. But there was little sense that that world was about to end, or that it needed to end; the politics of it all, the adults in my family averred, simply needed to be better handled. The advent of Thatcher shocked all of that, the sense that an indisputable economics was the arbiter of what people might become now, of a business mentality yielding State to private ownership. Natural resources and utilities were successively sold off, as they have continued to be, to hedge-fund managers and wealthy stock-market gamblers. People started to be laid off at Dad’s factory, as the ‘unnecessary’ members of the workforce were dispensed with. There were more strikes, but also a sense of depression and futility. The Falklands War about ended it, in retrospect. The lunacy of chasing across the world to displace the ‘Argies’ from what we’d suddenly discovered were ‘our’ Islands brought farce to the moment, but does not shroud the immense aggression around at the time. Rumours abounded that National Service was about to be reintroduced, that papers calling me and my age group up had been printed. The ‘War’ had a complex resonance also for us. Dad’s engineering firm built large train and navy ship engines. He’d started there as an apprentice at age fourteen. He was by now, after thirty-five years’ service, a senior foreman. The firm built ship engines for the Royal Navy. When HMS Sheffield had been sunk off the Falklands, I recall Dad proudly telling me, one Sunday on the phone, that its engines were still running when it came to the bottom of the sea – or so they’d had it relayed back to them by Navy officers who’d been visiting the firm at that time. But with the Falklands War I became disaffected with politics, I only remember ever going to one more Labour Party meeting after it, as the national mood seemed to have shifted completely. I had campaigned hard in the 1979 election and did so again in 1983, and was spoken of by the local Labour agent in our constituency as a future candidate and MP. But it was all farcical, issues like nuclear disarmament seeming to take attention away from the

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fact that my class, the people I was around all my life in the council estate and poor streets where my grandparents lived and where my parents grew up, were the ones really under attack. I remember during both election campaigns being chased off broad gravelled drives by bull-faced Tory residents of richer housing estates and their seemingly always massively angry and large dogs. We consoled ourselves in the bars of the Labour Club at the end of long days campaigning, but I never felt we could get our world back.

3 Fantasia: Rememberable things

This is a world in which technology has accelerated at a pace, and far beyond, anything known in human history before. This has altered the way the ‘story’ of a life has been perceived. Yet much of this technology is strained towards proving that the visual is the sole way of capturing, entrapping, recommending the world, to the person utilizing it and their ‘Friends’. Facebook ‘Friends’ take the images received as a measure of the lived reality of the person ‘sharing’ them. (And yet how is it possible to share a moment lived – the question asked by modern art from the late nineteenth century onwards, yet a question seemingly unasked in the contemporary world of quick ‘exchanges’?) This technology has developed almost solely across the lifetime of my generation. My parents had an old black box Kodak, a lovely thing with a silver windon handle and silver shutter that we gazed into on holidays, usually clenched up with cold on a concrete seafront walkway in Norfolk or on the South Coast. The next generation to ours could have their births and deaths – and certainly their weddings and anniversaries – caught on video tape, played back endlessly on rainy autumn afternoons to friends and family. We still have one of those video cameras, with film of our young sons; but, like everyone awkward with such technology in the first place, we are anxious

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that the machines needed to play these sacred memories back to us are about to disappear, along with CDs and DVDs. However, lives became more accessible through such media. Now, we are in the world of iphones and Instagram, Snapchat and Facebook. Lives are lived ‘in public’, ‘in the moment’, filmed, packaged, sent to friends, posted on the Web for all to see, endlessly – or at least until the tech collapses.1 Lives are more ‘available’ in this sense than they have ever been. We are constantly ‘telling’ our experiences to others, showing ourselves in them, accounting for ourselves through these fluid, violable, and temporary, means. And yet what is exposed here, what is ‘rememberable’? This chapter presents a fantasia on the themes which spending time with The Prelude, bearing it in mind, makes rememberable. It presents a set of familiar subjects and ideas as they recur, and are varied, in texts and poems by writers from the nineteenth century through to the twenty-first. Passages from British and American prose, phases of poems, will be given, and thought upon. Resonances in later texts from the source, reflections upon reflections from it. These are resonances which will then be taken up again in my next, final, chapter to Ceaseless Music, where I reflect upon my poems across the book as they have been created from, and in response to, The Prelude and its afterlives. That last chapter, itself ‘Reflections’, will mark the outer reach of this account of a life breathed through by The Prelude, heard through it, and of its set of possible responses to Wordsworth’s epic of self. These chapters are not concerned with what in academic criticism might be taken for a poetics of influence; rather, SherryTurkle writes about a ‘new state of self’ which has emerged in the wake of recent technologies: ‘When the media are always there, people lose a sense of choosing to communicate. Those who use … smartphones talk about the fascination of watching their lives “scroll by”. They watch their lives as though watching a movie. … Adults admit that interrupting their work for e-mail and messages is distracting but say they would never give it up.’ See Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other (New York: Basic Books, 2011), p. 163.

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they offer a series of free extemporizations which move back and forth through personal and literary histories, discovering variant but related aspects of writing to those to be discovered in the wake of The Prelude. The writers and writing we return to are part of what is ‘rememberable’.2 It is out of this kind of memory that new writing specifically is instigated. ‘Rememberable’ is a word which the Oxford English Dictionary says was common in the nineteenth century. It is a word which deserves new currency in the memory-less early twenty-first century, when each image is instantly replaced by another. The fact that the word was ‘common’ during the Victorian era might, of course, indicate the anxieties about the implications of a technologized approach to the human which has only manifestly accelerated subsequently. Across our lives, our returns to favourite texts are returns to favourite parts of our own former lives and selves – we see the same writing differently, according to the path our lives have taken between successive readings. One of the unique qualities of the fact that several versions of The Prelude exist is that it exposes to us how Wordsworth reread (and so rewrote) himself across a span of life which stretched to over forty years. After an initial re-narrativizing and expansion in the ‘first’ five years of Wordsworth’s engagement upon his text, the ‘narrative’ elements and pattern of the poem remain consistent. Yet the language of the poetry, and Wordsworth’s attempts to reflect upon his former experience, adjust radically across time. This fact also has an echo in the textual history and taste displayed with regard to Wordsworth’s poem. That poem, newly named by Wordsworth’s widow and amanuensis as The Prelude, appeared in the months after Wordsworth’s death in 1850, in Wordsworth’s attention to the ‘rememberable’ is confirmed by his invention of an ‘opposite’ to cover the time in childhood before memories become available, intriguingly in an early draft of the Derwent ‘Was it for this?’ passage: ‘Was [it for these perhaps] & now I speak of things | That have been & that are no gentle dreams | Complacent fashioned fondly to adorn | The time [years] of unrememberable being.’ (The Prelude, 1798-1799, edited by Stephen Parrish (Ithaca: Cornell, 1977) p. 115).

2

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a late version much altered in terms of its poetic smoothness. Although many of the verse paragraphs were retained unaltered except for slight verbal changes or recastings of lines to regularize rhythms, the 1850 version emanates settled ideas and meaning for the most part, compared to the earlier, turnof-the-nineteenth-century versions, with their unpredicabilities, strained and irregular locutions, rapid and often exuberant language. Reading across and between the versions of the poem, however, sustains that sense of restlessness and impatience, unsettledness which continued with Wordsworth into old age. PLI SELON PLI From the Rydal Mount Summerhouse The birds are brightly loud this courting day, strong voices pearling the air after snows then ice-storms surprise me, as I venture along his winding high-raised terrace walks. The run of the house and garden are mine. The timber-lined and slated summerhouse, its rough-cut blocks of stone and heavy roof, keep me dry if not warm, as now the lake sparkles behind rhododendrons and ferns, a dash of sunshine shimmering waters. All seems settled here, the window-gaps frames across birdsong and lake into calm fells; yet this writing-place feels still unfinished, its door- and window-voids openings inward. 27.4.16 Our modern readings of The Prelude, less definite, less ‘Christian’, less in favour of a standardized ‘poetic’ language, tend to favour the 1805 version to the 1850 one. Yet, this early version has only been available since Ernest de Selincourt’s edition of the 1805 text alongside the 1850, which was first published in 1926. The 1850 version, published shortly after Wordsworth’s death, was the one ‘known’ by the Victorian

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poets, as it was by those writers in the earlier twentieth century now labelled as modernists – the Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot who were notably disparaging of Wordsworth.3 The next generation, however, was more sympathetic to Wordsworth’s strategies, particularly around the concept of poetry as a form of self-writing in certain modes. The English poet, and friend of Ezra Pound, Basil Bunting, saw it as a distinct shortcoming in his poetic master that ‘the silly bugger despised Wordsworth’.4 When he crafted his own autobiography, Briggflatts (1966), Bunting made his allegiance to both Pound and Wordsworth an integral part of the sequence’s music: Brag, sweet tenor bull, descant on Rawthey’s madrigal, each pebble its part for the fells’ late spring. Dance tiptoe, bull, black against may.5 The River Rawthey, which runs next to the Quaker Meeting House at Brigflatts that provides Bunting’s sequence with its emotional and religious centre, plays beneath the poem, as the Derwent does beneath Wordsworth’s. The river sound is cast as a musical structure, the ‘madrigal’ giving a vocal range which raises conceits of interweaving and complexity that are carried through in the other references to music and composers in Briggflatts: Domenico Scarlatti, Schoenberg. Wordsworth’s river ‘voice’ which ‘flows along’ his dreams and his biography (‘intertwines’ them in an early version6) As late as 1933, Eliot put Wordsworth’s poetry down to enthusiasm for a ‘revolutionary faith’ which, Eliot makes manifoldly clear, is distasteful to him as a later poet and critic. T. S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (London: Faber, 1964 edition), p. 75. 4 Richard Burton, A Strong Song Towed Us: The Life of Basil Bunting (Oxford: Infinite Ideas, 2103), p. 108. 5 Basil Bunting, Briggflatts (Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 2009 edition), p. 13. 6 William Wordsworth, The Prelude: The Four Texts (1798, 1799, 1805, 1850), edited by Jonathan Wordsworth (London: Penguin, 1995), p. 3. 3

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in Bunting takes on a later, more complex organization, one aware of the generic specificities to which a twentiethcentury poet, with his record player and sleeve-notes, has immediate recourse. Bunting casts the sounds in nature as counterpointing each other; the bull’s bellow ‘descanting’ on the river’s sound, the stones at river-bottom each contributing to the polyphony. The whole is a chorusing, a celebration of a coming to life at the start of Briggflatts, which underpins the whole Wordsworthian sequence of harmony, lostness, disorientation in the modern city, regret at the lapsing of childhood connection to place and to nature, as to early love. Bunting ties his own ‘life story’ to the history of Northumbria, the region of his childhood, to the Saxon kings and to early poets, in a complex interchange of past and present, past in the present. Briggflatts comes back continually to this first place as the field of force which draws history, religion, personal regret, together at the seasons’ turn: Snow lies bright on Hedgehope and tacky mud about Till where the fells have stepped aside and the river praises itself, silence by silence sits and Then is diffused in Now.7 The silence which surrounds the river side near the fells, the sense that the sounds themselves attune the ear to the larger quiet around, opens a space in which history, the unconscious, whatever God is, can enter. But it is the specific landscape, its brightness at certain seasons, the tactile feel of it, that provides the broader space in which these possibilities can enter. In terms of our modern sensibility, there is a key wordchange between the 1805 and 1850 versions of The Prelude which generates the resistance among some writers to the later one. Towards the end of the poem, when reflecting upon what Bunting, Briggflatts, p. 31.

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has been achieved within it, Wordsworth looks forward again to the more achieved work which he hopes to undertake in The Recluse project. This alone will mount what in 1805 he calls an ‘excuse’, in 1850 an ‘insufficient plea’, for having written so at length about himself. In 1805 he calls The Prelude ‘this record of myself’ (XIII, 389); in 1850, ‘this story of myself’ (XIV, 390). Etymologically, there is actually little difference between the two: ‘record’ is a written account of incidents, which carries a legal weight. And yet, to us, 1850’s ‘story’ carries more of a sense of constructedness, whereas ‘record’ feels more transitory, on-the-wing. ‘Story’ now carries also that sense of arbitratriness and potential falsity, the imposition of a pattern and ‘meaning’ upon something which actually escapes definition. We feel abject before stories, cast in the role of listeners and appreciators; ‘record’ carries the lightness of capturing a life in motion, as well as being vulnerable. The etymology of ‘record’ brings words close to home, to the body, carrying within itself as it does the Latin word ‘cor/cordis’, meaning ‘the heart’ or ‘of the heart’. A ‘record’ is a piece of writing that (indeed) might change or be changed as circumstances and contexts alter: it is of us. ‘Record’ allows in, allows things to happen around it, new things to come from it. It heartens new writing in its aftermath. ‘Rememberableness’. The templates and models from earlier writers taken up by later writers and writing have been taken to heart. They are always there for the later writer, but always just out of sight, beyond definition. The relationship between a later and an earlier writer is often surprising and always difficult to pin down. W. G. Sebald calls his essay on the Swiss writer Robert Walser, ‘Le promeneur solitaire’, a ‘Remembrance’, despite the fact that Sebald never met Walser outside of the pages of Walser’s own fugitive texts. The main headline to the essay is, of course, its title, in memory of Rousseau’s solitary walker. Sebald’s writing is a ‘remembrance’ of the French philosopher through the modern Swiss. The first piece of Walser’s that he read, Sebald recounts, was Walser’s

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own memorial to the Prussian writer Kleist, in his imaginary account ‘Kleist in Thun’. This ‘encounter’ was later enhanced by Sebald’s random discovery of a photograph relevant to Walser’s story in an antiquarian bookshop in Manchester, inserted into a biography of Kleist. Such happenstance, Sebald asserts in ‘Le promeneur solitaire’, was among those incidents which show him something that he has only ‘slowly learned to grasp’, that ‘everything is connected across space and time’. But, and what is crucially important, these encounters do not mean for Sebald that he has ‘grasped’ everything about this important precursor, Walser. Instead, Walser’s example lies behind Sebald’s own solitary walks through countries and writers’ works: On all these paths Walser has been my constant companion. I only need to look up for a moment in my daily work to see him standing somewhere a little apart, the unmistakeable figure of the solitary walker just pausing to take in the surroundings. Sometimes I imagine that I see with his eyes.8 The idea of ‘looking up’ from the desk while writing in order to see the ‘constant companion’ is a familiar one from The Prelude. The companion both authorizes and presents the figure of the ideal reader for writing. Again it is about the imagined presence of (absent) friends as addressees and supports for the current project. Think of those moments when Wordsworth pauses the ‘record’ to gesture to the absent (and later to the dead) Coleridge, as the sympathetic presence to whom The Prelude is addressed. Sebald’s ‘pausing’ of his ‘daily work’ to ‘see’ Walser is mirrored in Walser’s own ‘pausing’ on his imagined ‘solitary’ walk. But Walser remains ‘somewhere’, ‘a little apart’; he is not wholly there. Sebald’s essay on him emphasizes, in its mixture of photographic ‘portraits’ of the author and glinting allusions to his works, how elusive and W. G. Sebald, A Place in the Country, translated by Jo Catling (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2013), p. 149.

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‘erratic’ Walser himself is. Often, he notes, in Walser’s later writing, ‘the stream of memory slows to a trickle and peters out in a sea of oblivion’: For this reason it is particularly memorable, and touching, when once in a while, in some context or another, Walser raises his eyes from the page, looks back into the past and imparts to his reader – for example – that one evening years ago he was caught in a snowstorm on the Friedrichstrasse in Berlin and how the vividness of the memory has stayed with him ever since.9 We might say, then, that seen through Sebald’s eyes, Walser’s writing shows us particularly strongly what is the modern case: that so much of memory, so many encounters, ‘peter out in a sea of oblivion’, that we find it hard to hold onto what is most important and personal to us. Walser wrote his ‘stories’ on scraps of paper, often recycled from other purposes, as he walked his paths through Germany, France and Switzerland (Wordsworth carried his working notebooks with him on his walks, Sebald presumably too). But this process of ‘looking up’ from the page, away from the writing, seems, for Sebald, to be the means of access to ‘the past’ and to ‘imagination’ (‘Sometimes I imagine I see with his eyes’). It is only when ‘looking up’ from the writing, reflecting perhaps on where it has led us to, that the specific memory, the ‘authentic’ incident of experience, such as the snowstorm in Berlin, can come forth and thence be ‘imparted’ to the reader (and to the subsequent writer). Wordsworth makes this doubling a factor among the ways in which we look at ourselves through writing at different points of time: A tranquillizing spirit presses now On my corporeal frame: so wide appears The vacancy between me and those days Ibid., p. 136.

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Which yet have such self-presence in my mind That sometimes when I think of them I seem Two consciousnesses – conscious of myself And of some other being. (II, 29–33) The ‘some other being’ (‘a little apart’) which ‘yet’ has some ‘self-presence’ is only possible through ‘remembrance’, even when that remembrance is of an earlier writer and writing. Sebald’s subtitle to his essay, ‘Remembrance’, forces the worlds of experience (he ‘connects’ Walser’s long ‘walks with my own travels’), and of reading, together. And he does all of this, of course, through his own present writing. This is so, even when it is writing from which we each ‘look up’ to experience our own reflections and memories, becoming conscious both of ourselves ‘and [or as]of some other being’. Walser, and through him Sebald, raise particularly the question of who this kind of writing is for; is it indeed only for the writer her- or himself, and only encountered randomly by others, including other later writers? Given that so much experience is deliberately rendered forgettable by Walser (Sebald quotes Benjamin: ‘Every one of Walser’s sentences is to make the reader forget the previous one’), why is it then ‘particularly memorable, and touching’, that a direct ‘memory’, such as the snowstorm, breaks from the text at certain moments? One answer is provided by Walser himself, who, in one of his longer works, ‘The Walk’, directly correlates walking with reading and with writing. ‘Since, dear kind reader, you give yourself the trouble to march attentively along with the writer and inventor of these lines’, and do so ‘quite at ease, with level head’, then you get to visit a bakery with the writer, a bakery moreover with a ‘gold inscription’ on its front – so a place of sweet, rich, writing – as a kind of reward. Since he’s aware that such treats, and encounters with ‘the green and luscious embellishments of trees’ are denied to people in the burgeoning cities of the early twentieth century, ‘“all this,” so I proposed to myself “I shall certainly write down in a piece or sort of fantasy, which I shall entitle ‘The Walk’.”’

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Such writing, Wordsworth’s, Sebald’s, Walser’s, remembers to show us the things in the world we might otherwise forget. It surprises us into ‘self-presence’, remembrance of ourselves. An answer as to what such writing is for, is, then, that it is simply for itself. We read ‘The Walk’ to hear a narrator telling us about the need for ‘The Walk’. If we follow the trail properly, we’ll be given a few dainties along the way. If we ask beyond the fripperies of the text, what it is for, however, we need to pay particular attention to the adjective in the first of the quotes given above from ‘The Walk’: ‘attentively’. Walser pays much attention to attentiveness, even while recognizing that not much of this stuff attended to will be retained: With the utmost love and attention the man who walks must study and observe every smallest living thing, be it a child, a dog, a fly, a butterfly, a sparrow, a worm, a flower, a man, a house, a tree, a hedge, a snail, a mouse, a cloud, a hill, a leaf, or no more than a poor discarded scrap of paper on which, perhaps, a dear good child at school has written his first clumsy letters. … If he does not, then he walks only half attentive, with only half his spirit, and that is worth nothing.10 The writer is fully attentive, since ‘he loves to walk as he loves to write’; the ‘poor discarded scrap of paper’, the child’s first attempt to form letters about the world, might stand in for this kind of writing, which, in the list here and everywhere, adopts a child’s eye view of the world, sympathetic to everything. The man who walks is the man who reads the world around him. Reading attentively is a way of learning attentiveness towards the world. Focus is constantly shifting, from humanity to nature and back again (‘a child, a dog’), but there is little differentiation between the world’s elements. ‘We don’t

Robert Walser, The Walk and other stories, translated by Christopher Middleton et al. (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2013), pp. 64, 68, 88–9.

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need to see anything out of the ordinary. We already see so much’, as the brief paragraph which constitutes Walser’s story, ‘A Little Ramble’, ends.11 To that extent, Walser’s writing resolutely poses its refusal to deliver anything fantastical or imaginative. Each ‘story’ provides a little outing for the reader in sharpening that quality of attention and does no more. We join the reader (writer) for ‘a little ramble’, leave him afterwards. There’s a whimsicality about even its seemingly most potent lessons – such as ‘the man who walks must love’ – which rapidly undo themselves in a welter of details, such as the innocent list here, which make us lose our sense of purpose. We read because, in the busy world of modern life, we constantly forget things: the writing gives us what we otherwise can’t bring to mind, the gilt bakery, the Lake District at the end of the eighteenth century. Walser’s writing comes closest of all that I know to a kind of private language, which is a text that addresses itself to readers while also not giving them anything. Walser the writer remains hidden within and behind it. Wordsworth’s The Prelude, hidden for his lifetime, known only by Coleridge and by those members of his family and circle who so diligently transcribed version after version, is writing with a similar ‘self-presence’ which is, in the absence of a further philosophical masterwork, The Recluse, writing to the self only. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who might have provided the model for Wordsworth in his sense of walking as reading (and writing) as he did later for Walser and for Sebald, delights in such possibility. In Reveries of a Solitary Walker he confronts the fact that on his walks many ‘delightful thoughts’ have come to him only to be forgotten: ‘I shall preserve in writing those which come to me in the future: every time I reread them I shall experience the pleasure of them again.’ He is (ironically, as it happens), revolutionary in the fact that ‘I am writing my reveries entirely for myself’, so that, ‘as the moment of my departure

Ibid., p. 18.

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approaches’ (death here becomes the tongue-in-cheek flâneur) ‘reading them will remind me of the pleasure I have in writing them and, by thus reviving the past for me, will double my existence, so to speak’.12 Wordsworth’s ‘two consciousnesses’ are jokingly pre-figured from this perspective as death defying. Walking as writing as philosophizing as ‘knowing oneself’, but only as conceiving of any of this as possible through the fact of ‘writing entirely for myself’. Autobiography in these heady whirls takes a different turn – not just recording, or narrating, a self, but telling a self to a self, to ensure ‘self-presence’ in an ultimate sense. Such encounters between self and self across time, between authors across time, between readers and poems across a lifetime, form the matter of what literature can hope to be. Sebald’s comic sense of happenstance, the ‘finding’ of a clue to a life’s perspective on the connections between all times and spaces in a random discovery in an (of course!) antiquarian bookshop, does not rule out other forms of more staged encounter. The American poet, lecturer and essayist, Ralph Waldo Emerson, took the Grand Tour of Europe in 1833, and, as an ambitiously literary man, visited the great writers of the time, Carlyle, Coleridge, and John Stuart Mill. Despite his equivocations about aspects of what Wordsworth had become, Emerson was eager to travel to the Lake District to meet the then sixty-three-year-old poet, as he recounted when he later wrote up his ‘First Visit to England’ in his travel memoir, English Traits, in 1856. For, as a result of his encounters with the major literary figures of his day, the erstwhile preacher Emerson launched his own career as a writer more concertedly. He drafted his founding first essay, that definitive text for subsequent American literature, ‘Nature’, on the boat back to Boston from Europe. Emerson’s encounter with Wordsworth at

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Reveries of a Solitary Walker, translated by Russell Goulbourne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 8–9.

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Rydal Mount on 28 August tells us much about what reading and/as presence can mean. That counter is the subject of: EMERSON AT RYDAL MOUNT The whole thing, extempore. Old Wordsworth scuffling in his gravel path, bursting suddenly into long recitation, set me first near to laugh. But, recollecting myself that I had come thus far to see a poet, and here he was now chaunting, I saw that he was right and I was wrong and gladly gave myself up to hear him; swaying with his agricultural pace, his gestures wild as a truant school-boy’s, this seer disfigured by his green goggles, with hidden powers touching the affections, trances of thought and mountings of the mind now seen as through glass, darkly; now face to face. In English Traits, Emerson recalls that Wordsworth talked ‘with great simplicity’. He is a ‘plain, elderly, white-haired man’ whose eyesight is plaguing him. Yet this, Emerson mentions, is no great burden, since Wordsworth as a composer of poetry ‘carries even hundreds of lines in his head before writing them’. It is when speaking his poetry from memory that Wordsworth comes alive for Emerson, as previously for William Hazlitt. Wordsworth’s modulation from normal speech to recitation is ‘unlooked for and surprising’, Emerson says; he displays then ‘great animation’. Emerson, clearly, from his one conversation with Wordsworth, was unimpressed by the man, whose everyday opinions he found mundane. It is in his speaking out of his poetry that Wordsworth displays his ‘departure from the common’, as though in recitation he left his ordinary self behind.13 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays and Lectures, edited by Joel Porte (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1983), pp. 775, 777–8.

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Emerson’s is but the latest example of what we have found arresting in Hazlitt’s and De Quincey’s accounts of meeting Wordsworth and hearing him speak. It is the speaking-aloud of the poems which made him exceed ‘the common’. Yet, as we have also seen, recitation, vocalization, is not just a facet of the writer biographically, but also something the poetry integrates as part of its content and process. ‘Voice’ is a vital word for Wordsworth, as we have seen in numerous examples quoted across this book. It acts as a prompt to writing, a prompt to writing as an opening-out, as a remembering, a drawing of other, and past, selves out into the present. Nature speaks to Wordsworth directly. It is when he is most attuned for it, ready to receive it, that his poetry moves into new modes of understanding. The River Derwent sent ‘a voice | That flowed along my dreams’; when the Boy of Winander ceases hooting to the owls, a ‘gentle shock of mild surprise | Has carried into his heart the voice | Of mountain torrents’. Seeking to renew his writing of The Prelude after the summer break that he took in 1804, Wordsworth reports hearing ‘a voice that stirred me’ – the robins who have appeared with the turn of the year towards chill. And so on, through numerous situations and examples. ‘Voice’ in The Prelude is the term around which the real metaphorical nexus of the writing is held. Voice is nature; Wordsworth is nature’s ‘Prophet’. Voice sets moving the remembrance of the hearing of nature which is poetry. ‘Voice’, if you like, is the non-negotiable, non-translatable, irresistible aspect of what the poem has to tell us. Iain McGilchrist is adamant about this absoluteness of metaphor as an aspect of right-hemisphere brain activity; metaphor, in many ways, captures the possibilities not only for new meaning and expression, but also for experience and the embodiment of experience, which that hemisphere presents: When the metaphor is paraphrased or replaced, whatever had been extralingual, unconscious, and therefore potentially new and alive in the collision of these two entities gets reconstructed, this time in terms only of what is

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familiar. The point of each is looked at in a different light. And it works both ways, as the coming together of one thing with another always must. You can’t pin one down so that it doesn’t move, while the other is drawn towards it: they must draw towards each other.14 McGilchrist’s own hidden metaphor in these last phrases establishes magnetism, the pulling together of mutually ‘drawn’ entities, as the procedure of poetry, that supremely metaphoric medium (‘Hast’ou seen the rose in the steel dust?’ as Ezra Pound asks in Canto LXXIV). The Prelude demonstrates that it is his particular attentiveness towards the voices of nature that made Wordsworth the poet, that he hears in his mind (‘There was a boy’, indeed, had originally been drafted in the first person, ‘I was a boy’ – originally it was more directly an ars poetica). ‘Voice’ is his ‘familiar’ rendition of what he hears, which otherwise has a strangeness, a mixture of the beautiful with the fearful. ‘Voice’ is a catch-all term for the many sounds which nature presents to him and to his poetry. But it draws our attention to those sounds in nature, attunes our senses towards them through the poetry – often it is the poetry’s inscrutability, its refusal to ‘paraphrase or replace’ terms such as ‘voice’, to translate them as something else, which ensures our own attention to the poem, and through it to the world. ‘Voice’ is the human version of something which is not-human, the multitudinous noises in the world around which surprise and ‘shock’ us, when we suddenly break off from our own noisesomeness and ‘look up’, go silent, actually attend to what it is we are hearing or saying or writing, and where it is coming from. Among the Victorian successors to Wordsworth, it is John Ruskin who is perhaps most attentive to this aspect in his own understanding of nature. In his sporadic and unpredictable

14 Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), p. 117.

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autobiography, Praeterita (1885–9), Ruskin mulls the importance to him of music, before confirming that ‘the Voice is the eternal musical instrument of heaven and earth, from angels down to birds’. Praeterita, a late work of Ruskin’s, is punctuated by reminiscences of his childhood holidays in Scotland, and of the continuing Scottish influences into his present life. The distinction of the music of Scotland from every other is in its association with ‘sweeter natural sounds, and filling a deeper silence’. And yet, such is the tumbling over of incident and reflection at this point in Praeterita, that this assertion of uniqueness immediately leads on to a reminiscence of ‘yesterday afternoon’, when Ruskin tells us he went down to the lake side near Brantwood, his home in the Lake District, and saw ‘the calm of its fairest expanse of mirror wave’: It is, literally, one of the most beautiful and strange remnants of all that was once most sacred in this British land, – all to which we owe, whether the heart, or the voice, of the Douglas ‘tender and true’.15 The contention is very much that it is the distinctive Scottish music and poetry which has tuned Ruskin’s ear towards ‘the Voice’ of nature, and which enables him to hymn ‘my own lake’ – Coniston Water – in this way. In Wordsworthian mode, the ‘sweeter natural sounds’ in Praeterita find their primal basis in Ruskin’s childhood visits to an aunt’s in Perth: She lived at Bridge-end, in the town of Perth, and had a garden full of gooseberry-bushes, sloping down to the Tay, with a door opening to the water, which ran past it, clear-brown over the pebbles three or four feet deep; swifteddying, – an infinite thing for a child to look down into.16

John Ruskin, Praeterita, edited by Francis O’Gorman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 357–8. 16 Ibid., p. 8. 15

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This ‘infinite thing’ becomes a focus of the early pages of the book, as Ruskin recalls himself being ‘contented’ as a child by ‘these occasional glimpses of the rivers of Paradise’. As he grows up, the river becomes something to be directly thought upon: ‘I passed my days, much as the thistles and tansy did, only with perpetual watching of all of the ways of running water, – a singular awe developing itself in me, both of the pools of Tay … and of the precipices of Kinnoull.’ These were ‘thoughtless days’, Ruskin recalls, but crucial ones, a test of the authenticity of the account given in Praeterita as a whole. Although ‘inordinately impressional and emotional’, Ruskin continues, ‘it is important to the reader’s confidence’ in these writings that the ‘awe’ which he tells us he felt at the ‘swirls’ of the River Tay is not a matter of ‘illusion or false imagination’. Indeed, this is something which the writings of his own life can ‘boast’ of. Ruskin is remarkably liberal towards his reader; he says at a later moment that she or he can ‘skip’ whichever parts of this autobiography they choose, because (like Rousseau) ‘I write, for the moment, to amuse myself’, and not for that reader.17 Yet it is vital to that ‘impressional and emotional’ basis of the autobiography that ‘all of the ways of running water’, the ‘cress-set rivulets in which the sand danced and minnows darted’, remain its authentic sound and sight. Comically, this loving attention to the ‘unpolluted power of nature’ leads Ruskin, in his account of his eighteenth year when it was at its height, to rebuke ‘idle’ Wordsworth for his simile making. It is the metaphoric, according to Ruskin, which informs the necessary rhetorical situation of any writer: by the side of [River] Wandel, or on the downs of Sandgate, or by a Yorkshire stream under a cliff, I was different from other children, that ever I have noticed: but the feeling cannot be described by any of us that have it. Wordsworth’s

Ibid., pp. 44–5, 220.

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‘haunted me like a passion’ is no description of it, for it is not like, but is, a passion; the point is to define how it differs from other passions, – what sort of human, pre-eminently human, feeling it is that loves a stone for the stone’s sake, and a cloud for a cloud’s.18 It is ‘the sounding cataract’ of the River Wye which ‘haunts me like a passion’ in Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’, the result of the poet’s frustrated attempt to ‘paint | What then I was’ during his first visit to the scene, when ‘nature’ ‘To me was all in all’ (MW, p. 133, 77–8). Ruskin argues for a greater embodiment of natural facets in writing; Wordsworth’s occasional holding of two things alongside each other in his poetry is insufficient to convey experience, which is multiple but whole. ‘All in all’, ‘a stone for the stone’s sake’. In this regard, it is striking that the scene by the river as one which instigates a specifically autobiographical writing recurs in Victorian work. In William Hale White’s intriguing investigation of the borderline between life writing and fiction, The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford (1881), we find a reiteration of Wordsworth’s memory of himself in the ‘Was it for This?’ passage of Book I of The Prelude as ‘a five years child | A naked boy’ playing in the pools formed by the Derwent down from his Cockermouth birthplace. For ‘Mark Rutherford’, such play in the River Ouse at Bedford strikes that note of ‘rememberableness’ literally, setting in train the keynote of ‘reminiscence’ which underwrites the ‘autobiographical’ enterprise: I remember whole afternoons in June, July, and August, passed half-naked or altogether naked in the solitary meadows and in the water; I remember the tumbling weir with the deep pool at the bottom in which we dived; I remember, too, the place where we used to swim across the river.19 Ibid., p. 144. William Hale White, The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford, edited by William S. Peterson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990 edition), p. 4. 18 19

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‘Rutherford’ later described his first encounter with Lyrical Ballads as literally a Road to Damascus experience, instilling for him a more pantheistic version of God than the low church Protestant one that he had been raised with. Yet the ‘I remember, I remember’ passage here signals how far the signature version of Rousseau’s ‘naked savage’ as a child dancing in the rivulets had become a literary (and ‘autobiographical’) set piece by this stage in the later nineteenth century. Wordsworth is as much the ‘memory’ here, as the ‘remembered’ moments of childhood are. Ruskin’s resistance to what he sees as inadequate simile from Wordsworth retains in this light a freshness, and opens for him further metaphors which might motivate his lifetime’s writing. Ruskin’s conjuring of the autobiographical Wordsworth goes to the centre of his writings’ quest through history to understand authentically, and to ‘define’, what it is in the human that is the unique. In and for this, at one point in ‘The Lamps of Memory’ chapter of The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), Ruskin comes up with a telling word (the OED cites this example of his use of it as the first in the language): For, indeed, the greatest glory of a building is not in its stones, nor in its gold. Its glory is in its Age, and in that deep sense of voicefulness, of stern watching, of mysterious sympathy, nay, even of approval or condemnation, which we feel in walls that have been long washed by the passing waves of humanity.20 ‘Voicefulness’ is a striking and surprising word in this context, but goes to the heart of what I’ve been trying to say about The Prelude. It is unlikely that a building’s walls would ‘voice’ (or that they might ‘watch’ or display the human quality of sympathy). As with Wordsworth’s constant sense of nature as a ‘voice’, we are slightly thrown; the physical fabric, and John Ruskin, Selected Writings, edited by Dinah Birch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 24.

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richness (‘gold’) of the building, have become aetherialized but not unsubstantiated into something other, a ‘voicefulness’ ‘which we feel’ in a ‘deep sense’. The building speaks from and of its Age, but also from and of the long wash of the passing waves (a nice pun on ‘passing’ here), of humans across history. Dinah Birch, in her introduction to Ruskin’s Selected Writings, points out that although he did not write Praeterita until he was an old man, in fact ‘it could be said that all his work, from the earliest childhood poem … is autobiographical’.21 The creation of autobiography, as the passages on the ‘swirls’ of the Tay in Praeterita itself demonstrate, could be said to be a record of Ruskin’s coming into ‘voicefulness’, and of constantly needing to renew that presence: The advance of the imaginative artist … owns no laws. He defies all restraint and cuts down all hedges. There is nothing within the limits of natural possibility that he dares not do, or that he allows the necessity of doing. The laws of nature he knows; these are to him no restraint. They are his own nature. … Nothing can stop him, nothing can turn him aside. [He creates] by what intense power of instantaneous selection and amalgamation cannot be said. … But if we … break off the merest stem or twig [of the imaginative painter’s work] it all goes to pieces like a Prince Edward’s drop.22 In our Age of texting, sexting, and Instagramming, we are largely voiceless; our emails are often misunderstood because they cannot speak nuance or emotion, often give offence to their silent readers. Dumbly, we put a cross on a ballot paper every five years and are told to accept that this is our political expression. Meanwhile, the poor increasingly need the soup kitchens to survive, and the vested interests who have hijacked the media and governments across the world continue to sell off Ibid., p. x. Ruskin, ‘Of Imagination Associative’, Selected Writings, pp. 14–15.

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state and natural assets to their banker personal friends. A move Wordsworth deplored and would deplore, as he wrote in a famous letter to Charles James Fox of January 1801, in which he enclosed a copy of the Second Edition of Lyrical Ballads: Recently … by the invention of Soup-shops etc. etc. superadded to the increasing disproportion between the price of labour and that of the necessaries of life, the bonds of domestic feeling among the poor … have been weakened, and in innumerable instances, entirely destroyed. (L, p. 41) Wordsworth’s belief in ‘one Society’ resonates at such moments of equation and unity as Ruskin’s ‘The laws of nature he knows…. They are his own nature.’ To ‘break off’ or segregate any part of society from another is to destroy the whole. Ruskin sets ‘voicefulness’ against all such means to silence us, against all restraint forced upon us. The work of art is inviolate. To attend to only a part of it over the whole is to shatter it. David Hockney’s recent ‘A Bigger Picture’ paintings are on this wavelength, as though condemning the ways in which painting has traditionally belittled nature through the way it has shrunk it within small frames, and selected only nature’s most ‘aesthetically-pleasing’ aspects. The sheer size of Hockney’s renditions of the Yorkshire Wolds challenges traditional perspective and restraint of nature. By standing too close to these paintings, it is impossible to see them; the trees’ largeness in the paintings means that we must stand back in the kind of awe Ruskin experienced before the ‘all of the ways of running waters’. In his catalogue essay to the ‘A Bigger Picture’ exhibition, ‘Seeing with Memory: Hockney and the Masters’, Tim Barringer makes precisely this point, linking these Hockney paintings to a passage in Ruskin’s Modern Painters, which enjoins the artist to ‘go to Nature in singleness of heart … rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing’.23 It is from this refusal to recognize constraint that David Hockney, A Bigger Picture (London: Thames and Hudson, 2012), p. 52.

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‘voicefulness’ emerges, as art, as poetry, as history, as what ‘nature’ might be taken to still mean, and mean for us, in the twenty-first century. There’s a nostalgia and homesickness about all of this which needs to be a part of the response we make to The Prelude. John Ruskin himself has a fantastic passage in which he laments the ‘restless and discontented present’ age. He scorns the way in which we dash through the countryside on railways (now we could add motorways also) which prevent all connection with nature, and which confirm only the urbanization of the modern world: The very quietness of nature is gradually withdrawn from us; thousands who once in their necessarily prolonged travel were subjected to an influence, from the silent sky and slumbering fields, more effectual than known or confessed, now bear with them even there the ceaseless fever of their life; and along the iron veins that traverse the frame of our country, beat and flow the fiery pulses of its exertion, hotter and faster every hour. All vitality is concentrated through those throbbing arteries into the central cities; the country is passed over like a green sea by narrow bridges, and we are thrown back in continually closer crowds upon the city gates.24 Ruskin is partly lamenting the loss amid the modern rush of those professions of journeymen and pedlars who had formed so much a part of Wordsworth’s idealized philosophy and imagination. It is the loss of those people who were in touch with the world of nature by their moving slowly through it. Wordsworth’s quiet, steadying, ‘ceaseless music’ has been replaced by Ruskin’s pulsing ‘ceaseless fever’. Ruskin’s argument is that, amid this fretfulness, such continuing human activities as the creation of great gothic buildings ensure a

Ruskin, Selected Writings, pp. 26–7.

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link to history even in the cities, but a history which is always attained through nature: ‘Those ever springing flowers and ever flowing streams have been dyed by the deep colours of human endurance, valour, and virtue.’25 Ruskin’s is a sharp nostalgia for a connection with the world which has already passed. That, in Wordsworth’s wake, these matters are an integral part of the Victorian psychodrama, is confirmed by such works as Alfred Lord Tennyson’s ‘Maud’ (1855). The speaker of the tragedy, whose desire is to reconnect with the object of his childhood desires, is haunted and distracted by the way that ‘Maud’ is represented as pure ‘voice’: Silence, beautiful voice! Be still, for you only trouble the mind With a joy in which I cannot rejoice, A glory I shall not find. Still I will hear you no more, For your sweetness hardly leaves me a choice But to move to the meadow and fall before Her feet on the meadow grass, and adore, Not her, not her, but her voice. Maud’s voice, which seems oddly a part and not a part of her, is a matter of the out-of-doors. She sings in the meadow near the Hall where she lives, and, famously, in the rose garden. And yet the deterioration which Tennyson’s ‘monodrama’ charts in its main speaker’s jealousy and yearning weirdly abstracts Maud from her singing voice, or, as here, makes the singing voice Maud. It is an odd projection which figures Maud ‘with her exquisite face | And wild voice pealing up to the sunny sky’. The speaker seems, through these gradual losses of perspective, to become increasingly sensitized to the interchange between human musics and those in

Ibid., p. 17.

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the natural world, as revealed in the lyric ‘Come into the garden, Maud’: And the soul of the rose went into my blood   As the music clashed in the hall; And long by the garden lake I stood,   For I heard your rivulet fall From the lake to the meadow and on to the wood,   Our wood, that is dearer than all. That possessive ‘your’ is a marker of how, for the Victorian mind, the external and the internal are blended in ways that Wordsworth would have resisted; nature is marked by the human mood and tragedy, not the other way about. The speaker of ‘Maud’, as he further breaks down, increasingly discovers a hellishness in his own mind. This happens, typically, through his presuming a posthumous existence, after his violent duel with, and killing of, Maud’s brother and subsequent exile. Typically, also, his existence in the city threatens an overwhelming of his mind by loudness and by irregular sound: my bones are shaken with pain, For into a shallow grave they are thrust, Only a yard beneath the street, And the hoofs of the horses beat, beat, The hoofs of the horses beat, Beat into my scalp and my brain, With never an end to the stream of passing feet, Driving, hurrying, marrying, burying.26 Silence, or ‘peace’, is not envisaged even after death in this tormented world – the speaker finds solace only by a passionate patriotic commitment to his country in signing up to fight in the Crimea. What is miraculous about Tennyson’s 26 Alfred Lord Tennyson, Selected Poems, edited by Aidan Day (London: Penguin, 1991), pp. 238–9, 263, 272.

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‘monodrama’ as a whole, however, is the way it seizes upon the notion of ‘voice’ as demanding adoration, but also as a signal for destruction; the different verse forms deployed by Tennyson give to the speaker almost a different self or character at each moment in the breakdown. His readiness to speak through different renditions of the world as aspects of his own trauma mark the Hamlet-distrust which has entered between the two. The speaker of ‘Maud’s’ followers in this are legion. The American poet Wallace Stevens’s first collection, Harmonium (1927), bears several examples of uncertain rationalization on this point. ‘Peter Quince at the Clavier’, for instance, rapidly shifts from the practicality of the fingers on the clavier’s keys making sound to ‘the self-same sounds | On my spirit’ which ‘make a music, too’. As a result, ‘what I feel, | Here in this room, desiring you … Is music’. We might well feel that the speaker too rapidly bypasses the seeming object of his ‘desire’, in order to rationalize the aesthetic and immortality of the moment (‘The body dies; the body’s beauty lives’).27 There is an irregularity about the relation between self and context, and correlatively an inexpressiveness about the ‘music’ made, which is at odds with the steady regulation of Wordsworth’s writing out of these interactions. That ‘ceaseless music,’ which is also ‘the harmony of music,’ is the ‘mind of man’. The English poet who most intensely follows this Tennysonian exacerbation of such Wordsworthian traits, in its formal and also in its temperamental aspects, is Edward Thomas. Thomas’s early poems like ‘The New Year’, ‘Man and Dog’, and ‘Lob’ seek to recoup Wordsworthian poems of encounter on the roads for a twentieth-century aesthetic. As Edna Longley notes about Thomas’s poem ‘The Signpost’, Thomas was prone to quote Wordsworth’s tag from The Prelude that ‘the very world’ is the Wallace Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, edited by Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1997), pp. 72–4.

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place where ‘in the end | We find our happiness, or not at all’ (X, 725–8). It is ‘earth’ and the sounds of earth, of the waters and the birdsong, which ultimately form Thomas’s distinctive ars poetica.28 Thomas’s is a countryside alive with the sound of waters, and waters which allow for a timelessness otherwise obscured in the modern world. Watching a child playing by the stream in ‘The Brook’, the speaker finds their attention divided between a butterfly and ‘the gleam, | The motion, and the voices, of the stream, | The waters running frizzled over gravel, | That never vanish and for ever travel’. Suddenly access is gained to history through this quiet moment, as the speaker’s thought turns to an ancient barrow nearby, and to the horseman supposedly buried with his horse beneath it. It is as though the permanence of the scene, sitting beside the brook, causes the present to fall away before a wider scope. In the succeeding poem to this that Thomas wrote, ‘Aspens’, we find a similar sense of the permanence of features in nature which alert us to the passing of human trades and people in this world: The whisper of the aspens is not drowned, And over lightless pane and footless road, Empty as sky, with every other sound Not ceasing, calls their ghosts from their abode, A silent smithy, a silent inn.29 Like the movement of the aspens’ leaves, the poetry is what fills the emptiness and the double silence here, invoking the past, but at the same time respecting its right to silence. ‘We’ are ultimately the aspen, that ‘ceaselessly’ grieves for the lives lost, the ghosts, that we can recognize at rare moments like

Edward Thomas, The Annotated Collected Poems, edited by Edna Longley (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 2008), p. 154. 29 Ibid., pp. 96–7. 28

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these, through poetry. As Thomas perhaps most famously put it, in the last stanza of ‘I never saw that land before’, I should use, as the trees and birds did, A language not to be betrayed, And what was hid should still be hid Excepting from those like me made Who answer when such whispers bid.30 This call and response between nature and the mind is familiar from the Wordsworthian tropes I have discussed throughout the book. Thomas knows, as Wordsworth did, the limits of what language might tell us, and therefore the responsibility we must show towards it. We must not seek to say more than we can, and so ‘betray’ language into falsehood. Thomas’s is also a call of a poet to poets, to those similarly attuned (‘like me made’). But, like Wordsworth, he does not rule out a possibility that this poetry of his attunes others also to hear the ‘whispers’ – that all are poets. The call and response is between the present poem and past versions of it in history. Yet it is a call also from the present into the future, where other poems might emerge using the same language as the trees and birds – the ceaseless voices coming to us through nature, and creating new poems as a proper response (the only full response).

… all those sounds Nineteenth-century American philosophy and its aftermath has, for a long time now, been one measure of things for me. We have glimpsed it earlier, in discussing Emerson’s encounter with Wordsworth in 1833, and, more remotely, when considering Stanley Cavell’s thoughts on autobiography. Cavell is one of the principal philosophers in recent times who has taken on, Ibid., p. 120.

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promoted, and furthered, the tradition of American thinking from the nineteenth century. That tradition itself furthered the ideas of European Romanticism, and Wordsworth is an acknowledged model and forerunner for these writers, especially in the renditions of the self on the move in nature, which they establish. Henry David Thoreau’s A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) is a good register of the possibilities of this thinking, and provides a good model for how this current book is structured. Thoreau’s chapters literally run through the days of the week, Saturday through to Friday. During the week, the writer ‘travels’ with someone from their home in Concord along the rivers and into the mountains, then returns downstream. The travelling is done by small boat, although there are divergences from the riverbank world, as the travellers walk to explore its environs. This book is as haunted as The Prelude came to be – although it is a present-tense narrative of the journey. By the time Thoreau had completed and published it, his companion on the trip (the cause for the frequent pronoun ‘we’ in the book), his brother John had died suddenly and agonizingly of lockjaw. The ‘Week’, in other words, occurred in 1839; Thoreau’s brother died in 1842; the book appeared seven years later, on the tenth anniversary of the original voyage. The text as we have it, like The Prelude from 1804 onwards, is haunted by this interplay of presence and absence, but, more properly, by this notion of turning and returning – much like this journey itself – to a detailed set of experiences which only find their ‘form’ latterly in the process of creation which is a recreation. The nature of A Week captures this ethos within it. The text is deeply digressive, departing from the teleological expectation established by the notion of journey and return. Playfully, Thoreau can be dismissive of the value of the actual voyage as an experience, suggesting there is more to think about – and write about – than ‘reality’ offers. ‘Perhaps I can tell a tale to the purpose while the lock is filling,’ he muses at one point as they move between river levels, ‘for our voyage this forenoon

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furnishes but few incidents of importance.’31 Although the travellers do fulfil the chronological shape of their voyage, the Week is filled with the thoughts, speculations and reflections. These go together with accounts of his reading by the writer, along with frequent accounts (often derived from other texts) of the history, settler and Native American, of the places they ‘travel’ through. Thoreau’s own poems, and select passages from others’ poetry, both contemporary and past, occur in the text, often ‘unsigned’, with no author attributed, in response to the places or to the thoughts entertained as the places pass. At the heart of the book, however, are the by-now-predictable sounds. At Plum Island, Thoreau emphasizes the grandness, but also the dreariness of this scene in Massachusetts: ‘A solitary stake stuck up, or a sharper sandhill than usual, is remarkable as a landmark for miles; while for music you hear only the ceaseless sound of the surf, and the dreary peep of the beach-birds’ (p. 161). It is music which links this writer to the past. ‘A strain of music … can be wafted down through the centuries from Homer to me,’ Thoreau exclaims, and so establishes himself as a pioneer of writing in this new context of America: What a fine communication from age to age, of the fairest and noblest thoughts, the aspirations of ancient men, even such as were never communicated by speech, is music! It is the flower of language, thought colored and curved, fluent and flexible, its crystal fountain tinged with the sun’s rays, and its purling ripples reflecting the grass and the clouds. (pp. 139–40) It is a music which can accept modernity; a few pages later, Thoreau compares telegraph wires vibrating to ‘a faint music in the air like an Aeolian harp’, that stringed box placed in casements so dear to Coleridge and to other Romantics Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, edited by H. Daniel Peck (New York: Penguin, 1998), p. 161. All subsequent references are to this edition, and page numbers are given in the text. 31

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(Wordsworth refers to one in Book I of The Prelude (104)). What is notable for us here, in a book which ventures ‘beyond’ (or before) criticism, is the hint that music is a ‘communication’ which does not need to sully itself, as it were, by becoming speech. It is a flower; it is water, reflective of the things of the natural world, both primitive and modern at the same time. Yet it is not words, not the words in which Thoreau’s book must seek to ‘communicate’. (He is interested in the lapse between experience and articulacy, in other words, which elsewhere in this book we have used the thoughts of Iain McGilchrist to adumbrate.) This is an idea which recurs in the book, almost a thread running beneath and across it. Defending ‘fable’ early in A Week, Thoreau asserts that, if a story is ‘naturally and truly composed so as to satisfy the imagination, ere it addresses the understanding’, then it might be accepted by ‘wise men’ as a measure by which to run a life. ‘We seem to hear the music of a thought, and care not if the understanding be not gratified’ (pp. 47–8). Although elsewhere it is described as ‘the neverfailing beauty and accuracy of language, the most perfect art in the world’, language falls some way short (although Thoreau does not admit it) of ‘nature’s health or sound state’. That ‘state’ recurs in ‘all these sounds, the crowing of cocks, the baying of dogs, and the humming of insects at noon’ (p. 34). Like Wordsworth, then, Thoreau is sceptical about what books can tell you compared to the experience of nature: ‘The birds draw closer … seemingly composing new strains upon their roosts against the sunshine. What were the amusements of the drawing-room and the library in comparison, if we had them here?’ (p. 243) The answer, as with Wordsworth’s ‘Expostulation and Reply’, of course, is ‘no kind of amusement at all’. The newness of the birds’ composition in response to, and as resistance to, the fierceness of the sunshine, is more telling than the exchanges of polite society or than the deadening volumes of the library. As with his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, who he frequently quotes in his text, as though Emerson were another of its absent

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presences, for Thoreau it is this newness which ultimately gives confidence in and to the text. Thoreau’s is a wildness in the writing which mirrors the wilderness of this America which his voice partly charts, by giving detail and description to the bald maps and dead histories of the region outside his town. Although companioned here, as Wordsworth notoriously was by Dorothy at Tintern Abbey, the speaker of Thoreau’s text is essentially a solitary. He is alone in his unmediated encounters with the world around him, in his recollections of past encounters with the wilderness, such as when he climbed various mountains or went on previous journeys. Thoreau also, in this book, has Wordsworthian encounters with other solitary figures such (as Peck notes in his Introduction to the Penguin edition) as the ‘old brown-coated man’ at its outset, who ‘nobody else saw’; and ‘nobody else remembers him now’ (p. xiv). As with Emerson, however, what is notable about the process of Thoreau’s writing is how it sees autobiography as the measure of all texts. More importantly, A Week casts self as the measure, and container, of all of history (‘all history is but the epoch of one degradation,’ as Emerson put it in the founding essay, ‘Nature’32). Sitting by the river and eating an evening picnic, the speaker in A Week experiences waves of sublimity which are then superseded by further waves which replace them. ‘We are grateful when we are reminded by interior evidence of the permanence of universal laws,’ he reflects. This sudden access, to broader pulses and rhythms which he feels, then, settles geographically towards the East, whose religions have underpinned much of the book’s sense of mythology, ‘fable’, and spirituality. Then we immediately move to the self in history: In some happier moment, when more sap flows in the withered stalk of our life, Syria and India stretch away from our present as they do in history. All the events which make Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays and Lectures, p. 45.

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the annals of the nations are but the shadows of our private experiences. … In short, the history which we read is only the fainter memory of events which have happened in our own experience. … This world is but the canvas to our imaginations. (p. 235) All that has gone before is present now, among ‘our private experiences’, which are the living, vivid versions of events which stretch back into primitive times. As he has said earlier in A Week, ‘All that is told of mankind, of the inhabitants of the Upper Nile, and the Sunderbunds, and Timbuctoo, and the Orinoko, was experience here’ (p. 99). Here is our vantage point, and in this writing out of the self is reflected all of the past. Like The Prelude, A Week prioritizes ‘the music of thought’, but, more especially, ‘the imagination’, as a way of realizing the past in the present; for Thoreau, as not for Wordsworth, that imagination includes realization of past cultures and societies, the whole of the European and Eastern past in its ‘here’, in this text, now. All of the ‘waves’ and ‘sap’ from that past converge in the present self, but also in the self as the present text, the text from which we cannot stand back as it speaks to us. There is something exorbitant and exhilarating about this, given our self-enclosed worlds and lives – yet also, let’s face it, something imperialistic. Thoreau’s chorusing of the assumption of all past cultures into the present of the American land and landscape can feel disconcerting. Yet at the same time we can see what he is aiming for, and that it is a way of thinking that is new, and that asserts itself beyond written history, even the history which we write about ourselves inside ourselves. At the time he wrote and published A Week, of course, Thoreau could not have read The Prelude. But it is noticeable how much his text treats similar ideas and even the digressive manner of Wordsworth’s text, its defence of a kind of preunderstanding through the sounds and ‘music’ of nature which is welcomed into, ironically and paradoxically, a supremely written and textually allusive piece of work. Language is used

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to point towards a possible way of life which it can never fully articulate, never fully live, but which enjoins the reader themselves to move outside the boundaries of property and society and to explore the environment around them. This is a salutary lesson in the early twenty-first century, where we are sounded by text(s) (txts) and by imagery projected at us, where we are so often denied control over experience, where we are denied the right simply to walk out or away. Thoreau’s exemplary book offers one place where we can do so; its odd mixture of prose, poetry, philosophy is democratic towards its readership to this degree that everyone might tune into it. A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers is perhaps bolder in this mixing than is Thoreau’s other and more well-known life manual, Walden (1854). Walden and A Week were both being worked on by Thoreau during his stay in the summer of 1845 at the idyllic Pond, and make an intriguing pairing potentially – the one book excavating further into the site of its title as into the mind of its author, the other much more open and free in its play between sites travelled through and thoughts held, then moved beyond. Structurally, A Week feels closer to a Wordsworthian text, in its enactment of its thinking through the progression of the writing. As with Wordsworth, for Thoreau the process of travelling is more than a metaphor for those processes of thinking and writing. In his own essay ‘Walking’, Thoreau tells us that ‘you must walk like a camel who is said to be the only beast which ruminates when walking. When a traveller asked Wordsworth’s servant to show him her master’s study, she answered “Here is his library, but his study is out of doors.”’ True study is outside, away from the books. (Nietzsche has the same thought: ‘Do not believe any idea that was not born in the open air and of free movement.’33) ‘In my walks I would fain return to my

Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, translated by Duncan Large (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 21.

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senses. What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking something out of the woods?’34 This is the true presentness which A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers also encompasses; however far the thought ‘recorded’ in Thoreau’s text seems to stray from the moment, it remains rooted in the detail of it, is sparked by something out of the world which is being experienced and witnessed. As ‘Walking’ also asserts, ‘We cannot afford not to live in the present. He is blessed over all mortals who loses no moment of the passing life in remembering the past.’35 Of course, no such ‘mortal’ can ever exist; it is integral to our humanity that we abstract ourselves from the present when we are forging the narrative of self which involves us with versions of our past. We constantly measure the ‘new’ world against our images of past ones – that is how we understand it, can respond to it physiologically and thence mentally. That is what neurology is currently discovering to be the essence of what ‘self’ is. And yet, you can see again what Thoreau is asking, which is an absolute freedom and openness to assimilation of everything around, independently of custom and of categorization or containment. Every individual must enact for themselves the American Revolution, just as, for passages of Book IX of The Prelude, Wordsworth hoped that he could embody the liberation and hope of the French Revolution. Thoreau’s ‘Walking’ tells us that ‘life consists with Wildness. The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him.’ We must ‘press forward incessantly’, and labour continually to do so. Importantly, Thoreau turns to his favoured art in order to mediate this new possibility: In short, all good things are wild and free. There is something in a strain of music, whether produced by an instrument or by the human voice … which by its wildness, to speak The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau: Excursions, edited by Joseph J. Moldenhauer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), pp. 189, 190. 35 The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau: Excursions, p. 220. 34

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without satire, reminds me of the cries emitted by wild beasts in their native forests. It is so much of their wildness as I can understand.36 Again, the limit to what ‘understanding’ can give. But, again, the assertion that ‘music’ is the closest we might come to that boundless experience which the forests and the woods present. We are reminded that it is on a day ‘stormy … rough … wild’ that the boy Wordsworth is recalled as receiving some as yet unarticulated sense of his father’s imminent death in Book XI; it is in those moments of ‘wildness’ in nature that we come closest to insight into our own situation. None of this advocacy, of Thoreau’s for the self as the present point of history and writing, or Wordsworth’s of a self, recollected in and through memory and history, however, amounts to ‘life writing’, a term which, as I create this book, is ubiquitous in academic studies. We are not single, absolutely verifiable, selves from moment to moment. This is what The Prelude teaches us, and this is what is most heartening about it.37 This is Wordsworth’s continuing relevance – imagination, contradiction, inarticulateness, and impossibility is integral to the writing of the life as to its living. The facets of that life, even if partly ‘true’ (how can we ever verify what another feels,

Ibid., p. 210. The American poet William Carlos William’s personal testament, Paterson (1946–58) echoes something of this in its second Book, where the repeated mantra ‘Walking’ releases mediations on thought and physical movement. See Paterson (London: Penguin, 1983), pp. 44–58. 37 Depressingly, one prominent ‘how to’ guide to Life Writing has to make some measure of steady authenticity the heart of the medium’s appeal. ‘Why do people read life writing?’ its authors ask: ‘People read because they want to know about many real lives, not just their own. … For many years now, readers have turned to life writing because self-doubt has invaded so much literary fiction. … Life writers are free to tell a story – but they have a contract with the reader not to invent, to tell as far as possible what actually happened.’ Sally Cline and Carole Angier, Life Writing: A Writers’ & Artists’ Companion (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), p. 1. 36

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or says they feel, how can we listen to them listening?), find a different place in the ‘record of myself’ even as the writer moves on self-reflectively through the writing. Wordsworth reflects upon this at the opening of Book II, as he recalls the playtime of his schooldays: is there one, the wisest and the best Of all mankind, who does not sometimes wish For things which cannot be – who would not give, If so he might, to duty and to truth The eagerness of infantine desire? A tranquillizing spirit presses now On my corporeal frame, so wide appears The vacancy between me and those days Which yet have such self-presence in my mind That sometimes when I think of them I seem Two consciousnesses – conscious of myself And of some other being. (II, 22–33) (Nor are you the same person or consciousness as when you first read this passage above.) This passage opens with something obvious about the life not lived, although the idealization of the ‘infantine desire’ to set against adult mores of duty and truth is striking. But then the passage hardens into something very telling, the setting of a split, of emptiness, ‘vacancy’, between the present writing self and the past self, which yet has a version of ‘self-presence’ in his mind at the moment of writing. Memory makes him alien to himself, but, importantly, both selves exist in the instant. Current bodiliness recedes and lulls, as the mind is subsumed by the ‘two consciousnesses’. Wordsworth’s vocabulary here seems strikingly modern. It enables that feeling of doubling, self-alienation, we sometimes have, especially when tired, or when writing. Such selfreflectiveness enables us to unshackle ‘life writing’ from its boundedness to narrative and ‘explanation’. It also questions whether the current vogue for ‘non-fiction memoir’ might offer a ‘truer’ perspective than academic criticism. These terms

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and practices are, from the perspective of The Prelude’s poetry, too bounded.38 We touched upon doubling earlier, in connection to Kieslowski’s film The Double Life of Veronique, the sense of one self being haunted by another, and feeling the presence of the other, particularly at the moment of her loss. The double seems almost an instigation to living in the present, writing it in Wordsworth’s case; The Prelude is the harbour of these ‘two consciousnesses’, the one speaking to, and taking its perspective upon, the other. The poem exercises an exemplary self-vigilance. But what we also see in reading the poem is a mind telling stories to itself, about who it was and therefore is, in a very active and unpredictable process. The phrase immediately after the moment of reflection cited just now returns us to memory, to the ‘grey stone | Of native rock’ which was the centre of Wordsworth’s remembered boyhood games: the rock had disappeared when the poet recalls returning to it, and had become part of an assembly hall. Here a literal modernity overtakes a close-held memory. To some extent there is a ‘logic’ to the connection between the reflective passage, and the occurrence of this specific image, as it exemplifies a literal ‘vacancy’ between past and present – the cherished rock has been removed and broken up to make the new place of ‘entertainment’. Yet this in its turn is also immediately dismissed (‘let the fiddle scream’), and we are soon back with ‘boisterous’ boyhood sports (II, 39–42). There is an energy to all of this, a constant impulse onwards, Wordsworth’s model of ‘two consciousnesses’ is also a heartening corrective in this world of social-networking, where ‘self’ is often a split entity in a damaged sense: split, as Sherry Turkle has maintained, ‘between the screen and the physical real, wired into existence through technology’. Laurence Scott has pointed to the paradox whereby the ‘history of consistent … personhood’ demanded of us by the internet is always and only one required by corporate interests seeking to sell us new products on the basis of our browsing ‘past’. See Turkle, Alone Together, p. 16; Laurence Scott, The FourDimensional Human: Ways of Being in the Digital World (London: Windmill Books, 2015), p. 28.

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especially in the early books of The Prelude, perhaps because this is the place where that ‘vacancy’ between present adult self and unself-conscious boyhood self is at its greatest; there is a true drama in the separation between the two selves which is not as evident in the later books, where the meditations upon history and political disillusion are shared between a young adult and someone, the poet now writing what we read, only ten years older. The dynamic of the ‘two consciousnesses’ as integral to the writing, and to the writing out of a self, is highly suggestive, beyond our usual fascination with dopplegangers and with the uncanny haunting of one self by another. It tells us, in the terms of recent scientific thought, something about how we come to be selves at all. Antonio Damasio’s Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain develops a complex theory about consciousness as it relates to a multi-staged version of selfhood. Memory is key, but key because it involves the all of us, body and mind, past and present.39 When we come across new experiences, or encounter new objects in the world, Damasio claims, we do not simply ‘record’ (that word again) the features of the experience or object – colour, form, shape – but ‘the brain actually records the multiple consequences of the organism’s interactions with the entity’. As such, with every

In an earlier book, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Brain, Damasio had shown how both body and mind are integral to all of our responses to the world: for instance, ‘the essence of feeling an emotion is the experience of … changes [in the body state] in juxtaposition to the mental images that initiated the cycle [of feeling]. In other words, a feeling depends on the juxtaposition of the body proper to an image of something else, such as the visual image of a face or the auditory image of a melody.’ In fact, memory is made up through the deployment of such whole body (and mind) images, which ‘are not solely visual; there are also “sound images”, “olfactory images”, and so on’ (London: Vintage, 2006 edition) , pp. 145, 89. Memory is our way of re-inhabiting the versions of the sights and sounds of the past we choose to tell ourselves, consciously or unconsciously, in response to the world we perceive in the present.

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‘new’ perception that we make in the present, we are engaging much of our past responses: Our memories of certain objects are governed by our past knowledge of comparable objects or of situations similar to the one we are experiencing. … The notion that the brain ever holds anything like an isolated ‘memory of the object’ seems untenable. The brain holds a memory of what went on during an interaction, and the interaction importantly includes our own past, and often the past of our biological species and culture.40 You might say that we are always our pasts. Yet, for Damasio, observing the conscious mind also teaches that we construct narratives as means to link the past self to the present one: echoing his book’s title, ‘Self comes to mind in the form of images, relentlessly telling the story of such engagements’ (p. 203). Damasio calls the interaction between the self and an object which alters our feelings, makes us something different, the ‘core self’. But he calls ‘the autobiographical self’ that which occurs ‘when objects in one’s biography generate pulses of core self that are subsequently, momentarily linked in a largescale coherent pattern’ (p. 181). That ‘momentarily’ is vital; every moment in life in which we interact with the world around us involves some feeling and creation of new chemical links between different parts of our brains. Who we are, the ‘pattern’, only exists in the moment, and is always becoming something else. Of course, we rarely link our present and past consciously, or perhaps only at key moments when one new experience makes us create a mini-film in which we run a version of a past event.

Antonio Damasio, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain (London: Vintage, 2010), pp. 132–3. All subsequent references to this work are given in the text.

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NOSTALGIA Mind is the stories it tells itself like those seasick storm-caught sailors who stepped across the ship’s side into green wheat thrashing in the winds, not one of them glancing back, but rushing towards loves calling them home – stories it tells as it teaches us not to hear them. The Prelude is perhaps the most sustained place in poetry where we can see such processes happen. In our brains, these images and links happen in fractions of time, often milliseconds. Poetry allows us to slow that process, and to see it the more clearly. But it also shows us that ‘the conscious mind’, in its responses to the world at each moment, rests upon a welter of unarticulated material and connection: Damasio wants very much to break the barriers between the ‘conscious’ workings of the mind and what he calls the ‘non-conscious’ space. The ‘non-conscious’ is both larger, and capable of its own reasoning, through the connections which it makes between ‘previously learned emotional-feeling factors’ (p. 275). We can only articulate why we responded as we did after responding; The Prelude forms a vast but ‘momentary’ ‘pattern’ of autobiographical self which performs for us this retrospective actuality, and which suggests its expressive limitations. In order to experience (‘feel’) it, therefore, we need to allow it fully to play upon the ‘previously learned emotional-feeling factors’, without imposing immediately upon our listening a critical voice or vocabulary which is always insufficient. Once again, we might recognize in this the vital significance of literature, and particularly of poetry, at this particular point in the twenty-first century. Damasio’s sense that it is in images that we capture the world around us suggests that the arts most suited to replicate the brain’s functioning are film and poetry, where not only the creation and elucidation of imagery, but also the thinking beyond and through images, are most strongly

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to the fore. Damasio shares with Iain McGilchrist fear about what is currently happening to the human brain in response to developing technology that is highly pertinent. ‘In the generation that has grown up multi-tasking, in the digital age,’ Damasio says, ‘the upper limits of attention in the human brain are being rapidly raised.’ While this might give a terrific advantage in some respects to those most able to perform many complex acts of attention simultaneously, it will also ‘in the not-too-distant future’ change aspects of consciousness fundamentally. As a result, there ‘may be a trade-off in terms of learning, memory consolidation, and emotion’ (p. 174). We might not exist any longer, in other words, in a state of multi-selfedness, but rather in a world of selflessness, nonselfedness, where we are unable to construct an autobiographical or a core self as we lose access to ‘our own’ pasts, and to our ‘non-conscious’ previous emotional life. It is that emotional-feeling life which is so necessary to our present responses. Poetry, as the place where imagery draws attention to memory, and where the emotions are actively engaged, provides a better model for humanity moving into the future than online access ever will. Poetry also slows time, makes us aware of its consequences, shows how we might play in and with time, and with the ‘ordinary’ patterns of vocal rhythm and intonation. It makes us active participants in the world. Poetry puts us back into connection with our selves as selves by putting us into proper, complex, connection with other selves, showing the connection of present to past versions of us, and the connections of the non-conscious and conscious worlds that we all carry inside our bodies and minds. From the perspective of this recent science, therefore, The Prelude demonstrates a convenient construction of ‘the autobiographical self’ as it passes from moment to moment, always becoming something other, but always threading a story of the self in its different versions. The model of ‘two consciousnesses’ within one speaking voice, as it were, a monologue which changes and reviews itself across Wordsworth’s recastings of the poem, has become an archetypal if paradoxical one for later writers. This is especially

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so for later poets who felt that the ‘autobiographical’ self must be articulated in order for the major work they felt capable of to proceed. Wordsworth felt that he was in The Prelude sloughing off that autobiography, in some sense articulating it better to understand who he was, in order to embark on what he saw as the more significant work of the philosophical poem – also the first such in the language – The Recluse. We see a similar sense of preparation in the work of later writers, or of repeated reflection upon the sources of their craft which is necessary to them once they are established. In each case, the concept of ‘two consciousnesses’ is vital to this stage of alteration or reflection.

Another life, other lives In an immediate sense, this sense of doubleness would seem to be what Wordsworth bequeathed to the next generation of poets to his own, a generation otherwise made uncomfortable by what they saw as the conservatism of Wordsworth’s later work and by his acceptance into a political establishment. Shelley, for instance, in his allegorical poem about the evolution of his poetic sensibility, Alastor, notably divided the possibilities held within poetry as he understood it, between two contrasting personae. He offers a narrator figure who is a pietistic Wordsworth: Mother of this unfathomable world! Favour my solemn song, for I have loved Thee ever, and thee only; I have watched Thy shadow, and the darkness of thy steps, And my heart ever gazes on the depth Of thy deep mysteries.41 (19–24) Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, edited by Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York: Norton, 1977), pp. 69–86. Line numbers are given in the text.

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There is a mocking exaggeration about a lot of this selfpietism (‘unfathomable … depth | Of thy deep’), a lurching of the ‘Wordsworth voice’ into parody and pompousness. Shelley is clearly more inclined towards the other figure in his poem, a youthful poet who travels the world like Byron’s Childe Harold, seeking extreme experiences in order to strike a very different poetic note. When that youth finally arrives at poetic maturity, in a dream of his image of what the highest poetry might be, however, we might note that the terms of the dream are not that far removed from some of the inflections of that Wordsworthian strain we have become familiar with. Shelley’s youthful poet has an erotic dream of a ‘veiled maid’, all sinuous, ‘glowing limbs’ beneath the thin transparent fabric of her garment. The maid is herself ‘a poet’, who talks in ‘low solemn tones’, before she throws off her solemn mood and raises in her voice ‘wild numbers’ and sweeping from some strange harp Strange Symphony … The beating of her heart was heard to fill The pauses of her music, and her breath Tumultuously accorded with those fits Of intermitted song. (166–7, 169–72) Against this ‘strangeness’ and breathless ideal, the ‘Wordsworth’ figure in Shelley’s poem seems inadequate. Alastor several times quotes the ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’ as presenting bewildered and uncomprehending responses to the world, and the various unanswered ‘obstinate questionings’ which it raises. But the ‘veiled maid’, so excitedly dreamt up as offering an image of beauty which stands out against those worldly matters which weigh down the ‘solemn’ narrator, is also an Angel of Death. Soon after dreaming of lying in her arms, the youth in Shelley’s poem wanders further but then dies, seemingly lapsing out of a world which cannot accommodate him. The ‘pure’ voice of the maid which lured him in the dream is too much for the actuality of lived existence. Shelley

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sets up a doubling, then, around the music of poetry; the allegory of Alastor sets two musicalities struggling against each other within the one poem, and ultimately and paradoxically suggests that they cannot be reconciled. The music of ideal possibility happens in dreams and leads to death; the music of worldly reflection lives on muttering and repeating its own best lines in a feeble attempt to state what the issue is. It is as though the Wordsworthian music, for succeeding generations, splits in two directions; it is a model for contemplating the past and the world around, but also holds up a model of poetry as a supreme expression which yet cannot be adequate to the poverty and degradation of everyday and ordinary lives. This split is demonstrated in later figures and texts with the shadow of Wordsworth’s autobiographical work in them. From the twentieth century, Edward Thomas would again seem to have been a case in point. Harried by years of journalism, over-production of hackneyed prose for financial purposes, and by depression and thoughts of suicide, between 1912 and 1914 Thomas produced a series of variously displaced autobiographical works in prose. These include the novel, The Happy-Go-Lucky Morgans, various short prose pieces, the journey-text In Pursuit of Spring, and the autobiography which became known as The Childhood of Edward Thomas. As the editor of several of these works, Guy Cuthbertson, acknowledges, they often owe a strong debt to John Ruskin’s late autobiography, Praeterita, which is particularly a presence in The Childhood of Edward Thomas. Yet, at the centre of both The Happy-Go-Lucky Morgans and The Childhood of Edward Thomas is the phrase from Wordsworth’s ‘My Heart Leaps Up’ which gets misquoted by Thomas in a late piece, ‘Fiction’: ‘The child is father of the man.’42 Even in Wordsworth subsequently used his own lines as epigraph to the more famous ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’. The concept, of course, goes to the heart of The Prelude, which Wordsworth was working on in Spring 1804 as he completed the ‘Ode’.

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Thomas’s ‘novel’, The Happy-Go-Lucky Morgans, there is, as Cuthbertson also notes, a strong element of autobiography, but an autobiography which recombines different elements in Thomas’s childhood, and different people that he knew, into a story of exile and displacement through its firstperson narrative. The ‘novel’ opens with the line ‘My story is of Balham and of a family dwelling in Balham who were more Welsh than Balhamitish.’43 That issue of identity (its absurdity – ‘Balhamitish’), and of association, will then run through the plot, which has a tantalizing aspect in that we never really know the identity of the narrator himself. Yet it is in the ‘present tense’ memoir, In Pursuit of Spring, which recounts a cycle tour Thomas took out of London on Good Friday 1913 heading westwards, that the most odd and radical innovation around the ‘two consciousnesses’ of writing occurs. This is the book which Robert Frost, the friend and encourager of Thomas who he was to meet in October 1913, thought could easily be re-rendered as poetry. Frost’s clear hint brought a response from Thomas in the Autumn of 1914, when he did begin to write poems. In Pursuit of Spring passes by Nether Stowey briefly, and the district in which Coleridge and Wordsworth resided, and contains glancing reflections on both. But it is largely taken up with a kind of state-ofEngland description of the places and landscapes which the cyclist passes through. What enlivens this quite dreary and repetitious account of suburbs, beautiful scenery, and the cost of bed and breakfast at various wayside inns, however, is the sporadic recurrence in the book of a character the narrator calls ‘the Other Man’. This figure is a kind of literal shadow for the narrator, showing up at various moments along the road, or eating supper at the inns where the main speaker enters to rest. The most significant

Edward Thomas, Prose Writings: A Selected Edition. Volume I, Autobiographies, edited by Guy Cuthbertson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. xviii, xxiv, 13. 43

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moment of these encounters occurs when it emerges that ‘the Other Man’, too, is a writer: He rambled on and on about himself, his past, his writing, his digestion; his main point being that he did not like writing. He had been attempting the impossible task of reducing undigested notes about all sorts of details to a grammatical continuous narrative. He abused notebooks violently. He said that they blinded him to nearly everything that would not go into the form of notes. … I mounted. He followed.44 There’s a nice interplay here between this alter ego’s problems with his digestion and the ‘undigested notes’ which he cannot wrestle into any kind of shape. He is a kind of Wordsworth in his own Spring of 1804, unable to create continuous coherent narrative from the scatter of passages which might or might not be shaped towards The Prelude. ‘The Other Man’ is Thomas’s narrator in negative; whatever his ‘own’ difficulties, that narrator has to produce a ‘grammatical continuous narrative’ which pursues and enacts the journey which gives the book its structure (and which is necessary to its commercial viability). In Damasio’s terms, if you like, the Other Man represents the ‘core self’, responding to the small details of the world in the moment, but he cannot form them into an ‘autobiographical self’. There is a tension between ‘detail’ and ‘pattern’ which is clearly important to Thomas at this stage – and which was clearly something that Robert Frost registered as being a feature of In Pursuit of Spring itself. What is also intriguing about the Other Man, then, is that he is a negative of the narrator in a literal sense; he makes him look at the possibility of failure, of an indigestion which is a dislike of writing – something which Thomas, who wrote so voluminously, must also frequently have felt. The shadow is unshaken and unshakeable; ‘I mounted. He followed.’ 44 Edward Thomas, In Pursuit of Spring (London: Thomas Nelson, 1914), pp. 219–20.

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‘Undigested notes’ presumably emerge, when they do, as a kind of faeces, a kind of unsuccess which dogs even the most established poets’ thoughts. This is clearly so with the later St. Lucian poet Derek Walcott, himself a writer in Thomas’s wake. Walcott’s collection Tiepolo’s Hound presents glimpses of his own autobiography, especially into his father’s life. But it is an autobiography cast through the eyes, literally in this case, of another. The reflections on his own past and present are strung along most obviously by a search for the picture of the hound figured by the Renaissance artist Tiepolo which Walcott’s speaker remembers from an art book he viewed as a child, but whose existence in an actual painting is uncertain (and is it even a Tiepolo painting, not a Veronese?). Yet these poems also figure this search alongside a shadow life of the late nineteenth-century painter Camille Pissarro. Walcott is a painter as well as a poet; Pissarro is an anti-type to him, as a Jewish artist whose family history took him away from the Caribbean, where he was born, to France, and to friendship with such as Monet, Cezanne and Gaugin.45 Walcott’s poem is, therefore, partly about trying to see ‘the Caribbean’ in Pissarro’s many landscapes of the French countryside, and in his cityscapes of Paris and London. But it is also about the inadequacies of Walcott’s life and art lived in contrast, as someone who, while recognizing his African and particularly European artistic inheritance, has chosen to stay in place, as it were: Over the years, I abandoned the claim of a passion which, if it existed, naturally faded Derek Walcott’s earlier sustained autobiography, ‘Another Life’ (1973), makes much of his split between poetry and painting. In the end, he intimates, it was the necessity to render ‘the visible world that I saw | exactly’ which frustrated his attempts to be a painter, since he saw the world as an irredeemably complex thing, and his technique is not adequate to it. He therefore foregrounded the activity which moved from direct images to metaphor, poetry. See Derek Walcott, Collected Poems 1948-1984 (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986), pp. 200–1.

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from my island. Pissarro, rooted in his fame, a smoke wisp on the Seine, his exile dictated by a fiction.46 This recognition of all the past, and of associations we seek to make of it, as a kind of fiction, takes us into the realm of Damasio’s storytelling. As the speaker of Walcott’s book puts it, he is ‘the same, yet not the same’ as Pissarro. (93) Like ‘The Other Man’ in Thomas’s memoir, he recognizes the power of detail over grammar: ‘what should be true of the remembered life’. Pissarro’s perceived inability to stay true to his origins, therefore, has a strong part to play in the limiting of Walcott’s own achievement in Tiepolo’s Hound: My inexact and blurred biography is like his painting; that is fiction’s treason, to deny fact, alter topography to its own map. (pp. 101–2) Ultimately, then, this is not the book that the speaker had hoped it to be, since ‘There is another book which is the shadow | of my hand on this sunlit page, the one || I have tried hard to write, but let this do’ (p. 158). Tiepolo’s Hound is an unsettling and brilliant exposition of those limitations; the sense that, in order to write the self, it is often necessary to adopt a sketched narrative from elsewhere, from ‘another life’, even from someone else’s life. This will be a narrative that will sustain the ‘freshness’ of memory, but find some ‘pattern’ in which to frame it. What had seemed full of imaginative potential in accepting the story of another as the story of the self, however ‘the same, yet not the same’, is that it slides into ‘morose resignation, a plodding, monotonous rancour’. Like Wordsworth in ‘Expostulation and Reply’, 46 Derek Walcott, Tiepolo’s Hound (London: Faber, 2000), p. 135. All subsequent references are given in the text.

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Walcott comes up with an amazing sense of deathliness out of this sheer repetition. His vein at this point is reflection upon the art of painting which he shares with Pissarro, but obviously the image has wider application, as always, in this book of poetry: ‘More failures stare through their frames, accusing corpses | erect in their coffins, a dead light in their eyes’ (p. 98). This is the ‘vacancy’ which Wordsworth fears with regard to his ‘two consciousnesses’. This is a void or vacancy which confirms the actuality of the different versions of self which can be realized (or created), but also a sense that the distance might not be overcome, that the fictiveness of the ambition of writing a life ultimately ‘blurs’ and makes ‘inexact’ what should be dynamic and ‘fresh’. We need to find ourselves in others, but we cannot simply be them, for to be so would be to surrender who we are, to alter ‘how it was’. And to find ourselves in and through place. Wordsworth’s sounds are in place. They come out of place. They find their place in history, sound in the present. To read, and to write from reading, is to hear into place. The first place, the birthplace, the terrace-walk, score the life and the poetry, its persistence in the ear. The later sounds of the lakes and tarns, the water-forces down hillsides, punctuate and vary, counterpoint, that early music; make the writer listen out for them. As we have seen, for David Toop, places are sound archives, repositories for the histories of those who have listened in to them, uttered in them; the human mark upon the world around is our speech, our sound, our music. We can listen out for it, need to do so, in a world which increasingly prevents our listening to any single source. We might orient ourselves again by that means, as by listening in to music, to poetry, aware of the place and moment it comes down to us out of. The places associated with poets are therefore special places, like magnets, drawing us into the sights and sounds of the world out of which the poetry was made. Although there have of course been many changes, it is still possible, in the quiet between the planes’ flying over, to hear the garden sounds at Dove Cottage – that small space in which

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Wordsworth composed parts of The Prelude aloud, his own voice a counterpoint to the birds in the trees, the rustle of breeze through his orchard. The world around the cottage on his and Dorothy’s everyday walks, was constantly in movement. In her journal entry for 15 November 1800, for instance, Dorothy reports one walk to a neighbour’s: ‘The hills & the stars & the white waters with their ever varying yet ceaseless sound were very impressive.’ On another, she captures the polyphonic character of that world, chorused by Wordsworth and by such as Basil Bunting after him: ‘Everything green & overflowing with life, and the streams making a perpetual song with the thrushes & all the little birds.’47 As soon as the traffic dies down for the day, something of those sounds is still to be heard from the water forces in the hills; they call upon us. The place remains an emblem whose resonance carries over to other places of writing, such as Thomas Hardy’s: writers’ places beyond the reach of this particular book, Ceaseless Music. SOUNDING THE LIGHT AND THE LAND Upper Bockhampton and Max Gate I The four year old waits, still upon the stairs, His eyes fixed on the wall’s Venetian red For the chromatics of light at sunset. In Spring or Autumn, light intensifies, Sets colours’ embers glowing a short while, Before, leaving a dim aftermath framed In its decline below window-level, Light slips away. Tensed, scarcely able to Utter through his melancholy, the boy Recites ‘And now another day is gone’ To himself, to the last light, to his hopes, Then climbs his now cheerful heart to sleep. 47 Dorothy Wordsworth, The Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals, edited by Pamela Woof (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 4, 32.

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II The teenaged boy skuffles the dense carpet Of fallen red and yellow leaves in the wood. Coppices of larch and ash, yew and pine. He rakes together heaps, throws flames in handfuls From slippery rises by the Roman Road. The light moves. The sunlight clears a wide path Through the new stark branches. He stops his game, Gathers three or four of the largest leaves, Unfurls drying chestnut fans, stoops to choose A thin stick ready to hand, peels its bark, Then kneels at a puddle’s muddy margin, Gently dips in the stick, writes words across The leaves’ veins, makes fragile notes of them. III As the shovels and mattocks strike to chalk, As labourers dig out the foundations, Yellowed bones appear laid on the whiteness. They kneel with small trowels and paint brushes, Work for hours with held breaths, revealing The three hunched ageless perfect skeletons: Their arced spines, knees pulled in to the skulls’ base, Making them seem, he wrote, like chicks in shells. IV In each of the writing rooms, the complex Mullions and bars of the window-frames He designed, so that it should be that way, See light writing on the walls. Tree-shadows Shimmer on matte against iridescence, Scribbles of light in miniature gridworks. The wind’s sounds are shut out from his silence. Through the day, dark skeins thicken, brights hazing. V More years pass, more excavating to build No longer the cob walls of his first house

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But the towering red bricked wings of his last. He grabs a crowbar with the other men, Drives it into the soil, seeking purchase Beneath the henge of heavy, shaped, sandstone, Straining through the day to bring it to light, To set it upright like raising Babel. His unmorticed study panes catch glances As they take into themselves dying suns. 14.11.15 Contemporary American poetry is alert to many of the questions raised by this book about self, selving, through poetry and sound. American poetry seems, more than contemporary British poetry, ready to confront the major issues affecting the environment of our times – climate change, global warming, distraction from the self, dissociation from it. Jorie Graham would stand, for me, at the apex of those poets who sense that the new climate conditions demand a new version of selfhood, but one which then speaks differently through poems whose lines and sentences necessitate a different sense of possibility. Graham’s syntax includes many of the features we have found in The Prelude: a digressiveness which yet sustains a concerted and contained music of emergence out of distraction and difficulty. The poem ‘Thinking’, from The Errancy (1998), for example, is a generative poem which finds its correlative for potential in the figure of a crow balanced on powerlines, poised before flight, eyeing all round, disqualifying, disqualifying all the bits within radius that hold no clue to whatever is sought, urgent but without hurry, me still by this hedge now, waiting for his black to blossom, then wing-thrash where he falls at first against the powerline, then updraft seized.48 Jorie Graham, The Errancy (Manchester: Carcanet, 1998), p. 40.

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We watch, in other words, as ‘the soundless’ mentioned in the opening line of the poem ‘foams’ into activity, into noise, ‘wingthrash’ is ‘born’. Thought, metaphor, poetry becomes from stasis. Graham’s 2012 collection, P L A C E, holds much of this potential together through its exploded form, running pivotal lines down the centre of the page against longer lines which span it: …I think I am in this body – I really only think it … The poem asks ‘who is it that is listening, who is it that is still wanting | to speak to you | out of the vast network | of blooded things, | a huge breath-held … howling-silent, sentence-driven, last-bridge-pulled-up-behind city of | the human’.49 The body, feeling, as it is in Wordsworth, is, for Graham, what she calls here a ‘place in place’, ‘the borderline of ethics and reason’. The poem can’t deliver that ‘borderline’ beyond its own pushing beyond the normal limits of form, asking us to read differently and so making us aware of the physical practicalities of reading, the need to move the eye in different ways down the page. This emphasizes the dissociations which the attention to limit allow for (‘in this body | I really only think it’). What is even more surprising is that these lines/limits occur in a poem called ‘The Bird That Begins It’, at night-time, when a ‘sound like a | rattle’ throws away, cuts through, the darkness. The human bodiliness is confirmed by the birdsong (even instigated by it). Human desperation, its outon-the-edgeness of its own existence, is instilled by the unlikely, cutting sound of the bird singing in darkness. Graham’s syntax, its reach, comes firmly from a sense that human selfhood is derived from somewhere out there in the world beyond, from the places in which we exist and have existed. In a seemingly more ‘conventional’ poem on this Jorie Graham, P L A C E (Manchester: Carcanet, 2012), pp. 54–5.

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subject in P L A C E, ‘Cagnes Sur Mer 1950’, a seemingly personal memory turns into a mini epic of confirmation: Appearance and disappearance. When my mother’s voice got closer it had a body. It had arms and they were holding something that must have been a basket. … All I was to invent in this life is there in the wicker basket   among the lemons having come from below the horizon where the sound of   the market rises up into the private air in which she is moving. … I think that was the moment of my being given my name, where I first heard the voices carrying the prices as her face broke and its smile appeared bending towards me saying there you are, there you are.50 This is a crude redaction, for the purposes of manageability, of what is a much more free-flowing sequence of sentences in Graham’s original text, which spans over three pages. The equations are carried even in the abbreviation, however. Voice and body (including the body of this text), the sense of imaginative maturity anchored in the initial beauty of the world, the wicker basket of lemons. Graham is shrewd about the intricateness of this with economics; the sense that names and identities now are tokens of exchange which are easily devalued in the modern world, but yet that human responsiveness, the mother bending smiling over the young child, confirms all of us. The public sounds through the private, but we are all sustained by breathing that ‘private air’ in particular places (Cagnes), and at particular moments in our early lives, as I will show from my own experience in the next, and closing, chapter. These are the continuing, ceaseless, instigations to achieve who we are, to become who we could be, to ‘invent in this life’. Ibid., pp. 7–8.

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4 Reflections

‘Vertigo on your Birthday Trip to Tintern’ (page xxiii) Vertigo is a debilitating and deeply unWordsworthian condition to suffer from, but it came to me, typically, on a special anniversary outing to the Wye Valley and to Tintern Abbey. This valley was the setting for what is often seen as the ur-poem to The Prelude, ‘Lines Composed Above Tintern Abbey’ which Wordsworth composed before leaving to Germany (where he started the autobiographical poem) in 1798. Wordsworth’s poem above Tintern relishes the presence of his sister Dorothy, as a kind of representer and mediator of the thoughts of his own younger self – the poem in this case literally adopts the ‘two consciousnesses’ of the ‘now’ and the ‘then’ which are integral to The Prelude. In ‘Vertigo …’, this jokey account of the in-every-way disturbing and vertiginous experience of being at Tintern, the speaker experiences a similar steadying from another. My son had stepped in to prevent me from doing what the unbalanced consciousness and unbalancing vertigo were telling me to do, to fall over the edge. On this occasion also (and Wordsworth’s poem makes much of its occasion), a sense that closeness with those others is vital to us is what brings us back to the world. Wordsworth’s ‘Lines Above Tintern Abbey’ is partly an experiment with fluid and expansive syntax, correlative in this

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to The Prelude, which treats of similar themes of an interfusion or intermixing of past with present, memory with human hopefulness. The syntax of the blank verse in ‘Vertigo…’ is simpler in its mimetic ambition – the unsteadiness of the penultimate sentence from ‘Trailing’ seeks to capture the unsteady loss of control and purpose in the speaker. The final sentence, with its clear narrative direction (‘As … your … the view … the scene’), comes back into rhythmic focus, and sees all gratefully set to rights. The hubris of this whole project of writing in the wake of The Prelude, of sounding Wordsworth’s poem in this fashion in Ceaseless Music, has created many such moments of dizziness, doubt, self-questioning and uncertainty, with occasional feelings of refinding a foothold.

‘Whatever Comes In: Dove Cottage Arbour’ (page 9) What is notable is the steepness of the Dove Cottage garden, in which Wordsworth composed passages from The Prelude (‘our own little piece of mountainside’ Dorothy Wordsworth called it). What is notable in fact about each of the gardens of the rented homes which Wordsworth was instrumental in designing and laying out – here, Allan Bank, Rydal Mount – is the way they are all on quite vertiginous slopes. Wordsworth’s design in each case effectively layers the gardens down the hillsides. A terrace or path enables views, arbours, the writingplaces and summerhouses at the top. A middle section of the hillside is wilder, but is descended in several places by an array of steep, twisting and variously wide paths, paths often made by simply inserting flat-edged rocks as steps into the hillside. A more formal garden, and one allowing for lawns and a vegetable plot, nests in the lea of the hill at the bottom of the gardens. This means that the current end of the Dove Cottage garden, where an arbour now stands, gives a prospect over the roof of the Cottage, across Grasmere Lake, into the mountains.

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It is thought that Wordsworth had his own shelter in the garden as it was in his time, possibly in the orchard which grew behind the Cottage (and outside of the current garden edge) at that period. The positioning of such a structure in his day is unknown. But the steepness of the garden means that, wherever he worked (and he had a new door cut into the side of the Cottage so that he could escape outside without being troubled to go through the family rooms) he was likely to do so while looking out over the building and the Lake. The current arbour, in line with this, is a kind of lookout place, like those in the Iron Age used as hill forts. What is interesting about it as a prospect is that it keeps the house and lower garden in view – a reminder that Wordsworth had tried in the unfinished ‘Home at Grasmere’ (1800) to get the large project of The Recluse under way. Domestic centredness and ordinariness, as the basis upon which the scope of the imagination might be fostered, as attempted in ‘Home at Grasmere’, seems captured in the prospect offered by the Dove Cottage arbour. ‘Prospect’ is, of course, a key Wordsworthian word; that up-high perspective forms the final summatory statement of the advent of imagination in the ‘roar of waters’ heard from the peak of Snowden in the last book of The Prelude (XIV, 58). Here, in this brief sonnet, it is the readiness to receive sounds and sights from the world that I wanted to capture; the sense, through the free and extended syntax of its longest section, sustained by commas and semicolons, of the world coming in above and beyond what heartens and sustains. Many rhymed sonnets were included in the manuscript book of Wordsworth’s recent verse which travelled with Coleridge to Malta and the Mediterranean. I perhaps first came across the formal informality of unrhymed sonnets, which seem closer to the idiomatic possibilities of modern speech, while allowing for that syntactic ‘freedom’, through the American poet Robert Lowell’s various collections Notebook, History, and The Dolphin – all of which I read as an enthusiastic teenager soon after they were published. My sonnet’s ‘little room’ provides perhaps some architectural equivalent to such makeshift yet

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resonant (in many senses) structures as Wordsworth’s arbour and Rydal summerhouse, from which a sonnet appears later in this book. In both cases, unrhymed-ness perhaps allows for that porousness of structure, and openness to the world around, which is a central aspect of the experience of being in each shelter in each of the gardens.

‘Perspective’ (page 27) On the longer evenings of summer, even during the warmer evenings of Spring, I used to sit and read at a particular spot which gives a view down the long, thin, family garden, until the light went. That prospect along the garden, at those particular moments when the light was dying beyond the mesh fence, is what remains with me of my teenage years most strongly. Moments of rare aloneness in the cramped bungalow, moments to myself. Although I go back relatively frequently to the place, as my now widowed mum still lives there, I no longer have the chance to feel those moments, live them again. They remain imaginary, live sometimes in dreams, can be reconjured in pauses of busy days. These are the moments that centre us, but are sadly uncaptureable beyond fantastical daydream moments, or beyond the poem, perhaps. The awkward lineation and running-together of ‘big’ words like ‘memory’ and ‘imaginings’ across cranky line ends is an attempt to render this feeling of necessity yet unpredictability in such moments’ recurrence. The wobbly lineation aims also at the moments’ awkwardly imperfect rendering of the lived original source. The blackbird’s singing was real – the generations of the bird gave a perpetual background note to the scene, the song striking particularly loudly as the light died increasingly. I can hear it now, in imagination, writing these words. The poem was consciously written, then, as an ars poetica, one scored by Wordsworthian preoccupations and by deploying something of his ideas and vocabulary;

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but one self-conscious about doing so, trying to dramatize the clumsiness at this late moment, and from this hubristic perspective, of doing so.

‘The First Traces’ (page 58) No film, biography or work of writing or art comes close to La Belle Noiseuse in charting the labour, the false starts, the endurance required in any creative act. The long duration of Jacques Rivette’s film allows for the ‘real time’ watching of an artist as he sets out towards what he hopes will be the creation of his masterwork. The film reverberates with literary reference (it derives from a Balzac short story and alludes to Ibsen among other precursors), but in the main it traces the development of the co-creation of the painting between the artist and his model. As they work together through the days and hours, what we learn is that the constant approach to some integral truth about humanity depends upon the freedom the artist gives to the model, but also to the development of his own technique as he works to achieve what the work might be. Once the work is complete, the artist considers it too shocking, too exposing perhaps, and walls it up in his studio. A more ‘acceptable’ (and marketable – an agent is involved) version is produced ‘to be seen’ (although we, the audience, having watched for hours a picture being created, through sketches to false starts on canvas, ironically are not shown any ‘final’ painting, be it the masterwork or the commercial fake). The film, in other words, shows us the frustrations and annoyances, the patience necessary to achieving moments of inspiration – but also the limitations of what art can give to humanity – ‘mankind cannot bear too much reality’, as Ibsen himself wrote. What is interesting also in the film is that, of course, although the main actor Michel Piccoli has some skill as an artist, he cannot draw or paint well enough to be a convincing creator in

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a film which so relies upon the close-up work through which ‘he’ sketches, then paints, the model, Emmanuelle Béart. So the camera work constantly shields us from the fact that we do not see Piccoli actually drawing, although ‘his’ hand in its blue shirtsleeve is on view at work for minute after minute in the film. This constant shifting and ‘fraud’ in the change of perspective, I think, is also a part of the creation of all works of art worthy of the name; the tricks and slights through which effects are brought off, the flourishes and gestures which are necessary to convey the essence of (and our ‘presence’ at) any process of creation. That issue of address to the subject is, I hope, captured, by the opening of the poem, ‘I have in mind’. Well, yes and no – when is this present tense, and is the statement true anyhow, and, if true, to what end is it so? These perplexities are part of Wordsworth’s process, as evidenced by his multiple starts, restarts, crossings-through – the thick volume of photo reproductions of the poem in the various Cornell Prelude editions. How do things fit? How are they to be seen? Or heard? What is it that can’t be shown?

‘Sounding the Canal’ (page 104) The canal bank walk to our youngest son’s primary school during all seasons was a ritual across six years of our lives. A gift: ducklings in Spring, canal boats across the summer, occasionally, fish breaking the surface, a sense of a working history in the thought of the heavy horses dragging goods through the Midlands along this narrow towpath over a century before. A wharf near the school had seen the offloading of grain and goods, the landing stage still to be seen. But best of all were those winter mornings when the canal had frozen right over. Our 5-6-7-8-9-10-year-old son would thrill, not to the snow which sometimes bordered the path so much as to the chance to make noise, to throw sticks and stones that skittered along the frozen waters’ surface. But,

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also, to pause between throws, to hear the resonances that the hitting of the hard surface set going right along the canal, and almost out of sight. Learning to see and hear through the eyes and ears of a child, remembering what it was as a child to see and hear, revelling in the freedoms of that in a world which otherwise suppresses such possibilities, this is what sounding The Prelude is about. Being a parent partly involves hearing how your child, from birth, sounds the world, cries out into it in order to hear the echoes its voice sends back, spending days making sounds, varying and modulating tone and pitch, in order to come into their own voice, to begin to shape the sounds into words. For whole days our boys sat, whatever went on around them, however they played with the toys on the mat in front of them, ‘aaaah aaah aaahing’, ‘ooooh ooooh ooohing’, ‘aaahoohing’, not looking for response, ignoring it when it came, simply repeating the same sounds, mouths wide, coming into who they might be. I see ‘Sounding the Canal’ as a little parable poem, as an extension of that process, and its often unintended consequence, such as the setting-off of unseen geese beyond the bridge. When I wrote the poem early in the process towards completing Ceaseless Music, I had not encountered Iain McGilchrist’s commentary on the Boy of Winander whose hooting to the owls has its own inadvertent consequence, when he hears, in the intensified silence after he has ceased hooting, the sound of the torrents falling down the surrounding mountains. But something was working in the way ‘Sounding the Canal’ put itself together, out of recalling a variety of repeated moments when we had walked that canal path, thrown things onto the ice, heard the skittering and booming sounds, been startled several times by the clap of wings of duck and geese bursting from the frozen surface, perhaps spooked by the dull vibration eerily erupting beneath them. (Wordsworth of course has his own ‘ice sounds’ in The Prelude Book I, when he remembers the ‘splitting ice’ on Esthwaite Water ‘yelling’ long and dismally (565–70).)

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‘Vibrations always exceed the actual entities that emit them,’ Steve Goodman has claimed. ‘Everything moves’, molecules, even at a quantum level, vibrate, ‘all entities are potential media that can feel or whose vibrations can be felt by other entities.’ What is created is a ‘texturhythm of matter’, ‘a weird, agitated, nervous’ world in which everything is connected by the pulse it sends out and hits off another thing. What is created is the ‘patterned physicality of a musical beat or pulse’.1 It takes, perhaps, the miracles that nature enacts (a rare long ribbon of frozen four-feet-deep canal water), and an unpredictable moment of living the world through a different perspective while walking along with a child, to bring these scientific and poetic possibilities together into some other presentation. The poem tries to catch that suddenness by the odd temporal pattern it looks for. The main-verb-less opening section speaks to the stasis of the ice-world, the weird appearance of the things normally at the bottom of the canal upon its frozen surface. The advent of the verb with the line ‘Only when you began prising’, in its own unsettled irresolution, is meant to be moving towards that active sound-world, the sounds confusingly both out of place and in place within this new animation.

‘Then There Was’ (page 109) Wordsworth’s poetry is full of the ravages which the contemporary social system enforced upon the poor. ‘The Ruined Cottage’, the poem drafted as a separate work, then included in Book I of The Excursion (the only published part of the great The Recluse project to which The Prelude was to form a kind of entry point), is the tale of a father who disappears from a family through want, and of that family’s starvation and sickness, its disappearance into death. We don’t Steve Goodman, ‘The Ontology of Vibrational Force’, in The Sound Studies Reader, edited by Jonathan Sterne (London: Routledge, 2012), pp. 71–2.

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know where he ends up – is he killed in action as a soldier, has he simply committed suicide? Other poems have similar tales of death, absence, the division of marriage and loss of children to hardship. The equivalent passage in The Prelude is provided by the encounter with the homeless discharged soldier, whose story had again originally been a separate Wordsworth poem. Having served the country in the wars, he has been left on his own, is hungry, desperate, ghost-like. He is left to drift the public roads, and, as we have seen, his voice inflects and infects the voice of the poet as he wanders those roads, but composing his poetry. Trying to create an equivalent story of social abandonment to Wordsworth’s precedents naturally discovers Wordsworth’s blank verse as its proper form and shape. Appallingly, similar stories are prevalent now in contemporary Britain; the story told in my poem is a fabrication of various elements of stories from several people I’ve met in the last three years. The suicide was a real one; the finding of a dad by a young boy, the allowing of a poor alcoholic mother to only see her son in public and at half-time in his football games, surely shame the country, and its government? The casual title is meant to echo some of Seamus Heaney’s casual openings in his later poems, such as that to ‘St. Kevin and the Blackbird’. A sense of stories continuing, coming around again, being retranslated, re-transposed, into new works. Casual, but, of course, in this case also devastating – the endless sense that the social divisions in Britain continue from Wordsworth’s day to our own; homelessness continues, the desperate life on charity or benefit seems something the rich are relaxed about sustaining. On a visit to Dorchester Abbey I saw a report on a table near the poor box from the committee voluntarily administering the local Food Bank. Forty-two adults, thirty-five children, the chair of the committee had written, in the small Oxfordshire town of Wallingford, had received necessary basic foods from the Bank in February 2015. Wallingford borders the former prime minister’s own parliamentary constituency. Where, in

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2015, is that ‘law’ Wordsworth desperately sought in 1835, which would enable ‘all persons’ to have sufficient sustenance ‘to support the body in health and strength’? Community and charity are key to the ‘loftier’ ‘somethings’ glimpsed by The Prelude, the poor and the lonely populate its roads as they do other of Wordsworth’s writings early and late. Part of my response in rereading The Prelude here, in this book, is my alertness to this immediacy in this moment; the way it weighs the artificiality or preciousness of seeking to speak a narrative of selfhood, ‘natural’ selfhood, in times when what should come most naturally through a social and political system are being thwarted for the purposes of supporting one section of society – the rich. Wordsworth’s anger, outrage, (‘all persons’) remains pertinent, more so in the last ten years in England but also elsewhere in much of the world.

‘Riverrun’ (page 133) The experience of sitting while we made recordings of the noises to be heard at various sites associated with Wordsworth, including here on the riverbank behind the birthplace at Cockermouth, was a process of concentration, of becoming attuned to sound in a different way, of realizing how attention to sound is a deliberate act of mind, and that the mind is variously tuned to various sounds around it across time. Now it is the snuffling of a dog that comes too close, now it is the sound of a ball against a wall whacked by loud boys, now it is old-aged pensioners speaking loudly to each other as they cross the iron bridge which now spans the River Derwent near this place. Wordsworth played with his sister and their nurse, who sang to them (presumably nursery rhymes or local songs) on an elevated walkway which looks out over the riverbank, across the river, away into the hills and mountains. Planes now frequently disturb any immediate everyday sounds, but the river flow persists beneath. What most struck me sitting there for nearly an hour while the recording was ongoing

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was the question as to whether all of these sounds lingered and persisted? Do they infinitely resonate out from this spot through the air, through the atmosphere, through space? And if so, of course, these current sounds resonate out after all of the sounds across history, including the sounds of Wordsworth’s voice, as the child who frisked on that raised garden-walk, and as the adult poet who later composed his poems on the public roads, dictated them to his sister and wife in the woods not far from Dove Cottage. While I knew the speed of sound on earth, and the weird phenomena caused by the fact that sound is slower than light, that we hear after we see, I thought that, as space is a vacuum, sound would not flow there. Wrong. Apparently space is only a near-vacuum, sound slows drastically and presumably diminishes almost to nothing. Almost. At least in fantasy, each of our uttered words, each human word, each word in the voice of the poet, might be moving, ever further away, but not finally silenced, through time, across space. The title of the poem, reflecting the famous Anna Livia Plurabelle sequence of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, reflects also that moment in Joyce’s other, autobiographical, novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, when the child Stephen Dedalus inscribes his address in his school exercise book, giving his name first, then class and college names, and on out to the universe at the end. That sense that our self, as the address we make in our spoken words, might scale the expanse of Stephen Dedalus’s ambition is inspiring, especially at the spot where Wordsworth’s own sounds began, at his birthplace.

‘Pli Selon Pli’ (page 148) The vast majority of the criticism, and the popular opinion, about Wordsworth insist that his career seriously waned from the mid-1810s onwards. The poet in middle- and old age is a conservative figure in this view, politically, and in his poetic language and intonation. He accepted a public role as a civil

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servant, as the Distributor of Stamps for Westmoreland, in April 1813. The next month, he moved to a leasehold at Rydal Mount in the neighbouring valley to Grasmere – a home grander than any of his family’s previous residences. At successive elections he campaigned for the local Tory aristocrat, Lord Lowther (the son of his father’s employer). The later poetry, as a result of these atmospheres, becomes much more conventional in its vocabulary and meaning, much more obviously Christian. So the story runs. Yet a visit to the garden at Rydal Mount suggests that something of a restlessness remained, within the older poet. The Far Terrace which he constructed in order to walk and rehearse aloud his poetry runs high on the garden’s steep incline. The pathway to the Terrace runs straight through the summerhouse which Wordsworth had built to write in. That summerhouse itself is a rough and ready construction, with heavy unfinished stone pillars, and great openness, due to the empty ‘window’ holes, and to the open doorways either side allowing free access and egress to the pacing poet. The whole feels very exposed, the weather and seasons able to enter the structure, the wonderful view across Rydal Water to one side also allowing, when I was there on my most recent visit, hail to enter the empty window-space. Although the so-called summerhouse offers shelter of a kind, therefore, and prospects, it also suggests vulnerability, provisionality. It is a way-station on the terrace-walks; it can be paused at but not easily or comfortably rested in for much of the year. The summerhouse is, a reminder that, within himself, Wordsworth into old age was a fretter and ponderer, impatient with his achievement, constantly revising his earlier poetry for new editions, constantly revisiting and revising who he himself was. The summerhouse opens onto beautiful vistas; yet, on bleak late-winter days, it exerts a dusk-like pressure driving the self inwards, huddled against the weather, brooding again upon what remains to be done. This rough sonnet’s title echoes a line that I have long had in mind as a substantial analogy for what poetry, and poetic

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architecture, achieve. The French poet Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–98) was a prominent member of a loose grouping of poets concerned to reinvolve poetry with music, to strain syntax and grammar so as to bring forward the sound effects words make. His single-sentence sonnet ‘Remémoration d’amis belges’ (‘Remembering Belgian Friends’) speaks of a rising feeling of antiquity, as the stones of the city of Bruges reveal the past ‘pli selon pli’, ‘fold (up)on fold’.2 This idea of poetry as something which offers folds upon folds of images, while obscuring the links between them, and as holding sound, and meaning, within a single form is very alluring. It maps also onto the relation of past to present, where memories surge back through us at repeated and repeating moments across life. It is reminiscent of the folded and stitched notebook which Coleridge took to Malta in 1804. It also, to my mind in this sonnet from the Rydal summerhouse, yields an idea of the mountains seen successively receding across the landscape into distance, of the sun-crops on the rippling lake waters.

‘Emerson at Rydal Mount’ (page 158) This blank verse sonnet forms one of the poems in a sequence ‘Places of Writing’ (the title shamelessly stolen from Seamus Heaney) from my collection Skying (2012). It was an attempt to capture a moment which had long fascinated me – when Emerson, a writer whose ideas had been important to me from my mid-twenties, actually went to meet Wordsworth. As the sonnet attempts to show, the encounter was an awkward one. Wordsworth had settled into well-rehearsed seniority, and received each summer a parade of dignitaries, royalty and literary celebrities to Rydal, often providing them with a set script of ‘insights’ and taking them on prepared walks around Stéphane Mallarmé, Collected Poems and other verse, translated by E. H. and A. M. Blackmore (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 58.

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the ‘important’ places for him. Emerson clearly found much of his meeting with the elderly Wordsworth funny, including the persona adopted by the older poet, as a bardic presence who spouted as a party piece immense chunks of his own poetry (setting it upon the air, again). And yet the sonnet attempts to register the self-overcoming which Emerson made in ‘recollecting’ of himself to himself, and to the purpose and reverence of his visit, the setting of things back into their place, and the self-giving-up ‘to hear him’. Emerson rises above himself, is taken outside himself, to experience the sounds which the encounter gave him, and thence to reflect upon them despite the disfigurement (Wordsworth’s poor eyesight led to him sporting a bizarre but apt green eye-shade) and the remaining uncertainty Emerson felt about what he was witnessing. That process of self-recollecting was, in various ways, a strong element in the encounters with Wordsworth at Rydal which poets made. My ‘Places of Writing’ sequence had in fact begun as a set of poems which was solely made up out of reimaginings of the visits paid by such as Margaret Oliphant, John Constable and Aubrey de Vere. It altered when I thought about this issue of encounter more widely, and pulled in Yeats, Wittgenstein, Lawrence, instead. Although the sonnet seems to be a direct record of the encounter, I wanted it, in tribute to its moment and rarity, to stand a ‘little apart’ also. The out-of-date vocabulary and syntax (‘chaunting’, ‘set me first near’) are meant to hold the moment up for examination. Yet the syntax is meant to become wayward in the sestet of the sonnet, as the commas ‘hold together’ a series of phrases which are themselves hardly connected. As with the experience rendered in my more recent poem, ‘Vertigo…’, here is a brief attempt to undermine a steady perspective and rhythm. It is an attempt to show how a poem’s own vocabulary, like the mind of Emerson meeting Wordsworth, can open to other prospects, to another vocabulary and presence. The words of this sonnet also obviously stand ‘a little apart’ from themselves, in that they have absorbed something of the vocabulary of Emerson’s

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English Traits, but also, substantially, a line from Book I of The Prelude. Near the opening of the poem, in the Glad Preamble, the speaker expresses his new vocational certitude like this: I cannot miss my way. I breathe again! Trances of thought and mountings of the mind Come fast upon me. It is shaken off – As by miraculous gift ‘tis shaken off – That burden of my own unnatural self. (19–23) My attempt, in taking over this expression of freedom and inspiration, of expanded thought and experience of giftedness, into the unlikely narrow limits of the sonnet, was to capture the significance of the encounter for Emerson by having him, as the ‘I’ of the poem, be translated over into the words of the poet he is encountering. The unrhymed sonnet form can give a snapshot of that, whereas a looser, or more expansive blank verse form, too much in the shadow of Wordsworth’s own model, might diffuse it. His own experience of having his understanding opened out through visiting Wordsworth was, I felt, best to be captured by having Emerson commune with Wordsworth’s own great phrase for this experience at the opening of his work. The oddity of the syntax which I sought to build around the phrase in its new setting was perhaps governed, I now feel, by the inversion which comes with Wordsworth’s exclamation, which confers its own oddity across the line-break: ‘I breathe again! | Trances of thought’. My inclusion of Wordsworth’s line, ‘out of Emerson’s mouth’, as it were, was ‘justified’ by my knowledge, via a biographer of Emerson, that he knew swathes of The Prelude, as of The Excursion, by heart, and that he would recite them himself when out on walks, particularly to children he felt might benefit thereby.3 It is this process, of absorption, or, alternately, of voicing the other out of one’s Robert D. Richardson Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 149, 543.

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own mouth, which, in its turn warranted the echoing of St Paul in the sonnet’s last line, with the sense that (appropriately for Wordsworth, here the truant schoolboy) a child sees God and heaven ‘face to face’, the adult ‘as through a glass, darkly’. This is true to Wordsworth’s sense that the doors of the prison-house of experience and perception close increasingly with maturity. But that sense is also altered here, in that the encounter between Emerson and Wordsworth was clearly one in which Emerson at least recaptured the ability to see things afresh. This, in spite of the dashed expectations, and in spite of the ludicrousnesses of the encounter. Not least, we sense that he found a vocational confirmation in the encounter, which is partly about meeting a ‘true’ (‘right’) poet and recognizing the absurdities, as well as the seriousness of accepting that ‘miraculous’ gift. The sonnet, in other words, is shadowed by the sense of an ‘unnatural self’ that must be thrown off by all of us if we are to encounter possibilities beyond ourselves, in order for us to come into who we are and might be. I suppose, finally, that the sonnet is also shadowed by an essay I’d read, and which is vital to all considerations of self-writing – Paul de Man’s ‘Autobiography as De-Facement’ – an essay which claims that there is no true self to be written, and no language in which it can be written. As De Man puts it: ‘The interest of autobiography … is not that it reveals reliable self-knowledge – it does not – but that it demonstrates in a striking way the impossibility of closure and of totalization (that is the impossibility of coming into being) of all textual systems.’4 All writing of the self defaces the self (my word here, ‘disfigures’, shows the lengths we also go to mask our own true faces, as our selves). Does this description of how ‘Emerson at Rydal Mount’ configured itself aid an understanding of its possibilities? I’d hope not. Mainly, what I hoped might be experienced here,

Paul de Man, ‘Autobiography as De-Facement’, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), p. 71.

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as in other poems I’ve written, is a kind of vertiginousness, a sense of a syntax in the last six lines which has somehow lost its directional pace, just like the poet ‘swaying’ in his farmerpersona. It is the kind of syntax which seems to veer out of its course, to head down side-tracks, or to hold many things which don’t belong together by commas, just as Wordsworth’s writing does, as can be seen by many examples in this book (‘shaken off – As by – That burden’ is one such sequence just quoted from Book I; the interjection shows how these things cumulatively gather sense, rather than directly so – ‘it is shaken off, that burden’ being the ‘direct’ way of saying the same thing). I hoped for bewilderment, in other words, a bewilderment enforced by the brevity of the sonnet structure. There is a tenuousness of grip between the grammar of ‘this seer … with hidden … trances of thought … now’ which I had hoped might capture the lostness of the speaker as he felt the overwhelming as it hit him through Wordsworth’s ‘recitation’, the sense of its ceaselessness, of its inescapability. In some senses then, like many of the modernist poems I love, this sonnet is a pastiche of former texts, interwoven to create a primal or representative scene, which is about reading, but also about reading’s demonstration of how we might grow in the presence of something which is larger than us. My hope, however, is that the syntax of the poem takes us, as it were, past the artificial quotation aspect, into a further real experience of the mixing of emotion and of the overturning of established modes of understanding; that the musical construction of the poem, in other words, has an effect beyond the editorial inclusion of relevant words or phrases lifted from predictable sources. Those words and phrases become something other than themselves in this new context, just as Wordsworth’s echoes of Prospero in the early books of The Prelude, or of Milton and Thomson throughout, quietly work towards a different cumulative possibility as aspects of his own ‘record’. In part, of course, it remains about voice and voicing – the attempt here, as in other poems of the ‘Places of Writing’ sequence, and in poems elsewhere of mine, is to create a

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version of a plausible voice (the ‘I’ persona) which will allow the poem to express its larger ambition. It is about creating those voices – but also hearing them, picking a way through ‘dead’ text in order to find those intonations which might be given new voice in the new poem; finding a rhythm in a piece of writing which might then be translated as the rhythm of a ‘speaking’ voice which, however ‘dated’, might say something in the present and to it.

‘Nostalgia’ (page 185) Martha C. Nussbaum has reminded us that, as she puts it, emotions ‘have a history … a narrative structure’. Thinking about her grief at her mother’s death, Nussbaum points out that she could not ‘understand’ her feeling ‘without grasping it as one strand in a history of deep love, of longing for protection and comfort’.5 We are always tethered, as it were, to the context of stories which we can occasionally decipher, which link our present strong emotions to former environments; that is what establishes the version of self which we ‘are’. We have, as it were, an emotional ‘past’, outside of, but speaking to, our ‘rational’ self. We are, in that way, constantly linking our present feelings to our earlier ones, and often feeling the proximity but distance of our earlier emotional states. As Wordsworth understood, mourning and memory are intimately linked, and we often, in the present, feel the loss of a centredness we ‘had’ in the past. Nostalgia. I remember hearing the story about the sailors who were struggling in the storm and who simply decided in their extremity to set out for home, a long time ago. But I don’t remember where or when. I remember it intriguing me at that moment, and it has stayed with me, obviously. The final line of Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 175, 236.

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the poem, written from the perspective of brain science such as Damasio’s, however, is a rebuttal of the sentimentality of all such suggestions. What we are as selves is in the moment; ‘nostalgia’ is an emotion which we have, but it is never the same emotion at each recurrence. Nussbaum’s ‘narrative’ and ‘understanding’ are as much at sway of such irregularity and unpredictability as any other conceit. Yet we remain as deluded and sad as the tragic sailors.

‘Sounding the Light and the Land’ (page 195) What fascinates, carrying over the Wordsworth ‘infulnence’ as he mis-wrote it tellingly, to other writers’ places, is their having sought out their own fields of force through stillness and silence out of which the words might emerge. Crossing the cliffs outside Zennor in Cornwall, to the place rented by Frieda and D. H. Lawrence during the First World War (where they put up Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry also), you are alerted to the exposure of the house, its vulnerability, its out-on-the-edge perspective upon things. I wrote of this place in ‘Higher Tregerthen’, a poem in Skying. This is the place where Lawrence made his two great novels, The Rainbow and Women in Love out of the The Sisters manuscript he brought there. It is also the place where he and Frieda were harassed as possibly dangerous traitors (Frieda was German), much as Wordsworth and Coleridge had been in Somerset just over a century before. But the sea-sounds, the rushing winds, even in early summer, carry over in the mind, as do the small fragile plants and flowers, such as the few violets Mansfield was eager to plant there. Thomas Hardy’s biography, and his houses on the edge of Dorchester – first his childhood cottage at Upper Bockhampton and then the house he built for himself, Max Gate, on the outskirts of the country town – figure that field of

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force differently. The child Hardy is recalled in the ‘biography’, actually an autobiography, published by his second wife after his death, as sitting on a spot on the stairs which captured the last moments of sunlight at the turning moments of the year. As the light died, in premonition of Hardy’s later interest in tragedy, he apparently from a very young age chanted to himself the lines of Isaac Watts’s hymn ‘And now the day is gone’, with its admission of wasted time (‘And now my childhood runs to waste | My sins how great the sum!’) but also its assurance of angels’ and God’s vigilance through the hours of darkness (‘With cheerful heart I close my eyes, | Since thou will not remove’). Whatever the thoughts that struck the young child at such moments, he soon began writing them down under the pressure of his desire immediately to do so; even into adulthood he deployed his early method of using wet sticks to write on large fallen leaves, when he had no other writing materials to hand. The evocative Egdon Heath in his novel The Return of the Native (1878), for example, is dependent upon set-piece descriptions which pivot locale upon sound: ‘The wind, indeed, seemed made for the scene. … Part of its tone was quite special; what was there could be heard nowhere else. Gusts in innumerable series followed each other from the north-west. … Treble, tenor, and bass notes were to be found therein.’6 When Hardy attained the means to deploy his architect’s skills to build his own house at Max Gate, that relation to the dying sun, and the illumination of it on the interior house walls, continued. He moved his writing rooms and studies around the house as it developed across the years, but always designed the windows so that they gave the best view of the sun as it set behind the many trees that he planted in the garden. He could see it moving on the wall of the room he died in. Unexpectedly, when they were excavating the foundations for Max Gate, and again as he had the grounds re-dug when

Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native (London: Penguin, 1994), p. 60.

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expanding the original structure, Iron Age remains, including bodies, and pots, were unearthed, much to Hardy’s fascination. The house’s location is on what was perhaps an ancient ritual and burial site. Quite late on, a large carved stone whose symbolic purpose was unclear emerged after daylong struggle; Hardy had it set up on his lawn where he could see it gathering and reflecting light from his last study window. Hardy’s action here is curiously reminiscent of an odd passage in The Prelude Book VIII, where the poet recalls an instigator to early imagination to have been a ‘black rock’ which he saw opposite his school-time cottage dwelling. At certain times, in certain weathers, the rock ‘Glistered far … from out its lurking-place’. It had ‘lustre’; yet the child was ‘not certain whence the cause | Of the effulgence’, even when it had been seen ‘a hundred times’ (560–80). At such moments, the ancient and irrefutable substance of the world seems to signal radiantly to us; at such moments, the imagination has its own lustre, both writers imply. THE LAST TRACES The trees loom behind the clouded pane Of the distance, straight in even rows; Thousands of years, their obscure vigilance Has been there, their fretwork of thin high things Etched at back, and sometimes before, cold fogs. Spirits, they stand apart and on an other Side from us, as though always about to return. *** The path behind Allan Bank again, sun Honeying the valley between mountains, The clarity of fell-tops against sky; The leaves of autumn still curled beneath leaved Early summer oak, ash, and horse chestnuts; The few sounds at a distance, then your delight At wind’s breaths setting streams running in trees.

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