Experimentalism in Wordsworth's Later Poetry: Dialogues with the Dead (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism) 1009320793, 9781009320795

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EXPERIMENTALISM IN WORDSWORTH’S LATER POETRY

Tim Fulford provides detailed readings of a range of little-known, late and difficult poems which together present an alternative Wordsworth to the one we are used to. This newly revealed Wordsworth continued experimenting with form, genre and style as his career progressed so as to ponder the challenging experiences presented by later life. Fulford invites the reader to engage, through Wordsworth’s poetry, with such broadly felt concerns as quarantine, isolation, mental illness and bereavement. Focused yet broad in chronological scope, this study also considers the literature of Wordsworth’s old age in relation to his earlier work.   is the author of many books and articles on the literature and history of the Romantic Period (–), and is the editor of The New Cambridge Companion to Coleridge (). His monograph Wordsworth’s Poetry – () won the Robert Penn Warren/Cleanth Brooks Award for Literary Scholarship . His edition The Collected Letters of Sir Humphry Davy (co-edited with Sharon Ruston) () won an honourable mention in the Modern Language Association’s biennial Morton N. Cohen Award for a Distinguished Edition of Letters.

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   

Founding Editor Marilyn Butler, University of Oxford General Editor James Chandler, University of Chicago Editorial Board Claire Connolly, University College Cork Paul Hamilton, University of London Claudia Johnson, Princeton University Essaka Joshua, University of Notre Dame Nigel Leask, University of Glasgow Alan Liu, University of California, Santa Barbara Deidre Lynch, Harvard University Jerome McGann, University of Virginia David Simpson, University of California, Davis This series aims to foster the best new work in one of the most challenging fields within English literary studies. From the early s to the early s, a formidable array of talented men and women took to literary composition, not just in poetry, which some of them famously transformed, but in many modes of writing. The expansion of publishing created new opportunities for writers, and the political stakes of what they wrote were raised again by what Wordsworth called those ‘great national events’ that were ‘almost daily taking place’: the French Revolution, the Napoleonic and American wars, urbanization, industrialization, religious revival, an expanded empire abroad, and the reform movement at home. This was an enormous ambition, even when it pretended otherwise. The relations between science, philosophy, religion, and literature were reworked in texts such as Frankenstein and Biographia Literaria; gender relations in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Don Juan; journalism by Cobbett and Hazlitt; and poetic form, content, and style by the Lake School and the Cockney School. Outside Shakespeare studies, probably no body of writing has produced such a wealth of commentary or done so much to shape the responses of modern criticism. This indeed is the period that saw the emergence of those notions of literature and of literary history, especially national literary history, on which modern scholarship in English has been founded. The categories produced by Romanticism have also been challenged by recent historicist arguments. The task of the series is to engage both with a challenging corpus of Romantic writings and with the changing field of criticism they have helped to shape. As with other literary series published by Cambridge University Press, this one will represent the work of both younger and more established scholars on either side of the Atlantic and elsewhere. See the end of the book for a complete list of published titles.

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EXPERIMENTALISM IN WORDSWORTH’S LATER POETRY Dialogues with the Dead

TIM FULFORD

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Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge  , United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, th Floor, New York,  , USA  Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne,  , Australia –, rd Floor, Plot , Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – , India  Penang Road, #–/, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore  Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment, a department of the University of Cambridge. We share the University’s mission to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/ : ./ © Tim Fulford  This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press & Assessment. First published  A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data : Fulford, Tim, - author. : Experimentalism in Wordsworth’s later poetry : dialogues with the dead / Tim Fulford. : Cambridge ; New York : Cambridge University Press, . | Series: Cambridge studies in Romanticism | Includes bibliographical references and index. :   (print) |   (ebook) |   (hardback) |   (paperback) |   (epub) : : Wordsworth, William, -–Criticism and interpretation. :   .  (print) |   (ebook) |  /.–dc/eng/ LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/ LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/  ---- Hardback Cambridge University Press & Assessment has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations

page vi vii viii 

Introduction  The Death Zone: Wordsworth, Scott and Davy on Helvellyn



 Chronicle of a Death Untold: Wordsworth’s ‘Epistle to Sir George Beaumont’



 Wordsworth in Homage: Elegising the Lyrical Ballad



 Wordsworth at Sea: Lockdown and Lunacy in Two Poems from the s



 Dementia Poetics in Wordsworth’s Late Memorials



 Wordsworth’s Bardic Vacation: Invoking the Spiritual in the Age of Steam



 Hybrids, Hermits and Hut Dwellers: Late Lyrical Ballads



 An Aged Man Writes about an Aged Man: Wordsworth’s Last Poems and the New Poor Law

  

Bibliography Index

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Figures

 Samuel Ireland after Charles Townley and William Hogarth, ‘Satan, Sin and Death’, after . Metropolitan Museum, New York. The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund,  page   J. M. W. Turner, ‘Staffa, Fingal’s Cave’, –, Oil on canvas, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, B..   A. Picken, after Matthew Ellis Nutter, ‘The Viaduct over the River Eden at Wetheral’, published by Charles Thurnam, Carlisle, Cumberland, . Public domain 

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful for the advice and help of Julia S. Carlson, Jeffrey Cox, Michael Gamer, Bruce Graver, Nigel Leask, Charles Mahoney, Peter J. Manning, Seamus Perry, Phil Shaw, Jo Taylor, Alan Vardy and Eric Walker. Parts of Chapters , , ,  and  were published in earlier and partial form in my articles ‘What a Difference a Day Makes: Place, People, Poetry’, Rethinking Romanticism, ed. Suchandra Chakravarty and Ananyya Banerjee (New Delhi, ), –; ‘Romantic Hybridity and Historical Poetics: Lyricization and the Elegiac’, Essays in Romanticism,  (), –; ‘Wordsworth’s “Epistle to Sir George Beaumont”: The Road Twice Taken’, Review of English Studies,  (), –; ‘Wordsworth Elegizing the Lyrical Ballad in the s and s’, Studies in English Literature –,  (), –; ‘Wordsworth’s Moonyverse: Lockdown and Lunacy in Two Poems from the s’, The Wordsworth Circle,  (), – and ‘Representing Dementia in Wordsworth’s Late Memorials’, Essays in Criticism,  (), –. Figure  is a public domain image downloaded from the website of the Old Cumbria Gazetteer at www.lakesguides.co.uk/html/lgaz/lgazfram.htm

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Abbreviations



Wordsworth, Poems, in Two Volumes, and Other Poems, –, ed. Jared Curtis (Ithaca, ) Poems by William Wordsworth: Including Lyrical Ballads, and the Miscellaneous Pieces of the Author. With Additional Poems, a New Preface, and a Supplementary Essay (London, ) Wordsworth, Poems, Chiefly of Early and Late Years (London, ) The Poems of William Wordsworth, D.C.L. (London, –) S. T. Coleridge, Poetical Works, ed. J. C. C. Mays,  vols (London and Princeton, ) Wordsworth, The River Duddon, a Series of Sonnets: Vaudracour and Julia: and Other Poems. To Which Is Annexed, a Topographical Description of the Country of the Lakes, in the North of England (London, ) Wordsworth, The Excursion, ed. Sally Bushell, James A. Butler and Michael C. Jaye (Ithaca and London, ) The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Early Years –, ed. Ernest De Selincourt, rev. Chester L. Shaver (Oxford, ) Fenwick, Isabella. The Fenwick Notes of William Wordsworth, ed. Jared Curtis (Tirril, Penrith, ) Wordsworth, Home at Grasmere, ed. Beth Darlington (Ithaca, ) Wordsworth, Last Poems, –, ed. Jared Curtis (Ithaca and London, )



  CPW Duddon

Excursion EY Fenwick Home at Grasmere Last Poems

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List of Abbreviations

Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads and Other Poems –, ed. James Butler and Karen Green (Ithaca and London, ) The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Later Years, ed. E. de Selincourt, rev. Alan G. Hill,  vols (Oxford, –) The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Middle Years –, ed. E. de Selincourt, rev. Mary Moorman and Alan G. Hill,  vols (Oxford, –) Wordsworth, The Thirteen-Book Prelude, ed. Mark L. Reed,  vols (Ithaca, ) Wordsworth, ‘The Ruined Cottage’ and ‘The Pedlar’, ed. James A. Butler (Ithaca and London, ) Wordsworth, Shorter Poems –, ed. Carl H. Ketcham (Ithaca and London, ) Wordsworth, Sonnet Series and Itinerary Poems, –, ed. Geoffrey Jackson (Ithaca and London, ) The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser,  vols (Oxford, ) Wordsworth, Yarrow Revisited, and Other Poems (London, )

LB LY MY Prelude Ruined Cottage Shorter Poems Sonnets W Prose YR

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Introduction

This book is the third in a trilogy about Wordsworth’s later poetry. In the first, The Late Poetry of the Lake Poets, I compared his later writing with that of Coleridge and Southey and investigated how he responded to the reputation he acquired of being a reclusive nature poet speaking for traditional rural culture. In the second, Wordsworth’s Poetry –, I investigated such issues as patronage, Scottish ballads, competition with younger poets, radical politics, and meditations on aging. I revealed a Wordsworth trying to find new means to configure the relationship of poetic imagination to history – history at large and his own history as a poet and person. Now, in this third investigation, the route that I take through the large and varied later oeuvre explores Wordsworth’s experimentalism, which often involved the hybridisation of innovative form with one or more traditional genres. My purpose is to restore to attention some poems that I find, for all their failings, to be searching meditations on the human condition and complex articulations of the struggle, in adverse circumstances, to affirm the value of feeling and the importance of poetry. They have been too little read, because they neither suited conventional taste nor fit the mould of Romanticism as it was defined and taught. But they reward careful attention, even if their merits have lain in the shadow of the spectacular verse of the ‘Great Decade’. The context for my discussions is the revival of interest in Wordsworth’s later work that has burgeoned since the explorations made in the s and s by Geoffrey Hartman, Peter Larkin, Kenneth R. Johnston and William Galperin, and that now begins to attain a critical mass. Simon Jarvis, Jeffrey C. Robinson, Eric C. Walker, Peter J. Manning and I myself have shown how the later poems ‘work out’ older verse into unique ways of knowing. Stephen Gill termed the process ‘revisiting’ in a study devoted to the later Wordsworth’s reuse of his earlier work. Jessica Fay has traced Wordsworth’s growing interest in monasticism and hermiticism. Philip Shaw and Jeffrey Cox investigate the political as well as domestic 

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Introduction

implications of the later verse, and the influence on it of younger contemporaries. Brennan O’Donnell and Geoffrey Jackson have evidenced the continuing commitment to formal and prosodic experimentation. Wordsworth had been preoccupied with lateness and loss since ‘Tintern Abbey’, the Lucy poems and the ‘Immortality Ode’. The poetry he wrote thirty and forty years after these retrospective and elegiac works was belated not just in regard to his life as he lived it (the perspective of age against that of youth) but also in regard to the lateness of his early verse. For Wordsworth and his circle, conscious of that early verse – their communal foundational myth being that it had power to redeem time and recuperate loss through poetic recollection – the later verse could not help stand in relation to it (his old poetic voice might now itself be one of the things lost with time that the older poet sought to regain). So too for us, as readers. If we cannot encounter the later poems as if we had never read the earlier, famous work, we can understand them as both powerful revisionings of that work (and of the perspectives offered in it) and as challenging articulations of late-life experiences not available in that earlier work. New expressions of lateness informed by but distanced from the old; meditations on lateness rather different from – and sometimes critical of – the preoccupation with lateness taken by the young poet who wrote of five long winters past and of the lost hour of splendour in the grass. To be the poet who had written those lines, thirty or forty years on, and to have experienced not only their disappearance into his past but also painful blows that as a young man he had not even imagined made Wordsworth belated with regard to his own oeuvre of remembrance, as well as to his own life; his new poems, whether restatements that reworked his old verse or radical departures from that old verse, put its redemptive power and its recuperative purpose into question. Wordsworth had always experimented: in  and , his Lyrical Ballads were radical enough departures from tasteful subject-matter, diction and form to baffle a generation of critics. In the years after , when his brother drowned at sea, his experimentalism, more often than not, intertwined with a need to find new ways to voice a straitened sense of what it was to be in the world, facing irreparable loss. There was much to face. By the late s, Wordsworth had lived with the decline into dementia of his sister Dorothy, seen Southey’s wife become overwhelmed by depression and then Southey himself succumb to senility. He had witnessed old friends descend into confusion when uprooted from their homes and confined in faceless institutions in the name of modern social policy. Worse still was the frequent toll of death. As well as his brother in

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Introduction

, his children Thomas and Catherine had died (in ), as had his closest literary partners – Scott in , Coleridge and Lamb in , Hogg and Hemans the following year. His sister-in-law Sarah Hutchinson also expired in  and, after a long illness, his daughter Dora in . Sickness, madness and death came to feature in his life to a degree that few of us in the twenty-first century West will experience; as a result, his conception of the poet’s task became markedly different. His old belief that the poet’s mind could repair the damage of bereavement by brooding on nature’s sponsoring powers gave ground to a search to find ways to bear what must be borne. Nature prophecy no longer quite fitted; he increasingly turned from the sublime egotism of The Prelude and the rustic speech of Lyrical Ballads towards elegiac consolation or epitaphic commemoration of people bereft by loss – people too alienated from the world to regain their place or to recover their identity within it. In this poetry, the poet may assuage the devastating effects of death but cannot heal them. It is a matter of finding forms to bear witness to – and thus bear with – desolation rather than to find abundant recompense for it. Sorrow is no longer redeemed by a deepened conviction of being nurtured by nature: ‘Care may be respited, but not repealed;/ No perfect cure grows on that bounded field’. Finding forms to bear witness involved a commitment to challenge himself so that his words found purchase on the complexity of a world experienced as much in alienation as in unity. The later Wordsworth is reluctant either to reject or embrace nature; he attempts instead to articulate an ambivalent movement of consciousness in which awareness of isolation and need for solace are both in (grim) play. To achieve this articulation, he had to stand away from his old style even as it pulled him towards the consolation of a communion in which he no longer fully believed. Hence the later experimentation: finding new forms meant not repeating himself, meant avoiding the stale and the facile – the twin evils of continuing in his established veins. But it also meant not rejecting his earlier work outright, but inviting readers to appraise its reworking in his new poems. As Peter Larkin puts it, Wordsworth’s later poetry often moves ‘through appositional differences’. He cast familiar concerns in unfamiliar forms – some of his own invention; he melded traditional genres into strange hybrids – the elegy with the epistle and with the epitaph, the sonnet with the lyrical narrative and the medieval romance with the ballad; he used unusual metres; he turned his dead friends’ verse into his own. The results were uneven (for varied reasons that I explore), but at their best, the new poems speak with subtlety, insight and power of

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such troubling experiences as the depression of living in confinement and the dread of facing loved ones’ incurable disease and untimely death. Why dialogues? And why with the dead? Wordsworth had always written dialogues – whether addressing poems to his sister, wife or Coleridge (‘Tintern Abbey’; The Prelude) or whether featuring dialogue within them (‘The Thorn’; ‘The Leechgatherer’). And he had dwelt upon death in the Lucy poems and The Prelude. In later years, he continued to do so, but in altered, often retrospective, forms. Many of the poems I examine in this book operate by substituting, for the bygone conversation with Coleridge, Dorothy Wordsworth and the Hutchinson sisters that death and dementia had made unrenewable, dialogues with their past writings, or with writings that Wordsworth had produced in dialogue with them. He borrowed their words, or replied to their articulation of experience, as if calling them into conversation from the grave – or from incoherence. These dialogues with dead companions are, I show, substantial achievements. Exquisitely subtle and delicate evocations of transience, loss and renewal, they commemorate departed friends by renewing their words as Wordsworth’s own – and indeed revising his own old words. Poems of homage, they constitute a development of the elegiac verse that Wordsworth had pioneered in Lyrical Ballads in which one of the things being elegised is his own old poetry – a distinct late Romanticism and a form of the elegiac in which the egotistical is subsumed within the tributary. They constitute an elegiac practice that is significantly different from the nineteenth-century mainstream represented by Shelley, Tennyson and Arnold. The later Wordsworth adapted many forms so as to fulfil the commemorative demands of elegy without making a confessional outpouring of grief. The new-style lyrical ballads of the s and s hybridised the elegiac with narrative ballads. They told stories about people living on the border of life and death that Wordsworth had derived not from his old companions, but from conversations, made in writing and in person, with newer acquaintances who substituted for his oldest, closest circle. These included Walter Scott and Humphry Davy, with whom he climbed Helvellyn and exchanged letters and poems, and Samuel Rogers – a poem derived from a walking tour taken together and an exchange of letters. Other correspondents who prompted poems and in turn received them included R. P. Graves, a local curate, and Elizabeth Ogle, an admirer of his verse. George Beaumont was another: Wordsworth addressed him in a poetic epistle that emerged from a prose correspondence. Expanding this poem in , he also joined the elegiac to the epistolary, for Beaumont

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Introduction

was by this time fifteen years’ dead but Wordsworth chatted to him as if he were alive and waiting to receive his verse letter. In so doing, he displaced the tragic deaths of Thomas and Catherine Wordsworth. Similarly, in sonnets and memorials, Wordsworth strove to bear the impact of loved ones’ death – or loss of identity – by addressing people who had also been afflicted by loss – Mary Lamb, Robert Southey and Lady Beaumont. Here, dialogues with the living shared the burden of bereavement and brought the dead back to writer’s and reader’s minds. There was also less occasion-driven, less ad hominem verse. I examine several poems that make the life of the sailor, anxious, alone and alienated on the wide wide sea (lit, if at all, only by the moon) emblematic of human life in general – and these invoke the words of both Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner and Wordsworth’s drowned brother, who never completed the voyage that would have allowed him to retire and live on shore in the company of William and Dorothy. Oblique, occluded dialogues. A series of shorter sea poems emerged from a tour shared with Henry Crabb Robinson. These respond to Wordsworth’s s encounter with a modern world of mechanisation, rapidity and timetabled transport, which he conceived as undermining the poet’s vatic role of voicing the spirits of the dead, speaking to and for the lost past that he intimates in nature. He attempted instead to address, and channel the response of, the spirit of modernity as a bard of futurity. In these poems, and many others in his later oeuvre, Wordsworth’s angle on religious consolation remained unorthodox at best. Some poems contain stoical alignments of the biographical order created by poetic form with the dictates of providence. The pattern Wordsworth makes from a sick or deceased person’s life is equated with divine sanction: here, of course, hubris is involved. The poet remains a prophet, as at the end of The Prelude, but in different terms: he is no longer on a personal quest to discover the supernatural in nature. He is now Anglican, and endorses the history and liturgy of the church as a means through which spiritual needs have traditionally been mediated. But there is little in the way of a sense of sin requiring penitence and redemption by Christ’s sacrifice: Wordsworth is hardly Christian at all in this orthodox sense. Indeed, several poems conclude with little or no religious affirmation at all: Wordsworth was not in his late work a consistently religious poet. In his bleaker, starker work, he offers the consolation of poetry as the force tentatively alleviating, although not redeeming, a grim world of existential isolation and loneliness in which endurance is not rewarded by happiness or acceptance. In these remarkable poems, represented here by the examples I examine in

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Chapters ,  and , he anticipates the view taken by W. B. Yeats and Samuel Beckett in their portraits of old age. Experimenting by hybridising genres and forms, Wordsworth remained a formally innovative poet as well as one prepared to cast a cold eye on the human condition. His transformation of English poetry did not just consist of the modernisation of ballads and the development of the blank-verse lyric with its internalisation of the speaking voice, as in ‘Tintern Abbey’ and The Prelude. Rather than viewing him as a revolutionary who later accommodated himself to establishment values – including conventional Christian piety – I revalue here his willingness to differ, to be awkward, so as to defamiliarise the world-experience presented. His persistence in innovation bespoke a determination to stand at odds to the popular literature and conventional taste of his times. The one-time lyrical balladeer appeared after  as the author of original forms and genres: Evening Voluntaries, Elegiac Musings, Elegiac Stanzas and chivalric romances, as well as of unnamed poems that mixed elegy and epitaph, or reworked the nature lyric in couplet and triplet rhyme. Titles advertising affiliation to more than one genre were, as Stuart Curran points out, a hallmark of the new poetic movement that had begun in the s. To name but a few, Coleridge called poems ‘Religious Musings’, ‘A Poet’s Reverie’, ‘A Vision in a Dream’; Byron termed ‘The Giaour’ ‘A Fragment of a Turkish Tale’; Shelley advertised Hellas, a Lyrical Drama and Moore ‘An Oriental Romance’. It was understood at the time that the mixing of generic elements heralded by such titles was an attack on the traditional equation of a smooth, flowing style with the passionate speech or thought of an implied speaker. In an influential review of Southey’s Thalaba the Destroyer, Francis Jeffrey identified this attack as an attempt to decouple poetry from its traditional association with the values, taste and speech of the upper classes. He singled out Southey’s formal and prosodic variety, as well as his mixing of the ‘low’ diction found in ballads with the ‘high’ form of epic, as the modus operandi of a Jacobin poetics that was also evident in Lyrical Ballads: the singular structure of the versification, which is a jumble of all the measures that are known in English poetry, (and a few more), without rhyme, and without any sort of regularity in their arrangement . . . Every combination of different measures is apt to perplex and disturb the reader who is not familiar with it; and we are never reconciled to a stanza of a new structure, till we have accustomed our ear to it by two or three repetitions. This is the case, even where we have the assistance of rhyme to direct us in

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Introduction

our search after regularity, and where the definite form and appearance of a stanza assures us that regularity is to be found. Where both of these are wanting, it may be imagined that our condition will be still more deplorable; and a compassionate author might even excuse us, if we were unable to distinguish this kind of verse from prose.

The mixture of so many forms did not allow readers to settle, preventing them from hearing themselves think: they could not identify in the narration the voice of an implied speaker who shared their aesthetic norms and social values. Southey repeated these alienating effects in his  epic/romance The Curse of Kehama, as Jeffrey astutely remarked in the Edinburgh Review: the problem was formal defamiliarisation. Forty years before Browning, and over a century before Brecht and Jakobson, Southey’s jarring metres and irregular stanzas drew attention to the medium, rather than to the passions of the presumed speaker. They took the reader ‘behind the scenes . . . to catch a peep of the operose and toilsome machinery by which the effect is produced’ and thus ‘perplex [ed]’ him ‘with a perpetual feeling of uncertainty and disappointment’ (). The new poetry offended against lyric norms: its irregularity of form, prosody and content made poetry’s purpose not the crystallisation of a normative speaker’s emotion but aesthetic disturbance and social innovation. Jeffrey thought the same about Wordsworth’s Excursion because it hybridised elements of heroic and epic poetry with trivial subject-matter and low diction. He was not alone: Peter Bell, for instance, nonplussed critics when published in . They wrote of its ‘gross perversion of intellect’ and ‘tincture of imbecility’; even Charles Lamb, though an admirer, found its commonplace subject discordant with its form: ‘I cannot say that the style of it quite satisfies me. It is too lyrical.’ Wordsworth’s response to criticism of this kind was not to abandon but to modify his experimentalism. The lyrical narratives of the s and s still dealt, in commonplace diction, with the supernatural beliefs and everyday lives of rural people, but adapted forms somewhat different from the ballad. In other words, they did not only deviate from, so as to defamiliarise, conventional form but also recast Wordsworth’s own earlier work. ‘The Somnambulist’ is an example discussed here: written in dialogue with Walter Scott’s poems, it adopts the conventions of the pseudoantique chivalric romance in an unusual lengthened stanza so as to narrate in new terms the same kind of concern once addressed in the Lucy poems and The White Doe of Rylstone. ‘The Norman Boy’ reshapes ballad metre into lines of seven and eight feet; ‘The Widow by Windermere Side’ tells the story of a rustic villager reminiscent of the women in ‘Goody Blake and

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Introduction

Harry Gill’ and in ‘Michael’ but in linked sonnets rather than ballad stanza or blank verse, putting to narrative use a form associated with concentrated argument and visible formality. The effect of this hybridisation was to obviate customary dismissals of the kind ‘Peter Bell’ received while still displacing readers from their comfort zones. As O’Donnell remarks, Wordsworth aimed to create poetic form, the fabric of which will be in various ways both familiar and strange, comfortable and challenging, by virtue of its being both similar to and dissimilar from linguistic experiences of the reader, whether those experiences have been constituted through contact with other poems, with the ‘real language of men,’ or both. It is this invitation to the active, continuing discovery of ‘similitude in dissimilitude’ which Wordsworth sets forth as his chief aesthetic aim, since such perception is no less than the ‘great spring of the activity of our minds, and their chief feeder’. (W Prose, I, )

‘Stanzas Suggested In A Steamboat Off Saint Bees’ Head, On The Coast Of Cumberland’ is a case in point. It is a poem about local tradition and its renewal that matches form to content, using a nine-line stanza featuring three rhyming couplets and a final triplet – the rhyme of which is the same in all eighteen stanzas. As such, it exemplified Wordsworth’s  insistence that ‘the composition of verse is infinitely more of an art than Men are prepared to believe, and absolute success in it depends upon innumerable minutiae’ (LY, II, ). A minute combination of couplets and triplets, demanding great suppleness of syntax so as to avoid becoming jangly, was also used to update the blank-verse nature lyrics of Wordsworth’s youth so as to articulate the changed perspective of age. In the Evening Voluntaries of the mid-s, rhyme constantly asserts the possibility of renewal and return even while, semantically, the poem traces patterns of evanescence and disappearance, or of stasis and immobility. In these poems, the first-person meditation of an emplaced narrator that was the hallmark of ‘Tintern Abbey’, ‘Nutting’ and other early nature verse is sometimes eclipsed. The poet’s stance in the landscape is obscured; the kinds of generic figure common to early eighteenth-century poetry are mixed with personal musing. The result is a hybridisation of styles confounding the expectations of both Wordsworthians and readers for whom eighteenth-century verse was the polite norm. As I show in Chapters  and , Wordsworth hybridised the elegy with the epitaph, writing memorial and consolatory poems that switched between impersonal commemoration of a dead or demented friend’s public virtues and ‘speaking’ intimately to the friend while inviting the reader to eavesdrop; in this way, lost intimacy is regenerated in ghostly

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Introduction

form. Eschewing the models of votive and funerary elegy, these poems largely refused to indulge in outpourings of grief; Wordsworth kept his mourning verse tensile by using unexpected forms – the sonnet, and the epistle that addressed the deceased as if still living. It was his ability to offer ways of grieving without resorting to facile forms of consolation that made Wordsworth appeal to many Victorians – as Stephen Gill has shown. In a twenty-first century dominated by climate-change disaster, pandemic, and war, as we again experience a vulnerability to death and isolation that the Victorians knew, we may once more be compelled by the gravity of suffering and the persistence of love in these poems of an older, disillusioned poet who was tenderly aware of the reality of loss and the fragility of hope.

Notes  Geoffrey H. Hartman, The Unremarkable Wordsworth (Minnesota, ); Peter Larkin, ‘Wordsworth’s “After-Sojourn”: Revision and Unself-Rivalry in the Later Poetry’, SiR, ,  (), –; Kenneth R. Johnston, Wordsworth and The Recluse (New Haven, ); William H. Galperin, Revision and Authority in Wordsworth: The Interpretation of a Career (Philadelphia, ).  Simon Jarvis, Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song (Cambridge, ); Peter Simonsen, Wordsworth and Word-Preserving Arts: Typographic Inscription, Ekphrasis and Posterity in the Later Work (Basingstoke, ); Jeffrey C. Robinson, Unfettering Poetry: Fancy in British Romanticism (New York and Houndmills, ) and Poetic Innovation in Wordsworth’s Poetry, –: Fibres of These Thoughts (London, ); and Eric C. Walker, Marriage, Writing and Romanticism: Wordsworth and Austen after War (Stanford, ), Peter J. Manning, Reading Romantics: Text and Context (Oxford, ), and ‘Wordsworth in the Keepsake, ’, in Literature in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century British Publishing and Reading Practices, ed. John O. Jordan and Robert L. Patten (Cambridge, ), pp. –, ‘William Wordsworth and William Cobbett: Scotch Travel and British Reform’, in Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism, ed. Leith Davis, Ian Duncan, and Janet Sorensen (Cambridge, ), pp. –, ‘The Other Scene of Travel: Wordsworth’s “Musings near Acquapendente”’, The Wordsworthian Enlightenment: Romantic Poetry and the Ecology of Reading, ed. Helen Regueiro Elam and Frances Ferguson (Baltimore, ), pp. –, ‘The Persian Wordsworth’, European Romantic Review,  (), –. ‘Wordsworth’s “Illustrated Books and Newspapers” and City Media’, in Romanticism and the City, ed. Larry H. Peer (New York, ), pp. –.

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

Introduction

 Stephen Gill, Wordsworth’s Revisitings (Oxford, ). See also John Williams, William Wordsworth: Critical Issues (Houndmills and New York, ) and Christopher R. Miller, The Invention of Evening: Perception and Time in Romantic Poetry (Cambridge, ).  Jessica Fay,Wordsworth’s Monastic Inheritance: Poetry, Place, and the Sense of Community (Oxford, ).  Philip Shaw, ‘Wordsworth’s “Dread Voice”: Dora, Ovid and the Later Poetry’, Romanticism, . (), – and ‘Discomposed at Cora Linn’, The Wordsworth Circle,  (), –; Jeffrey N. Cox, William Wordsworth, Second-Generation Romantic: Contesting Poetry after Waterloo (Cambridge, ).  Brennan O’Donnell, ‘Numerous Verse: A Guide to the Stanzas and Metrical Structures of Wordsworth’s Poetry‘, Studies in Philology  (), i– and The Passion of Meter: A Study of Wordsworth’s Metrical Art (Kent, ); Geoffrey Jackson, Sonnet Series and Itinerary Poems, – (Ithaca, ).  Lines – of the Evening Voluntary ‘Not in the Lucid Intervals of Life’ (Last Poems, p. ).  For instance, Wordsworth printed in the  Miscellaneous Poems a note to ‘Composed Upon an Evening of Extraordinary Beauty’ to ‘inform the reader that “Allusions to the Ode, entitled “Intimations of Immortality,” . . . pervade the last stanza of the foregoing Poem’. The Miscellaneous Poems of William Wordsworth,  vols (London, ), II, .  Private email, .  For a Marxist critique of the dematerialised position of this internalised voice, see Anthony Easthope, who suggested that Wordsworth strove in ‘Tintern Abbey’ to produce an illusion of a normative meditative voice, initiating a nineteenth-century poetic in which poet and reader are divorced from historical contingency, mystifying the act of reading as timeless telepathy, Easthope, Poetry as Discourse (London and New York, ), pp. –. For Wordsworth’s formal variety and innovation see David Duff, ‘Wordsworth and the Language of Forms: The Collected Poems of ’, Wordsworth Circle,  (), –.  Stuart Curran, Poetic Form and British Romanticism (Oxford and New York, ), p. xi.  Review of Thalaba, Edinburgh Review,  (), –.  Lamb to Wordsworth, [ April ]. The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. E. V. Lucas,  vols (London, –), VI, Letters, p. .  O’Donnell, ‘Numerous Verse’, .  Gill, Wordsworth and the Victorians (Oxford, ).

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 

The Death Zone Wordsworth, Scott and Davy on Helvellyn

In August , William Wordsworth, Walter Scott and Humphry Davy met in Keswick and then together climbed one of the Lake District’s most rugged mountains. It was a spontaneous excursion, energetic and lively. Scott told many amusing stories; Davy climbed down on his own – perhaps for greater speed, perhaps to take a closer look at rock formations (Fenwick, p. ). In , Wordsworth, reminded of old days, remembered it as an occasion of youthful vigour, all the more special because of its joyful innocence of the sadness that, he now knew, would follow. The young friends, with their best years and greatest work still before them, had stood ‘rejoicing’ on ‘old Helvellyn’s brow’, ‘as if earth were free / From sorrow, like the sky above our heads’ (‘Musings near Acquapendente’, , pp. –, Sonnets, pp. –; –). Then, they had been triumphant, as if they had surmounted the earthly world of time, change and death symbolised by the mountain’s ridges, crags and cwms. They had viewed, from the summit hills Pride of two nations, wood and lake and plains, And prospect right below of deep coves shaped By skeleton arms, that, from the mountain’s trunk Extended, clasp the winds, with mutual moan Struggling for liberty, while undismayed The shepherd struggles with them.

(‘Musings near Acquapendente’, –)

Here, the phrase ‘skeleton arms’ perhaps likens Striding and Swirral Edges, which protrude from the peak, to the skeleton that in depictions of Milton’s Death allegorises the fate of all life in the fallen world. The arms imprison the wind – the free movement of air that symbolises vitality. But the friends, it seems, have risen above the human struggle in the valley of the shadow: they are, apparently, superior to the shepherd. 

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

The Death Zone

Figure  Samuel Ireland after Charles Townley and William Hogarth, ‘Satan, Sin and Death’, after . Metropolitan Museum, New York. The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, .

The superiority is an illusion – the brief fantasy of a joyful day of days. Davy had died, aged only fifty, in ; Scott had followed him to the grave in , at sixty-one. Wordsworth’s poem is suffused with this knowledge, and with the retrospective awareness that their day together was more exceptional in its happy liveliness than any of them had realised at the time. Now, from the perspective of , it becomes a ‘spot of time’, a moment, like those of The Prelude, retrospectively understood to have been so intensely vital that it could not but be menaced by destruction – but whose very vitality meant that it could be recreated in memorial verse, suffused with sadness, in after years. Such was Wordsworth’s  mythologisation of the  occasion. By then, however, it had already been giving rise to poetry for over thirty years. The friends’ fell walk was, in fact, one of the most fertile episodes in

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The Walkers, –



Romantic poetry, for it led each of the walkers not only to respond to it in verse but also to modify his way of writing as he confronted the fact of death. For this reason, it has much to tell us about the interwoven and time-dependent relationships between place, people and poetry, and about the post- development of Romantic verse as a group discourse. I shall explore these aspects in what follows, examining each of the walker’s responses in turn, and seeking, in particular, to evaluate the inflection of Wordsworth’s later poetry by the words that Scott and Davy brought to that  fell walk.

The Walkers, – Before , Scott was not the poet and novelist famous across Europe that he later became. He was known as a collector and editor of border ballads who also wrote ballads of his own – and that is why Wordsworth sought him out when touring Scotland in September . Scott’s The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border () won Wordsworth’s admiration because it published narratives, old and new, that commemorated local places for the tragic or heroic events that had occurred there. Scott had curated, and presented in print, a living tradition of song, poetry of the common people of the kind that Lyrical Ballads () was modelled on. These were not descriptive nature poems, but stories of conflict – clans at war, brothers murdered, women’s laments over dead lovers. So strongly did they appeal to Wordsworth that, as he put it in the tributary poem that he sent to Scott in , he was afraid to visit Yarrow, the site of many of the poems, lest the mundane reality should spoil the impression he had gained from the ballads set there. Be Yarrow stream unseen, unknown! It must, or we shall rue it: We have a vision of our own; Ah! why should we undo it? The treasured dreams of times long past, We’ll keep them, winsome Marrow! For when we’re there, although ’tis fair, ’Twill be another Yarrow!

(, pp. –)

Here, Wordsworth echoes the refrains of some of the old songs about Yarrow even as he refuses to go there: thus, he aligns himself with its literary version even as that version deters him from seeing the place itself. In one sense, here, he is imitating Scott, who had himself updated old

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The Death Zone

ballads and written new ones in the same vein; in another, however, he is differentiating himself from the ‘border minstrel’ by admitting that he could not claim local knowledge. He was not the place’s native poet, its new Bard. Scott’s reaction to the gifted poem came in a letter in which, while inviting Wordsworth to visit, he made it clear that for him, as a native, there was no gap between the old songs about the place and the place as an everyday experience. Indeed, he was himself living on Yarrow (or nearby) as had his ancestors who were named in an old ballad. I by no means admit your apology however ingeniously & artfully stated for not visiting the bonny holms of Yarrow & certainly will not rest till I have prevailed upon you to compare the ideal with the real stream. We are usually now (during the vacation of the court) within three miles of the dale of Yarrow by a wild & mountainous pass. Our own farm is on Tweedside, a sweet & simple spot which I hope you will one day visit. I intended a poetical request of this nature in your own measure & versification but postpone it for the present.. . . There are some good lines in the old Ballad – the hunted hare for instance, which mourns that she must leave fair Leaderhaugh and cannot win to Yarrow and this which from early youth has given my bosom a thrill when sung or repeated ‘For many a place stands in hard case / Where blythe folks ken’d nae sorrow / Mongst Homes that dwelt on Leader side / And Scotts that lived on Yarrow’.

Wordsworth was just as much a native of a ‘wild & mountainous’ country as Scott but, they both knew, could not claim to represent a living tradition of folk poetry that turned local events into the stuff of legend. There was no Lakeland equivalent of the border ballads to collect and update. His ballads were his own (and mostly derived from his time in Somerset). Scott, beneath his generous invitation, established himself as the more authentic representative of place and past – of the folk; he became the embodiment of what Wordsworth aspired to be. In January , the publication of Scott’s first long poem, The Lay of the Last Minstrel, made him popular as well as respected. This tale, which incorporated ballad metres and romance stanzas, posed as a medieval story. Set in the borders, it invested Scott’s locality with glamour, as the scene of fast-paced narrative and suspenseful action. It revived the chivalric values of a bygone, knightly, culture, making medievalism new for a nation at war with France. It also revived the supernatural beliefs of older times, as Wordsworth had tried to do in Lyrical Ballads – but to much greater acclaim from reviewers and readers. Wordsworth would later grow envious of Scott’s reputation and sales, but in early  professed himself pleased by the Lay. Scott, in reply, declared himself pleased at his pleasure:

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The Walkers, –



I am truly happy that you have found anything to interest or amuse you in my romance. It has the merit of being written with heart & goodwill and for no other reason than to discharge my mind of the ideas which from infancy have rushed upon it. I believe such verses will be generally found interesting because enthusiastic. Having thus expelled from my brain the Fiend of Chivalry & sent him to wander at will through the world I must sweep & garnish the empty tenement & decorate or rather fill it with something useful.

Scott’s notion that he had expelled chivalry from his brain was premature: many more poems and novels reviving chivalric tales for modern times would follow. But in spring , he was ready to take a furlough visiting Wordsworth on his ground. It was not simply their liking for ballad writing and mountain country that brought the two poets together. In March, Wordsworth told Scott about the death of his brother, John Wordsworth, in the shipwreck of the East India merchant vessel of which he was captain ( March ; EY, p. ). Wordsworth was devastated by the loss. Having last seen John on a mountain pass under the peaks of Helvellyn and Fairfield, Wordsworth now found his home turf haunted by memories of the cruel, violent and untimely death to which his brother then unwittingly went. Overwhelmed by grief, he was surprised when Scott replied that he too had lost a relative, wrecked in the same ship: The same dreadful catastrophe deprived me of a near relation a delightful & promising youth [John Rutherford] the hope and pride of his parents. He had just obtained a cadetship & parted from us in all the ardour of youthful hope & expectation leaving his father (a brother of my mother) almost heartbroken at his departure. But I will not dwell on the grief & despair which his fate occasioned except to assure you that in the scenes of distress which I was obliged to witness & in which indeed I shared sincerely I often thought of the similar effects which the same disastrous event must necessarily have produced in your little family of Love.

When Scott arrived in the Lakes in August, visitor and host had common loss as well as mutual interests to share; the meeting must have been charged – not least because some reports speculated that the wreck had been caused by John Wordsworth’s negligence or ineffectualness – inferences that upset Wordsworth and that he was keen to dispel. Davy’s coincident arrival seems to have been less planned, though his relationship with Wordsworth had been closer than Scott’s was. By , he had been, for nearly five years, a highly popular and fashionable lecturer on science in London; in , he would begin the experiments that

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The Death Zone

overturned current chemical theories and showed matter to be held together by electrochemical forces. He had become a friend of Wordsworth’s friend Southey in  and of Coleridge in . In dialogue with them, he had developed as a poet even while investigating rare minerals and devising brilliant experiments on the curative properties of newly isolated gases. As early as , he published, under Southey’s aegis, verse in the tradition that Wordsworth was simultaneously developing in the  Prelude manuscript – blank-verse nature poetry viewing rugged crags and wild landscapes. His ‘Mount’s Bay’ apostrophised the crags at Land’s End, celebrating their domination of space and their defiance of time. It also contrasted the solitary poet, who dared to investigate nature at its most dangerous, with the man of business, said to be oblivious to its attractions. But while Davy paralleled Wordsworth in recalling his lonely fell-wandering and cliff-scaling, he diverged in that his descriptions were informed by the new earth science (‘geology’). Thy awful height Bolerium* is not loved By busy Man, and no one wanders there Save He who follows Nature: He who seeks Amidst thy craigs and storm-beat rocks to find The marks of changes teaching the great laws That raised the globe from Chaos. Or He whose soul Is warm with fire poetic, He who feels When Nature smiles in beauty, or sublime Rises in majesty. He who can stand Unaw’d upon thy summit clad in tempests And view with raptured mind the roaring deep Rise o’er thy foam-clad base, while the black cloud Bursts with the fire of Heaven. * the Land’s End. The upper stratum is composed of granite, the lower with the surrounding rocks of Shistus.

In this passage, the geologist and the poet are both seen as true followers of nature; they pursue their enquiries into it as bold adventurers. The geologist aims to interpret the laws by which the earth was formed by reading the successive strata of different rocks in the cliff face; the poet seeks to get close enough to know nature’s beauty and sublimity by exposing his body to them. The thunder and lightning break over him from above and the roaring waves threaten him from below. This is to show science and poetry as forms of hands-on and emotional immersion in nature rather than a forms of library study, laboratory experiment or mathematical theory. Yet, there is theory in play – for the nature, origin

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The Walkers, –



and age of granite was the crucial issue and the reading of strata the key methodology in the central debate within earth science. Abraham Werner had shown that the similar order of the rock layers visible in cliffs all over Europe suggested a widespread, if not universal, temporal succession. Rocks had been laid down over vast periods of time and space – by, Werner argued, deposition of shells and debris on ocean floors followed by consolidation caused by the weight of material accumulating from above (Neptunism). Rock, in effect, was petrified death – the residue of millions of once-living organisms. On his account, granite was one of the oldest rocks. James Hutton contested this theory, arguing from his observation of strata that granite was a more recent rock than many, formed not by marine deposition but by subterranean heat forcing molten rock upwards. According to this Plutonist theory, heat shaped the earth, injecting molten rock into layers above it, causing folding and faulting of rock under pressure, and producing earthquakes and volcanoes. Demonstrating granite’s relation to basalt, and basalt’s to volcanic lava, then became a crux in the efforts of Hutton and his followers to disprove Werner’s theory and establish their own in its stead. Nonetheless, both Hutton’s and Werner’s followers agreed that the world was many millions of years old and that rock faces revealed ‘the immeasurable course of time’, the passing of whole epochs and the extinction of the creatures that once flourished. John Playfair, Hutton’s disciple, described himself inspecting a cliff and growing ‘giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time’. Likewise, when he risked his life in observing the granite lying above the schistus at Land’s End, Davy’s pursuer of Nature, attempting to find key evidence to support Hutton’s theory, found himself overawed by the temporal and spatial powers there revealed. Discovery of fire’s formative role in the creation of the earth was his goal – a quest echoed by the poet ‘whose soul / Is warm with fire poetic’. Davy’s fusion of scientific and poetic enquiry greatly excited Coleridge, who met the young chemist after returning from Germany in spring  (after Southey but before Wordsworth). Davy and Coleridge inhaled nitrous oxide together in Bristol and each tutored the other: Coleridge devoted himself to reading chemistry under Davy’s supervision and Davy submitted his poems to Coleridge for advice. One, ‘The Spinosist’, conceived of nature as an endless process of growth, death and renovation – as Hutton’s theory also did in viewing the earth as a dynamic cycle of rock uplifted by heat and fire and worn down by wind and rain (there was, Hutton concluded, ‘no vestige of a beginning – no prospect of an end’ to this cycle). In the

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following passage, Davy identifies heat, originating from the sun, and wind and water (storms and sea) as the agents of an immanent energy: All, All is change, the renovated forms Of ancient things arise & live again. The light of suns the angry breath of storms The everlasting motions of the main Are but the engines of that powerful will. – The eternal link of thoughts where form resolves Has ever acted & is acting still Whilst age round age & world round world revolves

In reply to this poem, Coleridge wrote from the Lake District (to which he had just moved so as to live near Wordsworth). He gave Davy suggestions for improvements and then an account of his exploration of a local mountain in a storm of Wind & Hail, the like of which I had never before seen & felt. . . . the wind became so fearful & tyrannous that I was apprehensive, some of the stones might topple down upon me. So I groped my way further down, and came to  Rocks, placed in this wise each supported by the other like a Child’s House of Cards, & in the Hollow & Screen which they made I sate for a long while sheltered as if I had been in my own Study, in which I am now writing – Here I sate, with a total feeling worshipping the power & ‘eternal Link’ of Energy.

This was to quote Davy’s own poem back to him, showing that Coleridge not only shared its pantheistic sentiments but also put them into action: he was scrambling down the crag, an exhilarated explorer of nature exposed to the elements, just as Davy’s verse suggested the geologist and the poet should do. Davy responded to this letter by wishing to come to the Lake District, so he too could be ‘wandering over majestic mountains, cooled by the breezes of health, or sleeping upon brown leaves beneath the unclouded heaven or floating on lakes coloured by the suns of evening’. While showing Davy that the Lake District was a place where the explorer of nature flourished, Coleridge also set out to show him Wordsworth, and to impress Wordsworth with his abilities. On Coleridge’s recommendation, Wordsworth approached Davy to help prepare for publication the second edition of Lyrical Ballads, containing an entirely new volume full of his latest poems. Davy, who lived near the printer in Bristol, was to ensure that each manuscript poem had been correctly set in type, and was to introduce proper punctuation – a highly responsible task that occupied him through the autumn, not least because Wordsworth kept requesting last-minute changes. The time-consuming process, which Davy executed while carrying

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The Walkers, –

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on his chemical experiments and editing Southey’s Thalaba the Destroyer, was an immersive course in Wordsworthian nature poetry and poetics. Davy proofread, amongst other poems, ‘Lines Composed a Few Miles Above . . . Tintern Abbey’. He quoted the poem in a letter to Coleridge and went to Tintern in the wake of his reading, imbibing its healthful airs and measuring their composition with a eudiometer. He also refreshed his interest in the poetry of crags and cliffs, reading in ‘The Brothers’ a description that must have brought to mind his own youth, and his own description of the follower of nature in ‘Mount’s Bay’: every corner Among these rocks, and every hollow place That venturous foot could reach, to one or both Was known as well as to the flowers that grow there. Like roe-bucks they went bounding o’er the hills; They played like two young ravens on the crags.

(LB, p. ; –)

In ‘To Joanna’, meanwhile, he encountered Wordsworth’s depiction of the power of the Lakeland fells – including Helvellyn – to answer the human voice: southern Loughrigg heard, And Fairfield answered with a mountain tone: Helvellyn far into the clear blue sky Carried the Lady’s voice, – old Skiddaw blew His speaking-trumpet; – back out of the clouds Of Glaramara southward came the voice; And Kirkstone tossed it from his misty head.

(LB, p. ; –)

Davy was evidently impressed by the Preface to Lyrical Ballads as well as the poems, for in his  Discourse Introductory to a Course of Lectures on Chemistry, he adapted to science what Wordsworth had argued about poetry’s role in preserving spiritual and moral health in the face of the deleterious effects of urban society: ‘to men collected in great cities, who are wearied by the constant recurrence of similar artificial pursuits and objects, and who are in need of sources of permanent attachment, the cultivation of chemistry and the physical sciences may be eminently beneficial’. Wordsworth, in turn, was motivated by Davy’s glorification of the man of science to introduce into the  version of the Preface an extended discussion of the social role of the natural philosopher and poet. The poet, he suggests, is at the philosopher’s

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The Death Zone side, carrying sensation into the midst of the objects of the Science itself. The remotest discoveries of the Chemist, the Botanist, or Mineralogist, will be as proper objects of the Poet’s art as any upon which it can be employed, if the time should ever come when these things shall be familiar to us, and the relations under which they are contemplated by the followers of these respective Sciences shall be manifestly and palpably material to us as enjoying and suffering beings. If the time should ever come when what is now called Science, thus familiarised to men, shall be ready to put on, as it were, a form of flesh and blood, the Poet will lend his divine spirit to aid the transfiguration, and will welcome the Being thus produced, as a dear and genuine inmate of the household of man. (W Prose, I, )

It was not until  that Wordsworth and Davy walked side by side in person rather than print. In August, Davy came to the Lakes, visited Southey and then, as Dorothy Wordsworth noted, ‘spent two days with my Brother – they were out of doors from morning till night’ (EY, p. ). Davy was now, as Coleridge had hoped, a full and energetic member of the Lake poetic circle centred on Wordsworth, sharing its commitment to outdoor exposure to the hills and dales of the district. Although what he said when walking with Wordsworth has not survived, something of its likely nature appears in Samuel Purkis’s record of his  hiking expedition in the Welsh mountains: Davy’s knowledge of Geology, and Natural History in general, rendered him a most delightful companion in a tour of this description. Every mountain we beheld, and every river we crossed, afforded a fruitful theme for his scientific remarks. The form and position of the mountain, with the several strata of which it was composed, always procured for me information as to its character and classification.

One especially extensive hilltop view led Davy to what Purkis called an extemporised utterance of ‘unmeasured blank verse, highly animated and descriptive, at once poetical and philosophical’. The collection of minerals, drawing of sketches and articulation of verse were, for Davy, all valid forms of response to what the strata revealed – the record of vast past ages, living matter dead and petrified and then melted and moved, only to be buried beneath still more sediment. When he returned to Keswick in August , Davy had just been to Ireland, where he had been making a geological tour in connection with his lecture series on geology (Britain’s first). He had investigated the basalt cliffs of the Antrim coast on foot and by boat in an effort to find evidence that would resolve the debate between Wernerians and Huttonians. The evidence was

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The Helvellyn Walk, August 



inconclusive, and he would take further field trips to Ireland in , and in the volcanic regions of the Auvergne and Naples in . He discussed the rival theories in his lectures, given to large audiences at the Royal Institution annually until . After Ireland, the geology encountered on climbing Helvellyn intrigued him, for it too is complex, being comprised of rocks that Huttonians interpreted as deriving from the metamorphosis of sedimentary layers into volcanic lava, with some overlying sedimentary rocks near its summit. Helvellyn’s very stone was made from the dead, and from the fiery melting of the dead, subsequently eroded by water.

The Helvellyn Walk, August  The two visitors brought different interests but a common love of mountains and of poetry to what was Wordsworth’s home ground. For Wordsworth, the journey over Helvellyn was familiar; he, Southey and Coleridge had often used it to travel to each other’s houses. Helvellyn and its neighbour Fairfield loom over the valley in which Grasmere lies – and they feature in his verse as sacred places of self-discovery and, since his parting from John Wordsworth under their slopes, of loss and lament. On this occasion, though, the mountain was unexpectedly transformed by a piece of strange news that emerged in the last week of July. At the bottom of one of the peak’s terrifyingly steep ridges, the bones of a walker had been found scattered, watched over by a dog. The corpse of the dog’s puppy lay nearby. The walker was rapidly identified as Charles Gough, who had been missing since  April, when he had gone to the mountain with his dog intending to do some angling and sketching. Evidently, he had fallen from the ridge and died, and the dog had remained by his body. On  July, one of the Carlisle newspapers concluded that ‘the bitch, shocking to relate, had torn the cloaths from the body and eaten him to a perfect skeleton’. More sentimental interpreters, as Mary Wordsworth reported on  July, admired the dog for ‘guarding the bones of her Master’ through ‘upwards of  months’ (EY, p. ). Either way, the macabre and sensational story was the latest news in the area, confirming Helvellyn’s reputation as a grim, dangerous and deathly mountain. To Scott and Wordsworth, meeting for the first time since discovering that their relatives had drowned in the same shipwreck, Gough’s death must have been especially shocking. No sooner did they unite in grief than they were again confronted by a young man’s violent death at the hand of nature. Helvellyn, the site of Gough’s bones, was haunted by the drowned bodies of John Wordsworth and John Rutherford.

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The Death Zone

Scott Neither Wordsworth nor Scott recorded their walk in letters, nor did Davy. Its strong effect on them emerged in poems rather than prose. Scott’s was the first to appear in print. In , he published ‘Helvellyn’, describing the ascent and recounting the story of Gough. Unusually for Scott, the author appeared as himself, relating the recent event in the first person: I climbed the dark brow of the mighty Helvellyn, Lakes and mountains beneath me gleamed misty and wide; All was still, save by fits, when the eagle was yelling, And starting around me the echoes replied. On the right, Striden-edge round the Red-tarn was bending, And Catchedicam its left verge was defending, One huge, nameless rock in the front was ascending, When I marked the sad spot where the wanderer had died.

Scott, in the Lakes, is led away from his typical medievalising style, with its use of historical narrators and antique diction and its focus on the heroic deeds of ancient knights. Ignoring the personae of his folk ballads and chivalric romances, he also neglects his walking companions, depicting himself as alone on the ‘dark brow’ – a device to increase the sense of danger and achievement. This was to imitate Wordsworth’s characteristic narrative mode (‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’). It was to place himself where Davy’s nature-follower stood on Land’s End – a sublime, fearless explorer of rocks and cliffs. The summit view and the silence pierced by the eagle are also Wordsworthian motifs, as is the recitation of place names (found, for example, in ‘To Joanna’). Scott has been drawn by the place and its overwriting by his host into a Wordsworthian manner that eclipses the actual Wordsworth’s presence on the fell. If this is a friendly dialogue, writing back to Wordsworth in homage, it nevertheless raises the possibility of rivalry, for it takes Wordsworth’s poetic ground. In the second stanza, it becomes apparent that Scott is attempting a lyrical ballad, dramatising a local event that had occurred to an ordinary, rather than public or heroic, figure – exactly the tendency that Wordsworth was recognised for. Dark green was that spot ’mid the brown mountain heather, Where the pilgrim of nature lay stretched in decay, Like the corpse of an outcast abandoned to weather, Till the mountain-winds wasted the tenantless clay. Nor yet quite deserted, though lonely extended,

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Scott For, faithful in death, his mute favourite attended, The much-loved remains of her master defended, And chased the hill-fox and the raven away. (–)

The plainness of the diction, the interest in abandonment and the close-up focus on small details in a hostile wilderness recall ‘The Thorn’. It seems that Scott, like Wordsworth, is holding decay and death out for attention as forms of participation in nature, rather than heralds of oblivion or passages to spiritual resurrection. The dead Gough is a pilgrim to the heart of nature, his corpse keeping one spot green in the brown heather, as if fertilising the earth. The third stanza, however, veers from this bleak vision of natural cycles and instead takes a sentimental route, as the narrator addresses the dead man’s dog: How long didst thou think that his silence was slumber? When the wind waved his garment, how oft didst thou start? How many long days and long weeks didst thou number, Ere he faded before thee, the friend of thy heart? And, oh! was it meet, that – no requiem read o’er him, No mother to weep, and no friend to deplore him, And thou, little guardian, alone stretched before him – Unhonoured the pilgrim from life should depart? (–)

In other words, the dog’s watching is not merely a sign of its faithfulness but a substitute for the offices of mourning which allay the finality of death and console survivors. Sentiment is saved; the canine provides the friendship that is lacking within the human: pilgrims need not pass alone and unlamented into an unfeeling nature. Scott, it turns out, wants death to be redeemed by fellow feeling, as indicated by display and ceremony. Ceremony takes Scott back to his comfort zone; in the fourth stanza, he leaves his Wordsworthian mountain behind in favour of a medieval hall: When a prince to the fate of the peasant has yielded, The tapestry waves dark round the dim-lighted hall; With scutcheons of silver the coffin is shielded, And pages stand mute by the canopied pall; Through the courts, at deep midnight, the torches are gleaming; In the proudly arched chapel the banners are beaming; Far adown the long aisle sacred music is streaming, Lamenting a chief of the people should fall. (–)

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From pooch to prince; the pageant replaces the personal: Scott cannot abide simplicity for long. The last verse awkwardly transitions back to Helvellyn and the dog. So keen is Scott to dress the lonely, violent death with a sentimental analogy that he likens it to a crag-bound lamb dropping to its death to be next to its mother. Addressing the puppy, he says: But meeter for thee, gentle lover of nature, To lay down thy head like the meek mountain lamb, When, wildered, he drops from some cliff huge in stature, And draws his last sob by the side of his dam. (–)

The cliché ‘lay down his head’ hardly diverts readers from an appalled flinching as they imagine what it tries to hide – the gruesome sight of the lamb’s smashed body. But Scott, keen to wrap Gough’s death in the borrowed emotion of a decorous pieta, presses on. He cannot allow Gough to end on the grass on a brown heather moor; he must give him pomp and circumstance – a ‘stately . . . couch’ – before he can return to the simple elements of the actual scene – the grey plover flying across the mountainside and the local names of the fells: And more stately thy couch by this desert lake lying, Thy obsequies sung by the gray plover flying, With but one faithful friend to witness thy dying In the arms of Helvellyn and Catchedicam. (–)

Simple, yet sentimental: the birds, pathetically, sing obsequies; the mountain cradles the dying man; the dog (now singular – the smashed puppy having been forgotten) takes the typically human role of consoling witness. Here, Scott updates the mourning convention that saw hounds carved in effigy on their masters’ tombs (the Victorian statue of ‘Bobbie’, the dog that lived by his master’s grave in Edinburgh’s Greyfriars’ kirkyard, is his legacy). Despite the composure of this deathbed tableau, the overall impression given is that of a narrative poet attempting, in response to the stark, solemn and essentially static material, to restrain his propensity to create action and suspense. Gough’s death is not quite enough of a story for the poet of the Lay of the Last Minstrel and nor is his own ascent of the peak. Rather than dwell on ordinary events and mundane objects, and on the states of feeling to which they give rise, Scott, even at his most

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Wordsworth

Wordsworthian, strains at the leash. His anapestic tetrameters – an unusual choice in English verse – are one of the galloping metres he preferred; the feminine rhymes – mostly present participles – suggest movement to the next line. Hurrying the reader, they suit story rather than meditation. Scott’s look and sound different from Wordsworth’s typical rhymes and metres, as if parading the poem’s independence of the lyrical ballads that, in setting, subject and diction it often imitates. They are a token of Scott’s difference from his host, suggesting that he wanted to retain an independent voice even while writing out of an experience and a conversation shared with Wordsworth, on Wordsworth’s home ground.

Wordsworth Unbeknownst to Scott, Wordsworth, prompted by their day on Helvellyn, was also writing a poem in which he uneasily experimented with his friend’s typical style. He drafted ‘Fidelity’ in  and published it in . Like Scott’s poem, it sets the scene high on the mountain and then moves down and focuses on the skeletal body and the loyal dog. This similarity reflects the two poems’ origins in the same fell climb, on which the walkers looked down on Striding and Swirral Edges and the tarn they enclose – the site of Gough’s fall. Another similarity seems more a matter of Wordsworth becoming temporarily Scottified. He announces the remarkable story of the dog remaining by his master in the manner of the old ballads that Scott collected and imitated, introducing to his poem – which is a terse third person report up to that point – the persona of a ballad singer drumming up interest from bystanders by advertising the extraordinariness and authenticity of his narrative: But hear a wonder, for whose sake This lamentable tale I tell A lasting monument of words This wonder merits well.

(, p. ; –)

It was rare for Wordsworth to speak in so conventional a ballad style, but The Lay of the Last Minstrel, whose popular success he envied, portrayed ballad singers referring, as they sang, to their own stories of wonder (‘The Scald had told his wondrous tale’ (Canto VI, stanza ) and ‘I cannot tell how the truth may be / I say the tale as ’twas said to me’ (Canto II, stanza )). Scott had

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The Death Zone

also contributed ballads to M. G. Lewis’s Tales of Wonder. In this context, Wordsworth’s phrasing suggests a Scott-influenced effort to make his meditation on Gough sound like one of the newly fashionable pseudo-antique tales of the chivalric or the supernatural. Apparently, writing and talking to Scott in the context of their mutual experience of sudden death at nature’s hands had affected his style, as it would in his  ‘Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle’, another tale said to be told by a minstrel. Wordsworth’s turn to Scottified minstrelsy is all the more unexpected because ‘Fidelity’ is, for the most part, a third person, dispassionate account of events. Eschewing the egotistical sublime of his first-person nature lyrics, Wordsworth adopts the narrative style of a reporter: A barking sound the shepherd hears, A cry as of a dog or fox; He halts, and searches with his eyes Among the scattered rocks: And now at distance can discern A stirring in a brake of fern; And instantly a dog is seen Glancing from that covert green. The dog is not of mountain breed; Its motions, too, are wild and shy; With something, as the shepherd thinks, Unusual in its cry: Nor is there any one in sight All round, in hollow or on height; Nor shout, nor whistle strikes his ear: What is the creature doing here? (–)

It is not just the plain diction and detached viewpoint that allows each aspect of the place and each stage of the event to be separately dwelt upon; the metre and form also conduce to a terse narration. There is little enjambement; most lines are separate statements. Lines  and  do not rhyme; the others do, though not in one pattern. If Scott gallops, Wordsworth creeps – in increments: the iambic tetrameter lines halt midstanza on deepened of six or seven syllables. This brings the reader up short at a visual and metrical pause that is also a pivot, since after it, the rhyme scheme changes to couplets and the argument moves in a slightly different direction. It is a technically brilliant experiment with a composite, elongated ballad stanza (rhymed and unrhymed; of eight lines, save one of nine introduced to vary the effect and emphasise stasis with a triplet). The effect is to concentrate the reader’s attention, and model incomprehension: we

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Wordsworth

see slowly, in steps, a series of things, or aspects of things, whose relationship as a whole is not immediately apparent. It was a Cove, a huge Recess, That keeps till June December’s snow A lofty Precipice in front, A silent Tarn below! Far in the bosom of Helvellyn, Remote from public Road or Dwelling, Pathway, or cultivated land; From trace of human foot or hand. There, sometimes does a leaping Fish Send through the Tarn a lonely cheer; The Crags repeat the Raven’s croak, In symphony austere; Thither the Rainbow comes – the Cloud – And Mists that spread the flying shroud; And Sun-beams; and the sounding blast, That, if it could, would hurry past, But that enormous Barrier binds it fast. (–)

The focusing of objects in these stanzas establishes the cove as a death zone even before anything of Gough’s fate is described. The ‘deep recess’ keeps winter’s snow into summer; its tarn is silent; the only signs of life (the leaping fish) are small and solitary. The raven’s cry – foreshadowing death and predation as in Macbeth – is repeated by the crags. The flying shroud – another foreshadowing of death – and sounding blast cannot escape the enormous barrier of the cliff. The cove, it is implied, is a pit into which vitality is sucked, diminishing until it is vestigial and unable to escape; the place is a black hole. By the end, the self-referential talk of ‘wonder’ has been left behind, and the language has returned to dispassionate empirical report (a matter of finding ‘proof’ from what remains). It is neither sensational nor emotional, as the outbreak of balladry might lead readers to expect. Whereas Scott dignifies and sentimentalises the event by analogy with princes and lambs, Wordsworth’s Scottification remains limited and he reassumes what Scott termed his ‘different path from what has been travell’d by [his] predecessors’ – the path of making every commonplace word as charged as possible with implied feeling so as to vindicate the extraordinary significance of the seemingly ordinary. The poem does not expatiate fulsomely on the dog’s chivalric service or loyalty: its claims about profound love and strong feeling are syntactically semi-detached from the animal. Thus, they

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are dwelt on as emotions in themselves, rather than simply as attributes of Gough’s dog. And these emotions exceed human understanding, so that the poem ends on a declaration of ignorance. Yes, proof was plain that since the day On which the traveller thus had died The Dog had watched about the spot, Or by his Master’s side: How nourished here through such long time He knows, who gave that love sublime, And gave that strength of feeling, great Above all human estimate. (–)

The depth and meaning of love are not to be known empirically, or by calculation. Since, up to this point, the dispassionate narration has carefully served the cause of human knowledge – of our ability to estimate what has happened from the remaining evidence, it is as if the poem’s ending presents, calmly and matter-of-factly, the limitations of its own calm matter-of-factness. This is the poet who said that he wrote lyrical ballads to show ‘that men who do not wear fine clothes can feel deeply’ extending his testament from people to animals (Letter to Charles James Fox,  January ; EY, p. ). Feeling is a mystery; the dog’s ‘watching’ is evidence of it, as is the poem’s record, but it surpasses her and our understanding, comprehensible in its causes and effects only to an unnamed ‘He’ who gives love. This ‘He’ is God, but it is significant that the poet is too restrained to identify him as the Christian Father and Son. Death’s destructiveness is too palpable – the skeleton too visible – for confident affirmations of faith in divine love. Wordsworth, after all, was still grieving his brother, whose drowned body had been recovered, after seven weeks underwater, only four months before Gough’s – a recovery that must have recalled the pulling of a drowned man from Esthwaite water that Wordsworth remembered as a traumatic episode in his boyhood (‘At length the dead man, mid that beauteous scene / Of trees and hills and water, bolt upright / Rose with his ghastly face’; Prelude, V, –). Finally, then, the poem is not about Gough, or the shepherd, or even the narrator, but about mourning as a way of living: the dog demonstrates life’s survival amid a deathly nature owing to an endurance of suffering made possible by depth of love (she suffers deprivation and isolation but does not turn away from the dead loved one). Here, Helvellyn is the scene of a new, bleaker, Wordsworth who emerged after his brother’s drowning – a Wordsworth who no longer finds himself able to intuit a reparative

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power in the rocks and stones and trees of his landscape, as he once did in Tintern, but instead affirms a strength of love for the unreturning dead which may be felt, though not understood, by humans and animals but that is not reciprocated by the wider world. In this way, the poem is a way of coping with a place associated with the violent betrayal of man by nature – Gough’s death standing in for John Wordsworth’s and the dog’s loyal love for the bereft Wordsworth’s – and for the stoic resignation that John Wordsworth was reported to have shown during the shipwreck. Thus, perhaps, the poem was motivated by Wordsworth’s need to defend his dead brother from the criticisms made of his conduct. With the benefit of displacement and distance, it is more convincing, in both its reappraisal of nature’s power to heal and its tentative affirmation of love’s consolatory power, than were the  ‘Elegiac Verses in Memory of My Brother, John Wordsworth’, in which the poet stands beneath Helvellyn as he did when he last saw his brother. It is a fine poem indeed: its depth of feeling about nature, and mortals’ place in nature, is all the stronger for the restraint, achieved by verbal plainness and formal experiment, with which it is expressed.

Davy Davy’s only recorded comment on the Helvellyn climb was that the summit was composed of the sedimentary rock greywacke – a fact that suggests that having just come from his geological investigations in Ireland, he was keenly observing the mountain’s mineralogical nature. His geologist’s eye was, however, also a poet’s: he followed his day on Helvellyn with landscape verse that adopts Wordsworthian motifs more closely than before. According to Dorothy Wordsworth, her brother read a part of The Recluse to Davy after they had arrived in Grasmere (Letter of  October ; EY, pp. –); this experience seems, judging by Davy’s poetry of the period, to have remained with him. Its effect, still more than that of Lyrical Ballads, is apparent in the blank verse fragment describing a huge crag on the Irish coast that Davy had explored just before coming to the Lakes – not Fairfield but ‘Fairhead’. Taking the role of a solitary walker, as Wordsworth often did, Davy looks down on the seascape and then to the distant prospect: – but chiefly thee, Fair-Head Unrivall’d in thy form and majesty! For on thy loftiest summit I have walk’d In the bright sunshine, while beneath thee roll’d

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The Death Zone The clouds in purest splendour, hiding now The ocean and his islands – parting now As if reluctantly: whilst full in view The blue tide wildly roll’d, skirted with foam, And bounded by the green and smiling land, The dim pale mountains, and the purple sky. Majestic cliff! thou birth of unknown Time, Long had the billows beat thee, long the waves Rush’d o’er thy hollow’d rocks, ere life adorn’d Thy broken surface, ere the yellow moss Had tinted thee, or the mild dews of Heaven Clothed thee with verdure, or the eagles made Thy cave their aëry: so in after time Long shalt thou rest unalter’d mid the wreck Of all the mightiness of human works; For not the lightning nor the whirlwind’s force, Nor all the waves of ocean, shall prevail Against thy giant strength – and thou shalt stand Till the Almighty voice which bade thee rise Shall bid thee fall.

Davy’s poem is deeply Wordsworthian. ‘Tintern Abbey’ echoes in its phrasing and syntax, as does the The Recluse. Standing above the clouds, looking over the sea and land that is partly hidden by them, Davy resembles Wordsworth on Snowdon’s summit in the climactic passage drafted in  and incorporated in the poem intended as the Prelude to The Recluse: on the shore I found myself of a huge sea of mist, Which meek and silent rested at my feet. A hundred hills their dusky backs upheaved All over this still ocean, and beyond, Far, far beyond, the vapours shot themselves In headlands, tongues, and promontory shapes, Into the sea, the real sea

(Prelude, XIII, –)

Davy’s reference to the eagles nesting in the sea cave may be a response to that other section of The Recluse – Home at Grasmere – in which Wordsworth describes the eagles on Helvellyn: ‘And if those Eagles to their ancient hold / Return, Helvellyn’s Eagles! with the Pair / From my own door I shall be free to claim / Acquaintance, as they sweep from cloud to cloud’ (Home at Grasmere, p. ; –).

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Davy learned from Wordsworth, as he also did from Coleridge, to master the tropes of the sublime so as to defy the death that Helvellyn forced the walkers to confront. ‘Fairhead’ displays a considerably more sophisticated control of these tropes than his earlier invocation of Land’s End in ‘Mount’s Bay’. Davy now writes directly, in the first person, rather than through the awkwardly generic ‘he who follows nature’. Now, the natural sublime suggests the still greater sublimity of the supernatural, as it does in Wordsworth. Like Coleridge and (later) Shelley in Chamonix, he hails the crag as an embodiment of strength and power, subordinate to nothing within nature. If Scott’s Helvellyn cradles the dying man, while Wordsworth’s is indifferent to him, Davy’s Fairhead positively dwarfs human mortality altogether – long outlasting ‘the mightiness of human works’. The evocation of a religious authority then pre-empts a still more risky, atheistic conclusion. Only the ‘Almighty voice’ can destroy Fairhead – but this voice is also creative, implying a Huttonian cycle of geological uplift and downfall, rather than an end (‘bade thee rise / Shall bid thee fall’). As in ‘The Spinosist’ of , this cyclical power seems, therefore, all the more powerful, even if only loosely identified with an orthodox God separate from the world. It is the cliff’s endurance of the elements that impresses Davy. Commenting on the rock’s geological origins in the deep past, Davy implies that it is so hard that it resists erosion by the sea: it is and will remain ‘unalter’d’. He does not trace its formation to the sedimentation of seashells on an ancient ocean floor; its beginning is ‘unknown’. Fairhead is composed of dolerite; Davy was fascinated by the basaltic formations of the Irish coast as evidence that might confirm or deny Hutton’s arguments that much of the visible earth had been thrust up as molten rock heated from below. Here, as in his annual geological lectures, he mediates his geological interests and their potential impiety, positing no specific origin but viewing the cliff’s defiance of temporal change as sublime. More than that, he recoups some power for himself as the witness of this defiance: if the Almighty operates through voice so as to raise and lower the crag, so does he: he addresses the cliff, personifying it (why speak to an object unless one presumes it can understand?). In other words, Davy’s trope of address aligns his verse with the almighty voice: both poet and God act on nature through articulate, immediate words. If the creative/destructive force of nature is sublime, working on a cycle of altogether vaster scale than that of human life/death, and thereby rendering humankind temporary and unimportant, so is the poet. Effectively, Davy here adopts a

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sublime egotism as assertive as Wordsworth’s but pitched on a view, taken in the present, of a vastly ancient geological time. It was this capacity to discourse on the sublimity of nature’s operations that marked Davy’s relationship with Scott. The Helvellyn walk proved the start of a long-term friendship. J. G. Lockhart attests to Davy’s admiration of The Lay, describing how he recited lines from memory as he rode to Yarrow with Scott in . He notes how the two men brought the best out of each other’s minds, if not in poetry, then in poetic conversation and prose: Each strove to make the other talk – and they did so in turn more charmingly than I ever heard either on any other occasion whatsoever. Scott in his romantic narratives touched a deeper chord of feeling than usual, when he had such a listener as Davy: and Davy, when induced to open views upon any question of scientific interest in Scott’s presence, did so with a degree of clear energetic eloquence, and with a flow of imagery and illustration, of which neither his habitual tone of table talk (least of all in London), nor any of his prose writings (except, indeed, the posthumous Consolations of Travel), could suggest an adequate notion. I say his prose writings – for who that has read his sublime quatrains on the doctrine of Spinoza can doubt that he might have united, if he had pleased, in some great didactic poem, the vigorous ratiocination of Dryden and the moral majesty of Wordsworth?

As the host and the local who led the visitors who so stimulated each other, Wordsworth was at the centre of the group dialogue nurtured by the shared experience of climbing Helvellyn together – an experience already overwritten by the climbers’ knowledge of each other’s verse and of events of the gravest kind. Focusing on the specifics of that day of days allows us to move beyond the notion of isolated poets with their own separate styles and see, instead, a mutually influential practice of verse-response to the evidence and experience of death – whether in the sea, at the foot of Striding Edge, or deep in the rock faces. Helvellyn’s death zone produced interrelated poetic languages, distinct yet not different, even when apparently egotistical in tone and singular in viewpoint. The day traversing the mountain made Davy a more involved member of Wordsworth’s circle than has often been acknowledged, not only as a hill walker and brilliant chemist but also as a poet. He would continue to make poetry one of the ways he formulated an understanding of the forces that formed the earth, across deep time, and also shaped its interpreter in the present moment. His poetry became a significant part of the mental discipline that enabled him to design scientific enquiry, both outdoors in nature and in the

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laboratory. He said as much in his geological lectures: ‘The strength and the correctness of the imagination can only be preserved by exercise, and suppositions, . . . increase the activity of the mind; they accustom it to rapid combinations’. He wrote more mountain verse in Switzerland and Italy in  and , while investigating rock formations and lava flows. It was in the staging of his involvement in the mountain landscape that he owed most to the poet of The Recluse: diction, sentence structure, and narrative point of view all suggest the continuing influence of his hill walking with, and listening to the verse of, Wordsworth. For his part, Wordsworth took no lessons in versification from the brilliant man of science. Geological knowledge, however, does appear in his post- writing. In his  guidebook to the Lake District, he identifies schist as the main rock of the area – an identification that suggests he had been influenced by Hutton’s Plutonist theories, perhaps via Davy. The effect of the Helvellyn day on Scott was time- as well as placebound. The news of Gough and his dog, coming just as he and Wordsworth met and commiserated over the drowning of their relatives, led him to a poem more strongly shaped by Wordsworthian motifs than he had written before or would write again. Meditating on a present-day commonplace death and a remarkable instance of devotion in the Lakeland mountains, he became something of a lyrical balladeer – only to regain his individuality by the introduction to his Helvellyn poem of trademark galloping metre and baronial halls, medieval pageantry and baa-lamb sentimentality. These poetic trademarks, in the long term, attracted a degree of distaste from Wordsworth, not least because they made Scott’s verse far more popular than his own. Reviewers, for instance, preferred Scott’s Helvellyn poem to ‘Fidelity’. Nonetheless, the shared walk cemented a cordial friendship, with further meetings until their final farewell near Yarrow, as a sick Scott departed for Italy. In the end, it was Wordsworth’s writing that was especially marked by the conjunction of place, time, and people in August . Gough’s death deepened Helvellyn’s association with his brother, also killed by nature’s hostility. Sharing the day and the news with Scott, so fluent and popular a versifier of human dramas set in the mountains and moors, and with Davy, an admirer of deep and destructive forces visible in the crags, he was stimulated to write one of his most economical and charged reflections on mortality and nature. ‘Fidelity’ is both an implicit memorial to John Wordsworth and the first successful poem in his later style in which he no longer looked to nature to provide a benevolent or reparative spiritual home.

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Notes  See Stephen Gill, Wordsworth’s Revisitings (Oxford, ), pp. –. The poem is also discussed by Peter J. Manning, ‘The Other Scene of Travel: Wordsworth’s “Musings near Acquapendente”’, in The Wordsworthian Enlightenment: Romantic Poetry and the Ecology of Reading, ed. Helen Rugueiro Elam and Frances Ferguson (Baltimore, ), pp. –.  E.g. William Hogarth, ‘Satan, Sin and Death (A Scene from Milton’s “Paradise Lost”)’ c.– and James Gilray, ‘Sin, Death and the Devil’, .  From a letter of  March ; The Letters of Sir Walter Scott, ed. Herbert Grierson,  vols (London, –), I, –.  Ibid.  John Rutherford, Scott’s cousin, who was lost in the wreck of John Wordsworth’s ship.  From a letter of  March ; The Letters of Sir Walter Scott, I, .  Richard Matlak, ‘Captain John Wordsworth’s Death at Sea’, The Wordsworth Circle,  (), – and Deep Distresses: William Wordsworth, John Wordsworth, Sir George Beaumont, – (Newark, NJ, ).  Robert Southey (ed.), Annual Anthology,  (), , lines –.  Quoted in Donald B. McIntyre and Alan McKirdy, James Hutton, the Founder of Modern Geology (Edinburgh, ), p. .  Quoted in ibid., p. .  James Hutton, ‘Theory of the Earth’, Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh,  (), .  Sharon Ruston, ‘From “The Life of the Spinosist” to “Life”: Humphry Davy, Chemist and Poet’, in Literature and Chemistry: Elective Affinities, ed. Margaret Hagen and Margery Skagen (Aarhus, ), pp. –.  Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. L. Griggs,  vols (Oxford, –), I, –.  Collected Letters of Sir Humphry Davy, ed. Tim Fulford and Sharon Ruston,  vols (Oxford, ), I, .  Ibid., –.  Davy, A Discourse Introductory to a Course of Lectures on Chemistry (London, ), p. ; see Maurice Hindle, ‘Humphry Davy and William Wordsworth: A Mutual Influence’, Romanticism,  (), –; see Catherine E. Ross, ‘“Twin Labourers and Heirs of the Same Hopes”: The Professional Rivalry of Humphry Davy and William Wordsworth’, in Romantic Science: The Literary Forms of Natural History, ed. Noah Heringman (Albany, ), pp. –.  See Sharon Ruston, Creating Romanticism: Case Studies in the Literature, Science and Medicine of the s (Houndmills, ), p. ; see Roger Sharrock, ‘The Chemist and the Poet: Sir Humphry Davy and the Preface to Lyrical Ballads’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London,  (), –.

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 Quoted in John Ayrton Paris, The Life of Sir Humphry Davy, Bart. LL. D,  vols (London, ), , –.  For these, see Robert Siegfried and Robert H. Dott, Jr., Humphry Davy on Geology: The  Lectures for the General Audience (Madison, ).  Jonathan Jones, ‘Pet Rescue’. The Guardian.  March . www .theguardian.com/artanddesign//mar//art.artsfeatures  Walter Scott, Poetical Works, ed. J. Logie Robertson (London, ), pp. –; lines –.  Cf. ‘Ye ween to hear a melting tale’ (Canto II, stanza ).  Scott to Anna Seward,  April ; The Letters of Sir Walter Scott, I, .  Royal Institution MS HD//G, p. .  Quoted in Paris, The Life of Sir Humphry Davy, I, –; lines –.  See my ‘Pantheistic Poetry; Geological Touring; Chemical Experimentation: Coleridge and Davy in the Mountains and on the Page’, The Coleridge Bulletin,  (), –.  M. J. S. Rudwick, Bursting the Limits of Time: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution (Chicago, ), pp. –.  See Siegfried and Dott Jr., Humphry Davy on Geology, pp. –.  J. G. Lockhart, Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott,  vols (Paris, ), III, .  Siegfried and Dott Jr., Humphry Davy on Geology, p. .  See John Wyatt, Wordsworth and the Geologists (Cambridge, ), pp. –; on geology’s influence on Wordsworth’s landscape aesthetic see Noah Heringman, Romantic Rocks, Aesthetic Geology (Ithaca and London, ), pp. –, –.

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Chronicle of a Death Untold: Wordsworth’s ‘Epistle to Sir George Beaumont’

In , Wordsworth took his family to the Cumbrian coast, to benefit his children’s health by sea bathing. From there, he addressed a verse-missive to his patron and friend, the country landowner Sir George Beaumont. Supplementing the prose letters that Wordsworth and Beaumont exchanged, it continues a dialogue. Colloquial and yet structured, it reveals Wordsworth forging verse conditions to reshape the country-house poems developed by Ben Jonson, in which the address of patron by poet had modelled a virtuous sociability also exemplified in the moral community of the landed estate. Wordsworth transforms the Jonsonian model so that exemplary community takes the form of intimate, domestic sociability based on the dales family rather than the country house. Modelling chatty friendship and describing family life, his epistle represents an alternative both to the blank-verse celebration of rustic society that had stalled in ‘Home at Grasmere’ and to the rustic speech that, in ,  and , had narrated the troubles of rural folk. It is a prime example of the ‘new’ later Wordsworth experimenting with a traditional form, and with the comic rather than his wonted egotistical sublime, as he turned away from the solitary communion with nature he had explored in The Prelude. In , Wordsworth returned to the still-unpublished epistle of , vastly expanding it as he revised his old manuscript. By this time, Beaumont was long dead and so, tragically, were the children Wordsworth had taken to the seaside. The new version talked to Beaumont and of the children as if they were alive, as if Wordsworth were still writing in , as if to recur to an innocent time when he did not yet know what he now knew – an impossible return (revision without retrospect). Examining this  text, I explore its peculiar tone, its fascinating double perspective and the complex literary allusions in which the undisclosed fact of death is accommodated, if not resolved. I discuss the role of revision as a mode of renewing the past in which conversation revived conceals regret elegised (Wordsworth’s effort to 

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renew a destroyed community by writing as if its destruction had not yet occurred revives both the community and the consciousness of its loss). The verse epistle, as developed by Ben Jonson and his circle from Horatian antecedents, was a means of idealising the country estate as an example of virtuous community; it also exemplified a moral relationship between the poet and the patron to whom it was ‘sent’, bracing frank colloquial address with a conspicuously regular couplet form. Wordsworth had been impressed by Jonson’s epistles since first encountering them in ; from , Beaumont had been trying to persuade him of the merits of the poetry of his ancestors, John and Francis Beaumont, who had written epistles to Jonson. Thus, the Jonsonian epistle was a shared interest and frequent topic in the postal dialogue by which Wordsworth and Beaumont maintained their friendship. To address a verse epistle to Sir George was, in this context, to send an appropriate gift while extending the friendly discourse of their prose correspondence into verse. Wordsworth began the epistle as a letter by a reluctant holidaymaker disappointed in his accommodation and his location. The bare holiday cottage on the windy coast seemed bleak by comparison with the harmony that flourished in his home village of Grasmere – a rural community undisturbed by new industry and free of domination by a single landowner. In , he had viewed Grasmere as an ideal country estate, a virtuous economy in which the landlord’s role was taken by God, whose ‘hall’ was the vale in which the village nestled: A true community – a genuine frame Of many into one incorporate. ‘That’ must be looked for here: paternal sway, One household, under God, for high and low, One family and one mansion; to themselves Appropriate, and divided from the world, As if it were a cave, a multitude Human and brute, possessors undisturbed Of this Recess – their legislative Hall, Their Temple, and their glorious Dwelling-place.

(–)

Grasmere’s ‘true community’ had, however, recently come under strain: Wordsworth’s children were worryingly sick; Coleridge, his intellectual companion and poetic collaborator, had broken with him and left; his mode of poeticising the village had been savagely criticised. Reviewing the  Poems in Two Volumes, Francis Jeffrey judged that Wordsworth’s aim was to connect his ‘most lofty, tender, or impassioned conceptions, with

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objects and incidents, which the greater part of his readers will probably persist in thinking low, silly, or uninteresting’. Jeffrey concluded, ‘[i]f the printing of such trash as this be not felt as an insult to the public taste, we are afraid it cannot be insulted’. Meanwhile, The Recluse, in which the importance of rural life as a model for civilisation was to be dealt with in lofty, Miltonic, style, had stuttered in Coleridge’s absence. Exiled from a fallen Eden to a borrowed house on an exposed shore, his poetry unpopular and his closest collaborator lost, Wordsworth was left to ponder what rural community and poetic relationship should consist of. He wrote a long prose letter to Beaumont complaining that, when travelling past Muncaster Castle a little further up the coast, he had found that ‘the noble Proprietor has contrived to shut himself up so with Plantations and chained gates and locks, that whatever prospects he may command from his stately Prison, or rather Fortification, can only be guessed at by the passing Traveller’ (MY, I, ). On the outside rather than an invited guest, Wordsworth resented the exclusion, and quoted James Thomson’s verse as an ironic counterpoint that also implied that such landscape parks were unpropitious ground for poets: ‘You cannot rob me of free Nature’s grace; / You cannot shut the windows of the sky’. ‘The business’, Wordsworth observed sardonically, ‘was done more thoroughly; for the sky was nearly shut out altogether’. Likewise, Beaumont’s friend Uvedale Price kept too much of his Foxley estate ‘exclusively to himself’. Used to ‘a power to exercise . . . control’, the great landowner was tempted to make ‘his power . . . his law’, banishing what displeased him from his view, ‘impoverishing and monotonising Landscapes’. Receiving these comments, Beaumont must have felt reminded that the landowner’s estate, for a poet to flourish there, should present a variety of habitats illustrating its inclusiveness and openness to his tenants, rather than display his total domination of his land and those who work on it. Only two days after he sent Beaumont the prose letter, Wordsworth began the verse epistle – a poem about the morality of patronage and landownership in the manner pioneered by Horace in Latin and, in English, by Jonson. Wordsworth had translated parts of Horace’s epistles in the early s; in these poems, the virtues of a retired rural life, and the pressures patronage makes on the poet’s independence, are explicit themes. In February , he had encountered Jonson’s verse letters and was impressed enough to incorporate into ‘Home at Grasmere’ phrases from ‘To Penshurst’ celebrating the virtuous rural community of Sir Robert Sidney’s estate:

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

thy walls be of the country stone, They’re reared with no man’s ruin, no man’s groan; There’s none that dwell about them wish them down; But all come in, the farmer and the clown, And no one empty-handed, to salute Thy lord and lady, though they have no suit.

Now in , Wordsworth found that the verse epistle suited his particular relationship with Sir George: its decorous mixture of formal order and colloquial diction accommodated both gentlemanly cordiality (the poet addressing Beaumont as a fellow artist) and the social distance of wealthy patron and poor poet. He emulated not just Jonson but also, in an act of graceful tribute, Beaumont’s ancestors John and Francis Beaumont, who had written epistles from their country house Grace Dieu (a former priory near Coleorton). John had addressed poems to Francis; Francis had addressed John and their mutual friend Jonson. In this respect, models from the Leicestershire past influenced Wordsworth’s new Cumbrian voice (in November , he wrote that he was keen to realise Sir George’s aim of collecting John’s poems for republication (MY, I, )). Francis’s ‘Epistle to Ben Jonson’, for example, begins with the Horatian motif that Wordsworth also employs – a poet writing from rustic isolation to a fellow cosmopolitan artist. For Francis, Leicestershire is lonely and bucolic; like Wordsworth, he longs for his absent friend, writing that ‘The sun (which doth the greatest comfort bring / To absent friends, because the self-same thing / They know they see, however absent) is / Here, our best haymaker, (forgive me this! / It is our country’s stile)’ (–). In this context, Wordsworth’s epistle appears as a holiday pastime: he amuses himself by imitating the Beaumonts’ poetry in a poem that is to be a gift to Sir George, playfully aligning the Cumbrian coast with Grace Dieu, and likening his relationship with his patron to his patron’s ancestors’ poetic relationship with each other and with Jonson. The genre allows him to be relaxed and intimate and so does its supposed origin at Grace Dieu rather than at Coleorton itself. Locating the artistic community at the ancient priory, he does not have to address his ambivalence about the landowner’s power; he can write a tributary letter to Beaumont without having to portray the post-industrial and polluted fields of Beaumont’s estate at Coleorton or to consider contemporary landowners’ tendency, as at Muncaster and Foxley, to make their power their law and to impoverish and monotonise landscapes. Nevertheless, Wordsworth’s rural position is not a comfortable one. The epistle is an experiment in imagining Grasmere as well as Coleorton from a

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distance. It is an attempt to formulate the experience of being beyond sustaining rural community and beyond the verse that community had sponsored – beyond in time as well as space, his brother dead, his children ill, Coleridge estranged. In this situation, the old modes of exploring the overflowing feelings produced by displacement and by the need for home (the modes achieved in ‘Tintern Abbey’, The Prelude and ‘Home at Grasmere’) are no longer easily deployed. What was staged in those poems through sublime, Miltonic blank verse is here articulated by an ad hominem form that tempers passionate confession with domestic comedy. In this process, Wordsworth repurposes the motifs common to the epistle since Horace’s time. Whereas, like Horace, he writes from a country retreat to a friend in the city, describes the minutiae of an insignificant private life and is good humoured and candid, he is also self-consciously distant, on an unrewarding margin, ‘Far from [ ] Grasmere’s lake serene, / From the Vale profound and mountains ever green, / Fixed within hearing of loud Ocean’s roar / . . . on a bleak and lonesome shore’ (–; Shorter Poems, pp. –). Despite his exile, the formal vitality produced by rhyme and by the commitment to detailed description keeps self-pity at bay: the epistle depicts, and is itself an example of, the role of verse-making in alleviating an ennui brought on, in part, by isolation from conversation such as Beaumont’s: This Dwelling’s Inmate more than three weeks space And oft a Prisoner in the cheerless place, I, of whose touch the fiddle would complain, Whose breath would labour at the flute in vain, In music all unversed – and without skill A bridge to copy, or to paint a mill, Tired of my books, a scanty company, And tired of listening to the boisterous Sea – Pace between door and window murmuring rhyme, An old resource to cheat the froward time! And it would well content me to disclaim In these dull hours a more ambitious aim. (–)

Here, disclaiming any ability to sing and play, Wordsworth seems to echo John Beaumont’s epistle to ‘To my Lord Viscount Purbeck: a Congratulation for his Health’, wherein the poet depicts his own compositional labour as a substitute for musical performance, self-deprecatingly foregrounding the act of writing as a lesser, laboured, art:

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Chronicle of a Death Untold The Muses to the friend of musicke bring The signes of gladnesse: Orpheus strikes a string Which can inspire the dull, can cheare the sad, And to the dead can liuely motion adde: Some play, some sing: while I, whose onely skill, Is to direct the organ of my quill, That from my hand it may not runne in vaine, But keepe true time with my commanding braine: I will bring forth my Musicke, and will trie To rayse these dumbe – yet speaking – letters high, Till they contend with sounds: till arm’d with wings My featherd pen surmount Apollo’s strings.

(–)

If Wordsworth’s self-portrait gracefully invokes John Beaumont, it also alludes to Sir George’s favourite art: he cannot copy a bridge or ‘paint a mill’, as Sir George’s protégé John Constable was currently doing. But imagining Beaumont’s sympathy as a fellow artist and friend of artists allows him to demythologise his vocation. The fiction of address and of reception on which the epistle relies – and the allusions to Beaumont’s ancestor poets – here license an intimate, domestic, mildly comic selfportrait: no Bard wandering lonely as a cloud, Wordsworth paces the room, ‘murmuring rhyme’, a self-caged, plodding versemaker. Dramatising the ungainly labour that produces his poetry, Wordsworth deromanticises himself, lowering readerly expectations and licensing a concern for the quotidian. Verse – and this epistle as verse – will be situated in rather than displaced from the domestic world. In this, he echoes the ‘Countrey stile’ of Francis Beaumont, whose letter to Jonson, comparing the sun to a haymaker, offered itself as verse that compared great things with little. Wordsworth does just that in the following lines (–), playing with the Horatian motif of occupying himself with the daily doings of the rural region to which he has retreated, only to turn instead to the details of his departure from his Grasmere home into coastal exile. The idea is that although these details are merely domestic and ordinary (it is no heroic voyage but a family outing to the seaside he depicts), they are a proper subject for a verse letter because Beaumont is a close enough friend to be interested in them: an exile described, through correspondence, is an exile shared. Invoking the Muse, Wordsworth tells his friend ‘haply Beaumont, for my pen is near, / The unlaboured lines to your indulgent ear / May be transmitted, else will perish here’ (–). It is necessary to get the tone right: a certain self-deprecating humour is required to pre-empt the bathos that would ensue from claiming too much. So, Wordsworth brings himself down to bucolic earth (–).

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He engages, only to put aside, comparisons between the route he has traversed and the ‘classic ground’ of Greek and Roman mythology: Thus gladdened, soon we saw, and could not pass Without a pause, Diana’s looking-glass! To Loughrigg’s pool, round, clear and bright as heaven, Such name Italian fancy would have given – Ere on its banks those few grey Cabins rose That yet molest not its concealed repose More than the ruffling wind that idly blows. (–)

Having reduced expectations by treating his journey in comic terms, he is able to end on a note that is heartfelt – a note of gratitude to Beaumont that is both a poet’s tribute to a friend and a wistful expression of regret. Passing Loughrigg tarn, he fantasises about the perfect blend of nature and civilisation that would have occurred if Beaumont had, as he intended after purchasing land adjoining the lake, built a small house there. Beaumont had been prevented from building by another landowner’s objections, but Wordsworth pictures the planned cottage as if it had been constructed. In this imaginary annex to Grasmere and surrogate for Coleorton as it might be, water, rock, sky and ‘native trees’ would have enfolded the ‘lowly Dwelling’; patron and poet would have become neighbours in Wordsworth’s heartland. They would have been fellow artists living alongside each other in an idealised version of Coleorton company, as Wordsworth had in fact once lived with Coleridge in Grasmere – a place of ‘Republican Equality’ rather than exploited labour. One chimney smoking and its azure wreath – All, all reflected in the Pool beneath, With here and there a faint imperfect gleam Of water-lilies, veiled in misty steam. What wonder, at this hour of stillness deep, A shadowy link ’tween wakefulness and sleep When Nature’s self amid these watery gleams Is rendering visible her own soft dreams, If mixed with what appeared of rock, lawn, wood Truly repeated in the tranquil flood, A glimpse I caught of that Abode by Thee Designed to rise in humble privacy, A lowly Dwelling, here to be outspread Like a small hamlet with its bashful head Half hid in native trees. (–)

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Chronicle of a Death Untold

The fantasy is created by self-reflexive reference to self-reflection: ‘Nature’ is imaged reflecting itself and, in this process, the protraction of sound by rhyme is foregrounded (note how the gleam/steam rhyme-sound returns three lines later). The Burkean beautiful – an aesthetic dependent on the perception of harmony, symmetry and order – is offered here as an imaginative fantasy – a ‘glimpse’ that is opened to the poet by virtue of form and imagery and then vouchsafed to the friend/patron whose beneficence gives the poet confidence. The fantasy remains just that: there is no actual ground on which labourer, landowner, poet and patron meet as equal, Edenic dwellers. The epistle ends by abruptly returning to the actual and to an acknowledgement that missed opportunities cannot be seized retrospectively. Past blessings, however, do remain our possessions in face of time’s depredations: But Time, irrevocable Time, is flown And let us utter thanks for blessings sown And reaped – what hath been and what is our own. (–)

It is a phlegmatic conclusion, both an acknowledgment of Beaumont’s many acts of generosity and a generalisation responding to a particular encounter with a place. Its grace stems from the concluding use of Dryden’s trademark triplet. That triplet, creating sonic stasis rather than change, is a synecdoche of the epistle as whole: neoclassical form was, in , a means of finding a structure to show ordinary life to be valuable when it is understood to be hemmed around by the losses that come with distance. Powerful though it is, the ending is also abrupt: if it reveals Wordsworth’s ability to generate, from skilled control of neoclassical techniques, the expansion from quotidian specificity to profound generality that was achieved in Horace’s and Jonson’s epistles; it also seems a little hurried. Perhaps, it was for this reason that Wordsworth did not publish the poem at the time: he may have sensed that the vision of sharing artistic companionship at Loughrigg was too whimsical for its failure to materialise to engender the regret of the final lines. The relationship was not quite capable of bearing the weight of its conclusion; the concentration of effect produced by the tight formal constraints of the epistle did not wholly compensate for the relative lack of intensity in the conversation between poet and patron. Loughrigg was not a return to the Edenic community that had lapsed at Grasmere and could not be imagined at Coleorton.

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Chronicle of a Death Untold

Beaumont was neither Jonson’s Sidney nor the Coleridge of : he was not a fellow poet, and certainly could not be imagined making a poetic reply (although he did make paintings of scenes from Wordsworth’s poems). As an example of the virtuous landowner and as a surrogate for Wordsworth’s now alienated, once intimate companion, Beaumont had limits that could not easily be overcome by remodelling in neoclassical form the visions of community with nature that had featured in Lyrical Ballads and ‘Home at Grasmere’. By , when Wordsworth finally published the whole epistle in Poems, of Early and Late Years, the spatial remove on which its idealisation of happy, virtuous community depended had become more deeply inflected by temporal distance. Thomas and Catherine, the children whose failing health had taken Wordsworth to the seaside, had died in  – a terrible blow. Sir George had also died, in ; thereafter, Wordsworth visited his estate only once. The landscape politics of Coleorton and the patron/poet relationship were no longer pressing matters. The old manuscript now smacked of mortality: the anxieties it registered, and more, had come to pass. It was heavily reworked for the changed  context: new sections were added that changed its focus and nearly doubled its length. These new sections owed something to eighteenth-century topographical poetry – the surveys of a country and its inhabitants made on foot by poets supposedly passing through. Wordsworth, however, takes the topos more literally than such mentors as Denham, in ‘Cooper’s Hill’, and Dyer, in ‘Grongar Hill’. Whereas their pedestrianism is largely gestural, a way of establishing a viewing position at the poem’s outset, he narrates a family journey in (sometimes mock epic) detail. By doing so, he reorients the poem so that it is in dialogue with a still older piece of his own, ‘An Evening Walk’, first published in  and reprinted as recently as . That poem also describes the Lake District, but does not maintain its opening fiction of being an epistle sent to a distant friend describing a single, actual journey: ‘Far from my dearest Friend, ’tis mine to rove / Through bare grey dell, high wood, and pastoral cove; / Where Derwent rests, and listens to the roar / That stuns the tremulous cliffs of high Lodore; / Where peace to Grasmere’s lonely island leads, / To willowy hedge-rows, and to emerald meads’. The revised epistle to Beaumont, recollecting at length the joyful  journey from Grasmere to the coast, delivers on what remains an unfulfilled promise in the earlier poem: it also notably replaces the solitary pedestrian with the domestic group, as if Wordsworth were showing readers his poetic development towards a more

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intimate, confessional portrait of Lakeland dwelling than he had been capable of in his earliest verse. The reader of the  collection had no means of knowing that the epistle to Beaumont had been revised and expanded. The new portrayal of the journey seems of a piece with the rest – a description made just after the event and sent to Beaumont. Yet it is in fact imbued with a knowledge of the children’s and Beaumont’s deaths that it does not explicitly declare. Coloured by a loss that destabilises the conceit on which epistolary form depends, the journey narrative is elegiac as well as celebratory, although it cannot admit to being so. And what is elegised and celebrated is not only happy rural community, seemingly flourishing but actually already destroyed, but also poetry’s fictiveness: founded only on words, its ability to talk of and to the dead as if alive is both a happy resurrection and a sad haunting. Wordsworth, indeed, quotes his old poetic words in the new material. His past poetry that confronted destruction and death is evoked only to be contained as a traumatic mode now defused – the tragic persisting within the comedic rewriting. The first section of new material displays the tacit aim of the revisionary process – to imbue the poem, by evocation of other poems in which encountering death was central, with a concern that it will not explicitly name, a concern with writing’s ability to cope with, if not gain empowerment from, death and trauma. In this, it is a late response to The Prelude that turns that epic’s investment in the triumph over loss of the poet’s individual imagination into a pathos that can be accommodated within comic form and domestic felicity. The section concerns a creature encountered at the start of the remembered journey, just as the party leaves Grasmere: Blithe hopes and happy musings soon took flight, For lo! an uncouth melancholy sight – On a green bank a creature stood forlorn Just half protruded to the light of morn, Its hinder part concealed by hedge-row thorn. The Figure called to mind a beast of prey Stript of its frightful powers by slow decay, And, though no longer upon rapine bent, Dim memory keeping of its old intent. We started, looked again with anxious eyes, And in that griesly object recognise The Curate’s Dog – (–)

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Chronicle of a Death Untold

Here, the discovery that the ‘griesly’ ‘beast of prey’ is merely the curate’s dog causes a sinking from the gothic to the domestic: bathos is at hand. The effect is deliberate: not only were curates low-status figures of pity or derision but the ‘melancholy sight’ is also subverted by the mention of the creature’s backside (‘Its hinder part concealed by hedge-row thorn’) as if Wordsworth was defiantly or self-parodically taking to the nth degree his reputation for making verse out of the mundane and the dirty (The Edinburgh Review had remarked of his  collection ‘nor is there any thing, – down to the wiping of shoes, or the evisceration of chickens, – which may not be introduced in poetry, if this is tolerated’). To comically reduce the ‘beast’ bent on ‘rapine’ to a curate’s dog’s hidden backside reverses the trajectory of Lyrical Ballads, in which Wordsworth’s role was ‘to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural’. In , it seems, Wordsworth does not want to overstate his case for the significance of the ordinary and thereby provoke ridicule rather than sympathy in his readers. But the turn from his old style is tactical, for, after a mid-line pause, there is an unexpected shift in tone and, aided by surprise, Wordsworth movingly details the dog’s grief for its dead master. The Curate’s dog – his long-tried friend, for they, As well we knew, together had grown grey. The Master died, his drooping servant’s grief Found at the Widow’s feet some sad relief; ... Yet still he lived in pining discontent, Sadness which no indulgence could prevent; Hence whole day wanderings, broken nightly sleeps And lonesome watch that out of doors he keeps (–)

Misprision, it turns out, has led to new recognition of another’s being, as occurs in the Prelude ‘spots of time’. The imagination, straining to comprehend the unexpected, realises with a jolt that it has misrecognised the strange object: in that moment of realisation, it is first disappointed and then perceives the object with a new sympathy. The importance of local knowledge is enhanced: Wordsworth and his companions can feel for as well as know about the suffering of ordinary creatures. The curate’s dog becomes an extreme case of his old aim to show that ‘men who do not wear fine clothes can feel deeply’ (EY, p. ). In Grasmere’s ‘equal republic’, even the dogs are sensitives. The result is an animalisation of ‘Animal Tranquillity and Decay’, the Lyrical Ballad about a vagrant worn down by grief.

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Chronicle of a Death Untold

As the passage continues, it becomes densely evocative of some of the most disturbing encounters in all Wordsworth’s verse. The dog conjures up the marginal figures whose isolation and alienation, speaking of debilitation and death, test the poet’s vision of community to the utmost. He resembles the Old Man Travelling, the Discharged Soldier and the Solitary in The Excursion: Not oftentimes, I trust, as we, poor brute! Espied him on his legs sustained, blank, mute, And of all visible motion destitute, So that the very heaving of his breath Seemed stopt, though by some other power than death. Long as we gazed upon the form and face, A mild domestic pity kept its place, Unscared by thronging fancies of strange hue That haunted us in spite of what we knew. Even now I sometimes think of him as lost In second-sight appearances, or crost By spectral shapes of guilt, or to the ground, On which he stood, by spells unnatural bound (–)

‘[B]lank, mute’ recalls the aftermath of the Prelude boat-stealing episode, when Wordsworth felt haunted by ‘a dim and undetermined sense / Of unknown modes of being. In my thoughts / There was a darkness – call it solitude / Or blank desertion’ (Prelude, I, –). ‘Visible motion’ evokes the skating passage, wherein the boy ‘Stopp’d short, yet still the solitary Cliffs / Wheeled by me, even as if the earth had roll’d / With visible motion her diurnal round’ – a moment that leads him to hail ‘Ye Presences of Nature’ (Prelude, I, –, ). ‘Second-sight appearances’ evokes the ‘second-sight procession’ that heralds the encounter with the blind beggar in the London street, at which ‘my mind turned round / As with the might of waters . . . / As if admonished from another world’ (Prelude, VII, , –). ‘Spectral shapes of guilt’ echoes the ‘Spectre shape / Of terror’ – the phrase describing the drowned man’s body pulled from the lake (Prelude, V, –). In each case, the dog is made to configure Wordsworth’s residual temptation to disturb himself, even in his domestic sanctuary, with the ghosts of the primal encounters on which his ‘poem on the growth of my own mind’ is predicated. These ghosts signify the deathly absence on which life (the here and now) and poetry (the resurrecting fiction) are founded. Strangest of all is the allusion to the  loss of Catherine, the ‘ailing’ daughter for whose sake the journey to the seaside had been taken. ‘Stood

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forlorn’ () evokes the ‘worst’ moment in ‘Surprised by Joy’, ‘when I stood forlorn, / Knowing my heart’s best treasure was no more; / That neither present time, nor years unborn / Could to my sight that heavenly face restore’. Now describing the dog’s grief, the phrase aligns the epistle with the desperate sonnet and makes the animal a harbinger of the mourning father, as if the dog stands at the side of the road to signpost the  bereavement to which, writing from  but as if from , Wordsworth knows, but cannot say, the apparently happy journey led. To put this another way, the dog, overwritten by so many poems about encountering death, is a symbol of poetry’s uncanny ability to give the dead ghostly life. He is a figure of retrospective foresight, of the undeclared not-yet/already decreased who are conjured into being by this  version of  – Thomas, Catherine, Sir George: dear ones revived by poetic revision as if not already dead. Of all English poets, only Wordsworth would think to transfer the fundamental encounters of own poetic career – his quest to look through death, even his grief for his dead child – to a local dog. The apparent reductiveness seems to risk bad taste at best, sacrilege at worst. However, what the transfer enables is not just a domesticated versioning of past trauma but also a reimagining of the normally unnoticed. For Wordsworth, the transfer is a mark of fellow feeling between human and animal: one who has mourned finds kindred experience with another who still mourns. That he risked making it exposes his determination that even the ordinary objects of everyday life are fit subjects for poetry, a determination so all-embracing that it might embrace sparrows on the road and tiny thorn trees as well as the ‘meanest flower that blows’. Even the admiring Coleridge, while recognising the tendency as central to Wordsworth’s art, quizzed such extreme examples of it as the pond ‘three feet long, and two feet wide’. Here in the epistle, though, reader resistance is pre-empted: contained in scope and light in tone, the verse letter is to The Prelude what the dog is to the traumatised father – a lesser, domesticated, minor relative. As in ‘Surprised by Joy’, the imaginary revival reminds the bereaved father and friend of the actual loss; here, however, the reminder is displaced. The grief, less raw after thirty years, is accommodated by a conceit. Comic rather than tragic, the poem contains the death-in-life that the dog embodies by regularity of form (couplets) and by generic convention (colloquial intimacy). Finally, the dog is dismissed from the poem by an allusion as an unthreatening, exotic fiction: ‘Like a gaunt shaggy Porter forced to wait / In days of old romance at Archimago’s gate’ – where Archimago, Spenser’s conjurer-up of spellbinding images, is perhaps a coy reference to the poet himself (–).

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Chronicle of a Death Untold

The purpose that the dog had served becomes more apparent as the  additions proceed. By containing death, and embodying writing’s imaginative revival of the dead, the dog, once dismissed, clears the road for a recreation of the  family journey as if the deaths that followed in  had not happened. The journey, a comic ramble of unexpected encounters with local dalesfolk, is then able to become a tour of unalienated rural communities in which hospitality and equality survive despite suffering and poverty. In , there was a social and political context for this: the communities exemplify what was increasingly rare. Rural impoverishment and exploitation were now widespread. Landowners, dominating parliament even after the Reform Act, used the Corn Laws to keep the price of grain high, while clamping down on farmhands’ wages, increasing their profits while the labourers starved. A revolution was widely feared, for the year was marked by the Chartist convention and numerous strikes objecting to the reduction of wages. Wordsworth observed that ‘unforeseen distress spreads far and wide / Among a people mournfully cast down’. In , he had already protested this devaluation of rural people to ‘slaves’ and attacked the new Poor Law that condemned paupers to workhouses. He sympathised with the Chartists’ attempts to unite labourers in a mass campaign to extend the franchise. In this context, the epistle’s Virgilian ending – a ‘fortunatus et ille’ evocation of rural living – is implicitly political. Rustic hospitality, an expression of republican equality, is still alive, Wordsworth shows, but at the remotest, marginal places. Under a ‘barren ridge’ (), the travellers come to a remote farm where At our approach, a jealous watch-dog’s bark, Noise that brings forth no liveried Page of state, But the whole household, that our coming wait. With Young and Old warm greetings we exchange, And jocund smiles, and toward the lowly Grange Press forward by the teasing dogs unscared. Entering, we find the morning meal prepared: So down we sit, though not till each had cast Pleased looks around the delicate repast – Rich cream, and snow-white eggs fresh from the nest, With amber honey from the mountain’s breast; Strawberries from lane or woodland, offering wild Of children’s industry, in hillocks piled; Cakes for the nonce, and butter fit to lie Upon a lordly dish (–)

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Chronicle of a Death Untold

The food is of high enough quality to be fit for lords, but propriety and rank are not regarded by the welcoming cottagers. They offer an equal repast of simple foods in which all partake – ‘cottage comfort’ gathered straight from nature. They are poor but self-sufficient, free from market forces and commercial values. Edenic, except that they are not exempt from pain: their goodness, the narrator hints, is hard-won, a Georgic virtue surviving through toil in a world of illness and death. Wordsworth says of their hostess, Let me not ask what tears may have been wept By those bright eyes, what weary vigils kept, Beside that hearth what sighs may have been heaved For wounds inflicted, nor what toil relieved By fortitude and patience, and the grace Of heaven in pity visiting the place. Not unadvisedly those secret springs I leave unsearched (–)

Evidently, another tale of anxiety and loss could be told, just as the story of Thomas and Catherine’s deaths could be. In declaring this, but refusing to tell it, Wordsworth resolves to celebrate rural community in the face of all the pressures that menace it – those imposed by time and those imposed by social and economic forces. enough that memory clings, Here as elsewhere, to notices that make Their own significance for hearts awake, To rural incidents, whose genial powers Filled with delight three summer morning hours. (–)

The tone becomes elegiac, but sadness is countered by the pleasure of rhyme: the couplet jingle formally aligns the epistle with the simple ‘delight’ of the fragile scenes to which ‘memory clings’. Far from preaching in general terms about the importance of rural virtues, Wordsworth exemplifies them by matching form to content: the epistle achieves a colloquial lightness of being that is absent from the worthy Excursion; it is a rustic verse form wherein ‘little, nameless, unremembered, acts / Of kindness and of love’ may be remembered and emphasised. The epistle ends by characterising itself as a little act, a ‘humble offering’ to Love also made to Beaumont, the friend whose conversation occasioned its writing. Returning to the time of its composition, and foreseeing the

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Chronicle of a Death Untold

moment of its reception, it represents itself as the means of closing the geographical distance between poet, rustic and landowner/patron that it began by lamenting. Ending in the moment, it also collapses the temporal distance between the writer of  and the writer of  he is pretending to be. It portrays itself to have been therapeutic for the isolated poet in his coastal exile, allowing him to contain the need to relive past (poetic) encounters with loss, death and absence within a way of writing that enacts, as well as depicts, dialogic intimacy and domestic harmony. It is itself an example of the sociability of equals that it records in the Lake District’s ‘visionary mountain republic’ – an example cheerfully instructive to Beaumont, the landowner, and to the educated reader for whom he (being dead) stands: More could my pen report of grave or gay That through our gipsy travel cheered the way; But, bursting forth above the waves, the Sun Laughs at my pains, and seems to say, ‘Be done’. (–)

By the end, then, Wordsworth has arrived at an altered articulation of Nature: both the solitary intimations of mortality and immortality of The Prelude and the moralising of The Excursion are evoked but subsumed within a comic vision. Poetry flourishes under a laughing sun as it commemorates a domestic community; it is appreciated all the more because of that community’s fragility in a world of division, exploitation and grief. The fragility is stressed, also, in the companion poem that Wordsworth placed after the epistle – ‘Upon perusing the foregoing Epistle thirty years after its composition’, in Poems, of Early and Late Years and subsequent Poetical Works. There, Beaumont’s and the children’s deaths are signalled: temporal loss is reasserted; the idyllic rural sociability of the epistle seems all the more precious as it suddenly recedes into the past. The comedy of the epistle suddenly becomes bleaker. In exemplifying harmonious sociability through its colloquial address and couplet rhymes, the  epistle is a remodelled country house and topographical poem, revising the epistles of the Jonson-Beaumont poets and the topographical pedestrianism of ‘An Evening Walk’. It is also an example of a mode to which Wordsworth increasingly turned after . Articulating a rural world of community, beauty and fecundity so as to counter the prevailing discourses of laissez-faire economics and coercive social policy, and so as to accommodate the knowledge of death and

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Chronicle of a Death Untold

experience of loss, this mode is neither preachy moralising nor a faded repetition of the ‘sublime egotism’ of the ‘Great Decade’. It is not merely a technically masterful adaptation of seventeenth-century form and voice, at once wryly amusing and deeply serious, but also a new way of addressing Wordsworth’s oldest concern to represent rustic life as the best part of human society, braced and deepened as it was by the suffering and death that beset it.

Notes  It was these sources, and the Latin originals, to which Wordsworth turned, rather than to the later epistles described in Bill Overton, The EighteenthCentury British Verse Epistle (Basingstoke and New York, ).  On this idealism see David Simpson, ‘Wordsworth’s Agrarian Idealism: The Case Against Urban Life’, chapter  of his Wordsworth’s Historical Imagination: The Poetry of Displacement (London, ).  MS D. Home at Grasmere, p. .  Review of Poems, in Two Volumes; Edinburgh Review,  (October ), –.  Review of The Excursion; Edinburgh Review,  (November ), –.  See Bruce Graver, ‘Wordsworth’s Georgic Beginnings’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language,  (), –. See also Kurt Heinzelman, ‘Roman Georgic in a Georgian Age’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language,  (), –. Richard W. Clancey, Wordsworth’s Classical Undersong: Education, Rhetoric and Poetic Truth (New York, ).  Anne Barton, ‘The Road from Penshurst: Wordsworth, Ben Jonson and Coleridge in ’, Essays in Criticism,  (), – ().  ‘To Penshurst’, lines –. George Burke Johnston (ed.), Poems of Ben Jonson (London, ), pp. –.  On these functions of the epistle, and their modelling of an informal dialogue into which the reader is drawn, see William Dowling, The Epistolary Moment: The Poetics of the Eighteenth-Century Verse Epistle (Princeton, ) and David Fairer, ‘The Verse Letter’, English Poetry of the Eighteenth Century –, ed. David Fairer (Harlow, ), pp. -.  Marvell’s ‘Upon Appleton House’ is also a possible influence, although the form is different. Wordsworth consulted Marvell’s Works () and Gay’s The Shepherd’s Week in Six Pastorals () while drafting The Excursion. Marvell is included in the anthology of verse that Wordsworth compiled: see Poems and Extracts Chosen by William Wordsworth for an Album Presented to Lady Mary Lowther, Christmas  (London, ), pp. –.  Francis Beaumont’s Epistle appears on cxxxvii–cxl of vol. I of The Dramatic Works of Ben Jonson and Beaumont and Fletcher, ed. George Colman,  vols (London, ). John Beaumont’s main publication was the miscellany

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       

       

   

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Bosworth Field (London, ). This included a translation of Virgil’s fourth Eclogue and a poem addressed to King James on the true form of English poetry. See Duncan Wu, Wordsworth’s Reading, – (Cambridge, ), pp. –. On Wordsworth and the Georgic see Kevis Goodman, Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism: Poetry and the Mediation of History (Cambridge, ). Beaumont’s estate at Coleorton had been given over to coal mining for many years, greatly enriching Beaumont. On the tensions in Wordsworth’s response to it, see my Wordsworth’s Poetry –. On this, and for a reading of the epistle that highlights its thematisation of its own status as writing, see Simonsen, Wordsworth and Word-Preserving Arts, pp. –. Bosworth Field, pp. –. Constable, who had worked in a watermill as a youth, had been making oil sketches of Flatford Mill, lock and bridge in  and . From the note Wordsworth gave to Isabella Fenwick concerning the Epistle: Fenwick, p. . The first  lines were published in  as ‘Departure from the vale of Grasmere. August, ’. Lines – of the  text. An Evening Walk, ed. James Averill (Ithaca, ). As in the well-known joke about the curate declaring the bad egg ‘good in parts’. In a note on the poem, Wordsworth recalled the Grasmere curate as a parsimonious drunkard, nonetheless respected by the villagers because of his superior education. Fenwick, pp. –. Francis Jeffrey, Review of Poems, in Two Volumes; Edinburgh Review,  (October ), – (). Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria,  vols, ed. James Engell and Walter Jackson Bate (Princeton, ), II, . Compare ‘Fidelity’, about the dog who starves to death rather than abandon the body of his master, who has fallen from a crag on Helvellyn. ‘Surprised by Joy’, lines –. Shorter Poems, pp. –. ‘Immortality Ode’, , , p. . ‘The Thorn’, ; LB, p. . Lines – of the ‘Prelude’ to , p. xi, Last Poems, pp. –. See ‘Humanity’, lines –: ‘“Slaves cannot breathe in England” – a proud boast! / And yet a mockery! if, from coast to coast, / Though fettered slave be none, her floors and soil / Groan underneath a weight of slavish toil, / For the poor Many’. YR, pp. –. YR, p. . As Richard Gravil shows in Wordsworth’s Bardic Vocation, –, nd edn (Tirril, Penrith, ), pp. –. ‘Tintern Abbey’, –; LB, pp. –. From Wordsworth’s Guide to the Lakes, in W Prose, II, .

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Wordsworth in Homage: Elegising the Lyrical Ballad

Elegy is a form of poetry natural to the reflective mind. It may treat of any subject, but it must treat of no subject for itself; but always and exclusively with reference to the poet. As he will feel regret for the Past or Desire for the Future, so Sorrow and Love became the principal themes of Elegy. Elegy presents every thing as lost and gone or absent and future. (Coleridge)

Wordsworth, an orphan by age thirteen, from his earliest verse gave loss and absence a radical, but not static, place in nature. Absence, initiating repeated attempts at recovery and closure (‘spots of time’), never quite remained enclosed within – or as – itself but instead opened a horizon of productivity, its departedness breached as it provoked the poet’s bringing of it to book. In this way, Wordsworth was an elegiac poet in Coleridge’s sense. Indeed, elegy came down to him as much as a reflective mood as a genre for particular occasions. If Gray’s ‘Elegy in a Country Churchyard’ used the tropes of pastoral and funeral elegy in the service of reflective musing, Shenstone’s pastorals turned the elegiac away from death: elegies, he declared, depended on ‘a tender and querulous idea’ used to ‘throw a melancholy stole over pretty different objects’. Charlotte Smith also moved the melancholy mood away from the graveside; her elegiac sonnets dramatised lament as a condition of being, a song of self, rather than a response to an occasion. The lyrical pieces that Wordsworth collected in Lyrical Ballads – ‘Tintern Abbey’, the Lucy poems, the ‘Boy of Winander’, among others – distilled Smith’s art by portraying the encounter with nature as a tracing of, as Coleridge put it, things ‘lost and gone or absent and future’ – a process that aimed to intuit their meaning from the still extant signs of their departure and their otherness. The Poems on the Naming of Places, likewise, performed the elegiac in that they sought to overcome the world’s temporal and spatial difference (the always recurring prospect of its disappearance into the past) by articulating nature in terms 

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Wordsworth in Homage:



taken from the private dialogue of the poet and his intimates, who thus sustained it in their own, shared terms. The process of group-intimation was challenged in , when shipwreck robbed Wordsworth of his brother John. The violent death of one of his most intimate companions struck at Wordsworth’s vocation and at the community that sustained his vocation. He had assembled this community to dwell, sheltered by natural beauty, at ‘home at Grasmere’. Including Coleridge, his sister Dorothy, his wife Mary and his wife’s sisters Sarah and Joanna Hutchinson, it prompted his poetry-writing; the siblings listened to his verse, transcribed it, read it, recited it, revised it and wrote responses to it. But John’s death, terrible in itself, violated the community’s foundation myth that they were nurtured by the nature that Wordsworth’s poems celebrated (see Chapter ). Wordsworth could no longer assume the role of ‘prophet of nature’ (Prelude, XIII, ) that gave the community its sense of special mission. In Esther Schor’s words, Wordsworth repudiated ‘his own sense of the past in ‘Tintern Abbey’ . . . as authentically available through memory. In lieu of the ‘Present past’, he announces his perpetually present loss and doubts the power of his recollective, autobiographical poetry to shape a whole self’. This perpetuation of the presence of loss effectively refused the consolation that elegy, conventionally, was expected to produce. As Tom Clucas has observed of the elegiac verse Wordsworth wrote after John’s death, the poet forces himself to relinquish each consoling fiction, rather than create what Peter Sacks called ‘elegiac images of consolation’. If John’s death forced Wordsworth to reconsider his elegiac poetry, so did the repeated critical attacks made by reviewers. To write elegiacally on what appeared to be Smith’s terms turned out to be risky. Her egotistical focus on the poet’s own unconsolable grief had made her work seem self-pitying and histrionic. Anna Seward had termed Smith’s ‘Elegiac Sonnets’ ‘everlasting lamentables’ and ‘hackneyed scraps of dismality’; Wordsworth was attacked in similar terms. Francis Jeffrey, for example, attacked the ‘affectation and conceit’ stemming from Wordsworth’s ‘self-illusion of a mind of extraordinary sensibility’. Such attacks suggest that what Keats perceived as the egotism of Wordsworth’s overflows of feeling made the elegiac the riskiest of all voices in proportion to its dwelling on the poet’s intense feelings rather than on a social world beyond them. The poet might seem to be indulging his own grief, culpably refusing to be consoled or to provide consolation for others. Or he might, at the other extreme, console himself too quickly, undermining the sincerity of his sadness and disrespecting the memory of the dead (Wordsworth dramatised this ethical problem in

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Wordsworth in Homage

‘Surprised by Joy’). Elegy’s self-centredness, as Jahan Ramazani, David Kennedy and Diana Fuss have shown for the poetry of the late nineteenth century onwards, made it a genre more honoured in the breach than the observance – perhaps because Tennyson had developed the Wordsworthian lyric of lament to such an exhaustive length in In Memoriam. After , Wordsworth’s ‘breach’ consisted of a turn from autobiographical poetry, and from nature as a recuperative power. Eschewing the personal confessions of grief typified by the Lucy poems, and the recuperations of private loss characteristic of The Prelude, he braced himself by writing poetry that bears with loss by aligning the permanence of art with Christian – or at least deistical – resignation to divine will. In the ‘Elegiac Stanzas Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle in a Storm’ (), the disruptive power of grief, arising from a disturbingly violent nature, is stilled only by contemplation of the unchanging formal perfection that painting and poetry are capable of realising. This poem was far from Wordsworth’s final word on the matter of loss; if it signalled a turn from autobiographical nature lyrics, that turn led to a further forty years of experimentation with various kinds of elegiac poetry in which the formal order achievable by the reformulation of tradition – epitomising endurance and acceptance of God’s authority beyond any single temporal loss – is preferred to exploration of subjectivity in the face of grief (e.g., the Ecclesiastical Sonnets and the ‘Ode to Duty’).

Memorialising Women Wordsworth’s reformulation of tradition worked, in certain defined circumstances, to hybridise the graveside elegy as he understood it with the modus operandi of seventeenth-century ‘metaphysical’ poems. The defined circumstances were to do with gender: Wordsworth’s poems on dead women were far more likely to update the methods of Marvell and Jonson than were his poems on dead men. His later elegies for women do not necessarily ‘treat of no subject for itself; but always and exclusively with reference to the poet’. They are less like Smith’s practice and Coleridge’s theory than Wordsworth’s pre- verse would lead us to expect. A case in point is the poem Wordsworth called ‘Elegiac Stanzas’, written in /  for his friend and patron Sir George Beaumont on the death of Beaumont’s sister-in-law, Frances Fermor. O for a dirge! But why complain? Ask rather a triumphal strain When Fermor’s race is run;

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Memorialising Women A garland of immortal boughs To twine around the Christian’s brows, Whose glorious work is done. We pay a high and holy debt; No tears of passionate regret Shall stain this votive lay; Ill-worthy, Beaumont! were the grief That flings itself on wild relief When Saints have passed away. Sad doom, at Sorrow’s shrine to kneel, For ever covetous to feel, And impotent to bear! Such once was hers – to think and think On severed love, and only sink From anguish to despair! But nature to its inmost part Had Faith refined; and to her heart A peaceful cradle given: Calm as the dew-drop’s, free to rest Within a breeze-fanned rose’s breast Till it exhales to Heaven. Was ever Spirit that could bend So graciously? – that could descend, Another’s need to suit, So promptly from her lofty throne? – In works of love, in these alone, How restless, how minute! Pale was her hue; yet mortal cheek Ne’er kindled with a livelier streak When aught had suffered wrong, – When aught that breathes had felt a wound; Such look the Oppressor might confound, However proud and strong. But hushed be every thought that springs From out the bitterness of things; Her quiet is secure; No thorns can pierce her tender feet, Whose life was, like the violet sweet, As climbing jasmine, pure; – As snowdrop on an infant’s grave, Or lily heaving with the wave That feeds it and defends; As Vesper, ere the star hath kissed

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Wordsworth in Homage The mountain top, or breathed the mist That from the vale ascends.

(–; Last Poems, pp. –)

This highly compressed votive elegy eschews the self-reflection that Gray, Smith and Coleridge had made a recent trend, presenting instead a series of concise ‘tail-rhyme’ stanzas, each dividing into two units of three lines (a couplet followed by a shorter trimeter line), presenting Fermor’s life as a number of distinct facets. Here, form serves towards emblematisation, as does a skein of imagery through which the dead woman is ‘refined’, verse by verse, from the material context of the funeral into a state of spiritual suspension. This mode of proceeding adapts the argument-by-metaphor of Jonson’s ‘Celebration of Charis’ and especially of Marvell’s ‘On a Drop of Dew’, wherein the dewdrop’s various states indicate the soul’s graduated return to the heavens. Wordsworth liked Marvell’s poem enough to select it for the anthology he presented in  to Lady Mary Lowther, and he adapted its formal methods as well as its imagery – his interweaving of shorter trimeter lines echoes Marvell’s use of short lines to break the flowing verse sentence into distinct sections. Beyond Marvell, a tradition stretching from Shakespeare and Jonson forwards to Christopher Smart’s ‘A Song to David’ is invoked in the transforming images that follow – dew, violet, jasmine, snowdrop, lily, vesper. Thus Smart: Sweet is the dew that falls betimes, And drops upon the leafy limes; Sweet Hermon’s fragrant air: Sweet is the lily’s silver bell, And sweet the wakeful tapers smell That watch for early pray’r. Sweet the young nurse with love intense, Which smiles o’er sleeping innocence; Sweet when the lost arrive: Sweet the musician’s ardour beats, While his vague mind’s in quest of sweets, The choicest flow’rs to hive. Sweeter in all the strains of love, The language of thy turtle dove, Pair’d to thy swelling chord; Sweeter with ev’ry grace endu’d, The glory of thy gratitude, Respir’d unto the Lord.

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(–)

Memorialising Women



Though the images are all commonplace in literary songs, some had a particular history for Wordsworth. ‘Vesper’, the evening star, echoes Wordsworth’s own autumnal poem ‘September ’, written in the same six-line stanza as the elegy for Fermor, in which the star explicitly analogises evening prayer: This, this is holy; – while I hear These vespers of another year, This hymn of thanks and praise, My spirit seems to mount above The anxieties of human love, And earth’s precarious days.

(–; Duddon, pp. –; Shorter Poems, pp. –)

Collectively, the  images suggest the dependence of each distinct thing upon its interaction with others, but render the interactions progressively less material. Fermor’s life is buoyed on earth (snowdrop), on water (lily) and finally on air – or space (star). Thus spiritualised, it becomes more and more remote from the touch of the world. It is present as a recessed evening star that will, but has yet to, touch the emanations of earth. This withdrawal – but not removal – prepares the way for an extraordinary final stanza: Thou takest not away, O Death! Thou strikest – and absence perisheth, Indifference is no more; The future brightens on our sight; For on the past hath fallen a light That tempts us to adore. (–)

The simplicity of the grammatical structures, the short lines, neatness of rhyme and generality of the metaphors suggest a simple hymn. But this is deceptive: the simplicity carries a highly unorthodox and compressed argument, and it is this that makes the stanza so striking – and proleptic of Emily Dickinson’s poetic methods. How does death’s striking make absence perish? Normally it is thought to create absence, not destroy it. Wordsworth offers no gloss, even though the following lines cannot be thoroughly fathomed without understanding the paradox. The reader is forced to think through the connection, rather than treat the reference to the brighter future and illuminated past as bland images of pious assurance. And the connection seems to be that death definitively distils the deceased as the spiritual presence of which her star-like life gave

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Wordsworth in Homage

anticipatory knowledge. Death’s act of re- and de-finement – a sort of refinition – also illuminates the past since by terminating life, it casts the light of finality upon it, holding it up, complete. Fermor’s life, arrested, can now be seen retrospectively as a preparation for heaven – and this inspires the viewer to regard heaven as a nearer, brighter prospect for everyone. By the end, it transpires, what might have been expected to be a poem of lament and mourning has become one that aims to suggest transcendence through formal control. What makes the poem remarkable is its extreme economy of means, creating a crystalline clarity in which phrases and images that would in other hands be clichés are both sharply focused and put to the service of a novel perception, bringing the reader first gradually and then abruptly to a new view of life and death. All this is achieved not by dint of emotional reflection on a complex relationship with the elegy’s subject, Fermor, but by a deployment of the motifs and forms of Marvell and Smart. But ‘On a Drop of Dew’ and ‘A Song to David’ were not poems of mourning, and nor did they reveal the reflective subjectivity of the poet: Marvell and Smart were not elegiac in Coleridge’s sense. Wordsworth turned them in an elegiac direction even as he modified the elegy by crossing it with what becomes, when retrospectively focused by his borrowings, a previously neglected line of poets. In Johnson’s terminology, this line was a ‘metaphysical’ tradition; in Wordsworth’s, it was a poetry of ‘imagination’. Wordsworth had used the tail-rhyme stanza several times before  in poems that he classified as being of the imaginative kind. In each case, he used the form as he sought to commemorate lost nature-girls. ‘Ruth’ used the form; so did ‘Louisa’. And she hath smiles to earth unknown; Smiles, that with motion of their own Do spread, and sink, and rise; That come and go with endless play, And ever, as they pass away, Are hidden in her eyes.

(–; , pp. –)

The contrasting short lines of the tail-rhyme stanza here give emphasis to a process of secretion: ‘hidden in her eyes’ makes the seeing organ one of concealment rather than perception. It becomes a repository of once openly expressed, outward, smiles that are prevented from entire loss by this internalisation. The woman’s innocent spiritual self (‘unknown’ – not in the realm of earthly knowledge) would be lost but is preserved,

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translated, as a non-communicative trace within the normally most perceptive part of the body. This is elegiac in the sense that the woman is made an embodied archive of her own evanescent spiritual being: she remains, then, for the smitten narrator, elusive: he is a follower in her step, not her knower or possessor. The tail-rhyme stanza performs a similar process of recession and arrest in ‘Three Years She Grew In Sun and Shower’ (LB, pp. –). There, the process of translation is similar: imagery makes Lucy aerial and star-like as it does Fermor. But the  poem will not rest content with Lucy’s ‘never more will be’: its response to the earlier poem is to redirect metamorphosis towards a spiritual presence that the woman’s death allows mourners to intimate as an attainable future state. It is an unorthodox, pantheistic spirituality and it is also communal. It shows memory not as the exclusive possession of a single lover, but as a resource established by the poet so that his fellow mourners may project forward an ended life and understand the nature into which that life is dispersed as being proleptic of heaven. Poetry’s elegiac role for Wordsworth is no longer as in  to dramatise the yearnings, terrors and even fracture of a sole self (‘oh! / the difference to me’) but the more traditional poetic task of the mourning poet: to find words in which a public – a circle of friends and, beyond them, the readers – can bear its losses and discover in memory both compensation and expectation. As a result, it may be less intense as a revelation of personal subjectivity, less ‘lyrical’, but is more engaged with the poet’s historical mission to articulate, in ceremonial form, the hopes and fears of his community. It fulfils this mission, however, in disturbance – radically reforging the terms in which the community normally expresses its hopes and fears rather than conforming to approved ideology. In this regard, it is worth noting that Wordsworth also commemorated Fermor in a ‘Cenotaph’ (i.e., an epitaph for a monument or tomb from which the body of the deceased is absent). This memorial used the same tail-rhyme form as the ‘Elegiac Stanzas’: By vain affections unenthralled, Though resolute when duty called To meet the world’s broad eye, Pure as the holiest cloistered nun That ever feared the tempting sun, Did Fermor live and die. This Tablet, hallowed by her name, One heart-relieving tear may claim; But if the pensive gloom Of fond regret be still thy choice,

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Wordsworth in Homage Exalt thy spirit, hear the voice Of Jesus from her tomb! ‘I AM THE WAY, THE TRUTH, AND THE LIFE’

(, p. , Last Poems, p. )

Here, the short lines create the stasis and finality that is appropriate for epitaph. Impersonality, becoming monumentality, is a product of formal control – and it is the authority gained by this control that allows the poet to instruct the reader (‘Exalt thy spirit’), confident that he can summon the written words of the Bible as speech – and not just any speech, but the speech of Christ (‘hear the voice / Of Jesus’). This is prosopopeia to the power of three: Fermor’s absence from her memorial licenses Wordsworth not only, as is normal in epitaphs, to give his writing unearthly power by addressing the reader, as if from the tombstone, about the deceased (or in the voice of the deceased) but also to do so in the voice of Jesus, whose absence from his tomb indicated his resurrection – his crossing of the death/life soul/body boundaries. Fermor’s absence – both from her memorial and from the world – is not to be regretted because Jesus shows that absence can represent presence: he is gone in body but renewed as the Word. He is thus a guarantor of Fermor’s, and the mourners’, renewal as spirit. More than this, he is a figure for the poet, who can make the absent present again, if not in body, then as written words. This is usurpation as piety: summoning the Bible as authority, Wordsworth is both orthodox and heretical, for the final quoted line is at once his own poetic script, the inscription on the stone, and Jesus’s words. It is resurrected from the dead letter as the reader deciphers it and articulates it in his head: so, thereby, is Wordsworth, its inscriber. It is the poet’s way, truth and life, as well as Jesus’s, that is offered as the last (and first) word. ‘Cenotaph’ suggests that the impersonality that Wordsworth achieved by use of the tail-rhyme stanza aligns his elegiac poems with neo-epitaphs. Both genres are modified in the process: they become verbal machines in which poised formality monumentalises the subject via an association of images. They are not proto-lyrics in the sense that Coleridge’s remarks suggest: the voice modelled is public and ceremonial rather than personal and inward. Yet they are intensely emotive: mastery of traditional poetic form, rather than self-reflexive apostrophes to nature or to his own imagination (as in The Prelude), allows an intimation of transcendence. Adapting the form and voice of particular seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury poems, they display Wordsworth’s awareness that by relating these scattered predecessors to each other in his own work, he brings past poems into relationship with each other and with the present, creating literary history. This history is doubly a process of refinement: first, the poems in

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question are linked – ‘elegised’ – on the basis that each performs the task of transforming the messiness of the temporal into the purity of the eternal; second, Wordsworth refines the techniques of his predecessors. The new work is a honed, clarified version of the old: literary history is progress rather than repetition or regression – elegisation is a quintessence of past writings just as, in the poems, death is a distillation of the toings and froings of life. Wordsworth elegises poetic history and historicises his elegy in the same gesture. All this, however, is dependent on leaving behind the imbrication of poetry in particular spatio-temporal contexts: the history created is literary; the poems that Wordsworth adapts no more come trailing clouds of social or political context than does the person whose life his verse commemorates. It is a gendered and limiting process: the male poet writing of the dead woman finds a certain language of purification and refinement easier to attain because he is content to leave her details – her deeds – behind (content because he and his culture emphasise women’s virtues as exemplified in their bodies and characters – chastity, beauty, charity etc. – over a history of their actions – these being largely restricted to private life). The woman becomes an icon – a generic figure – a collection of formal features exquisitely arranged.

Memorialising Sir George: Elegy as Inscription To present this new Lucy poem to Sir George Beaumont was to offer a tribute to Beaumont’s taste for Wordsworth’s lyrics, proving that Beaumont’s support had allowed the poet to renew his vocation. The Fermor memorial was a late outcome of the patronage Beaumont had first extended in , which had included allowing Wordsworth and his family to live rent-free on his Leicestershire estate, Coleorton, in . In , Wordsworth visited Coleorton again, but now in the absence of Sir George, who had died in , and of his wife Lady Beaumont, who had passed a few months before the visit. Missing them on their home turf, Wordsworth found himself in tears when he sat in the grounds he had helped design, amid monuments bearing poetic inscriptions that the Beaumonts had commissioned him to write in – and had then had chiselled onto tablets. These inscriptions, relics of a once lively conversation and correspondence, now smacked of death; they were silent, stony witnesses of the emergence of his verse from dialogue. His task now was to monumentalise not a living friendship but the departed friend. The situation was complicated by Beaumont’s determination that he should have no formal epitaph, and an inscription of the kind that had

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been erected in the Coleorton gardens was likely to be too short to say much. Wordsworth’s solution was to mix genres, to create a hybrid of inscription, elegy and epitaph. Beaumont had stipulated that no commendatory verse should be inscribed on his tomb, and Wordsworth took this stipulation as the starting point of verse he entitled ‘Elegiac Musings in the Grounds of Coleorton Hall, the Seat of the Late G.H. Beaumont, Bart’ and published in Yarrow Revisited. With copious eulogy in prose or rhyme Graven on the tomb we struggle against Time, Alas, how feebly! but our feelings rise And still we struggle when a good man dies: Such offering BEAUMONT dreaded and forbade, A spirit meek in self-abasement clad.

(–; YR, pp. –; Last Poems, pp. –)

After this acknowledgement of Beaumont’s prohibition, Wordsworth offers his poem as a substitute for the forbidden epitaph: ‘Yet “here” at least’, he declares, Beaumont’s powers ‘might have their record’ (, ). He proceeds to detail his former patron’s virtues, performing the epitaphic function of drawing moral exemplae, for public edification, from a private life. But his poem is longer than an epitaph can be, and more personal: it effectively takes advantage of its freedom from actual inscription, from its substitutive, textual status. And when it breaks into lament, it implies a swell of emotion precluded in the epitaphic genre: Oh, fled for ever! vanished like a blast That shook the leaves in myriads as it passed; Gone from this world of earth, air, sea, and sky, From all its spirit-moving imagery, Intensely studied with a Painter’s eye, A Poet’s heart (–)

The exclamation is a feature drawn from elegy; it creates pathos by its sudden contrast with the previous sobriety of the narration. This pathos is intensified by the metrically irregular list of nouns – an all-inclusive list of nature in its major aspects – which also echoes the lists that feature in the poems Wordsworth and Coleridge had written thirty years earlier, and that Beaumont had learned to love (in ‘Tintern Abbey’ and ‘Frost at Midnight’). Thus it is not just Beaumont’s painterly appreciation of nature but also his capacity to be moved by the Wordsworth circle’s poetic appreciation that affects the bereaved poet.

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

As he continues, Wordsworth intensifies the emotional level, deploying the tropes of elegy with tact and control. Affectionate recall of Beaumont’s capacity to give himself to the Shakespearian characters that he played in private theatricals prepares for an apostrophe to his spirit that echoes Hamlet’s address to his father’s ghost: If thou hast heard me – if thy Spirit know Aught of these bowers and whence their pleasures flow; If things in our remembrance held so dear, And thoughts and projects fondly cherished here, To thy exalted nature only seem Time’s vanities, light fragments of earth’s dream –

(–)

Addressing Beaumont, Wordsworth calls upon his shade, as Hamlet did his father’s, but the Shakespearian allusion is more than a coded tribute to Beaumont’s acting, for it is apparent that there is an unstilled anxiety driving the address – and indeed the entire memorialising poem – the need to find one’s ‘remembrance’ shared, and thus validated, by others. Loneliness and abandonment lurk behind the idea that ‘thoughts and projects fondly cherished here’ (the inscriptions and gardens of Wordsworth’s past visits to Coleorton) might seem ‘vanities’ to the dead. The poet knows that he retains his own need for such activities to have been meaningful, but shows, by dramatising the detachment of the dead, that they might not have been. The apostrophe allows a chastening recognition of the insignificance of things – not least writings – that Wordsworth both acknowledges and resists when he adds: ‘Rebuke us not! – The mandate is obeyed / That said, “Let praise be mute where I am laid”’ (–). The poem, as not quite an epitaph, and not quite an inscription, has observed Beaumont’s injunction against memorials being carved on his tomb, yet it has nevertheless praised him in its own ‘here’ – a nowhere place of textuality – where, perhaps, ‘light fragments of earth’ persist as dreams. The text channels a dialogue with the dead because it is detached from the material world, and the fleshly life, that it commemorates. Wordsworth continues by justifying his earthly affiliation to the remembrance of otherwise little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and love. His poem, he suggests, deserves a place in Coleorton’s memorial garden – in the material world – because it is not the kind of formal epitaph or inscription that a reticent and modest man would have found pompous and self-aggrandising, but nor is it merely the self-indulgent recollection of trivialities. Generic hybridisation comes to Wordsworth’s

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aid: it helps him argue that his poem may both float free, as printed texts do, of the man in his place and stand alongside, as chiselled epitaphs do, his remembered presence in his locale. The poet imagines what will never happen on the ground, so as at least to make it occur in the imagined scene his words conjure up – he imagines his poem becoming, if not Beaumont’s engraved epitaph, then an inscription on a raised stone in his garden. Yet have we found how slowly genuine grief From silent admiration wins relief. Too long abashed thy Name is like a Rose That doth ‘within itself its sweetness close;’ A drooping Daisy changed into a cup In which her bright-eyed beauty is shut up. Within these Groves, where still are flitting by Shades of the Past, oft noticed with a sigh, Shall stand a votive Tablet, haply free, When towers and temples fall, to speak of Thee! (–)

The echoes of Gray’s, Collins’s, Dyer’s and ultimately Virgil’s memorial poetry (‘Shades’ ‘flitting by’) remind the reader that a whole textual, if not monumental, tradition, stemming from classical verse, stands behind the poem’s scenario of itself inscribed on stone in a garden, outlasting towers and temples. And of course, for Wordsworth’s attentive readers, his own earlier Coleorton inscriptions are evoked. It is next to these, erected when Beaumont was still alive, that he pretends the memorial will stand, taking its place in an already poeticised garden where stones bear words: Green ivy risen from out the cheerful earth, Shall fringe the lettered stone; and herbs spring forth, Whose fragrance, by soft dews and rain unbound, Shall penetrate the heart without a wound; While truth and love their purposes fulfil, Commemorating genius, talent, skill, That could not lie concealed where Thou wert known. (–)

The ivy, normally a symbol of death, here fringes the inscription as if it were framing one of Beaumont’s paintings. The deathly, the line implies, grows not to choke but to enliven the monument. Likewise, the herbs’ fragrance disperses the inscription’s praise of Beaumont’s qualities, making them felt along the heart of the viewer/reader. After this embrace, the final

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couplet, deferring again to Beaumont’s wish to have no epitaph because only God should judge his conduct, seems pre-empted: ‘Thy virtues He must judge, and He alone, / The God upon whose mercy they are thrown’ (–). If God is the final judge, and funerary monuments are therefore unwanted, the poet so represents Beaumont’s life in words, on behalf of both culture and nature, that God can have little choice but to approve. Wordsworth would rather renew the dead in writing, writing located in and disseminated by the nature it portrays, then let God – or himself as God – have a last word. The ending rather too neatly turns death and judgement aside – perhaps because Wordsworth had been less disturbed by Beaumont’s decease than he was by John Wordsworth’s or, later, Sarah Hutchinson’s. Nonetheless, the ‘Musings’ vindicate their title: by dint of invoking the motifs of elegy and epitaph without rigidly conforming to either genre, Wordsworth succeeds in acceding to Beaumont’s wish to have no epitaphic praise while breaking it. More than this, he makes the wish a pretext for a poetic meditation on the purposes for which and modes in which poetry commemorates. Generic hybridity enables this meditation to be offered as thought process – a spontaneous stream of reflection – yet also to benefit from the most powerful tropes of the relevant kinds of poem. These tropes are superbly controlled so that they heighten the emotional pressure yet precipitate developments in the musing. Meanwhile, all the time the couplet rhymes chime, constantly enacting remembrance of what has just passed; they ensure that the musings are pleasurable rather than mournful to hear, unlike the plainness of blank verse. As in Marvell’s and Jonson’s epistles, rhyme gives morality point but also makes it delightful. The poem, in fact, approaches the reader with a kind of cultured playfulness, an in-the-moment meditation that both the poet and reader know is also informed by motifs from and allusions to a tradition of memorial poetry. Its clever manipulation of its own status as written text and as engraved inscription is carried by this knowing playfulness, which has the serious purpose of formulating an appropriately pitched language of remembrance – one that can hold the private up for public scrutiny without sentimentality and without claiming too much. Informal formality is the mode in which Wordsworth crafts an affectionate yet purposeful commemoration of the small, private acts, rather than heroic public deeds, that made up Beaumont’s good life. ‘Elegiac Musings’ is a not a great Wordsworthian poem of the kind to which Keats’s term ‘sublime egotism’ applies. But it is a skilled technical achievement, the work of a poet so deft in his craft that he can, without the

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appearance of effort, adapt to his own ends elements of the neo-classical verse that was supposedly alien to him. This is not a struggle for mastery with a strong predecessor so much as an urbane, grateful deployment of a tradition to which he is glad to pay tribute, as when he quotes Fairfax’s translation of Tasso. It is a late renewal of neo-classical poetry only possible for a poet with the confidence to experiment with generic elements without losing his focus and his voice.

Friends and Family: The Nature Lyric as Homage From the mid-s, Wordsworth changed direction again, as Beaumont was followed into the grave by more friends and family members. As his Lakeland community became more and more depleted, he turned back to the time – and the verse – in which it was first formed, writing poems memorialising the dead friends. These poems were similar to the Fermor and Beaumont memorials in the respect that they were late-life versions of genres and styles developed in Lyrical Ballads – elegiac but not formal elegies of the pastoral or funerary kind. Because the dead had been so intimately involved in his poetry-writing, the new poems were generic and stylistic tributes to their conversation and their writing: Wordsworth revisited the kind of poetry that the dead person had, when living, written and/or assisted him in writing. In effect, he elegised the nature poetry of his youth, personalising its articulation of loss as he revived the verse genres particularly associated with each departed friend. This process created a paradox: the new poems were present-tense, in-the-moment articulations of encounters with nature – apparently spontaneous overflows of powerful feeling into thought or speech – yet their diction, syntax and form evoked the words of Wordsworth’s and the lost friend’s past. The present was apprehended, now, in verse echoing that of thirty-five (or more) years before; the live encounter took place in the words of the dead. When these words were not even Wordsworth’s own, but, for instance, Coleridge’s, the new verse was an act of homage. It was elegiac because it was founded on a newly dead friend’s old poetry, and tributary because that old poetry was shown to be a vital influence beyond the life of its author. What was mourned and celebrated was as much the old poetry as the dead friend and the dialogue with him. Coleridge died, after a long period bedridden, in July . Although Wordsworth wrote no formal elegy for the collaborator of his Somerset and Grasmere youth, the effect of the death is manifest in the sequence of nature poems he wrote over the next year. These poems, first published in  and  as a new genre, ‘Evening Voluntaries’, are evocations of

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evanescence and ending. They are offered as improvised songs of praise (‘Voluntary’ refers to the church organist’s music before and after evensong). One aspect of these poems is the neo-classical rhyming couplet, which Wordsworth honours but also reshapes by making his basic unit of sense the long verse sentence, often moving through many lines, rather than the couplet itself. The couplet rhymes highlight likenesses encountered on the thought-journey rather than clinch an epigrammatic point (as in Pope) or stand as polished miniatures (as in Erasmus Darwin). A precedent for this procedure is Anne Finch’s ‘Nocturnal Reverie’ (), a poem consisting of one fifty-line sentence. Its subject as well as style prompts Wordsworth’s twilight meditations. Finch begins on a quiet night, haunted by owl calls: In such a night, when every louder wind Is to its distant cavern safe confined; And only gentle Zephyr fans his wings, And lonely Philomel, still waking, sings; Or from some tree, famed for the owl’s delight, She, hollowing clear, directs the wand’rer right: In such a night, when passing clouds give place

(–)

She proceeds to list instances of what’s perceived in the gloom, finally resolving the syntactic tension by declaring that the mind, ‘charmed’ by the plethora of instances of evening tide, perceives the outside world to be like itself: silent musings urge the mind to seek Something, too high for syllables to speak; Till the free soul to a composedness charmed, Finding the elements of rage disarmed, O’er all below a solemn quiet grown, Joys in th’ inferior world, and thinks it like her own (–)

Wordsworth, whose ‘Descriptive Sketches’ () imitated loco-descriptive verse of Finch’s kind, praised her verse in his  Essay Supplementary to the Preface to Lyrical Ballads and included ‘A Nocturnal Reverie’ in the manuscript anthology he compiled for Lady Mary Lowther in . He also anthologised stanzas of Julius Mickle’s Sir Martyn describing the sun setting behind a hill: Led by her star, the horned moon looks o’er The bending forest, and with rays increast Ascends: while trembling on the dappled west The purple radiance shifts and dies away

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But these models were radically rebuilt by a return to the formative encounter of  and  with the Coleridgean ‘conversation’ poem, in dialogue with which Wordsworth had first developed his own blankverse nature poetry. Indeed, it is, in part, the reworking, in couplet and triplet rhyme, of a style derived from conversational blank verse that generates the poems’ energy. Reviving the conversational style pushes Wordsworth to volunteer new versions of couplet verse – to make free with, but not abandon, traditional form. The flexibility with which Wordsworth treats the Finch legacy and the Coleridgean influence are both to the fore in ‘The leaves that rustled on this oak-crowned hill’ (composed by January ), which opens with a twilight view of Grasmere: The leaves that rustled on this oak-crowned hill, And sky that danced among those leaves, are still; Rest smooths the way for sleep; in field and bower Soft shades and dews have shed their blended power On drooping eyelid and the closing flower (Last Poems, pp. – and p. )

The sombre musing of Milton’s ‘Il Penseroso’ is in play here: ‘leaves that rustled’ alludes to the ‘rustling leaves’ () that feature in that poem’s twilight landscape. Here, they are evoked as sound sources, as is, in parallel, the sky as a motion source. Evoked only to be calmed: activity is registered only as already over, past as soon as presented. What is still in process seems, after this most tenuous of realisations, to be even more intangible than normal. ‘Rest’, if it takes any physical form in this scene of absent sounds and motions, is a matter of almost imperceptible forces of change – ‘Shades’ and ‘dews’ – not unlike the ‘secret ministry’ in Coleridge’s ‘Frost at Midnight’. These everywhere-and-nowhere forces come to rest, as it were, on two small, generic, objects – an eyelid and a flower – that are almost synedoches for the observer and the nature he observes (animate and inanimate both shutting down; the presumed opposition of human and world stilled). In this silent scene, only the disembodied voice of the text remains in play, but this is more akin to the quiet recording of phenomena typical of a natural historian than the emotional vocalising of an elegist. The triplet rhyme gently asserts the smooth sameness that is said to be present in the scene: evening comes home, casting its spell on the text; the verse-flow is inclined to linger. The next multi-line sentence, pausing and regaining momentum midline and featuring heavy enjambments, turns the couplet and triplet

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rhymes into waymarkers on a long and winding road. The boundary role that rhyme plays in much eighteenth-century verse is transformed as Wordsworth, in dialogue with the dead Coleridge, reworks the setting and phrasing of ‘Frost at Midnight’, the poem that, more than any other, enabled him to develop his first great blank-verse lyric ‘Tintern Abbey’. The silence, pierced by the unexpected call of an owlet, echoes Coleridge’s poem; so does the consequent refocusing of the poet’s meditation: Sound is there none at which the faintest heart Might leap, the weakest nerve of superstition start; Save when the Owlet’s unexpected scream Pierces the ethereal vault; and ’mid the gleam Of unsubstantial imagery – the dream, From the hushed vale’s realities, transferred To the still lake, the imaginative Bird Seems, ’mid inverted mountains, not unheard. (–)

The owlet’s scream, by piercing the ethereal vault, implicitly calls into question the relationships that accrue from the difference of subject and object (language and world) – earth and sky, sound and silence, motion and stasis, spiritual and substantial, dream and reality, and imagination and thing. Not only does it cut into the arched gloom of the twilight vale but it also opens a gap in the text: the parenthetic phrases ‘mid the gleam . . . still lake’ (marked by brackets in editions from ) suggest a writer’s unexpectedly opened apprehension of a thought-train whose relationship with the main verse sentence is sidelong and unresolved (pressing yet parked). Compressed within these phrases is a renegotiation of reality’s visual relation to imagination and to dream. The hushpiercing scream reorients sound patterns but is also associated (though the parenthetic phrases are uncertain as to how) with visual transfers, for it is as a consequence of noticing the scream that a metamorphosis also becomes apparent. In a transference of shadow to substance, the mountains are deposited, upside down, in the still lake: a dream or gleam derived from the ‘vale’s realities’ is, as it were, realised in the less-thansolid medium of water. This metamorphosis echoes Coleridge’s exploration of the shifting inter-relationships that he was prompted to imagine by apprehending his son’s breathings ‘heard in this deep calm’. ‘Thou’, he predicted shalt wander like a breeze By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,

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Wordsworth in Homage Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores And mountain crags

(CPW, I, part i: –; –)

It also echoes Wordsworth’s figure of the ‘gleam’ that is ‘the poet’s dream’ in ‘Elegiac Stanzas . . . Peele Castle’ and the ‘visionary gleam’ of the ‘Immortality Ode’. What is being configured here is a process made possible in poetry – imaginative transformation derived from reality and received by it. The reception is important, for reality, altered, anchors the flight that it had launched before utterly fantastical regions are reached. The process, that is, might have inverted the vale utterly, so that it became a topsy-turvy mirror-world where purely fantastical things seem substantial – the upside-down hills as real as their solid counterparts. But there are limits: metamorphic energy is expressed by but also contained in the parenthesis and its effect is limited by litotes: the ‘imaginative’ (i.e., imagined) bird is not positively heard but only ‘seems’ ‘not unheard’. Wordsworth’s imagining of imagination curbs the possibility of vision attaining its own reality: hints and half-hearings foster possible pictures that could, but do not, objectify. Tentative as it is, the process arises from the here and now, passes through the observer’s ears to his text, renews his role as the witness who brings it into meaning and returns from him to a world now invested with potential even as it seems to be shutting down. Thus this twilight piece effects a reshaping of the ‘world that is the world of all of us’, even as it comments on such reshaping. In the following lines, Wordsworth’s evening scene pays homage to ‘Frost at Midnight’s’ nocturne by adopting the unusual syntax with which, at the poem’s close, Coleridge articulated a moonlit state in which all temporal alternatives are simultaneously entertained as possibilities (‘Whether the summer clothe the general earth / With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing / Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch / Of mossy apple-tree, while the night-thatch / Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall / Heard only in the trances of the blast, / Or if the secret ministry of frost / Shall hang them up in silent icicles, / Quietly shining to the quiet Moon’ (–)). Like Coleridge, Wordsworth supplements the ‘whether/or’ construction with a further ‘or’, suggesting a plenitude of possibility: Grave Creature! – whether, while the moon shines bright On thy wings opened wide for smoothest flight, Thou art discovered in a roofless tower, Rising from what may once have been a lady’s bower; Or spied where thou sitt’st moping in thy mew

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Friends and Family At the dim centre of a churchyard yew; Or, from a rifted crag or ivy tod Deep in a forest, thy secure abode, Thou giv’st, for pastime’s sake, by shriek or shout, A puzzling notice of thy whereabout (–)

The tower and bower invoke the setting of Gothic romance – perhaps ‘Christabel’, a poem Coleridge begins with owl calls. The yew tree suggests Gray’s churchyard elegy. The owl’s haunts are fanciful locations belonging to poetry, and are redolent of death – perhaps the death of the ‘Christabel’ poet. At this point, the poet suddenly shifts to direct, spoken address, entreating the owl: ‘May the night never come, nor day be seen, / When I shall scorn thy voice or mock thy mien!’ Unexpectedly confessional, the phrase suggests, in this context, that Coleridge the owl poet is its addressee as well as the owl. Wordsworth speaks to his dead friend and mentor, after years of distance in which anger and scorn, if not mockery, had tainted admiration and gratitude. The owl’s call unexpectedly returns, interrupting the musings it has prompted: In classic ages men perceived a soul Of sapience in thy aspect, headless Owl! Thee Athens reverenced in the studious grove; And, near the golden sceptre grasped by Jove, His Eagle’s favourite perch, while round him sate The Gods revolving the decrees of Fate, Thou, too, wert present at Minerva’s side: – Hark to that second larum! – far and wide The elements have heard, and rock and cave replied. (–)

As in ‘Frost at Midnight’, a second interruption calls the flow of meditation back to the observed – or overheard – scene. Also in the air is ‘To Joanna’, another lyrical ballad in which a sonic interruption of a peaceful place is returned through echo, so that the silent hills, replying in unison, become part of a conversation or song. Significantly, whereas in ‘The Boy of Winander’ episode it is the child’s agency, his ‘mimic hooting’, that elicits the owls’ unexpected reply and leads to an intimation of unity located in the self, here, agency lies with the birds. Surprise still matters, however, for it is because the owl is not to be summoned at the poet’s will, but interrupts his musings, that he is called out of himself and enabled to respond as the auditor of the spatio-temporal moment. Yet, he does not

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place his own mind and heart centre-stage: he remains a recorder rather than the cynosure: nature’s sound-stage exists in and for his interpreting ears but not for his self-revelation. Vocalising the vale, the owl takes on the function that the younger Wordsworth had eagerly seized for himself – that of the vatic poet calling natural ‘elements’ into concerted voice. Less egotistical in  than in , Wordsworth positions himself as the depository of a natural poetry that breaks into, only to confirm, his inheritance of historical myth. His verse records his sponsorship by the owl’s enlivening voice just as he muses on the owl’s vatic significance in ‘classic ages’. Thus, though it is a poetry of quiet report rather than bardic sublimity that he retrieves from the twilight scene of ebbing activity, he understands on what natural basis the Greeks and Romans imagined the owl being among their divine pantheon. He knows, courtesy of his capacity to be surprised by owl, that he stands in their line: he is confirmed in his traditional calling as a poet whose imagination begins in and returns to a nature animate in the form of sound. He stands in Coleridge’s line too: the echoes of the ‘Frost at Midnight’ poet, himself called into sound by the overheard owl in Nether Stowey, acknowledge Coleridge’s sonic summoning by nature. In this sense, the poem is an elegy in the form of homage, making Coleridge’s sponsorship of ‘The Boy of Winander’ and other lyrical ballads take a new turn. A revisionary renewal of Wordsworth’s voice as a nature poet is made possible by a self-consciously late updating of a past poem under the pressure of oncoming closure. Wordsworth, elegising the evening tide of his own life after the end of Coleridge’s, achieves a reworking of Coleridge’s poem about breaking silence so as to overcome the falling silent of Coleridge’s voice. ‘The leaves that rustled’ is not the only homage written in the wake of Coleridge’s death. The nightscape of ‘Frost at Midnight’ also informs ‘To the Moon. Rydal’ (composed in October ). Not just the scenario but also particular phrases highlight the debt to the ‘conversation’ and ‘meditative’ poems, as Coleridge called them, of –. Wordsworth’s tribute is a matter of style that verbal borrowings serve to signal. Coleridge is never mentioned by name: readers knowledgeable enough to recognise the borrowings understand that his words are being put to new purpose and that this is a testament to a missed friend’s formative influence. Such readers thereby become affiliate members of the circle of intimates. Decoding the text’s relationship to other texts, they reconstitute the depleted Grasmere community virtually, sharing privileged access to its semi-private conversation and its communal history.

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Friends and Family

The poem does not at once elegise Coleridge by echoing his words; at the outset, Wordsworth is more concerned with debating whether ancient myth offers a useful way to think about what he sees. Apostrophising the moon, he cannot simply use classical terms; instead, he wonders what to call her: can a modern poet articulate a relationship to the present time and place by invoking the anthropomorphism of pagan times? Queen of the stars! – so gentle, so benign, That ancient Fable did to thee assign, When darkness creeping o’er thy silver brow Warned thee these upper regions to forego, Alternate empire in the shades below –

(–; Last Poems, pp. –)

Here, Wordsworth places himself after the classical poets who position the moon as Hecate, a liminal visitor partaking of both heavenly and earthly realms, and also of the underworld of the shades. The moon represents life and death, divinity and mortality, and virgin and mother: she is a wandering bearer, in her contradictions, of human hopes and fears, a subject of religion, myth and poetry including, possibly, his own. Portraying himself a would-be vatic poet–prophet, he tentatively considers how, looking now at the moon across Rydal mere, he might imagine writing it down (to earth) as Diana, the huntress moon-goddess who dwells with her nymphs by rivers and in woods: A Bard, who, lately near the wide-spread sea Traversed by gleaming ships, looked up to thee With grateful thoughts, doth now thy rising hail From the close confines of a shadowy vale. Glory of night, conspicuous yet serene, Nor less attractive when by glimpses seen Through cloudy umbrage, well might that fair face, And all those attributes of modest grace, In days when Fancy wrought unchecked by fear, Down to the green earth fetch thee from thy sphere, To sit in leafy woods by fountains clear! (–)

Having invoked the moon’s cultural role throughout history, Wordsworth then domesticates her: O still beloved (for thine, meek Power, are charms That fascinate the very Babe in arms, While he, uplifted towards thee, laughs outright, Spreading his little palms in his glad Mother’s sight) (–)

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These lines echo the  ending of ‘Frost at Midnight’: the secret ministry of cold Shall hang them up in silent icicles, Quietly shining to the quiet moon; Like those, my babe, which ere tomorrow’s warmth Have capped their sharp keen points with pendulous drops, Will catch thine eye, and with their novelty Suspend thy little soul; then make thee shout And stretch and flutter from thy mother’s arms, As thou would’st fly for very eagerness.

(CPW, II, part i; –)

Thus, Wordsworth revives his now-dead fellow poet’s words identifying the moon as a manifestation of spiritual processes alive in nature, acknowledged by the innocent babe in arms. This is to renew the shared verse formulation of Somerset companionship in , itself seeming a time of innocence and vitality unmarked by alienation and death when recollected from . By these means, Wordsworth makes the moon a figure of poetry’s resistance to temporal destruction, renewable beyond the death of the poet. Coleridge’s moon poem returns, after an interval, in Wordsworth’s, just as the moon itself reappears in the sky after a time away. The borrowing gives, for readers close enough to recognise it, a tacit elegiac quality to the following lines, although they do not explicitly discuss poetic revivals or Coleridgean influences but instead portray classical worship of the returning moon as a goddess of chastity and fertility: Time, that frowns In his destructive flight on earthly crowns, Spares thy mild splendour; still those far-shot beams Tremble on dancing waves and rippling streams With stainless touch, as chaste as when thy praise Was sung by Virgin-choirs in festal lays; And through dark trials still dost thou explore Thy way for increase punctual as of yore, When teeming Matrons – yielding to rude faith In mysteries of birth and life and death And painful struggle and deliverance – prayed Of thee to visit them with lenient aid. (–)

Here, the moon’s monthly cycle, synced with women’s monthly cycles, symbolises new births. Renewing itself, it embodies nature’s immunity to

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the death that mortals suffer at the hands of time understood as a linear progress. Its light is now as it always was, trembling on the waves – both fragile and persistent. As such, it is a natural object of worship, a token of immortality not by means of easy transcendence to heaven but by selfrevival (and thus, it symbolises Wordsworth’s desire to renew himself by reviving his and Coleridge’s old words in new terms). Wordsworth recognises that his invocation is leading him away from the properly Christian temporality of a world created and redeemed by a patriarchal God (and in a poetry that proceeds from beginning to ending, origin to resolution, in linear narrative), but he places his recognition between dashes: Then silent Monitress! let us – not blind To worlds unthought of till the searching mind Of Science laid them open to mankind – Told, also, how the voiceless heavens declare God’s glory; and acknowledging thy share In that blest charge; let us – without offence To aught of highest, holiest, influence – Receive whatever good ’tis given thee to dispense. (–)

The effect of the asides is to acknowledge orthodoxy and linearity only to bracket them. Propitiation of the governance of the final Word is made, but left to one side, for it is the moon (goddess in all but name) that Wordsworth wants to make an exemplar to both ‘sage and simple’ – adults who, like the child in ‘Frost at Midnight’, are caught up by moonmotion: May sage and simple, catching with one eye The moral intimations of the sky, Learn from thy course, where’er their own be taken, ‘To look on tempests, and be never shaken’ (–)

Shakespeare was describing love when he wrote ‘it is an ever-fixed mark, / That looks on tempests, and is never shaken; / It is the star to every wandering bark, / Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken’ (Sonnet , –). Wordsworth’s quotation suggests that he is too, but the differences made by his remediation of Shakespeare’s line are significant. His love is a principle of compassion and charity in nature that is feminine, rather than masculine like Shakespeare’s. It is no ‘fixed mark’ but moves to guide and sustain its cyclical motion, countering the divinely

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ordained time that falls away from Eden to the grave. And this cyclical motion, in a poem that addresses the moon and renews sound in couplet and triplet rhymes, is, at least in part, a figure of poetry itself – the text being potentially repeatable with each reading and as subject to interpretation by different people as the poem shows the moon to have been. It is the moon, not the Lord, who carries conviction as an emblem to explore an elegiac engagement with the world on the wane, shaped by age, infirmity and vulnerability, and the loss and suffering consequent upon them, but shaped too by a present that is always imbued with the past but that will also, however fragile and fading, return in another cycle. This potential return offers a muted hint of the consolation that, traditionally, is one of the functions of elegy – the moon becomes a figure for the moonpoet Coleridge, departed yet returning as Wordsworth renews his poetry.

A Late Poem on the Naming of Places The death in  of Wordsworth’s sister-in-law Sarah Hutchinson led to a further elegiac reworking of the kind of verse that the Grasmere circle had enabled Wordsworth to pioneer. Published in  as a Poem on the Naming of Places, the new poem renews the community’s old custom of giving private names to local trees and rocks, and then testifying to these acts of nomination in writing. Coleridge, and Sarah’s sisters Mary and Joanna, had participated in this process, as had Dorothy Wordsworth: it was a way to bond as a group taking communal possession of a home. Wordsworth had celebrated it in Lyrical Ballads. Shaped by ‘A slumber did my spirit seal’ and ‘To Joanna’, the new poem memorialised, yet also updated, the language of a circle united now not by their present-moment shared experience and inscription of landscape but by their ability to read traces of past experience and past poems in (verse about) that same landscape. The circle was, by , sadly reduced. Joanna had followed Coleridge and Sarah to the grave in ; Dorothy survived but suffered from dementia. Hence, Wordsworth wrote Grasmere as a place marked by poetic names that had once designated the living and now named the dead, a textualised place in which nomination only highlighted the absence of the people nominated. The purpose was not simply lament, however: beset by Sarah’s death, Wordsworth inducted the reader into a broken circle as a means of continuing it beyond its now depleted membership. Thus, he turned the nature poems of the later s and early  into memorial poems: the transformation of the community’s language, and the poetry it sponsored, into a language for bearing with loss was

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simultaneously a mode of asserting continuity and a means of measuring ‘the difference to me’. The new poem describes two rocks near Dove Cottage: Forth from a jutting ridge, around whose base Winds our deep Vale, two heath-clad Rocks ascend In fellowship, the loftiest of the pair Rising to no ambitious height; yet both, O’er lake and stream, mountain and flowery mead, Unfolding prospects fair as human eyes Ever beheld. Up-led with mutual help, To one or other brow of those twin Peaks Were two adventurous Sisters wont to climb, And took no note of the hour while thence they gazed, The blooming heath their couch, gazed, side by side, In speechless admiration. I, a witness And frequent sharer of their calm delight With thankful heart, to either Eminence Gave the baptismal name each Sister bore. Now are they parted, far as Death’s cold hand Hath power to part the Spirits of those who love As they did love. Ye kindred Pinnacles – That, while the generations of mankind Follow each other to their hiding-place In time’s abyss, are privileged to endure Beautiful in yourselves, and richly graced With like command of beauty – grant your aid For ’ humble, ’ silent claim, That their pure joy in nature may survive From age to age in blended memory.

(Last Poems, pp. –)

There is a delicacy in this poem’s mode of working that itself acts as a tribute, suggesting the delicacy of the sisters’ ‘fellowship’. Coleridge had testified to this, and tried to participate in it, in his verse ‘Letter to Sara Hutchinson’: And I, dear Sara – I am blessing thee! It was as calm as this, that happy night When Mary, thou, & I together were, The low decaying Fire our only Light, And listen’d to the Stillness of the Air! O that affectionate & blameless Maid, Dear Mary!

Now Wordsworth commemorated it, pairing words to suggest how the siblings’ pairing is akin to nature’s structure: not only do ‘lake and stream’

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and ‘mountain and flowery mead’ syntactically complement each other but also the compound adjectives made from past participles – ‘heath-clad’ and ‘up-led’ – suggest the coupling of distinct entities and actions. The repetition of the same in ‘side by side’ and ‘age to age’ makes the doubleness more explicit, and, in the latter case, transfers it from the observed scene to the memorialising effect of this verse. It is the transfer of the sisters’ way of being to poetic language, and thus to the poet and reader, that the poem seeks to achieve, via landscape. To do so, however, it must put itself and its author into play, and by introducing a third term risk disturbing the harmonious doubleness that it seeks to honour. Thus, though the first twelve lines are disembodied and detached, omitting the poet-figure from both the described scene and the poetic narrative, Wordsworth no sooner records the sisters’ ‘speechless admiration’ than he enters the poem. ‘I’, he says, ‘a witness’, breaking his silence and the women’s speechlessness by speaking directly to the reader in his own person. But he is unsure of his position; he is a witness, so a slightly distant observer, but also a ‘frequent sharer’, so at least sometimes a participator. It is his unease at being only partly within the sisters’ experience, and his consequent need to assure himself that, if he looks on from outside, at least his testimony is authoritative, that leads him to insert himself as a master of words in the scene (and the poetic report of the scene). Whereas the sisters take ‘no note’ of time, and admire speechlessly, ‘I’ does more than witness: he names the rocks so as to allot exact linguistic terms for a way of being shared by the sisters too tacitly even to enter language. His act of naming sorts into separate places what was twoas-one: whereas the women wordlessly visit ‘one or other’ rock together, the ‘witness’ ‘to either Eminence / Gave the baptismal name each Sister bore’. This is to play the priest, as Wordsworth had observed himself doing in the  poem about naming a rock after Sarah’s and Mary’s sister. In ‘To Joanna’, Wordsworth likens himself, not without ironic distance, to a ‘runic priest’ (; LB, pp. –) carving the woman’s name on the stone; here, he invokes that comparison. Now, however, faced by death’s removal of Sarah from the circle, he can afford no hint of irony: reporting his act of baptism counters the experience of loss by recollecting the inaugural, hopeful days of initiation into the Grasmere congregation of Wordsworthian nature worship. It also, however, subjects the congregation to his control – to a sanctifying language of which he, not they, holds the key. His baptismal names effect a transfer of individual woman to specific rock: ‘Sarah’ now becomes one woman-stone, ‘Mary’ another – an exchangeable nature/woman embodiment created by the husband/

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brother-in-law poet who espouses nature through each. His words give him power: they speak and note so that people and place are each precisely defined in relation to him, rather than experienced communally among themselves. His anxiety to make nature bear language, his need to fix in words an experience he has part witnessed and part shared, violates their (women’s and nature’s) way of being in the place, even as it apparently pays tribute to that way of being. That being is changed slightly, if not utterly: but what is born of the change is a form of beauty because it allows survival, translating their grace into place. The poem’s beauty is terrible for reasons not dissimilar to those of Yeats: it turns out that the finding of words for the sisters’ collective being is driven by death. It is only in line , with the seemingly innocuous word ‘now’, that Wordsworth declares that the past events he has been recollecting have ended; only then do readers understand that the poem is elegiac. He makes no exclamation of grief but instead gives a typically matter-offact report, the emotional impact of which stems from understatement: ‘Now are they parted’. The present – the time of narration – is, readers suddenly realise, markedly different from the past and from the past poems. The act of affixing the sisters’ names to rocks, which survive, is a way of seeking their continued presence in the face of change. The irrevocability of that change is immediately qualified by the very personification that dramatises it: ‘far as Death’s cold hand / Hath power to part the Spirits of those who love / As they did love’. Death, reduced to a hand, is deadly but also limited by its physicality: the spiritual may elude its clutches. Here, Wordsworth both testifies to the strength of the sisters’ love and also prepares, by using the transformative power of a rhetorical figure, to show that it is poetry’s figurative language that can cause the realm of spirit – of love, of companionship, of memory – to triumph over time. At the same time, by evoking ‘The Brothers’, his old lyrical ballad commemorating siblings separated by death, in which ‘hand’ and ‘parted’ are crucial terms, he makes his new elegy elegise the past poetry that Sarah and Mary admired and transcribed: the old piece is revived in the new lines that speak of the depletion of the coterie that enabled its writing. The poetic defeat of death is also attempted in lines –: ‘Ye kindred Pinnacles – / That, while the generations of mankind / Follow each other to their hiding-place / In time’s abyss, are privileged to endure’. If the lost generations are in hiding rather than extinct, they may be found again: death is not the end. And the syntax reinforces the implication that finality can be kept at bay: the ‘while . . . abyss’ phrase is held subordinate to the main clause about the pinnacles ‘that . . . are privileged to endure’. Thus,

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the time of dying is syntactically bracketed, as if closeted in a hiding place, within the continuing present tense that establishes the rocks’ endurance. Language perpetuates the possibility of the past’s presence even while acknowledging its pastness, eliciting it from the place when the ‘speechless admiration’ practised by the sisters would have perished when one and the other of them died. This perpetuation is reinforced, for readers in Wordsworth’s circle as Mary and Sarah were, by the striking echo of The Prelude’s ‘hiding places of my power’ (Prelude, XI, ) which suggests that what is recessed in the abyss is also Wordsworth’s poetic calling, acknowledged to have been dependent on the sponsoring love of the sisters, and now, if not lost, then displaced by time’s depredations into the rock tokens that remain; there is, then, in the echo, an affirmation of continuity surviving, in altered terms, beyond breach. Apostrophe is the trope that drives Wordsworth’s efforts to commemorate what has been lost. When he says ‘Ye pinnacles’, breaking into firstperson exhortation, he puts himself to the fore, abandoning the position of witness to the reader, who now witnesses his address to the rocks (‘pinnacles’ heightens them so they seem far above the abyss: the Lakeland topography, verticalised, becomes another indication of the superiority of the sites of memory to death). But, in the poem’s substitutive logic, because he has witnessed and shared and named, because he has a medial place within and without the lost symmetrical pairings of sister/sister and sisters/rocks, he can transfer those pairings into his own pairing with the rocks. It is his affiliation to language, as opposed to their speechlessness, that is crucial: it makes him a supplementer, inside and outside, tilting their enclosed communality towards an open, unending process of signification. The apostrophe gives further linguistic impetus to Wordsworth’s prior linguistic act: it personifies the previously nominated, deathenclosing rocks, as if to speak to and for the dead Sarah and bereaved Mary elevated (if not ‘rolled round’) in them. He is now confidently the sisters’ spokesman, putting words where their ‘silent claim’ had been, urging the rocks to ‘grant your aid / For ’ humble, ’ silent claim, / That their pure joy in nature may survive / From age to age in blended memory’. The landscape will be a listening sisterhood called upon by Wordsworth’s naming. Of course, this is to an extent a self-fulfilling entreaty, and not only because in asking the rocks, now enlivened by his trope of address, to bear the women’s names he is asking them to repeat the names he has already told us he has given them but also because he says the names as he asks and thereby achieves the names’ perpetuation here, now and again and again in this rock-addressing poem. Jonathan Culler’s

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remark on the argument that apostrophe is the epitome of lyric is relevant here: ‘[i]n locating lyric value in a certain performativity, I have essentially treated it as an active form of naming, which performatively seeks to create what it names, and may fail or succeed in this extraordinarily arrogant ambition’. Arrogance is not quite the mot juste, both because the poet adopts a tone of humble entreaty, all too aware of the evanescence of names in face of the power of death, and because apostrophe does not here simply serve to demonstrate Wordsworth’s own vatic power to call nature into words. It is not simply the master trope of autobiography, not chiefly a figure of the poet’s act of representation calling up the past (the lost, the dead) only to find itself defaced, death-haunted, as it does so. Apostrophe is not selfserving/self-deconstructing, though it is self-empowering, because it is put in service of shared memory – of significant lives and loves saved from oblivion. It is a trope of supplementation, a third voice that perpetuates and is perpetuated by its relation to the severed pairs that it remediates even as it reinscribes. Transliterating the breached binaries of Sarah/Mary, women/rocks, poet/women, poet/rocks, poet/names, it effectively produces a new sibling relationship, between the entreating poet and the world as brought to life by his entreaty – a binary supplemented into a threesome but one dependent on the reader who witnesses it as s/he reads or hears the poem, as Wordsworth once witnessed the sisters. This relationship happens in the space/time of the poem’s reception: thus, there are still three terms in play (poet speaking, rocks bespoken, reader/auditor witnessing and construing). By the end, though, Wordsworth is done with numbers: with the phrase ‘blended memory’, he implies that commemoration subsumes all inputs and occasions. Impersonal, memory thus defined functions to reify the poet’s act of memorialisation as a locus of continuing meaning, independent of the poem yet created by it. This ‘blended’ memory is larger than the individual memory of a particular viewer or reader guided by Wordsworth’s words; it is the composite of all the rememberings produced by all the readings of the text, an elegiac plenitude subsuming numeration and triangulated narratorial positions, but enabled because the position of the narrator and the time of the narrative have been shifted in the poem from witness and sharer to nominator and speaker and from reported past to conversational present. It is the wished-for resting place of Sarah and all related to her – not rolled round in rocks and stones but transferred from them by the poem. It engraves her, that is, not on/in the rock that bears her name but in the timeless world that Wordsworth would have his

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

Wordsworth in Homage

language, launched from speaker to hearer and from writer to reader, conjure in the mind. To put this another way, apostrophe is the culmination of textual shifts designed to retrieve lost sisterly love from unspoken dialogue, via the place to which the nominating poet had transferred it, to his own words which then transfer this regained love to the reader–poet relationship, so that it may be renewed, beyond the poet’s death even, at each reading. The reader ‘visiting’ the poem is thus aligned with the bereaved brother-in-law returning to Sarah’s rock: though not generically an inscription, the verse adopts an inscriptional motif. Writing speaks the rock into life: it turns the ‘claim’ that Sarah’s proper name makes of the stone into a chain of meaningful, memorialising words. Through this chain of substitutions, bodily absence is converted to textual presence. The year  differs from  in this: as Wordsworth attempts to repossess a place marked by past presence and present absence, he comes to acknowledge that the loss of the woman designated by ‘Sarah’ leaves words floating free of things. It is in language – his language – that community with nature is made: the return to the object world as a stable foundation for language and therefore for self that is so often made in the earlier verse (and that reappears, in tentative form, in ‘The leaves that rustled’) is scarcely possible in this late-life circumstance. Where things were, words are: here the late, bereaved Wordsworth is more purely than ever before a language-poet. This, the latest of all his poems on the naming of places, becomes a poem on the placing of names. The poems prompted by the deaths of the Grasmere circle constitute a self-consciously late, evening-tide, reworking of the elegiac as Wordsworth had practised it in – and –. Decentering meditation on loss from contemplation of self as he had become wont to do after John Wordsworth’s death, they nevertheless also depart, by reworking the conversational nature lyrics of Lyrical Ballads, from much of the verse Wordsworth had written after . Grief is neither, as in the ‘Elegiac Stanzas . . . Peele Castle’, stilled by art’s monumentality nor expressed by passionate lament (the Lucy poems and Immortality ode). Rather, it is displaced: the poet does not declare his own feeling as his central subject but instead observes evanescence and diminution in nature, mourning Coleridge and Sarah Hutchinson indirectly by building a poem on their thoughts, words and names, so as to retrieve them, as language, from oblivion. Wordsworth’s dialogue with the dead makes them live, as language-traces, while intensifying consciousness of their actual absence. He weaves his textual consciousness of nature from the words they had brought to text (their own and his own), whereas elegy had typically voiced

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A Late Poem on the Naming of Places

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the deceased by direct address to the departed spirit. This elegiac verse is tacit: for passionate invocation, Wordsworth substitutes remembrance through homage. The poet scarcely appears in his poem but instead keeps the focus on the world as seen by one who has lost his mentor friends. He traces a deficit that is beyond him – out there – rather than, as in classical elegy or even in the Immortality ode, egotistically dwelling in his own sadness only then, in a dramatic turn, to wrest consolation from grief or to assert independence of the deceased – signalling that mourning is over. By these means, he turns the elegiac further outward than had been usual, achieving, through the form of tribute, a less solipsistic response to grief than Smith before him or Tennyson after him. In a quietly remarkable reworking of past poetry, he writes elegy as loco-description and textual revival – a dialogic development of the elegiac that, by finding indirect means, allows it again to take up its ethical task of ‘speaking, acting, and surviving in the face of loss, no matter how irretrievable those losses may be’.

Notes  A remark made on  October . Table Talk of S. T. Coleridge, ed. Carl Woodring,  vols (Princeton, ), I, –.  On the history of elegy, see Peter M. Sacks, The English Elegy: Readings in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats (Baltimore, ); Dennis Kay, Melodious Tears: The English Funeral Elegy from Spenser to Milton (Oxford, ); David W. Shaw, Elegy and Paradox: Testing the Conventions (Baltimore, ). On Wordsworth’s models see Pamela Woof, ‘Wordsworth Learns to Write Elegy’, The Wordsworth Circle,  (), –.  See David Kennedy, Elegy (London, ), pp. – (where Shenstone’s remarks are quoted).  See Jacqueline Labbe, Writing Romanticism: Charlotte Smith and William Wordsworth, – (Houndmills and New York, ).  Esther Schor, Bearing the Dead: The British Culture of Mourning from the Enlightenment to Victoria (Princeton, ), p. .  See Thomas Clucas, ‘“The Consecration, and the Poet’s Dream”: Evasion and Revision in the Elegies for John Wordsworth’, European Romantic Review,  (), –; see Sacks, English Elegy, p.  and Kurt Fosso, Buried Communities: Wordsworth and the Bonds of Mourning (Albany, ).  The Letters of Anna Seward,  vols (London, ), II, ; Jeffrey, Review of Wordsworth, Poems, in Two Volumes, Edinburgh Review,  (October ), –.  Jahan Ramazani, Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney (Chicago and London, ); Kennedy, Elegy, pp. –; Diana Fuss, Dying Modern: A Meditation on Elegy (Durham and London, ), pp. –.

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

Wordsworth in Homage

 See Peter Swaab, ‘Wordsworth’s Elegies for John Wordsworth’, The Wordsworth Circle,  (), –.  See, on Wordsworth and the epitaphic voice, Joshua Scodel, The English Poetic Epitaph: Commemoration and Conflict from Jonson to Wordsworth (Ithaca and London, ).  On Wordsworth’s adaptation of Jonson’s poems, see Anne Barton, ‘The Road from Penshurst: Wordsworth, Ben Jonson and Coleridge in ’, Essays in Criticism,  (), –.  Poems and Extracts Chosen by William Wordsworth for an Album Presented to Lady Mary Lowther, Christmas,  (London, ), pp. –.  Andrew Marvell, The Complete Poems, ed. Elizabeth Story Donno (Harmondsworth, ), p. .  The Poetical Works of Christopher Smart, II, Religious Poetry –, ed. Marcus Walsh and Karina Williamson (Oxford, ), pp. –.  Johnson coined the term in his ‘Life’ of Cowley. See The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets; with Critical Observations on Their Works,  vols vol. I (London, ), , – (). Wordsworth classified his verse under the heading ‘Poems of Imagination’ in his first collected works, Poems . . . by William Wordsworth,  vols (London, ). He helped construct a tradition dating from seventeenth-century verse by anthologising neglected poems in Poems and Extracts Chosen by William Wordsworth.  On Wordsworth’s and others’ earlier uses of the stanza, see Brennan O’Donnell, ‘Numerous Verse: A Guide to the Stanzas and Metrical Structures of Wordsworth’s Poetry’, Studies in Philology,  (), i–. Also, Jerome Mitchell, ‘Wordsworth’s Tail Rhyme “Lucy” Poem’, Studies in Medieval Culture,  (), –, and Caroline Strong, ‘History and Relations of the Tail-Rhyme Strophe in Latin, French, and English’, PMLA,  (), –.  On loss in the Lucy poems, see Peter Larkin, Wordsworth and Coleridge: Promising Losses (New York, ), pp. –.  Added in editions from . See Last Poems, p. .  See Eric Parisot, Graveyard Poetry: Religion, Aesthetics and the Mid-EighteenthCentury Poetic Tradition (Farnham, ).  Jerusalem Delivered, Book II, stanza xviii, ‘A veil obscured the sunshine of her eyes, / The rose within herself her sweetness closed, / Each ornament about her seemly lies, / By curious chance, or careless art, composed’.  In Poems and Extracts Chosen by William Wordsworth, pp. –.  Poems and Extracts.  Poems and Extracts, p. .  See ‘The moping owl does to the moon complain’, line  of Gray’s ‘Elegy in a Country Churchyard’.  Collected Letters of S. T. Coleridge, ed. E. L. Griggs,  vols (Oxford, –), II, .  On apostrophe in elegy as a means of overcoming the catastrophe of death, see Lorna Clymer, ‘Graved in Tropes: The Figural Logic of Epitaphs and Elegies in Blair, Gray, Cowper, and Wordsworth’, ELH,  (), – (p. ).

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A Late Poem on the Naming of Places



 Jonathan Culler, ‘Lyric, History, and Genre’, New Literary History,  (), – (p. ). For further discussion of the poetics of nomination in Wordsworth, see my Late Poetry of the Lake Poets: Romanticism Revised (Cambridge, ), pp. – (especially p. : ‘the talismanic name, resounding in Wordsworth’s rhythmic articulation of it, would turn hearing into a process of sounding the depths . . . a sonic code . . . both meaningless – apparently a pure sound – and deictic’.)  On this, see Paul de Man, ‘Autobiography as Defacement’, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York, ), pp. –.  Here my commentary develops the critique of de Man on epitaph made by Clymer, ‘Graved in Tropes’.  Cf. Paul H. Fry, ‘Wordsworthian elegy effects consolation by reducing the difference between states normally considered binary opposites’: ‘Elegy’, in William Wordsworth in Context, ed. Andrew Bennett (Cambridge, ), pp. – (p. ).  Dying Modern, p. .

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 

Wordsworth at Sea

Lockdown and Lunacy in Two Poems from the s

Visiting his son on the Cumbrian coast near Whitehaven, in April , Wordsworth was full of enjoyment: ‘I have walked and ridden a great deal and one day with another, I have scarcely walked less than  miles. The sea is a delightful companion and nothing can be more charming, especially for a sequestered Mountaineer, than to cast eyes over its boundless surface, and hear as I have done almost from the brow of the steep in the Church field at Moresby, the waves chafing and murmuring in a variety of tones below, as a kind of base of harmony to the shrill yet liquid music of the larks above’ (LY, II, ). Yet, if it was delightful to be on shore, what he imagined beyond the bound of the horizon had always been more ominous. The sojourn at the seaside reminded him, he told Isabella Fenwick, that ‘it was in that neighbourhood I first became acquainted with the ocean and its appearances and movements. My Infancy and early childhood were passed at Cockermouth about eight miles from the coast, and I well remember that mysterious awe with which I used to listen to anything said about storms and shipwreck’ (Fenwick, p. ). In , that awe turned to grief when his brother, John Wordsworth, drowned in the shipwreck of the merchant vessel of which he was the captain, when just beginning a voyage he was hoping would make his fortune and allow him to live in retirement near William and Dorothy – the orphaned, separated siblings reunited ( March ; EY, p. ). Wordsworth was devastated by the loss. (Southey, who visited Grasmere to console him and his sister, remarked that he had never seen people so affected by a bereavement.) In consequence, Wordsworth’s memories of living beside the calm sea near Barrow in Furness became overwritten by intimations of its cruel, destructive potential, even though John was wrecked hundreds of miles further south (‘Elegiac Stanzas Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle in a Storm’) (see Chapter ). These intimations were only deepened by the visit to the coast at Bootle in  that was made so that Wordsworth’s frail children Catherine and Thomas could 

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Wordsworth at Sea

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benefit from sea bathing. As I showed in Chapter , he described himself at the time as ‘Fixed within hearing of loud Ocean’s roar / . . . on a bleak and lonesome shore’ (‘Epistle – To Sir George Howland Beaumont, Bart. From the South-West Coast of Cumberland’, –). The following year, both children died unexpectedly, leaving their parents bereft and making the holiday, retrospectively, seem a calm preceding a storm. After these traumatic events, the sea off the Cumbrian coast always had the potential to symbolise untimely death and irreparable loss, and this potential was fully realised in a pair of poems linked by their occasion – the moon seen from the Cumbrian seashore – by their date – the mid-s – and by their scenario – the lonely sailor at sea in the dark allegorising men and women’s position in the world. There is a further link: Wordsworth placed the poems among the sequence he called ‘Evening Voluntaries’, named after the improvised music played in church before and after evensong: music, that is, which could follow any form the organist chose. Thus, to call a poem a voluntary indicated that it convoked a communal concentration of mind on matters of the spirit, without having to conform to any one poetic or liturgical form. To call it an ‘evening’ voluntary, meanwhile, implied not just a time of darkness (incipient or actual) but also a subject and, perhaps, a stage of life. Evening is identified as a stage on which to play out, from a changed, self-consciously late perspective, concerns about solitariness, loss and death that had often preoccupied the poet. In what follows, I will be considering the consequences of this generic marking while construing the poems as among Wordsworth’s most searching meditations on disappointment, alienation, loss and depression – and on poetry’s role in articulating aspects of spacetime that might mollify, if not cure, what he reveals to be the human predicament. The first of the pair, ‘Composed by the Seashore’, was set at Moresby and dates from . What is immediately notable about it is how unspecific it is. Where a reader of the earlier Wordsworth might expect to find a narrator meditating at a particular time in a particular place, there is instead no scene-setting, no poet figure and no particular evening. Nor is there conversational blank verse; the poem, in couplets, begins with a long, compressed sentence listing, Hamlet-like, the ills that flesh is heir to. What mischief cleaves to unsubdued regret, How fancy sickens by vague hopes beset; How baffled projects on the spirit prey, And fruitless wishes eat the heart away, The Sailor knows; he best, whose lot is cast On the relentless sea that holds him fast

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

Wordsworth at Sea On chance dependent, and the fickle star Of power, through long and melancholy war.

(–; composed April ; published ; Last Poems, pp. –)

These ills, intensified by the piling-up of instances yet unlocated in any one person, appear to illustrate a general human condition of depression, disappointment and despair. Failure abounds and consumes the intellect and emotions. Life is anxiety, the poem says, and for four opening lines leaves the reader anxious. How will the syntax, the list and the implied questions resolve? It is a generic figure, rather than a poet figure or a described character, who resolves them: the phrase ‘The Sailor knows’ indicates that the ills are not just suffered but understood: mental illness is a matter of self-knowledge arising from long experience. With tremendous compression, no sooner is the sailor established as the embodiment of late-in-the-day disillusion than he is identified as exemplary rather than unusual: the phrase ‘he best’ shows that he is not the exception in his knowledge, but the most knowing: his case stands for all. It is hard to think of a bleaker opening to an English poem, and things get no easier as the sailor’s lot is visualised. If the reader had been expecting a poem entitled ‘Composed by the Seashore’ to offer a picturesque view of ships in a bay, she gets instead a description whose status is perplexing: is it merely allegorical, or to some extent realistic? Not having encountered a narrator, it is hard to know where the poet stands, and how and what the reader should ‘see’. It is apparent, though, that the depicted lot of the sailor potentially emblematises human life in general; this voyage description possesses an intensity beyond its brevity, recalling the dread of the Ancient Mariner, ‘stuck, ne breath ne motion; / As idle as a painted ship / Upon a painted ocean’ (LB  version, Part , stanza ), and the desperation of Nelson, blockading the French fleet for month after month and unable to bring it to battle. Being ‘held fast’ is a mental as well as physical matter: here, the phrasal verb turns the water to cement, suggesting not just the solidified sea imprisoning the ship but also an obsessive mental state caused by powerlessness. Forward syntactical motion then slows with the addition of explanatory phrases and the multiplication of adjectives (‘and the fickle . . . through long and melancholy’). By these means, the sailor’s bitter knowledge of his vulnerability to outside forces (natural and social) is reproduced, in little, as a reading experience. By the time the reader reaches the sentence-end, she’s been on a long journey leading slowly nowhere; she is as ‘dependent’ as the mariner on a tortuous course imposed by the medium (the syntax as the sea). This is sticky, clogging verse, loading the reader with the weight of slow forces beyond her control.

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

Wordsworth at Sea

‘War’, the final word, leaves her like the sailor alone and held by an enduring violence that shows no sign of ebbing; it is a simple, static, sad state, anything but glorious. The stasis is formal as well as syntactical and semantic. The protraction of the ‘star/war’ rhyme over the following three lines (‘shores/doors/floors’) gets the poem sonically stuck: if this is harmony, it is harmony as the same-old: lockdown. O sad it is, in sight of foreign shores, Daily to think on old familiar doors, Hearths loved in childhood, and ancestral floors; Or, tossed about along a waste of foam, To ruminate on that delightful home Which with the dear Betrothed ‘was’ to come; Or came and was and is, yet meets the eye Never but in the world of memory; Or in a dream recalled, whose smoothest range Is crossed by knowledge, or by dread, of change, And if not so, whose perfect joy makes sleep A thing too bright for breathing man to keep. (–)

There is no escape, thus intensifying the exclamation of sadness that marks the poet making himself and the reader privy to the mental torment that arises from enforced isolation: the held-fast ship as floating solitary confinement (–). The status of voice is significant here. If the poet was speaking confessionally from a specific place and time – as the ‘Great Decade’ Wordsworth tended to do – he would be egotistically making himself exemplary, a claim that many readers, in his own time and since, have resisted, viewing him as a self-important over-valuer of his own petty experience. If he was speaking merely as the sailor, his words would pertain chiefly to the morale of a particular profession (as Orwell’s do in Down and Out in Paris and London). But he does neither – or both: it is unclear whether the poet is speaking, and sympathetically imagining the sailor’s anguish on the basis of his own, or whether these are the sailor’s own overheard words. The speech hovers above its putative speakers without quite clicking on either, the resultant anonymity lending its intimate personal details unlimited resonance. It is both generic and specific; it could be uttered by anyone in this particular way. What the speech says, and how, as well as who speaks, universalises it. ‘O sad it is’ is a far cry from the triumphant exclamation of the Prelude poet confident in his personal ability to prophesy of time’s redemption.

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

Wordsworth at Sea

It is a cry intimating that consciousness is a predicament – an experience of deprivation in an empty space where the present is knowledge of love left behind and the future is nevermore about to be. The speaker is all at sea; the nearby land is foreign; his home is inaccessible save in memories that haunt and dreams that turn to dread. Time is the problem, as it usually is in Wordsworth, but now experienced as mental corrosion rather than a medium redeemable by the recollective power of verse memorialisation. Its corrosive effect is made graphic for the reader by the strange mixture of tenses. In the phrase ‘that delightful home / Which with the dear Betrothed was to come’, the emphasised was rather than the ‘is’ readers expect brands the home as lost before even found. Home appears as an unfulfilled future apprehended as a possibility eclipsed even in the apprehension. To imagine the future is to know it already precluded: that happy time will not materialise. Or it will, only to be known as inaccessible – set aside by distance. Spatial remoteness consigns the present, material world to the immaterial past faster than it can be enjoyed or described – the shared loving home with the betrothed ‘came and was and is, yet meets the eye / Never but in the world of memory’. ‘Is’ is recessed, a temporal state so hedged round with ‘was’ and ‘will be’ that it is too fragile to preserve. If recalled in dream, it provokes dread of change or it contrasts so strongly with daytime reality that the dreamer is too oppressed by its joy to stay in the dream (‘too bright for breathing man to keep’ ()). This recession, grammatically and semantically realised, is syntactical too. ‘Or, tossed about’, ‘Or came and was’, ‘Or in a dream’: the alternatives multiply, but do not choose between inner states – each more enclosed and elusive – wherein the world of fulfilled coupledom is imagined and lost in face of actual isolation in a wasteland. Here, there is no redemption of the past, neither through revivifying memory nor restorative verse, only the proliferation of the already-lost prospect of happiness in mental states that are more tantalising than compensatory. Thought, knowledge and imagination are modes of self-torture. Foreboding severance, they provoke misery. Happy days? Wordsworth is closer to Beckett than to the poet of ‘Tintern Abbey’. As Peter Larkin put it, ‘it is an astonishingly thorough program of defeat’. The poem then pivots in lines –, the voice rousing itself to acknowledge existential heroism: Hail to the virtues which that perilous life Extracts from Nature’s elemental strife; And welcome glory won in battles fought As bravely as the foe was keenly sought.

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

Wordsworth at Sea

How different this is from the Wordsworth of yore: here, virtue comes not from immersion in or subsumption of nature, but as a removal, an extract, from it. Nature is war; naval ‘battles fought’ (), demanding courage and assiduousness (), belong, implicitly, to a subset of its ‘elemental strife’ (). The captain of the battleship – Wordsworth probably has Nelson in mind – is exemplary of humankind in general not because he is victorious but because he persists and fights in/against an essential condition of hostility and violence. If to brave a ‘sea of troubles’ is to win glory, Wordsworth is more interested in a milder form of recognition that is given by poetry. Coming to the nub of the matter, he outlines an ethic that verse may facilitate – an aesthetic, in fact, and one somewhat different from that of his early years: But to each gallant Captain and his crew A less imperious sympathy is due, Such as my verse now yields, while moonbeams play On the mute sea in this unruffled bay; Such as will promptly flow from every breast, Where good men, disappointed in the quest Of wealth and power and honours, long for rest; Or, having known the splendours of success, Sigh for the obscurities of happiness. (–)

Here, ‘sympathy’ because it will ‘flow from every breast’ () is the key, but, as it were, a minor one. The sailor’s predicament is allayed but not healed by the fellow feeling of which verse is one precipitate, taking its colour from the moonlight that silvers the view of ships in the bay. That view and the verse response to it are sketched in the barest vestiges: all we learn of the place of composition is that it is ‘this unruffled bay’ and of the time that it is ‘now’ while ‘moonbeams play’. Place and poet are almost elided, appearing only in order to allow a change of perspective from the emblematic sailor at sea to the night-time poetry composed from the shore. That change works through analogy: poetry is like moonbeams, acting as a gentle transformation by spreading sympathy across humanity. The sea, previously holding the mariner fast, alone in a world of strife, is quietened by the moon; the verse ‘yields’; sympathy then ‘flows’: these verbs suggest that what was a tempest-tossed turbulence has become, in the scene and in the poetry, a current of benevolent emotion. Like moonlight, this verse is a lesser current, evanescent and rarely discerned (nature diminished at night rather than in its full noonday power). Lesser but still effective because selffulfilling: while Wordsworth writes about poetry’s connective role in

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Wordsworth at Sea

spreading sympathy, the examples he chooses allow connection to be visualised and emotion to be released. In this respect too, he is a later, bleaker reviser of his optimistic youthful self: while now poetry is a half (reflected) light alleviating a time of darkness, in , the ‘hour of feeling’ was to be grasped in the moment, in a simple present-tense ballad on a sunny spring morning. Palliation rather than remedy: there is no triumph and no sense of poetic victory won from the acknowledgement of defeat in life (the limitations of action). Sympathy’s action is itself limited, as well as delayed. It might be as quiet and subtle as a rhyme sound that persists, beyond the bounds of the couplet pattern, with the slightest of gradual alterations: breast/quest/rest/success/happiness (the returns and incremental changes of the moon – sights reflected as sounds?). This scarcely changing sonic effect works to calm the onward movement of the poem’s final statement – another winding, complex sentence. One example follows another (‘such as . . .’) and the second example devolves, in the very last couplet, into alternatives (‘Or, having’). This is far from a linear path to a ringing conclusion: the flow of sympathy, the syntax suggests, is by currents and eddies – less direct than the keen seeking of and fighting with a foe. The elemental strife of nature is not easily brought to decisive battle, still less defeated. Good men remain disappointed: they do not get the rewards they strove for, material or reputational, or if they do get them, pine to retire from them. Yet, Nature yields no pastoral escape (Nelson never got back to an idyll with Emma Hamilton in a country cottage). Happiness is not attained; the poem ends on the sound of regret, or of a hope known to be in vain – men ‘sigh’ – while ‘obscurities’ locate happiness in the unattainable condition of being unknown/unknowing. Knowledge remains a curse, slightly allayed by feeling, even if it is splendour that one has known. Discontent and yearning abide; there is no takeaway compensation – not even any explicit reference to a God whose mysterious, apparently cruel, ways will be revealed after death to have been just, or loving (Cowper/Tennyson). In this respect, the poem is strikingly modern: Wordsworth’s moonlight verse is godless – grimmer about a world of human pain and chaster about poetry’s role in assuaging that pain than any poet until Hardy. The analogy with Beckett is worth pursuing: both writers revalue the small-scale, demanding admiration for ordinary mortals keeping going in a world that, within and without, is dark and comfortless save for some small solace offered by the writing itself in mobilising fellow feeling. Wordsworth, of course, lacks Beckett’s grim irony, his laughter at despair – he just has (here), the despair and the sympathy that comes from

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

sharing a plight. Larkin again: ‘there is an insistence here that marks the farthest point, a degree zero, of Wordsworth’s late poetry of sufficiency, neutralised as it is between arcs of meaning-loss and the private relief from meaning’. Wordsworth does not mince words; he refuses the sentimental. He has a shrewd sense of the limited nature of poetry’s power to heal. But he eschews lament: the matter is not to be resolved, the suffering not to be purged, by a poet’s cry of grief. It is too universal for that, and Wordsworth no longer assumes his own centrality as a prophet of nature leading humankind to a new faith. Late in the day, he casts a cold eye on life, if not on death. Here, he is less Christian, if by ‘Christian’ is meant a stoic resignation to divine will, than almost anywhere else in his late oeuvre (in Chapters  and , I will examine other remarkably powerful poems that eschew conventional piety and orthodox consolation). Like the late Yeats, Wordsworths’ utter command of his medium here allows him the confidence to speak for all – to look at human suffering without blinking, yet, in maintaining a verbal order in the face of disillusion and discontent, to assert a continuing ability to make meaning. The poem’s power to exemplify a way of coping or bearing with what it reveals comes from its concentration of a worldview into a tight form. Thus, the destruction of hope, which once took the entire ‘Ruined Cottage’ to narrate, is sketched in a few graphic phrases. Here, late style is the product of long practice in paring poetry down to the essentials for communicating suffering and feeling. Biographical stories and geographical locations are gone; solitaries and villages are absent. What remain, starker than before in this denuded context, are economy of diction, impersonality of voice, verbal energy manifest in the controlled tension between searching syntax and calming rhyme and the terse descriptions of mental suffering which charge the generic with the kind of emotional impact we associate with the specific. Late poetry is always in a relationship with the poetry the poet wrote earlier in life, and all the more so when the poet is often autobiographical, when he is a reviser of his old poems and when he can expect present-day readers to know his old work. For Wordsworth, writing about the Cumbrian sea revived past poems as well as past events. The poem was composed in a dialogue (witting or unwitting) with key poems in his earlier career. Thus, ‘Composed by the Seashore’ begins with a list of human discontents that invokes the ‘sea of troubles’ of Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy. The grim phrase ‘tossed about along a waste of foam’ derives from Shakespeare’s sonnet ‘The expense of spirit in a waste of

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shame’ and from the sonnet Wordsworth wrote in response in : ‘The world is too much with us; late and soon, / Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers’ (, p. ). The  poem revives the moonlight seaview of this sonnet; it also focuses on the waste of human powers. It too wants to find a consoling spirit in the illuminated ocean. It is as if its echoing of the sonnet enacts, at the levels of diction and theme, the longing for past and future companionship that it describes – as if the poem emblematises a memory of the poet he was in  and of the easy speaking-for nature he was then able to practise. Yet, if that poetic memory is enshrined in the allusive words, there is a major change indicated: in , it is the sea that symbolises wasted life, rather than, as in the sonnet, the sea being a symbol of an organic relationship with an animate nature to which humans, lusting for material wealth, have blinded themselves. In this reworking of the sonnet, the shipwreck of John Wordsworth is perhaps implicit, though unmentioned; the sea is now an image of a nature that does not offer compensation to humankind; the  perspective is rewritten in bitter disillusion. In between the two poems stand the ‘Elegiac Stanzas’ – the post-shipwreck turning point in which, now distrusting even a calm sea, Wordsworth declares, from the same Cumbrian coast, his loss of faith in nature. Those stanzas ended with insight into hidden terrors in the deep as if replaying John’s drowning (‘such sights, or worse, as are before me here’) and with an effort to sustain faith in the face of the inevitability of pain: ‘Not without hope we suffer and we mourn’ (, pp. –; –). By , hope no longer counterbalances suffering; it instead plagues the sailor, besetting and sickening his fancy. Speaking back to his earlier positions, Wordsworth now makes it poetry’s role not to affirm hope’s persistence but to palliate a suffering that it cannot cure by spreading what sympathy can be discerned by the moonlight in the darkness. In accordance with this attenuated role, he shifts from the confident declaration of general resolutions (‘Not without hope we . . .’) to a less assertive, less direct, formulation – the couplet rhymes that seem, to admirers of the early Wordsworth, an old-fashioned rejection of the poetic revolution he accomplished in the ‘Great Decade’. But in fact, this is no recidivist retreat to the style of Pope, Gray and Darwin that he had once rejected; it is a hybridisation of eighteenth-century nature moralising, with its couplet form and its generic figures, and the conversation poetry that he had elaborated in dialogue with Coleridge (composed in the same period as the moon and owl poems I discussed in Chapter  which were also categorised as Evening Voluntaries). In this hybrid nature poetry, the

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unorganic impersonality of the rhyme scheme is its point; it shows that Wordsworth was keen to challenge his art by choosing a resistant medium that forced him out of the comfort zone of first-person blank verse that he knew so well how to write. The couplets are, in effect, the traditional, established form that the organist of an evening voluntary adapts to his purpose so that it fits his response to the occasion. Thus, they are not discrete epigrammatic units but the formal deposition of moonlike/wavelike cyclicality: they create a constant backbeat of time renewed – sound returning from the past almost at once. The sonic patterning they establish is enough subliminally to make the reader always aware of form. The composed aesthetic artifice of the meditation sounds in the background. It is a poem that the reader ‘hears’ – not just a stream of consciousness – and so poetry itself becomes part of the issue – at least tangentially. What the poet in his poem once did, rhyme-sound now does: that is, instead of placing himself at the centre of a heroic conquest of temporal loss and spatial division, Wordsworth stands aside and lets poetic form be the force that assuages and diverts loss and division, even if it cannot arrest or overcome them, by establishing counter-rhythms and counter-rhymes to the syntactical imitation of mental turbulence and temporal lapse.

Lunar Sea By the time Wordsworth returned to the Moresby shore in October and November , the  visit and the poetry written then had become part of his personal archive. The new poem he now wrote had the  poem behind it. ‘To the Moon Composed by the Seaside, – on the Coast of Cumberland’ is another night piece looking over the waves and imagining the sailor’s moonstruck ‘phrenzy-stricken brain’ as emblematic of life’s anxious lot more generally (Last Poems, pp. –). Like its predecessor, this poem was added to the Evening Voluntaries sequence (in /). It also exemplified poetry as analogous to moonlight, as a counterforce to life characterised by care and anxiety – and for good recent reason. Since Wordsworth had last visited the fateful coast, his closest family and friends had begun to fail. As we saw in Chapter , Coleridge died in July ; Charles Lamb followed him in December and Sarah Hutchinson in June . Meanwhile, Southey’s wife Edith had become insane (probably as a result of dementia) and was taken to the lunatic asylum in York, and Mary Lamb’s recurrent mania had worsened, so that her periods of confinement in madhouses became more frequent and longer. Worst of all, Wordsworth’s beloved sister Dorothy had lapsed into

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bedridden dementia. In June , Wordsworth made common cause with Southey, writing ‘God bless you, and may he in his goodness give us both strength to support our trials, and the same to all who suffer along with us’. Mary Wordsworth added a description of Dorothy’s ‘wanderings by night and by day, . . . with anxiety that you should be told why she was seeming to neglect you – ‘“They never forget me, in their and my anxiety” has she often exclaimed’ ( June ; LY, III, –). Age had brought upon the Wordsworths and their circle a time of pain, worry, lunacy and death. Wordsworth himself was not exempt: he went to the coast because he was suffering from a strained right arm, which he wanted to alleviate by taking warm sea baths. The resultant consciousness of the precariousness of body and mind informed the nature lyric that he then wrote, with its immediate focus on the unsettled and the insomniac: Wanderer! that stoop’st so low, and com’st so near To human life’s unsettled atmosphere; Who lov’st with Night and Silence to partake, So might it seem, the cares of them that wake (–)

This opening will seem more typically Wordsworthian to any reader used to his earlier work. Apostrophising a nature spirit, he calls it into being: that it can partake in human life is a consequence of the poet’s anthropomorphic voice, in a process that is itself an expression of faith in poetic expression’s ability to affirm compassion. ‘so might it seem’: it is not the moon per se but the poet’s moonlike view, in which speculation and pretence – seeming – is entertained, that makes the heavenly orb condescend to the lower world. And, through the cottage-lattice softly peeping, Dost shield from harm the humblest of the sleeping (–)

Shielding the vulnerable, however insignificant they are, the verse’s moonlike effects are established much sooner than in the  poem, although the use of generic examples recalls it. Present participle –ing rhymes, ending the line on an extra-metrical unstressed syllable, are traditionally considered weak and therefore ‘feminine’ or childish; here, this quality is used to effect to give the moon’s watching an intimate, unthreatening quality (a mother peeping in on her child?). Perhaps this lunar influence fulfils a wish to imagine Dorothy, disturbed and anxious behind the latticed windows of Rydal Mount, at peace. Perhaps not: the poem is not confessional, though it is personal to an extent the  piece is not:

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Lunar Sea What pleasure once encompassed those sweet names Which yet in thy behalf the Poet claims, An idolizing dreamer as of yore! – I slight them all; and, on this sea-beat shore Sole-sitting, only can to thoughts attend That bid me hail thee as the ’  (–)

The gesture, here, of identifying the poet, set apart in the landscape, as the solitary receptive and transmitting consciousness through which the spacetime takes articulate form, aligns the poem with the conversation poems of the s – Wordsworth taking up the narratorial stance occupied by Coleridge in ‘This Lime Tree Bower’ and ‘Frost at Midnight’ in particular. ‘The Nightingale’ is also an intertext because Wordsworth differentiates his invocation of the moon from the invocations of the traditional poets. No Cynthia or Diana; his is a new, mythic moon of his own musing and making. Evidently, Wordsworth is much closer to his old methods here than he was in : we are on the verge, it seems, of the egotistical sublime. It is a verge he steps back from: the next lines articulate a milder, gentler means of intervention than that experienced by the Boy of Winander. They also turn from the personal; the ‘sole-sitting’ poet turns out to be a hinge rather than a subject for inner exploration. The rest of the sentence turns again to the generic sailor, whose frustrations emblematise the pains of life. Reversing the order of , this figure appears only after the moon/verse’s ministrations have already been summoned by the poet’s self-fulfilling plea: So call thee for heaven’s grace through thee made known By confidence supplied and mercy shown, When not a twinkling star or beacon’s light Abates the perils of a stormy night; And for less obvious benefits, that find Their way, with thy pure help, to heart and mind; Both for the adventurer starting in life’s prime; And veteran ranging round from clime to clime, Long-baffled hope’s slow fever in his veins, And wounds and weakness oft his labour’s sole remains. (–)

Wordsworth has a need to offer himself and his readers the moon’s merciful intercession – as if it were a naturalised Virgin Mary – because the sailor’s lot is just as grim an emblem of human life here as in . The sailor’s baffled hope manifests, in the image, as much literal as metaphorical, of a bodily disease, infecting his very blood – ‘slow fever in his veins’. It comes as close

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to his core-being as ‘the sensations sweet’ ‘[f]elt in the blood, and felt along the heart’ of ‘Tintern Abbey’ (, ; LB, p. –). Whereas in  these deeply absorbed sensations, recollected in memorialising verse, led to a state of rapt self-suspension in which poet and nature joined as a ‘living soul’, here, the blood is corrupted by them; they leave the sailor maimed; his ‘weakness’, mind and body, is all that ‘remains behind’ from his life’s experience of a nature figured as a benighted, universal ocean. Beginning a new turn of thought and a new sentence, Wordsworth sets out the terms of the moon’s benignant influence: it solaces by lightening the isolating darkness just enough to allay, though not overcome, the isolation produced by untamed nature (‘wilderness’), by confinement (the ‘grated cell’) and by death (imaged as a still more imprisoning enclosure – the tomb). The aspiring Mountains and the winding Streams, Empress of Night! are gladdened by thy beams; A look of thine the wilderness pervades, And penetrates the forest’s inmost shades; Thou, chequering peaceably the minster’s gloom, Guid’st the pale Mourner to the lost one’s tomb; Canst reach the Prisoner – to his grated cell Welcome, though silent and intangible! – (–)

As in , the generic figures represent a turn away from the personal encounters of the earlier nature lyrics. Wordsworth is not on the shore of Ullswater stealing a boat; he is in the territory of Gray’s Elegy and Young’s ‘Night Thoughts’ with his graveyard Gothic mourner and his unspecified, every-person ‘one’. Yet, the moon’s action is reminiscent of the secret ministry in Coleridge’s ‘Frost at Midnight’: here, as there, the moonshine configures poetry’s silent and intangible mobilisation of sympathy, although Wordsworth is more traditional than Coleridge in gendering it female – the work of an ‘Empress’. And lives there one, of all that come and go On the great waters toiling to and fro, One, who has watched thee at some quiet hour Enthroned aloft in undisputed power, Or crossed by vapoury streaks and clouds that move Catching the lustre they in part reprove – Nor sometimes felt a fitness in thy sway To call up thoughts that shun the glare of day, And make the serious happier than the gay? (–)

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The moonlit night does not bring a sunbright day, and Wordsworth does not want it to. The evening voluntary prefers the half-darkness; in the dim light, what can be thought is what is obscured by the ‘glare’ of day – that the self-sponsoring of meditation, and of poetry as an articulation of meditation, occurs in the recognition of nature as conflict, rather than as peace. Thus, the moon, though ‘enthroned aloft in undisputed power’, is ‘crossed by vapour streaks and clouds that move / Catching the lustre they in part reprove’: the clouds agitate against the moonlight, both reducing and contradicting it, only to be illuminated by it in the process. Shadowy forces have, despite their contrary motions, a silver lining; the moon, by picking out their surfaces, lets them be recognised, giving an insight into life that the ‘gay’ are too dazzled by day’s ‘glare’ to notice. It calls up thoughts – is a monitory prompt to reflection – and these are thoughts about conflict, change and mortality. What is surprising about the lines is the adjective. Were Wordsworth to have declared that ‘one’s’ night thoughts make one sadder and wiser, he would have been, in line with Young, glumly preferring the knowledge that stems from experience and from reflective retirement to the bliss that comes from innocent, unself-conscious activity. This would in itself have been a late-life reversal of the optimism of his revolutionary lyrical ballads of . But in fact, he chooses a more difficult and contentious comparative: ‘happier’. Thoughts of mutability and mortality make the bemooned ‘serious’ observer happier than the gay – an assertion so unlikely that it implicitly calls into question the nature of happiness and the stability of thought. It is this question, and the freight of tension with which it loads the mind, that the rest of the meditation attempts to work through. First, it is acknowledged that lunar thinking is dangerous; it may become lunacy – distracted, overwrought knowings aroused in the ‘brain’ like a rising tide responding to the moon’s pull: Yes, lovely Moon! if thou so mildly bright Dost rouse, yet surely in thy own despite, To fiercer mood the phrenzy-stricken brain (–)

Fierce phrenzy: it is hard not to think at this point that Wordsworth’s sea song arose as a means of pondering how to cope with a world in which his near and dear ones were periodically going mad: Mary Lamb, a danger to herself and others confined in asylums; Edith Southey gripped by delusion; Dorothy, crippled, shouting and hooting at Rydal Mount, unable now to ‘let the moon / Shine on [her] in [her] solitary walk’ (‘Tintern Abbey’, –; LB, pp. –). Quite properly, these distressing events are kept

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out of the poem; perhaps Wordsworth avoided the autobiographical precisely because what had become his and their reality was too intimate and too shocking to be made public. Nor does he take the traditional medical route of equating women’s mental illness with their moon-synced menstrual/hysterical cycles. Phrenzy is not gendered; it is an agitation produced by what the moon reveals, despite itself, as it casts its light into the darkness – a nature of constant change that offers no rest (‘vapoury streaks and clouds that move’). Having ‘seen so much’ from his marginal vantage point between land and sea, the poet then speaks what he feels – indicating his need for comfort by a change in register. He pleads, in his own first-person voice, for the moon’s authorisation for what he knows is a matter of hopeful belief rather than established fact. It is a tentative form of selfendorsement, of course – the musing verse requesting licence from the verse’s muse – but its presence signals an extremity of rhetorical and personal need. Let me a compensating faith maintain; That there’s a sensitive, a tender, part Which thou canst touch in every human heart, For healing and composure (–)

‘Help!’ the gesture says – ‘help me write you/myself into a discourse of succour in which I believe’. But what stops the moon being sickening rather than benignant, both in itself and as a metaphor for poetry? Wordsworth had, in ‘The Leechgatherer’, seen versemaking as maddening – ‘We Poets in our youth begin in gladness / But thereof come in the end despondency and madness’ (–; , pp. –). Here, he has no argumentative answer to the question of moonsickness that he raises: what follows is simply identified as a healing discourse; the entreaty is its own gradually accruing answer, succeeding by exemplifying the influence it describes: mightiest billows ever have confessed Thy domination; as the whole vast Sea Feels through her lowest depths thy sovereignty; So shines that countenance with especial grace On them who urge the keel her plains to trace Furrowing its way right onward. (–)

How convincing is this ‘especial grace’ gradually coming into being as we read it? What assurance of an interceding influence dispersed through

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nature and humanity does it create? Assurance depends not on argument but thematisation: in the poem’s climactic passages, it is the imagined scenarios that engage, so graphic are they as visualised vignettes – but their effect is not entirely in line with the endorsement of compensation for inevitable mortality/mutability that Wordsworth wants to make. For example, in the lines ‘On them who urge the keel her plains to trace / Furrowing its way right onward’, the inverted foot draws attention to ‘furrowing’. While this stresses the act of linear cleavage that the ship makes in the water, it also hints that human effort may be unknowingly absurd. The moon’s grace is all the more needed because the sailor’s ‘right way onward’ appears not only as tiny – a single wake on the face of the ‘vast Sea’ – but also quixotic. It is surely a ‘vain endeavour’ to try to plough the ‘plains’ of the ocean: there is no harvest to be had; it will not be farmed. One might as well, as the folk song says, try to winnow the wind. Perhaps, the scenario implies, the sailor’s course is not determined for him – not simply an image of life as a line from cradle to grave – but rather a route that his inflated will-to-power makes him choose (like Walton sailing ever northwards in Frankenstein – a would-be existential action hero also derived from Coleridge’s Mariner). Who is the lunatic here and who is the lunar-guided hero? A question of gender surfaces, half-seen in the moonlight: how ready is such a sailor to be soothed by the moon’s feminine, tidal sway (‘meek’, ‘gentle’) that works against his egotistical commitment to moving straight on through spacetime? The metaphor for his progress gives us cause to doubt; the visualised scenario retains a semantic penumbra allowing readers to criticise mankind as fixated on steering a lonely linear course through featureless darkness to an unknown destination, while unaware of how narrow, unfruitful and potentially mad this way of moving through the world is. If the ship furrowing ocean’s vast plains seems lonely enough, the poem ends with a still more graphic scene of maritime isolation – as if retelling one of John Wordsworth’s anecdotes of life at sea or updating the ‘The Ancient Mariner’ line ‘The steersman’s face by his lamp gleamed white’: And when thy beauty in the shadowy cave Is hidden, buried in its monthly grave; Then, while the Sailor, ’mid an open sea Swept by a favouring wind that leaves thought free, Paces the deck – no star perhaps in sight, And nothing save the moving ship’s own light To cheer the long dark hours of vacant night –

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Wordsworth at Sea Oft with his musings does thy image blend, In his mind’s eye thy crescent horns ascend, And thou art still, O Moon, that ’ ! (–)

The image of the confined sailor, pacing the deck of a benighted single ship, utterly in the dark except for the little light the ship itself produces, is extraordinarily stark – so stark that it implicitly puts in question the explicit affirmation Wordsworth concludes with – that the moon/verse’s influence becomes an internalised inward light, a saving grace, aiding humankind to bear its lonely, otherwise blind voyage. The poem manifests a counter current to its apparent drift – visualising man voyaging alone in darkness, lit only by his own actions – even as it intimates the soothing spread of sympathy from moon to mind. The issues that remain unresolved are whether this sympathy will suffice. Will it help him change a course he has chosen, or aid him in bearing the consequences of the path he cannot avoid? Is man mollified by it, or helped in an existential voyage that may be an image of ‘things as they are’ but may alternatively be an illustration of his sublime egotism? While the poem is aligned with the linearity that the sailor illustrates, highlighting his plight and his will and syntactically moving, like him, onwards over long stretches towards a destination, it also places him within (and displaces its own syntactical linearity into) formal patterns resembling the temporality of the moon (cycles; grammatical turns; rhyme’s regular returns). If the poem’s argument concludes with these patterns subsumed in him, its form leaves him subsumed in them (note how it concludes with two sets of rhyming triplets). That is, in how as well as what it says, this sea poem plays out the drama of a double affiliation to (what Wordsworth saw as) masculine and feminine articulations of spacetime – contrasting ways of being in the world. Taken together, what makes the two poems involving as well as, for readers of the younger Wordsworth, surprising, is their exposure of humanity as anxious, afraid and discontented and their refusal of any transformative resolution through nature – neither via unification, or recollection, nor recoil. The poem reveals a post-Prelude Wordsworth finding humanity more isolated and imprisoned than before. The existential angst of the generic sailor figure is not to be healed, as was the Prelude poet, by a recovery of the sense that he had always been sponsored by nature’s powers. He does not become a hero with the world centred on his consciousness. Eschewing the drama of triumph over adversity, Wordsworth finds different means to articulate the mental and emotional tensions of coping with suffering and to suggest the possibility of poetry’s invocation of

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nature providing consolation. These means include a revival of typically eighteenth-century poetic methods – the generic figure, the rhyming couplet. The generic figures divert his self-preoccupation towards others; the couplets brace his thought-stream – like the shore containing the tidal current – so that the verse realises on the page not simply an egotistical desire to go on but also an affiliation to a world within whose temporal and spatial patterns the going-on takes place. The rhyme scheme, in tension with syntactical thrust, enables an accruing verbal order flexible enough to bend to some shape the ‘waste’, ‘dread’ and will-to-power that the poems describe. The tension produced by this double alignment in imaged scene and verse form makes the poems model ambivalence in action. They are struggles between different ways of articulating grim passages of experience and, manifesting uncertainty, they offer a tentative, diminished consolation as the most that they, and poetry’s versioning of nature more generally, can produce. And they show that even this moonlight consolation is more menaced by the dark than the author would like to admit. They are processes of thinking-through being-in-time and poetry’s articulation of that being-intime, rather than conclusive statements. They are all the better for being so: what Wordsworth achieves in them is a new way to address old concerns that now struck him differently but still more strongly from a particular later-life moment. These are poems of the mid-s and of a particular coast – shapings of what that coast meant, when revisited, in terms of what experiences and what poems it was associated with – and shapings of the preoccupations that Wordsworth took with him to the coast – deaths, lunacies, infirmities and anxieties. They succeed by dramatising these personal concerns in generalised terms as a turbulent thought process through which readers are moved to work because its articulation of complex and ambivalent trains of thought and feeling is supple enough to grapple with miserable life experiences that we imagine ourselves sharing – or that resemble our own. They are testing poems indeed – but the difficult journey towards catharsis that they offer is all the more worth taking when we, and those we know and love, come to face anxiety, suffering, disease and death.

Notes  See the discussion in my Wordsworth’s Poetry – (Philadelphia, ), pp. –.  Peter Larkin, ‘Wordsworth’s “After-Sojourn”: Revision and Unself-Rivalry in the Later Poetry’, Studies in Romanticism,  (), – (p. ).

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Wordsworth at Sea

 Larkin, ‘After-Sojourn’, .  Text taken from The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth,  vols (London, –), V, –.  The scenario was evidently associated with John: in the elegy Wordsworth wrote for his brother (‘When to the attractions of the busy world’, ), are these lines: ‘that habitual restlessness of foot / That haunts the Sailor measuring o’er and o’er / His short domain upon the vessel’s deck, / While she pursues her course through the dreary sea’ (, II, –; –).

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Dementia Poetics in Wordsworth’s Late Memorials

In his  ‘Essays Upon Epitaphs’, Wordsworth suggested that memorials should omit any ‘deformity’ in their subject’s character. The character of a deceased friend or beloved kinsman is not seen, no – nor ought to be seen, otherwise than as a tree through a tender haze or a luminous mist, that spiritualises and beautifies it; that takes away, indeed, but only to the end that the parts which are not abstracted may appear more dignified and lovely; may impress and affect the more. . .. [U]nsightliness, disproportion, and deformity, vanish; and, through the influence of commiseration, a harmony of love and beauty succeeds. (W Prose, II, –)

It is the argument of this chapter that in the s and s, the pressure of memorialising old friends afflicted by madness caused Wordsworth to alter this view and to write a kind of poetry that did respond to (what he saw as) deformity. In the process – a process fraught with difficulty – he modified his epitaphic poetics: a series of memorials mixed the traits of his elegiac verse with those of his epitaphs and inscriptions. This was to take further, in extreme circumstances, the hybridisation of elegy and inscription I examined in Chapter  with regard to Sir George Beaumont and his sister-in-law. These memorials place Wordworth’s most intimate poetic voice – that which, in , he had called a ‘spontaneous overflow of . . . feeling’ (LB, p. ) – in tension with voices of distanced, disembodied formality. They constitute hybrid genres in which some of his oldest and most ‘Romantic’ practices are transformed as he attempts to find a way to speak, without intrusiveness, indignity and embarrassment, of a kind of madness whose symptoms were (and had long been) widely agreed upon, although their cause, onset and duration were not (physicians called it ‘amentia’, ‘imbecility’, ‘dotage’, and ‘dementia’). In , Wordsworth argued that ‘transports of mind, or . . . quick turns of conflicting passion; . . . might constitute the life and beauty of a funeral



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Dementia Poetics in Wordsworth’s Late Memorials

oration or elegiac poem’, while the permanent memorial that was inscribed – or inscribable – on a tomb should employ a controlled, solemn, voice: to raise a monument is a sober and a reflective act; that the inscription which it bears is intended to be permanent, and for universal perusal; and that, for this reason, the thoughts and feelings expressed should be permanent also – liberated from that weakness and anguish of sorrow which is in nature transitory, and which with instinctive decency retires from notice. (W Prose, II, –)

By , he had hardened this distinction between epitaph and elegy; elegy increasingly seemed potentially indecent, because it tended not only to expose the mourner’s sorrowful anguish but also to reveal the deceased’s private life to a public that had been taught by reviewers and biographers to enjoy gossip and scandal. Wordsworth agreed with Coleridge that they lived in a prurient ‘age of personality’ in which popular publications such as the Edinburgh Review and Blackwood’s Magazine trashed the personal character of writers and their friends. So incensed was he by the Edinburgh’s attack on the ‘cardinal deformity’ of Burns’s character, an attack made possible by James Currie’s warts-and-all biography which detailed the poet’s alcohol addiction, that he published a pamphlet excoriating both the reviewer and the biographer. His Letter to a Friend of Robert Burns () pleaded, without expectation of success, for a literary culture that evaluated the author’s published work rather than his private conduct. The purpose of criticism was not to pick over evidence of personal deformity, whether moral or physical. He had known since  of the dangers of referring to delicate personal matters even among acquaintances, having warned Basil Montagu to be wary of inviting Coleridge to live with him. Montagu reported to Coleridge that Wordsworth had called him a ‘rotten drunkard’ – causing a breach between the two old friends that was never wholly repaired. But to publish information of this kind was far more culpable: in , Wordsworth was angered by De Quincey’s allusions to Coleridge’s opium dependence in the course of the Confessions of an . . . Opium Eater; he was again annoyed in  when De Quincey published more ‘injurious, unfeeling and untrue’ details about the recently deceased Coleridge’s character in Tait’s Magazine (LY, II, ). After Coleridge’s death, however, Wordsworth wrote the elegiac poems, renewing old dialogue, that elegised Coleridge by employing the words of his conversation poems rather than by dwelling on his character (see Chapter ). Yet, as more friends and relatives died, it became more difficult to keep ‘deformity’ out of view. As we saw in Chapter , the following years were dreadful. Lamb died unexpectedly in December , leaving his

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Memorialising Charles Lamb

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recurrently insane sister Mary behind. In June , Sarah Hutchinson also died, an event closely followed by the full outbreak of Dorothy Wordsworth’s madness (which we now regard as pre-senile dementia). By then, Southey’s wife Edith had been confined in York Retreat, a humane asylum, having become violent at the end of September . She returned home but never recovered, varying only between ‘complete imbecility’, ‘settled melancholy’, and ‘angry fits’, preceded by going on ‘in a rambling strain with scarcely a gleam of sanity’. She died in . Meanwhile, Dorothy, affected in body and mind, became incontinent and unable to walk. Her memory was, Wordsworth wrote on  August , ‘confused as to passing events’, though she ‘remembers and recollects all but recent things perfectly’ (LY, III, ). Mary Wordsworth compared her to ‘a very clever tyrannical spoilt child’; her outbreaks of anger, she thought, ‘would terrify strangers to death’. Dorothy herself, in one of her intervals of lucidity, compared herself to a ‘madman’ and her thoughts to a ‘wilderness’ (LY, III, , ). Then in , Southey too succumbed to a madness that left him unable to read or write, ‘in a state of all but idiotcy’. As family members, old friends and fellow writers entered states that, in his words, ‘warped’ and ‘wreck[ed]’ their minds, and then died, Wordsworth was called upon to write their epitaphs (Last Poems, pp. –). In these circumstances, it proved difficult to employ a distant and ‘permanent’ style, soberly avoiding personal sorrow and omitting distressing aspects of the dead person’s broken health. A too-abstracted epitaph would scarcely represent his feelings of loss or do justice to his duty, as a friend, to offer a consoling poem to surviving loved ones and saddened readers. Yet, a full-blown elegy also posed potential problems if, while exploring the poet’s anguish, it threatened to reveal the ‘imbecility’ and ‘raving’ that caused that anguish. It might be an intrusive violation of privacy of the kind he had deprecated in Currie and De Quincey; it might offend family and upset readers, tarnishing reputation. Wordsworth’s response to this dilemma, at first awkward and tentative, was to transform the genres of elegy and epitaph as he had inherited and observed them, mixing aspects of each into hybrid memorials that, in some instances, foregrounded their own formal duality as a way of acknowledging the difficulty of writing about the delicate matter of dementia.

Memorialising Charles Lamb: Supplementing the Epitaph The first of the poems to respond to the delicate matter of madness was that which began as an epitaph requested by Mary Lamb for her brother’s

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Dementia Poetics in Wordsworth’s Late Memorials

tomb. Wordsworth worked on it at Rydal Mount in the last months of , while Dorothy lay distracted in an adjacent room. Reporting her symptoms to Southey, he commiserated over Edith’s lapse into madness. In these circumstances, it is perhaps not surprising that the epitaph that he produced alluded to Charles’s instability and to Mary’s insanity; in May , hearing of Dorothy’s mental fallibility, Lamb had told him Mary is ill again. Her illnesses encroach yearly. The last was three months, followed by two of depression most dreadful. I look back upon her earlier attacks with longing. Nice little durations of six weeks or so, followed by complete restoration – shocking as they were to me then. In short, half her life she is dead to me, and the other half is made anxious with fears and lookings forward to the next shock. With such prospects, it seem’d to me necessary that she should no longer live with me, and be fluttered with continual removals so I am come to live with her, at a Mr. Walden’s and his wife, who take in patients, and have arranged to lodge and board us only . . . I see little of her; alas! I too often hear her. Sunt lachrymae rerum – and you and I must bear it.

Mary has been retrospectively diagnosed as having suffered from manic depression, a concept not known to her brother and her friends, to whom it was not clear that her condition was different in kind from Edith’s or from Dorothy’s, even though the onset of Mary’s infirmity was not in mid-life or old age but in her twenties. All the women were described as giving way to violent outbreaks, as rambling and raving, as rehearsing past events in confused order and as enduring periods of settled unresponsiveness. It was to these outbreaks – and perhaps Charles’s seeking solace in alcohol – that Wordsworth alluded in his epitaph, only to find that even a passing reference to the ‘troubles’ that ‘hung about’ Charles’s life so distressed Mary that she decided not, after all, to have the verse inscribed on her brother’s monument. Wordsworth then expanded the poem, so that, when finished and published in , it included the original epitaph, revised, plus a supplement in a more elegiac voice. In this supplement, Wordsworth presented a dialogue with himself in which he reflected upon the piece’s hybrid form, and dramatised the problem of finding a voice in which Charles’s thirty-eight-year support of his sister could be acknowledged without dwelling overly on the recurrent mental crises that had led her in  to wound her father and kill her mother. The epitaph went through several drafts before it became the first section of the longer, supplemented poem. These drafts reveal Wordsworth struggling to refine his portrait of his old friend so as to avoid detailing the

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Memorialising Charles Lamb

‘deformity’ – or idiosyncracy – that Mary found embarrassing and that detracted from the idealisation of virtue that was the task of the genre as Wordsworth saw it. At first, the epitaph began by calling Lamb a ‘frail good man’. The published version dropped ‘frail’. To the dear memory of a frail good Man This Stone is sacred. Here he lies apart From the great City, where he first drew breath, Was rear’d and taught; and humbly earned his bread, To the strict labours of the Merchant’s desk By duty chained. Not seldom did those tasks Teaze, and the thought of time so spent depress His spirit, but the recompence was high; – Firm Independence, Bounty’s rightful Sire; Affections, warm as sunshine, free as air! And when the precious hours of leisure came, Knowledge and wisdom, gained from converse sweet With books, or while he ranged the crowded streets With a keen eye, and overflowing heart

(–; Last Poems, pp. –)

Here, hints concerning Lamb’s mental afflictions – stress and depression (causing him to be pensioned off early from his job at East India House) – are kept to a minimum; the emphasis (a matter of word and stress placement) is firmly on the abstract nouns – the generic virtues – that his labours allow him to embody. Independence, Bounty, Affections, Knowledge and Wisdom; Wordsworth constructs Lamb’s life as an instructive lesson in a risk/reward ratio of deferred attainment. In the second draft and published version, he added a line that changed this moral calculus into a battle in which Lamb won victory rather than received recompense: ‘so genius triumphed over seeming wrong’ (). Thus, evils, albeit minor, were no longer implicitly necessary to the achievement of good. Thus, too, Lamb’s innate ability as a writer was acknowledged more strongly than at first. After mentioning Lamb’s ‘Works by thoughtful love / Inspired’ (–), Wordsworth, re-drafting, reached for a simile, so as to view Lamb’s humour – often offensive or embarrassing in practice – through the ‘tender haze or a luminous mist’ of analogy. And as round mountain-tops the light’ning plays, Thus innocently sported, breaking forth As from a cloud of some grave sympathy, Humour and wild instinctive wit, and all The vivid flashes of his spoken words. (–)

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Dementia Poetics in Wordsworth’s Late Memorials

Naturalising Lamb’s conduct as a sublime mountain scene, Wordsworth removes it from its social context. Barbs and interjections are dignified; the idiosyncratic is rewritten as the exemplary – and the adverb ‘innocently’ assures readers in advance that no ill will was involved. Lamb’s unruly humour appears as sublime and unharmful as a far-off thunderstorm: by virtue of the trope, it is viewed from a safe distance just as the lightning is. Here, the epitaphic techniques that Wordsworth recommends in his Essays prove quite capable of beautifying the minor deformity of the dead Lamb’s caustic wit. Nevertheless, Wordsworth’s desire persisted to testify to the specific characteristics that made Lamb what he was. Thus, it became necessary to meet Mary Lamb’s objections, to remove lines celebrating characteristics that, conventionally, seemed like signs of impairment and madness. In the first draft, after ‘troubles strange, / Many and strange, that hung about his life’ (–), there followed phrases that particularised the effects of these troubles on Lamb’s behaviour: ‘Or suddenly dislodged by strong rebound / Of animal spirits that had sunk too low / Or by impetuous fancy, and quaint views / Of domineering humour, overcome’ (–). These phrases were subsequently omitted, leaving it unclear why Lamb is then said to have reproached himself. Depression and dominance are removed, and with them goes the disturbing oddness that Wordsworth was initially drawn to record. Lamb is left a less complex, less damaged man, more easily representable as ‘gentle’ and ‘meek’ – designations he had protested against when Coleridge had used them in ‘This Lime Tree Bower My Prison’. The final lines work hard to make Lamb epitomise Christian virtues. In the published version, Wordsworth added that ‘Still, at the centre of his being, lodged / A soul by resignation sanctified’ (–): his friend was thus elevated to sainthood. He then concluded that . . . if too often, self-reproached, he felt That innocence belongs not to our kind, A power that never ceased to abide in him, Charity, ’mid the multitude of sins That she can cover, left not his exposed To an unforgiving judgment from just Heaven. Oh, he was good, if e’er a good Man lived!

(Last Poems, p. )

Here, in a virtuous circle, Lamb’s abiding charity is repaid by charity. His embodiment of forgiving care ensures that the unforgiving judgement of Heaven is obviated. He is an instance of the efficacy of good works in

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winning redemption. The process is gendered: female charity, embodied by a feminised (gentle, meek) Lamb, palliates divine (male) justice into forgiveness. Lamb here invokes the lamb of God, Christ sacrificed to alleviate God’s punitive judgement of sinning humankind. The epitaph is by no means a failure as an example of the genre as Wordsworth saw it. Concentrating not so much on Lamb’s writings as on his good life well-lived, Wordsworth succeeds in the memorialist’s duty to ‘impress and affect’ readers by downplaying the aspects of Lamb’s life that suggest ‘deformity’. He ‘spiritualises and beautifies’ Lamb’s personal qualities, omitting details of his biography and of his own grief. Lamb becomes a moral and Christian hero; his goodness is made exemplary and propitiatory for readers. What is lost, however, is any sharp sense of the unique peculiarities that made the man embarrassing and strange as well as respected and loved. Lamb’s tensions gone, he becomes as bland as he is saintly. Gone too is the poet’s specific reaction to a troubled, as well as hilarious, man. Despite its sanctification of her brother, Mary Lamb judged the poem’s cryptic allusions to his ‘troubles’ to be too suggestive for use. The epitaph was not inscribed on Lamb’s tomb. Accepting this, Wordsworth reworked the piece in early , supplementing the revised epitaph, after a blank line and some asterisks that indicate a hinge, by a hundred lines offered as a spontaneous overflow of feeling (‘these simple lines flowed’ (; Last Poems, pp. –). The added lines breach the epitaph’s formal boundaries and move its impersonal voice towards the elegiac. By extending the epitaph, they effectively undo its supposed finality – that permanence that Wordsworth thought suitable for monumental inscriptions and achieved through form and voice. The resultant ‘epitaph plus’ hybridises into what Wordsworth called in a letter a ‘monody’ or ‘effusion’. But in practice, it is neither of these, because rather than an overflow of thought becoming speech, as ‘effusion’ implies, the added lines are conditioned by the prior encounter with the epitaph. Their overflow of feeling concerns, as much as it does Lamb himself, Wordsworth’s own poetic struggle to write of the dead when the circumstances of their lives are too delicate to be revealed. Their confessional disclosures of details about Lamb’s life and Wordsworth’s grief are examples of a way of doing it, samples of what was precluded in the epitaphic verse that precedes them. In their supplementary position, they offer a reflection upon the failings of the epitaph that they follow – but also, implicitly, on the need to precede the personal informality of elegy by a more formal and impersonal, memorial. What results is a poem pondering its own dual affiliation to epitaph and to elegy,

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Dementia Poetics in Wordsworth’s Late Memorials

rather than a monody. In this doubleness, it bears some comparison with Gray’s Elegy, in which an epitaph is embedded within the imagined scene, as the narrator, wandering round the churchyard, encounters and reads out a gravestone inscription. Wordsworth, however, does not enfold one genre within an imagined scene organised by the other: instead, he gives the reader an epitaph that ends, follows it by a gap, and restarts the text in elegiac mode by commenting on its failure as an epitaph. The supplement begins by acknowledging that the poet had not been able, within the epitaph, to fulfil the demand he felt to tell the truth. ******* From a reflecting mind and sorrowing heart Those simple lines flowed with an earnest wish, Though but a doubting hope, that they might serve Fitly to guard the precious dust of him Whose virtues called them forth. That aim is missed; For much that truth most urgently required Had from a faltering pen been asked in vain (–)

Truth to the life, and the falterings of the writer who attempts to tell it, will be the supplement’s theme. Truth is not, however, spontaneously utterable, but is dependent on the medium of transmission. What is too intimate – too deformed – for the inscription on enduring and inanimate stone may appear in print on ephemeral yet reproducible paper: ‘Yet, haply, on the printed page received, / The imperfect record, there, may stand unblamed’ (–). Foregrounding its own status as type set in a book, the supplement claims greater leeway to carry less-than-fit writing, writing, that is, released from the generic requirements of epitaph. But this is a fragile materiality, and Wordsworth immediately moves to bolster it by appealing to a conception of poetry as both immaterial and organic: ‘As long as verse of mine shall breathe the air / Of memory, or see the light of love’ (–). Here, poetry is less vulnerable (whether to blame or to destruction) because its imperfections – its failure to arrive at true finality – are displaced by its derivation from an insubstantial medium (memory) in which partiality and fallibility are accepted. And, by virtue of the personifying verbs, it is granted a bodily life, an animate existence, that neither stone nor its surrogate – paper – possess. Thus, it turns out that the supplement is itself supplemented: this not-quite epitaph, writing uneasily

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Memorialising Charles Lamb

existing on paper but not on stone, is sponsored by a notional poetry of the body – a poetry of immediate engagement with the elements (breath, sight) – and of the spirit (memory, love). After so characteristic a Wordsworthian move, we might expect the poem to adopt his typical Romantic voice – a flow of apparently unpremeditated thought-process, or unspoken inner speech. It is a sign of his struggle with the particular task of memorialising Lamb that it does not – or does not consistently. The ground is not fully cleared; the poet cannot simply assume a voice of confident declaration; the kind of address that is appropriate remains in question. In fact, the nearer he comes to considering the mental ills that set the course of Lamb’s life, the more Wordsworth puts elegiac form and voice, as he had epitaphic, under scrutiny. First, he breaks into intimate address: Thou wert a scorner of the fields, my Friend! But more in show than truth; and from the fields, And from the mountains, to thy rural grave Transported, my soothed spirit hovers o’er Its green untrodden turf, and blowing flowers (–)

In these lines, the elegiac motif of personal apostrophe is mobilised; so is the expected trope of consolation: talking to the dead soothes the bereaved and assures the poet of his vocation because he can, in the discursive time/ space of the poem, call up the absent into presence. The elegy works through grief towards acceptance by taking advantage of the unspoken voice of silently read verse to postulate an impossible conversation. The textual voice of the poet summons the dead, revived as the imagined recipient of his words even as his grave is described. But this familiar trope is then interrupted. Wordsworth continues by writing of himself speaking – dialogically supplementing his text by imaging a speech that he does not actually make: And taking up a voice shall speak (tho’ still Awed by the theme’s peculiar sanctity Which words less free presumed not even to touch) Of that fraternal love (–)

‘Taking up a voice’: the inferred speaker, already gesturally talking to Lamb, tells us that he is going to supplement his (written) speech by writing a meta-speech that is both his and not simply his. If this rhetorical

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gesture serves to supplement the authority he lacks by recourse to the notion of a more distant and formal discourse subsuming the merely personal (a textualised and disembodied orality that addresses Lamb in Wordsworth’s stead), it also undermines the familiar, emotional elegiac address that he has only just begun to utter. Why? Because to call himself into speech by addressing the dead Lamb risks making Wordsworth an intruder into that most delicate aspect of Lamb’s character and conduct – his ‘fraternal love’ for a sister who was both mad and a murderer. And yet, the phrase that follows in parenthesis compounds the unease by reminding us of the limitations of the less-free words of epitaph. Wordsworth, wriggling to find satisfactory means to write speech for the occasion, discloses a rhetoric of embarrassment characterised by supposed regress from the personal and from the textual. The supplementation of conventional forms and the voices that pertain to those forms is an effort to deal with difficult material without either coming so close that one violates privacy and faces deformity or, on other hand, staying so far away that little that is specific can be memorialised or lamented. Tellingly, the closer Wordsworth comes to Mary Lamb, the more that supplementary, selfqualifying voices proliferate – undercutting the usual function of apostrophe in assuring the poet of his singular, vocational power. These voices, apparently other than his own, are textual fantasies of extra-textual immediacy and finality that, as dialogic supplements, locate immediacy and finality elsewhere even as they claim them: sacrificing unity of voice – authorial integrity – they appear in the text to save it from its ambivalent affiliation to both closeness and remoteness. The result is far from a spontaneous overflow of a poet’s mind: to thee Was given (say rather, thou of later birth Wert given to her) a Sister – ’tis a word Timidly uttered, for she lives, the meek, The self-restraining, and the ever-kind; In whom thy reason and intelligent heart Found – for all interests, hopes, and tender cares, All softening, humanising, hallowing powers, Whether withheld, or for her sake unsought – More than sufficient recompence! Her love (What weakness prompts the voice to tell it here?) Was as the love of mothers (–)

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Memorialising Charles Lamb

Foregrounding the medium by parenthetic asides and italics, Wordsworth signals his poetic quandary. Awkwardness here stems not just from reluctance to disclose a private relationship but also from the necessity of concealing an essential part of that relationship even as disclosure is made. How the asylum-confined Mary can be said to live is highlighted by the italicisation of lives. The recourse to a supervening, detached ‘voice’ indicates that ‘to tell’ of Mary’s love by comparing it to a mother’s approaches too nearly the terrible fact that she killed her mother and that it was to save her from incarceration for this that Lamb became her life companion. In the face of such difficulty, the intimate address of elegy is interrupted and Wordsworth turns again to the more distant, idealising voice of epitaph and to the safer, because distancing, trope of simile: Still they were faithful; like two vessels launched From the same beach one ocean to explore With mutual help, and sailing – to their league True, as inexorable winds, or bars Floating or fixed of polar ice, allow. (–)

Here, the visual scene is powerfully suggestive of interdependence and loyalty but also of isolation and impediment, yet its very graphic intensity diverts readers’ attention from the biographical circumstances it is supposed to illustrate. To what the voyage and the obstacles correspond is obscured. The nautical images achieve the goals of epitaph as Wordsworth defined them but constitute a swerve from elegy just when the poem seemed most elegiac. Expectation, having been aroused by the flow of intimate address, is displaced: just why the Lambs were special – and therefore productive of the poet’s meditation on partnership – does not, after all, appear. Nor, explicitly, does another possible comparison, with Wordsworth himself and his own sister. Lucy Newlyn has suggested that the poem’s tribute to and lament for broken partnership is inflected by Wordsworth’s recent loss of his companion, Dorothy, into a madness similar in its symptoms and effects to Mary’s. Newlyn’s suggestion is supported by the turn that immediately follows. The similes, conferring intensity without violating privacy, have enabled him, now, to replace vocal supplementation with intimate apostrophe. He not only reassumes the second-person address but also makes common, spiritual, cause with his dead friend as he

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Dementia Poetics in Wordsworth’s Late Memorials

cherishes brief periods of companionate respite from an anxiety that blights both past and future: But turn we rather, let my spirit turn With thine, O silent and invisible Friend! To those dear intervals, nor rare nor brief, When reunited, and by choice withdrawn From miscellaneous converse, ye were taught That the remembrance of foregone distress, And the worse fear of future ill (which oft Doth hang around it, as a sickly child Upon its mother) may be both alike Disarmed of power to unsettle present good So prized, and things inward and outward held In such an even balance, that the heart Acknowledges God’s grace, his mercy feels, And in its depth of gratitude is still. O gift divine of quiet sequestration! (–)

This description of an elusive period of calm in the face of regret at the lost past and fear of the looming future is so specific, so exact, that although no biographical context is revealed, the poet seems to speak from experience of a state of mind known to him as well as to Lamb. After the mutuality of ‘inward and outward held / In such an even balance’, he is able to imagine the reconciliation of the distance required of epitaph with the passion demanded by elegy – ‘the heart / Acknowledges God’s grace, his mercy feels, / And in its depth of gratitude is still’. Here, a level of generality is attained that is, nevertheless, invested with emotion: if ‘the heart’ is impersonal, the three verbs in the list all suggest flows of feeling. ‘Still’ qualifies the last of them (‘is’) immediately and the sentence is then stilled at the line end. Form and syntax work jointly to reinforce semantics, giving the lines conviction as an achieved realisation of relief from the difficult experience of facing the mental decline of a loved one. The passage is the climax of the poem, as is shown when Wordsworth exclaims ‘O gift divine’, thus, by repeating a trope, branding his earlier exclamation (‘O silent and invisible Friend’) as a success. Apostrophe, it seems, has now, by calling the dead man’s spirit into words, made possible an address – a presencing – of another absent spirit – God’s grace, first (tacitly) spoken for by the heart and then (loudly) hailed by the poet. Invoking Lamb gives Wordsworth confidence to invoke God; divine grace, to put this another way, is a figure of the poetic text’s power to bring absence and silence into discursive presence and voice.

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Memorialising Charles Lamb

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After such affirmation, what realisation? The poem concludes by comparing the Lambs’ retirement into Mary’s asylum with a hermit’s. but happier far Was to your souls, and, to the thoughts of others, A thousand times more beautiful appeared, Your dual loneliness. The sacred tie Is broken; yet why grieve? for Time but holds His moiety in trust, till Joy shall lead To the blest world where parting is unknown. (–)

It is significant that here, Wordsworth borrows the phrase ‘a thousand times more beautiful’ from the conclusion to The Prelude, wherein he affirms the value of his severed companionship with Coleridge. He had revised this conclusion as recently as , with Mary and Dorothy transcribing the revisions, so that the altered manuscript spoke implicitly of his relationships with his wife and sister, one of whom was now disabled: The last and later portions of this Gift Have been prepared, not with the buoyant spirits That were our daily portion when we first Together wantoned in wild Poesy, But under pressure of a private grief Keen and enduring, which the mind and heart, That in this meditative History Have been laid open needs must make me feel More deeply, yet enable me to bear More firmly; . . . . . . we shall still Find solace – knowing what we have learnt to know, Rich in true happiness if allowed to be Faithful alike in forwarding a day Of firmer trust, joint labourers in the Work (Should Providence such grace to us vouchsafe) Of their deliverance, surely yet to come. Prophets of Nature, we to them will speak A lasting inspiration, sanctified By reason, blest by faith: what we have loved, Others will love, and we will teach them how, Instruct them how the mind of Man becomes A thousand times more beautiful than the earth On which he dwells (Prelude (), XIV, –)

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Dementia Poetics in Wordsworth’s Late Memorials

Including the Prelude allusion effectively compensates for the excision of biographical details by bringing the public memorial into dialogue with a still unpublished text that mentions aspects of the private lives of the poet and his intimates. To Wordsworth’s friends, who recognised the reference, the allusion aligned his feelings about the Lambs with the climactic acknowledgement, at the end of his greatest poem, of the dependence of his poetic vocation – and his own and others’ mental health – upon partnership. This partnership, however, was one in which others played roles more junior than did the poet himself. The allusion calls another voice to the text’s aid, but that voice is Wordsworth’s own: fully confident now in his ability to speak, he supplements himself – a self-endorsement rather than a deferral to others – even as he asserts the importance of others. Figurally, he is his own partner – and Lamb and his sister and perhaps even he and Dorothy are images of his need for others to help him accompany himself, to make his old writing inform new writing. Perhaps too they are the causes of that ability – as, by contemplating the sibling pairs as analogies for the co-dependence of sameness and difference, he makes self-accompaniment possible, allowing himself enough othering to accept his own past language as a gift from elsewhere that sponsors his present words. Difference, no longer irreconcilable with oneness, is neither rejected nor absorbed but is instead harnessed. The light bestowed, as a light received. It turns out that the poem’s tentativeness, self-reflexiveness, and foregrounding of its own un-united dual form, enables the vouchsafing, at its conclusion, of a confident commiseration not possible for epitaph or elegy alone. Although unity – any approximation of organic form – is sacrificed, deferral through supplementary forms and voices allows a proper deference, and this becomes the condition of memorialisation when the persons to be memorialised must have their deformities concealed, yet the person memorialising must approach near enough to justify the sorrow he shares with and purges for readers (who mourn the dead person whom they feel they know through his writings). By indirections and transformations, Wordsworth found directions out, although he nevertheless had to accept that his verses ‘though written with the utmost delicacy . . . cannot be printed in Miss Lamb’s lifetime’.

Memorialising the Southeys: Epitaphic Sonnets and Inscriptions What it was acceptable to print in the lifetimes of the demented person and their relatives became a still more pressing issue when Wordsworth

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Memorialising the Southeys

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came to write a memorial for Southey’s wife Edith. Her mental collapse, evident from September , was closely followed by Dorothy’s: the parallel events brought Wordsworth closer to Southey. In a letter to him of  June , Wordsworth described Dorothy’s condition (expecting her to die), Sara Hutchinson’s illness (which rapidly proved fatal) and Dora’s debilitating stomach complaint (which killed her in ), exclaiming ‘God bless you, and may he in his goodness give us both strength to support our trials, and the same to all who suffer along with us’. Mary Wordsworth then added ‘my beloved Sister in all her wanderings by night and by day, which have continued for at least a week, often turned her thoughts to you, with anxiety that you should be told why she was seeming to neglect you – “They never forget me, in their and my anxiety” has she often exclaimed’ (LY, III, –). When in November  Edith’s mental distraction was ended by death, Wordsworth, still living with the deranged Dorothy, set out to give himself and Southey consolation. He wrote a ‘private’ memorial for the bereaved husband – a gift that continued the dialogue of their letters and conversations in the formally intensified shape of verse (despite its private origins, he nevertheless sent it to the printer for inclusion in his forthcoming publication). The memorial is in the form of a sonnet – a significant choice after the Lamb memorial, because its ‘narrow room’ precludes extensive detailing of the deceased’s character and because its tight form tempers the passionate exclamation of elegy (EY, p. ). While epitaphs rarely take sonnet form, sonnets’ brevity and intricacy incline more nearly towards the permanence and distance that Wordsworth sought in epitaphs than they do towards the confessional flow of the blank-verse effusion. Braced by sonnet convention, Wordsworth was able to be epitaphic by interpreting, in an impersonal and thus factual voice, the public significance of Edith’s madness: God’s will ordained that piteous blight should reach Both mind and aspect; but far, far within (Tho’ warped the brain, tho’ clouds appeared to stretch Their shadow o’er the sacred heart – Love’s Twin For sympathy with every human wretch) Her’s was a holy Being, freed from sin; And voiceless powers for her did comfort fetch From heavenly heights that reason may not win.

(–; Last Poems, p. )

Here in the octet, the details of Edith’s deformity are held in parenthesis, suspended within a larger structure. They are acknowledged, but the

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Dementia Poetics in Wordsworth’s Late Memorials

syntax moves readerly attention onwards; narrative flow aligns with divine logic (‘God’s will’). For this reason, and because the ‘a’ rhyme continues in lines  and  (uniting the first-line statement of fact with the later assertion that ‘voiceless powers for her did comfort fetch’), formal means confer semantic authority. Wordsworth further harnesses the possibilities of sonnet form by turning his argument aside. Belatedly and unexpectedly, in the ninth line, he switches to second-person address – a distinctly personal narrator conjuring Southey as a ‘dear Friend’ on the basis of his similar experience. Such faith was thine – and now to me, dear Friend, Whose trouble flows from some mysterious source, While o’er my stricken Sister’s couch I bend Like consolation comes with gentle force So may remembrance of thy patient course Long-proved, sustain me till my trials end. (–)

This confessional moment – an admission of personal suffering characteristic of elegy – is vital to the sonnet’s effect; the image of the ‘stricken Sister’s’ sickbed particularises, intensifies and justifies the sonnet’s earlier impersonal claim that the heart offers ‘sympathy with every human wretch’. By the end, Wordsworth has engaged readers’ sympathy by revealing a vulnerability not discernible at the start: meditation on dementia and its ‘mysterious source’ has prompted an admission of need; Southey’s patience is to console Wordsworth, rather than Wordsworth’s stoic fortitude (vocalising God’s will) to console Southey. He is entreating rather than preaching; living with madness becomes a trial of the friends’ capacity to endure suffering and maintain belief. No conventional piety: if in the opening lines Wordsworth is tempted to sermonise, by the close, there is no fulsome assurance of a heavenly reunion after death. The sonnet ends merely by hoping that making common cause with another sufferer’s relative may confer patience to withstand sorrow until the end. Wordsworth was clear that consolation was the poem’s main purpose – and this made him want to publish it. He wrote to his daughter that ‘the thought in the Sonnet as it now stands has ever been a consolation to me, almost as far back as I can remember, and I hope that thus expressed it may prove so to others makes one wish to print it’ (LY, III, –). But this wish – effectively a desire to take up the role of elegiac poet – was blocked by the problem of indelicacy: ‘your Mother seems to fear it would be applied at once to your dear Aunt . . . if you think it may be printed without impropriety, pray be so good as to superintend the Revise.’ In the

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Memorialising the Southeys

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event, Mary Wordsworth’s fear prevailed and the sonnet was not published as drafted. Respecting his family’s concern that Dorothy’s problems should remain private, Wordsworth rewrote it, removing its confessional reference to his sister and leaving Edith unidentified. Under the cover of the anonymity thereby produced, he was direct and graphic about the condition and its deforming effects – shockingly abrupt in fact: Oh what a wreck! how changed in mien and speech! Yet – though dread Powers, that work in mystery, spin Entanglings for the brain; though shadows stretch O’er the chilled heart – reflect; far, far within Hers is a holy Being, freed from Sin. She is not what she seems, a forlorn wretch; But delegated Spirits comfort fetch To Her from heights that Reason may not win. Like Children, She is privileged to hold Divine communion; both do live and move, Whate’er to shallow Faith their ways unfold, Inly illumined by Heaven’s pitying love; Love pitying innocence not long to last, In them – in Her our sins and sorrows past.

(Last Poems, pp. –)

As a mixed genre – a sonnet that laments a death – the poem echoes Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets, yet it is more argumentative and discursive than passionate or consolatory – a hybrid of the elegiac and the knotty argument characteristic of Renaissance sonnets. Its purpose is to brace the distressed husband by persuading him to ‘reflect’, and then showing him the thought-pattern his reflection should take. This thought-pattern finds meaning in the ‘wreck’ of late-life dementia by reworking the Immortality Ode’s insights about the participation of the innocent minds of children in the eternal and divine. It suggests that Edith’s madness has meaning: it not only frees her from guilt and sorrow, unlike the grieving Margaret (while she grieves), but also in so doing returns her to the beginning, closer to what the ‘rational’ adult craves but finds his mind too occupied to find – ‘pitying love’. It is a purgation and a relief that implies that life’s afflictions are, mysteriously, also liberations: she is a ‘holy Being’ – like a holy fool, like children – because she now lacks the mental armour acquired when innocence is lost. Southey, it follows, should find spiritual purpose in what happened to her, and so should readers: Edith becomes an instructive lesson in the meaning and purpose of dementia. Wordsworth’s confident voice aims to decode at least some of the ‘mystery’ with which God’s ‘dread power’ governs the world.

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Dementia Poetics in Wordsworth’s Late Memorials

Although many twenty-first century readers, committed to seeing dementia as brain disease that scientific advances will at some point cure, will not share the poem’s Christian interpretation of the mystery of suffering, they may share the perception that the dementia sufferer’s humanity remains, though hidden ‘far within’. And they may, with Tobin Siebers, honour the attempt to provide a structure of feeling that allows relatives jointly to find meaning in their common experience. Wordsworth gives dementia aesthetic value by making its impact on sufferer and loved ones ‘a critical resource for thinking about what a human being is’. The aestheticisation gathers strength because of the combination of shocking detail and sonnet argument: it is Wordsworth’s formal, lexical and syntactical control that allows the poem to be a persuasive exemplification of its argument for the existence of compensatory patterns of order within apparent chaos. Mastery of sonnet discourse means that Wordsworth is able to launch interpretations with the confidence of one reporting facts and on the basis of these to make statements of breathtaking theological generality as if they were utterly uncontroversial. Much of this mastery is to do with rhyme – Wordsworth ties his lines together by using only two rhyme sounds in the octet but varying their order (ababbaab). The effect of this is to create not just continuity as in his Petrarchan sonnets that rhymed abbaabba but also variation. Couplets occur only at lines –, creating there a block of harmony that changes the pattern implied by lines – and is again changed in line , even before the c and d rhymes of the sestet, themselves creating an expectation that is altered by the final couplet. Aurally, the poem makes and transforms a pattern as it proceeds, suggesting that the pattern the poet discerns in Edith’s madness is no simple, neat and pre-determined given but a form found only through complex reflection. The poem works because it is structurally supple: the insistent statement of the final sestet is persuasive because it acts as the deposition of a gradually accruing implicit formal order. A syntactical order too – since if its rhyme scheme divides into quatrain and couplet, the sestet is nevertheless one sentence that moves over the line ends with urgency until its energy delivers a climactic realisation – ‘Inly illumined by Heaven’s pitying love’ in line  – only for that climax to be added to and further explained in the concluding couplet. This couplet – an unusual way for Wordsworth to end a sonnet and unexpected here – is thus marked out syntactically as well as by the rhyme scheme as being different from, as well as the culmination of, what preceded it. It is a new final unit in which the last/past rhyme enforces the comparison of early anticipatory childhood with belated diminished age.

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Memorialising the Southeys

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Early and late sound the same: the poem ends by aurally clinching an unlikely assertion of likeness so that it seems just, rather than tendentious. The intimacy of elegy is so hybridsed with sonnet structure that disciplined argument precludes pity and sentimentality. The generic and the general (Edith’s identity being concealed) gain sufficient force for urgency to be conveyed without the need for passionate confession. The sonnet, like the Lamb memorial, mixes and warps the formal characteristics of different genres in the effort to bring the chaos of madness into the realm of verbal order. In a grim irony, the recipient of the sonnet himself succumbed to dementia within two years of receiving it. Unable to read or write, Southey sat daily in his library, marooned in a sea of books, until his death in . Wordsworth was then asked to write an epitaph for the monument being erected in Crosthwaite church, Keswick. His first effort was in prose, and referred directly to Southey’s madness: his Mind, such are the awful dispensations of Providence, was prematurely and almost totally obscured by a slowly working and inscrutable malady under which he continued to languish until released by death in the sixty eighth year of his age. / Reader ponder the condition to which this great & good Man not without merciful alleviations was doomed; and learn from his example to make timely use of thy endowments & opportunities and to walk humbly with thy God. (Last Poems, p. )

Again, Wordsworth met opposition from a family that did not want the distressing condition discussed in public. A verse epitaph that scarcely hinted at the dementia of the final years was published in The Times on  December , and, in revised form, inscribed on stone in the church. In this instance, Wordsworth was so strongly bound by his medium that he did not attempt to hybridise genres: of all his memorial poems, this to Southey most strictly follows the criteria he had listed in the Essays upon Epitaphs. Details of deformity and flights of passion are absent. Nonetheless, the motifs of classical inscriptions are modified in line with Wordsworth’s opinion that ‘monuments to the dead, even in the cases of eminent Men, are more touching when connected with local remembrances’ (Last Poems, p. ; LY, IV, –). Whereas classical epitaphs often impersonate the deceased, making him speak from the tomb through the passer-by who stops, reads and voices the inscription, Wordsworth neither voices nor addresses his dead friend directly. Instead, he (or rather the visitor to the monument, voicing the inscription) addresses ‘Ye vales and hills whose beauty hither drew / The poet’s steps, and fixed him here’ and ‘ye, loved books’ (–; ). There is reticence rather than

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Dementia Poetics in Wordsworth’s Late Memorials

self-aggrandisement in this gesture of calling into life the local context rather than the deceased himself. By animating the hills and the books that Southey surrounded himself with, Wordsworth enlivens Southey’s writing, which, as he goes on to suggest, typically mixed the local and the universal, the private and the public: Whether he traced historic truth, with zeal For the State’s guidance, or the Church’s weal, Or Fancy, disciplined by studious art, Inform’d his pen, or wisdom of the heart, Or judgments sanctioned in the Patriot’s mind By reverence for the rights of all mankind. Wide were his aims, yet in no human breast Could private feelings meet for holier rest. (–)

The success of the displacing apostrophe enables the elevation of Southey as writer, only secondarily reaffirming Wordsworth’s own role as the bard who animates place with poetic imagination. Speaking to and for an enlivened Lakeland, he does then earn the authority to pronounce on the future of Southey’s spirit, implying that it ascends from the mountaintop heavenwards: His joys, his griefs, have vanished like a cloud From Skiddaw’s top; but he to heaven was vowed Through his industrious life, and Christian faith Calmed in his soul the fear of change and death. (–)

The last line is the faintest of hints at the persistent anxiety that dogged Southey in  and  and heralded his decline into dementia: however, if it raises the issue, it does so immediately to allay it. Consolation here takes the form of a lesson in the efficacy of faith; Southey’s last years yield a moral of general relevance, but his collapse into ‘idiocy’ remains a private matter. The poem succeeds as a public memorial by scarcely representing dementia at all. Taken together, the three poems illustrate the difficulty, in the face of familial and social convention, of representing the madness of people who are public figures, or were likely to be recognisable because they were related to public figures. When Wordsworth fulfilled his desire to console the mad and their loved ones, he portrayed their disturbed subjectivity in specifics, and used the portrait to consider the nature of human selfhood, the effect of madness on relationships and the meaning of suffering.

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Memorialising the Southeys

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He did so – avoiding sentimentalisation, condescension and euphemism – by hybridising genres and supplementing the voices expected of those genres, transforming memorial poetry by undoing the separation of epitaph and elegy that he had inherited from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. And although Wordsworth’s dementia memorials were uneven, they testify to the value of the individual, however different or ‘warped’, and to the significance of the love and pain of the individual’s partners. This testimony was given even as physicians increasingly defined people with dementia as medical cases – mere illustrations of the effects of brain decay. It stands, an early and vital counterweight to the hegemony of medical and scientific discourse over ‘the mentally ill’ that increased steadily from the early nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries.

Notes  ‘Dementia’ (sometimes ‘amentia’) was, in Wordsworth’s time, a term used by some physicians to refer to a genus of mental illness, of which senility was just one species. William Cullen listed ‘amentia senilis’ as one of several conditions affecting the ability to perceive and remember. Others were ‘amentia congenita’, and ‘amentia acquisita a cause externis’. This classification was echoed in the French Encyclopedie entry on ‘démence’, which also noted that it resulted from damaged brain fibres or reduction in nervous fluid. David Hartley, using the term ‘dotage’, attributed it, in old people, to the decay of parts of the brain. These definitions moved to the brain, as a physical organ, as in Thomas Willis’s  explanation of ‘stupidity’ as an ‘eclipse of the superior soul [that] proceeds from the imagination and the memory being hurt’. Stupidity could be congenital (inherited or otherwise), could be the result of a blow to the head, of alcohol and opium use, of the ‘mere declining of old age’ and of ‘an unexpected and very great affright or terror or vehement sadness’. In other words, for many medical authorities, the illness exhibited by some old people was not necessarily different in kind from those which might affect people of any age: the affliction of memory and imagination was the key issue whatever the cause. It was largely agreed that it was not curable, although its effects were not uniform or a matter of consistent steady decline. Increasingly, during the nineteenth century, a more empiricist and anatomical medical profession viewed dementia as brain damage. In  Southey’s brother, an Edinburgh-trained Harley Street physician, defined Southey’s late-life madness as an organic brain disease. G. E. Berrios, ‘Dementia during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: A Conceptual History’, Psychological Medicine,  (), –.  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Friend, ed. Barbara E. Rooke,  vols (Princeton and London, ), II, –.  Francis Jeffrey, review of R. H. Cromek, Reliques of Robert Burns , Edinburgh Review,  (January ), – (p. ).

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Dementia Poetics in Wordsworth’s Late Memorials

 Reported by Coleridge to Henry Crabb Robinson: Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. L. Griggs,  vols (Oxford, –), III, .  Southey, letter to Bertha Southey,  March , quoted in W. A. Speck, Robert Southey: Entire Man of Letters (New Haven and London, ), p. .  Southey, letter to Charles Wynn, June , quoted in Speck, Robert Southey, p. .  Southey, letter to Charles Wynn,  February , quoted in Speck, Robert Southey, p. .  Southey, letter to Bertha Southey,  March ; quoted in Speck, Robert Southey, p. .  Quoted in Lucy Newlyn, William and Dorothy Wordsworth: ‘All in Each Other’ (Oxford, ), p. .  Letter of  October ; The Letters of Mary Wordsworth –, ed. Mary E. Burton (Oxford, ), p. .  Henry Crabb Robinson’s comment of  January , quoted in Speck, Robert Southey, p. .  The Letters of Charles Lamb, to which are Added Those of His Sister Mary Lamb, ed. E. V. Lucas,  vols (London, ), III, –, end of May . Henceforth cited as Lamb Letters.  Mary Blanchard Balle, ‘Mary Lamb: Her Mental Health Issues’, Charles Lamb Bulletin,  (), –.  Line  of ‘Written after the Death of Charles Lamb’, Last Poems, p. .  See Alan G. Hill, ‘Lamb and Wordsworth: The Story of a Remarkable Friendship’, Charles Lamb Bulletin,  (), –.  For a similar view see Samantha Matthews, ‘Epitaphs, Effusions and Final Memorials: Wordsworth and the Grave of Charles Lamb’, Charles Lamb Bulletin,  (), – (p. ).  Newlyn, William and Dorothy Wordsworth, p. .  Text from The Fourteen-Book Prelude, ed. W. J. B. Owen (Ithaca and London, ), pp. –.  Crabb Robinson’s words; quoted in Last Poems, p. .  First published in The Sonnets of William Wordsworth (London, ), p. .  Tobin Siebers, Disability Aesthetics (Ann Arbor, ), p. . On Wordsworth granting aesthetic value in this way to the disabled characters of Lyrical Ballads, see Emily B. Stanback, The Wordsworth-Coleridge Circle and the Aesthetics of Disability (Houndmills, ), pp. –.

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 

Wordsworth’s Bardic Vacation Invoking the Spiritual in the Age of Steam

Wordsworth had, since the s, found his voice by calling on the spirits of nature and the spirits of the dead. Invocation and apostrophe were essential to his poetry; by voicing the departed, as invested in the material world, he not only animated them but also granted himself vatic status, justifying his claim to be a prophet of nature, a bard. His bardic vocation was a matter of voicing the Lake District but also Scotland, which he toured on foot on several occasions. The poetry that these tours yielded had invocation as one of its themes. Wordsworth placed himself in a line of bards who called up the spirits of the dead inhering in the landscape, including Fingal, Ossian and Burns. In this chapter, I examine what happened to apostrophe, to invocation – to Wordsworth’s bardic stance as the voicer of the spirits of nature and of the dead – when he came face to face with modernity – with a Scotland and Lake District accessed via a mechanised tourist infrastructure: motion automated and at speed. Steam boats and railway lines, I argue, left him in a representational quandary. They not only disrupted his established ways of knowing nature visually but also challenged his self-chosen task of bringing the inner, spiritual meaning of place into voice by speaking for its dead. Rather than reject the new technology for that reason, however, he attempted to be its bard and to call its transformation of space and time into poetic speech. No reactionary, Wordsworth did not reject or ignore the new world of infrastructure, speed and timetables but struggled to find ways to voice its significance and to intuit its relationship to the old, settled ways of being and dwelling that it began to supersede. On  October , the Liverpool Mercury reported the results of the latest in a number of unlikely races. Defying the storm, the boats of the St George Steam Packet Company and the Isle of Man Steam Packet Company had, despite wind and wave, taken passengers and mail to the Isle of Man: 

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Wordsworth’s Bardic Vacation On Wednesday last the Mona’s Isle and the St. George were opposed to each other in their passage from this port, and the Mona’s Isle performed the distance in a shorter time, but it was on Friday that their safety was put to the test. On that day they left here together, about  o’clock a.m., the wind blowing right ahead and approaching to a storm, which continued to increase during the day. At  p.m. the hull and smoke of the St. George were left out of sight. The Mona’s Isle arrived in Douglas a few minutes before one o’clock on Saturday, and the St. George not until nearly seven, being a difference of six hours in favour of the Manx boat. This is certainly the most surprising feat ever performed in steam navigation, particularly when the hitherto unrivalled character of the St. George is taken into consideration, and also the tempestuous state of the weather during the passage.

No Patrick Spens or Ancient Mariner here, tempest-tossed or becalmed. While the cruel sea had long been a place of legends, stories and songs, it was now subject to the machine. And while the report celebrates steampower’s triumph over tempestuous weather, it is still more elated to record its speed. Spanning the treacherous ocean to the port of Douglas is now a matter of hours even in the worst of weather. What is more, the journey gets faster because of competition. The St George had been unrivalled but a new, more powerful ship commissioned by a rival firm has taken its water and its market. The sea is now a transit zone across which capitalist investment and technological improvement play out. The Mona’s Isle, developing  horsepower, could carry up to  passengers from Liverpool to Douglas in about eight hours in fair weather. It won the race and its owners took over the route. Since his boyhood, Wordsworth had been able to see the Isle of Man from the Cumbrian coast and fells. Yet, as he put it in his  poem ‘View from the Top of Black Comb’, it had remained a distant prospect, shape-shifting in the unending and ever-altering visual depths of the sea, subject only to the imaginary dominion of the climber: Main Ocean, breaking audibly, and stretched Far into silent regions blue and pale; – And visibly engirding Mona’s Isle That, as we left the Plain, before our sight Stood like a lofty Mount, uplifting slowly, (Above the convex of the watery globe) Into clear view the cultured fields that streak Its habitable shores; but now appears A dwindled object, and submits to lie At the Spectator’s feet.

(, I, –; Shorter Poems, pp. –; –)

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

Here, the spectator alters his perspective by bodily exertion: the work of his feet elevates him above sea and island. ‘Now’, as he climbs, the isle dwindles: Wordsworth’s mountain-top command of nature is organic, made by labouring upwards into the moment, as in the Alps and on Snowdon. No steamboats crowd his prospect, ploughing their straight courses through the waves. How could they? – it was not until  that the first boats began to ply coastal waters. In April , Wordsworth had been on the Cumbrian shore in anxious mood, as represented in the poem ‘Composed by the Seashore’ discussed in Chapter . He needed a holiday. He was prepared, therefore, to avail himself of an offer from his friend Henry Crabb Robinson to accompany him on a quick tour. And so, on  July, the two men stood on the dockside in Whitehaven, along with Wordsworth’s son John, ready to board the steamboat for Douglas. This was the beginning of a trip that took in not only the Isle of Man, where his relatives lived, but also the Scottish Highlands, which he had visited in , ,  and . On those occasions, he had spent months getting to know the place on foot; now he would go further west than he had ever gone before, by sea. The pedestrian poet, transported by the latest technology, took advantage of what had already become an extensive network of steamer routes – a transport infrastructure no less, aimed at moving locals from island to mainland and, above all, at visitors keen to see sights. The most notable of these was ‘Fingal’s Cave’, the much depicted and described geological phenomenon on the Isle of Staffa that was the legendary redoubt of the dead Bard Fingal, singing of the last survivors of his race in the poems of Ossian (himself already dead when ‘discovered’ by James Macpherson). If to visit the cave was to commune with the romantic spirit of the ancient clans, now past but still resonant, the method of getting there was decidedly new. The steamers were the beginning of mass tourism, removing the labour and increasing the predictability of the Highland tour that had formerly gone overland and involved much walking, more wetting and not infrequent struggles to find beds in the few, often dirty, inns. But steamer travel meant going at the pace of the machine and following the route stipulated in the timetable. There was no freedom to wander, to idle or to dwell. A packaged experience was offered, with speed the selling point. The sales brochure and guidebook The Steamboat Companion explained: The ease and rapidity with which travellers may be conveyed, by Steam vessels, cannot be more satisfactorily exemplified than by stating, that a person may leave Glasgow, either by the Fort William or Inverary boats, and

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Wordsworth’s Bardic Vacation be at Crinan, west end of the canal, the first night; when he can engage a boat to be in readiness, and next morning early, may be in Jura; explore the island, and visit the singular caves on its western side; return at night to Crinan, and next day meet the boats from Inverary, at the south-east end of the canal; thus visiting the wild yet interesting scenery of a great portion of the Highlands, and be again at Glasgow on the third day.

What was not mentioned in the advertising literature was the constant vibration of the engine, the smell of steam, the rain of cinders and the plume of smoke. Nonetheless, Wordsworth took advantage of the network. From the Isle of Man, he took the John Ward Liverpool steamboat headed to Greenock. Then at Greenock, he picked up an Inverness-bound steamer, passing through the Crinan canal and disembarking at Oban. Thence, after two days, he took another boat to Tobermory, overnighting there. And then by steamboat, he travelled to Fingal’s Cave on Staffa and to Iona and back overland by Loch Awe, Inverary and Loch Goil and then through Renfrewshire, Argyll and Dumfries, Carlisle and Westmorland. The whole tour took no more than a fortnight. Wordsworth had moved – or been moved – fast; he had had his first extended participation in an avowedly modern culture predicated on the shrinking of space and time by the technologisation of motion. After his return to Rydal, Wordsworth wrote, between  August and  September, a long sequence of poems responding to his whistle-stop tour. Some of these considered the relationship between, on the one hand, his inspection of ancient ruins and natural wonders (the typical interest of antiquarian and picturesque travellers such as Samuel Johnson and Sir Joseph Banks) and, on the other, the new kind of motion that technology provided and the way of seeing it produced. These ‘steamboat’ poems appeared towards the beginning, middle and end of the tour sequence that dominated his  collection of poems, Yarrow Revisited. They effectively made the sequence’s overarching theme the changing relationship of traveller and poet to place and to the spirit of the past that he hoped to intuit there. It is these poems that I discuss in this chapter, as a way of examining Wordsworth confronting modernity and struggling to be a poet who could call up the spirit of the future as effectively as he called up the voices of the past. The yet unborn as well as the dead. The poems begin where the voyages began. En route from Whitehaven to the Isle of Man, the boat steamed past the high cliffs of St Bees Head, at the top of which stood the ruins of a priory. Wordsworth set the experience to verse, in a poem whose title positions him as a passenger observing from the deck of the thrumming vessel: ‘Stanzas Suggested in a Steamboat

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off Saint Bees’ Heads, on the Coast of Cumberland’ (YR, p. , Sonnets, pp. –). This was to advertise his taking of a modern poetic stance that had only been possible for the last seventeen years. It was to signal a departure from his typical narratorial position of walking or standing in a landscape, as in ‘View from the Top of Black Comb’. Nonetheless, the poem proper did not replace the fell-climbing narrator of  with a poet sitting on deck in front of the funnel. Within its nine-line stanzas, the narrator’s stance is abstracted. Rather than recount his first-hand impressions, Wordsworth ponders the meaning of mechanised transport: If Life were slumber on a bed of down, Toil unimposed, vicissitude unknown, Sad were our lot: no hunter of the hare Exults like him whose javelin from the lair Has roused the lion; no one plucks the rose, Whose proffered beauty in safe shelter blows ’Mid a trim garden’s summer luxuries, With joy like his who climbs, on hands and knees, For some rare plant, yon Headland of St. Bees. This independence upon oar and sail, This new indifference to breeze or gale, This straight-lined progress, furrowing a flat lea, And regular as if locked in certainty Depress the hours. Up, Spirit of the storm! That Courage may find something to perform; That Fortitude, whose blood disdains to freeze At Danger’s bidding, may confront the seas, Firm as the towering Headlands of St. Bees. (–)

So far, so predictable: the nature poet uses nature imagery to illustrate his proposition that ‘we’ need the challenge of the wild to keep us energetic and fulfilled. The modernity that the boat epitomises is one of monotony; machines turn the vicissitudes of the man/nature relationship into a repeatable, regular, ‘new indifference’. They are locked into a predictable schedule; they ‘depress’ the experience of time by removing its variety and vagaries. They also flatten the experience of space: the waves and troughs of the sea are furrowed as a field is. Subjectivity is ironed out – hence perhaps the removal of the figure of the poet on deck from the poem and his replacement with personified abstract nouns, Fortitude, Courage etc. The boat steams on, straight and narrow. Meanwhile, the poem’s form ranges it against the boat’s ‘straight-lined progress’. Each stanza ends with the same phrase, ‘Headland of St Bees’ or a variant thereof, closing with a

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Wordsworth’s Bardic Vacation

triplet. As we read on, we repeatedly come round to the same sound and word, and learn to expect to do so. There’s a pleasure of anticipation and arrival as we wonder, and then discover, how this pattern will be renewed. The poem is song-like – a rondo, or a catch – almost sing-song. If the boat’s progress is linear, its engine churning out the same rhythm, the poem epitomises the stimulation of facing, and finding varied ways to meet, a formal challenge. Wordsworth imposes toil on himself and triumphantly meets this challenge – plucking the ‘rare plant’ of harmony from the sonic ‘headland’. The third stanza begins with another characteristic motif: the poet addresses the cliff as if to conjure for his verse its sublime potential for threat and violence: ‘Dread cliff of Baruth!’ But then, in an unexpected turn, he changes his mind: ‘that’ wild wish may sleep, Bold as if men and creatures of the Deep Breathed the same element; too many wrecks Have struck thy sides, too many ghastly decks Hast thou looked down upon, that such a thought Should here be welcome, and in verse enwrought: With thy stern aspect better far agrees Utterance of thanks that we have past with ease, As millions thus shall do, the Headlands of St. Bees. (–)

Modernity has its advantages, he implies, because it makes mobility safer, if duller. He rejects the temptation to make danger the staff of life. Poetry should not romanticise risk or feed on drama; shipwrecks are real and ghastly (as he knew from his brother’s deadly wreck off Portland Bill). Rather than indulge the Romantic sublime, it is more honest to write a thanksgiving ode to Health and Safety. The predictability of steam technology is worth ‘utterance of thanks’ on his own and future people’s behalf (‘we have past with ease / As millions thus shall do’). The anxiety produced by the voyage crystallises in the form of a rhetorical question framed in the most general terms possible: ‘Yet, while each useful Art augments her store, / What boots the gain if Nature should lose more?’ On one level, this means that the seas and cliffs of St Bees’ Head will be diminished by the new technology that makes travel safer and faster; on another, it anticipates the questions that ecologists are asking now, after  years of mechanisation that have despoiled the earth and its climate. But in what follows, Wordsworth is more concerned to explore the mental and social effects of technologised motion than he is to depict

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Wordsworth’s Bardic Vacation

industrial pollution. He asks what will happen to ‘Wisdom, as she holds a Christian place / In man’s intelligence sublimed by grace?’, and, rather than give an answer, spends the rest of the poem explaining what this wisdom is and how it has come about. This explanation takes the form of a Burkean history of the local institutionalisation of spirituality akin to that which Wordsworth had previously made in the Ecclesiastical Sonnets. Material and traditional, the institutions in which past spirituality is perpetuated generate local pride and loyalty, thereby helping to attach people to the place – St Bees – and to the time – their generation as the inheritors of their local predecessors. Social cohesion follows, as does a self-conscious determination to live up to the perceived character of the ancestors. Both are threatened by a technologised mobility that is indifferent to local traditions because it works on a standard, uniform pattern and because it moves people to and from the place so predictably and safely that, feeling secure, they have less need for spiritual succour, less need for God. Wordsworth attempts to exemplify as well as describe the building of spiritual seriousness from local materials. He traces the commencement of local, Christian, civilisation to the missionary Bega who built a chantry at St Bees to give thanks for when her prayers were answered and the stormy seas threatening her voyage were calmed. He then uses the old lighthouse (an iron cresset mounting a flame) as a simile for Bega’s civilising effect on the local warlords: ‘Cruel of heart were they, bloody of hand,’ Who in these Wilds then struggled for command; The strong were merciless, without hope the weak; Till this bright Stranger came, fair as daybreak, And as a cresset true that darts its length Of beamy lustre from a tower of strength; Guiding the mariner through troubled seas, And cheering oft his peaceful reveries, Like the fixed Light that crowns yon Headland of St. Bees. (–)

Here, to call Bega ‘bright’ and like a ‘cresset’ is not to make a generic likeness, as if likening her to a ‘guiding light’ or ‘the light of the world’. Analogisation is tied to the specific and material. She is like the old cressetmounted light on the headland because she herself landed on that headland, guided through the storm. The present-day lighthouse visible from the steamboat becomes invested both with the old cresset light (material) and with the civilising light of the missionary (metaphorical) whose

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landing place (material) it still marks. The past – human and spiritual – is made apparent in the present as the poet’s analogies work upon what the local place discloses to him. He goes with its grain, building on traditions already consciously renewed for generations and manifested in stories and in stone. Hundreds of years after Bega died, he shows, the monks from the abbey that was built in her honour perpetuate her memory by saving mariners from the storm: ‘Yet none so prompt to succour and protect / The forlorn traveller, or sailor wrecked / On the bare coast’ (–). Their example, Wordsworth hopes, will be preserved in the charity school that replaced the monastery and that continues the local tradition of civilisation through religious education. The dead are perpetuated in the institutions of the living, as well as in the invocations of local poets such as Wordsworth. Viewed from the steamboat, the example, the tradition and the role of the poet who renews them in his analogical words are all endangered by the uniform and universal course of mechanised motion. St Bega and the coherent, rooted way of living practised in her name are replaced by a more generic, less human world-spirit – technology. Wordsworth laments its effects: Alas! the Genius of our age, from Schools Less humble, draws her lessons, aims, and rules. To Prowess guided by her insight keen Matter and Spirit are as one Machine; Boastful Idolatress of formal skill She in her own would merge the eternal will (–)

It is a powerful and perceptive charge: the self-moving capacity of machines effects the triumph of not only the material but also materialism. Machines usurp the spiritual because they appear to subsume it: motion have they now, and force. Even God – the eternal will – is sucked under, submerged in the engine’s remorseless will to repeat itself ad infinitum. The warning is not Wordsworth’s final word. He does not end by simply rejecting technology or regretting the rise of a modernity he cannot resist. Having diagnosed its effects with some prescience, he proposes a compromise, albeit one expressed with such lexical generality and grammatical obscurity that it seems highly unlikely. Rather than see the ‘eternal will’ taken over by the genius of design, it would be ‘Better’, he suggests, for ‘Reason’s triumphs’ (as exemplified in the steam engine) to ‘match’ with the spiritual beliefs that, historically, sustained people’s energies (their motions of mind and body): ‘Better, if Reason’s triumphs match with

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

these, / Her flight before the bold credulities / That furthered the first teaching of St. Bees’ (–). Bega may have been credulous in believing herself saved from shipwreck by divine intervention, but the sustenance she gained from this belief gave her energy to found a form of teaching that others continued in her name until it became endeared to the locality. Thus, her legacy was the gradual development of a caring, Christian community that still flourishes in the school on the headland, there where the poet can point to it. He ends with a deixical gesture as he again names the place. Here, the past is re-presented and tradition and modernity are linked because the gesture is putatively made from a steamboat. The poet ends his poem as a spousal verse, but the marriage he tries to celebrate is not of willing partners: he can join traditional and technological society together only at the level of extreme abstraction and only when still in contact with the localised past. When the boat leaves St Bees behind, and the passenger loses the headland from view, the union falls apart. To a new generation brought up with scheduled mobility, St Bees and the other localities to whose forms of culture people were once loyal may become no more than points of departure. Deracinated, materialist cultural uniformity is what Wordsworth fears from the machine, and while he hopes for ‘better’, he fears worse. Wordsworth restates the debate in the twelfth and thirteenth sonnets of the tour sequence. In the twelfth, entitled ‘At Sea off the Isle of Man’, he imagines, as from the steamboat, a past in which people’s moral sense was still encoded in local legends, and in which nature was imagined as being subject to mysterious powers that enforced justice: Bold words affirmed, in days when faith was strong And doubts and scruples seldom teased the brain, That no adventurer’s bark had power to gain These shores if he approached them bent on wrong; For, suddenly up-conjured from the Main, Mists rose to hide the Land that search, though long And eager, might be still pursued in vain. O Fancy, what an age was ‘that’ for song!

(YR, p. , Sonnets, p. ; –)

This age of song, a time in which, implicitly, poets were legislators, is contrasted with a present-day view of which the steamboat’s motion is a microcosm – the world understood as a mechanism. That age, when not by ‘laws’ inanimate, As men believed, the waters were impelled, The air controlled, the stars their courses held;

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Wordsworth’s Bardic Vacation But element and orb on ‘acts’ did wait Of ‘Powers’ endued with visible form, instinct With will, and to their work by passion linked. (–)

The thirteenth sonnet rejects the idea that ‘we’ can return to old ways of seeing, now understood to be illusory. It works to accept the power of science, which it perceptively argues is driven by the same restless desire for knowledge that, in the Adam and Eve story, brought about the fall. Rather than glorify Reason as simply a reflection of an impersonal truth, a neutral way of discovering the objective nature of things, he suggests that it also involves vanity or narcissism: it is ‘self-glorified’. Its triumphs, evidenced by technology, remain puny in comparison to what it does not and cannot know, because it ignores faith and love: Desire we past illusions to recall? To reinstate wild Fancy, would we hide Truths whose thick veil Science has drawn aside? No, – let this Age, high as she may, instal In her esteem the thirst that wrought man’s fall, The universe is infinitely wide; And conquering Reason, if self-glorified, Can nowhere move uncrossed by some new wall Or gulf, of mystery, which thou alone, Imaginative Faith! canst overleap, In progress toward the fount of Love, – the throne Of Power whose ministers the records keep Of periods fixed, and laws established, less Flesh to exalt than prove its nothingness.

(YR, p. , Sonnets, p. )

Again, this warning about the hidden vaingloriousness of reason bolstered by technological production remains pertinent today. It chimes with Frankenstein and with The Book of Urizen, although the poet’s alignment of Love with the ‘throne / Of Power’ itself possesses a vaingloriousness and authoritarianism that Blake contested. After paying visits on the Isle of Man, Wordsworth and his companions took a steamer for Greenock and changed there to another boat headed towards Oban. It was on these voyages that Crabb Robinson, in his journal, and Wordsworth, in his poems, began to chart the experience of seeing the landscape from a speedy, straightforward sailing machine. One of the facets of this experience that most preoccupied them was the difficulty of defining any place using the existent categories and practices

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

that they were accustomed to apply and operate. They discovered themselves to be occupying a radically new viewing position, incompatible with the experience both of the local who knows a place through dwelling in it (his feelings, his very speech steeped in it, as Wordsworth expressed it in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads) and also with that of a conventional picturesque tourist. The picturesque tour involved framing the landscape into static, composed, pictures. Movement, whether by carriage or on foot, was chiefly a means of arrival at a ‘station’ from which the pictorial view was visible; that view was the approved aesthetic experience, the desired knowledge of the place; it defined what the place was. Having seen it, one returned to the carriage and drove to the next such spot. Thus, to tour was to seek a series of static, distant views. By the s, the viewpoints (stations) were marked out on the ground and the routes between them indicated in numerous guidebooks. In ‘View from the Top of Black Comb’, Wordsworth modelled his alternative based on footwork; the Isle of Man does not stay still, a framed picture, but alters in relation to the walker’s experience of movement through the landscape. The near and far are experienced in shifting relation, by the other senses as well as the eye, and the mind and body are themselves altered in the process. On the steamboats, none of these modes of knowing was available. The passenger was both moving through space faster than he ever had before and standing still. If this was like being in a fast mail coach, the pace was steadier, the course was less interrupted and the path was straighter. The paradoxical stasis-in-motion meant that things seen on shore, rather than the viewer on deck, seemed to move with a new rapidity, though not so fast that they became flickers in a motion picture, gone before one knew them as when, later in the century, they were seen from trains running at  mph. At the  knots speed of a steamer, things altered continuously but not uniformly in relation to the viewer: parallax meant that mountains and islands changed places, moving to left and right of each other. The view appeared both like and unlike the picturesque views in which tourists were already schooled: observed from a sedentary position, it was distant and frameable according to acquired aesthetic principles, only for the frame to move before it could be fixed. What ‘it’ was continuously shifted; the picture that defined the place as the object of aesthetic appreciation – the object of knowledge in fact – kept blurring at the edges. As a result, the passenger might feel frustrated by the landscape’s refusal to stay beautiful and picturesque, by his inability to stop long enough to hold it before the eye and mind (a frustration that we avoid today by the instant snap of a phone camera). Disappointed, Crabb Robinson spent much time as the boat puffed through

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the islands reading or chatting in the cabin. When he did look out, it was by analogy that he tried to comprehend the changing scene. Lacking lived experience or close-to-hand contact with the place, unable to arrest its continuous alteration or control his own motion, he sought to know it by finding likenesses to places he did have deep experience of. There was nothing necessarily new in this: the first picturesque travellers in Britain had understood the landscape they were visiting by analogy with the Italian landscapes they had read about in classical poetry, seen in neoclassical paintings, and viewed in person on the Grand Tour. Likewise, colonists of far-flung lands interpreted the strange country by comparing it to – and naming it after – familiar places at home. Wordsworth had domesticated their technique in his ‘Poems on the Naming of Places’ after first moving to Grasmere vale, so as to make the place emotionally his own. On the steamboat, however, the view would not stay put and would look different in the unlikely event of its being visited again. It was, at it were, passing strange. Because of this elusiveness, the process of knowing-by-comparison was more provisional: the analogiser was forced to admit that the likenesses he drew were necessarily partial, remote and unsatisfactory. They might ramify – a changing view might briefly resemble many others – but they would not perfectly fit a place that blurred before the moving eye. Thus, the viewing and knowing process was itself brought to attention and analogisation did not just become, but was seen to become, the mode of knowledge-production that arose from this newly speedy way of moving through the world – a mode that might spiral, exchanging one place for another and another. Crabb Robinson had epitomised the difficulty when the steamer approached the Isle of Man. He was both too far away to know the place by exploring it on foot and too quickly past to fix it before his eyes like a picture. He turned instead to analogy, writing that ‘at a distance’ the island’s mountain ‘reminded me of Vesuvius. There are two summits which resemble the points of that otherwise most dissimilar mountain’. But this comparison produced only a superficial clarification of their elusive shape, which remained, beyond a partial likeness in one respect, ‘most dissimilar’. Similarly, Wordsworth was no more able to be exact when, on the steamer from Greenock, the Isle of Arran hove into view. In ‘On the Firth of Clyde (in a Steamboat)’, he set out the challenge that his viewing position posed to his poetics: Arran! a single-crested Teneriffe, A St. Helena next in shape and hue, Varying her crowded peaks and ridges blue;

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Who but must covet a cloud-seat, or skiff Built for the air, or winged Hippogriff? That he might fly, where no one could pursue, From this dull Monster and her sooty crew; And, as a God, light on thy topmost cliff. Impotent wish! which reason would despise If the mind knew no union of extremes, No natural bond between the boldest schemes, Ambition frames, and heart-humilities. Beneath stern mountains many a soft vale lies, And lofty springs give birth to lowly streams.

(YR, p. , Sonnets, p. )

Here, the steamboat is unnatural and depressing, dirty and dull. Writing from its lowdown, smoky vantage point, he dreams of escaping upwards on a mythical beast that soars as far above into the aery element as the monstrous machine stays below in the wet. Supernature rather than subnature. Myth not modernity. This is a fantasy of taking command of the landscape from above, for he can neither fly nor disembark and ascend on foot, as he did in ‘View from the Top of Black Comb’ and other poems. Knowing the place from the summit, feeling it under the feet, is precluded: the boat steams on. Nor can he fix the island in view: the motion is too rapid for it to be framed as a picturesque composition resembling a landscape painting. Standing still on deck, Wordsworth projects the boat’s speed onto the island, rendering its destabilising effect. The solid, material world is ‘varying’ its ‘crowded peaks and ridges blue’ (at speed, parallax means that they vary in relation to each other as well as collectively with regard to the viewer’s own position). Unable to dwell on the place so as to discover its unique self, he is left with analogy as a way of defining it, but this method too is frustrated by the boat’s rapid progress. Arran has no itself; it is Tenerife, and ‘A St Helena next’. Since Wordsworth had been to neither of these remote islands, and few of his readers had either, defining Arran by them could not be particularly informative: Arran does not in this process get recognised by its likeness to a deeply known or felt experience of a place. Analogy remains superficial, and inclines towards the substitution of one counter for another – a potentially endless process that circulates the place promiscuously as one of a chain of token signifiers. For Wordsworth, a poet committed to carefully regulated circulation that honours his source’s deeply known specificity, this is a poetic nightmare of modernity since the problem arises from his place on the speedy boat. At the sonnet’s end,

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he has no solution other than to hope that the lowpoint that the boat makes him occupy (down in the water) will enable an attitude of lowliness – of ‘heart-humilities’. He must get used to the steaming monster, and console himself with the fleeting and distant view from the bottom, in the hope of finding compensation – a ‘soft vale’. The recourse to and failure of analogy in both Crabb Robinson’s and Wordsworth’s steamer writing suggests that motion at speed precipitated a representational quandary. Wordsworth had spent much of his career, in poetry and prose, distinguishing his work from superficial forms of knowledge that circulated too rapidly – the picturesque tourism, ‘sickly German tragedies’ and trivial romantic novels that, he thought, pandered to the craving for instant amusement exhibited by mechanics – people whose lives were shaped by the rhythms of the machines they serviced in the new commercial cities (LB, pp. –). How to differentiate himself and his poetic from these forms when what he wrote about places came from the deck of a steamboat whose speedy motion resulted in the rapid exchange of one superficial likeness for another? The situation was complicated by the social life of the boat voyage, which pressed upon the traveller in a manner only hinted at by Wordsworth’s phrase ‘sooty crew’. In a statement recorded by Isabella Fenwick, he was more candid, remembering that on the voyage out of Greenock, On the deck of the Steam boat were several persons of the poor & labouring class, & I could not but be struck with their cheerful talk with each other, while not one of them seemed to notice the magnificent objects with which we were surrounded. . .. Was it right not to regret this? They appeared to me however so much alive in their own minds to their own concerns that I could not look upon it as a misfortune that they had little perception for such pleasures as cannot be cultivated without ease & leisure. Yet if one surveys life in all its duties & relations such ease & leisure will not be found so enviable a privilege as it may at first appear. Natural Philosophy, Painting & Poetry & refined taste are no doubt great acquisitions to society, but among those who dedicate themselves to such pursuits, it is to be feared that few are as happy & as consistent in the management of their lives as the Class of persons who at that time led me into this course of reflection. I do not mean by this to be understood to derogate from intellectual pursuits for that would be monstrous. I say it in deep gratitude for this compensation to those whose cares are limited to the necessities of daily life. Among them, self tormentors, so numerous in the higher classes of society, are rare. (Fenwick, p. )

The poor and labouring-class passengers mentioned here were probably, given the boat’s port of departure, Glasgow artisans rather than Highland

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peasants. Given the burgeoning shipbuilding industry on the Clyde, they may even have been employed constructing steamboats. Most likely, they were using the steamer as local transport in their ordinary working lives, rather than for a pleasure cruise. Wordsworth views them en masse, from a distance, though the deck is narrow. He does not talk with them and, because he has no inside knowledge of their lives, is unable or unwilling to give a history of their feelings as he had with the poor rustics of the place in which he had grown up – Michael, Simon Lee, the leechgatherer. Indeed, he is inclined to think that they do not have feelings for anything other than their immediate daily concerns. From the poet who once declared it his intention to show that men who do not wear fine clothes feel deeply, this is a remarkable statement. Underlying it is a reluctance to close the distance produced by social hierarchy: these urban artisans remain Other, like the mechanics in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads whose industrialised habits and tastes he disapproved of. But to preserve his distance and sustain his prejudices in the cramped quarters of the boat put him under pressure: there is an undertone of guilt as he contemplates the passengers’ poverty and labour and is thus reminded of the ‘ease & leisure’ of people like himself ‘who dedicate themselves’ to ‘Painting & Poetry’ (his comparative wealth is not laboured for). He compensates for this guilt by making a desire to see magnificent scenery (the reason for his being on the boat) both a sign of a sensitivity that the poor lack and a mark of the suffering that the leisured endure. If aesthetes toil not, and neither do they spin, they do endure selftorments – mental anxiety – to which the working poor are oblivious. And so, the poor are lucky in their lot; their lack of feeling and limited horizons are ‘compensation’ for their lives of work, work, work. Cant. Wordsworth’s argument is obviously specious as well as crassly insensitive and indulgently self-serving. It is his evasive response to an uncomfortable experience of the modern world: his need to justify himself and his vocation is produced by mass, socially mixed, transport, where human proximity threatens to undermine the prejudice that normally reinforces class privilege. He erects an imaginary cordon sanitaire to repair the breach to social distancing made by the material conditions of steamboat travel. Wordsworth, in these circumstances, becomes a snob. There is a political undercurrent to Wordsworth’s comments: the poor passengers represent their ‘labouring’ class, and that class, as he knew, was vastly increasing in size and importance and beginning to campaign for a share of power. He had, that same summer of , been writing poems opposing enfranchising working men and raising the alarm about these campaigns. Here, his political fears are implicitly related to his anxieties

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about his readership and about the social obsolescence of poets. The deck is divided, and he, perhaps, is on the edge: the poor passengers and the class they represent, being uninterested in perceptions of scenic beauty, will neither comprehend his poetry nor see the need for poets. And their time is coming, as the spread of the machines they construct reveals. For that reason, the steamboat is a worrying place socially and vocationally, as well as because its straight-line rapidity blurs the poet’s view and obviates knowing places by either picturing or clambering over them. If the labouring-class contingent on board heralded a future of indifference to nature and nature-poets, the tourist component threatened one of dumbed-down enthusiasm. Wordsworth called the passengers on the Maid of Morvern, the steamer that took him to Fingal’s Cave on Staffa, a ‘motley crowd’, hinting that they reminded him of a ship of fools. A Gaelic account of the ship from  registered how, through an islander’s eyes, the crew were servants of mechanical labour while their passengers were idle and pretentious: Iron beams and rods moving over and back, up and down, backwards and forwards, without ceasing, without stopping; pulleys and forks and notches responding to one another. Little wheels going full speed round the big wheels. A poor man down among the gear, perspiring steamily, where you would not imagine that a mouse could venture without being disfigured; but he was moving in the midst of the commotion as fearlessly as Para Mòr or myself would go among the sheep; greasing every piece of equipment, joints, swivels, and ducts with oil and butter.. . . there were many toffs down there with him on the quarter-deck of the ship: English folk, Lowlanders and French folk. Some of them reading, some sleeping, some yawning, some eating. One of them [had] a long, fancy telescope to his eye, as if he were going to fire at Duart Castle; I noticed a tall, thin, sallow-complexioned man with a monocle on his nose and a red stick in his hand with which he was drawing a picture of the castle. There was a large, posh noblewoman among them with a poor, wee, hairy yapper of a dog on her lap, which she was fondling and kissing; and there were two young maids with her who wore something that I had never seen before, white trousers of linen, under the rest of their clothes.

According to another tourist, John Eddowes Bowman, who made the trip to Staffa in  on board the Highlander, his friend John Dovaston ‘had the knack of pouring forth knowledge, spouting “Ossian” and attracting the attention of travellers (often females), to the extent of upsetting “the proper equilibrium of the vessel”’. Such performances would have been anathema to Wordsworth, who had fulminated against Ossianic displays for tourists on the banks of the Bran near Dunkeld and whose previous tours of the Highlands had been made on foot in the select company of his family circle.

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The most vivid account of the trip came from Felix Mendelssohn’s travelling companion Carl Klingemann, who went to Staffa from Fort William on the Maid four years before Wordsworth. Mendelssohn, wrote Klingemann, is on better terms with the sea as a musician than as an individual or a stomach; two beautiful cold daughters of a Hebrides aristocrat, at whom Felix may storm, quietly continued sitting on deck, and did not even care much for the sea-sickness of their own mother. Also there sat placidly by the steam-engine, warming herself in the cold wind, a woman of two-and-eighty. That woman has six times touched me and seven times irritated me. She wanted to see Staffa before her end. Staffa, with its strange basalt pillars and caverns, is in all picture books. We were put out in boats and lifted by the hissing sea up the pillar stumps to the celebrated Fingal’s Cave. A greener roar of waves surely never rushed into a stranger cavern – its many pillars making it look like the inside of an immense organ, black and resounding, and absolutely without purpose, and quite alone, the wide gray sea within and without. There the old woman scrambled about laboriously, close to the water: she wanted to see the cave of Staffa before her end, and she saw it. We returned in the little boat to our steamer, to that unpleasant steam-smell. When the second boat arrived, I could see with what truth at the theatre they represent the rising and falling of a boat, when the hero saves the heroine out of some trouble. There was a certain comfort in seeing that the two aristocratic faces had after all turned pale, as I looked at them through my black eye-glass. The two-and-eighty-years-old woman was also in the boat trembling, the boat went up and down, with difficulty she was lifted out – but she had seen Staffa before her end. The pleasure increased in gravity; where yesterday nice conversation went on, today silence was indulged in. That glossy negro, yesterday on deck, who (when he did not smoke) played on tambourine and pipe the Huntsmen’s Chorus on the Atlantic, and who in the evening had all the juveniles of Tobermory in his train, had remained there. The yellow mulatto cook, whose shining Calibancountenance we joyfully watched yesterday amongst saucepans, herrings, and vegetables, was now frying some stale ham, the smell of which drove some suffering navigators to despair, if not to worse . . .

In the light of Klingemann’s surprising revelation that black people were on board in , one wonders if Wordsworth’s reference to ‘motley’ alludes to the  passengers’ parti-coloured nature – also a result of seasickness and racial variety. His poetic reaction to the visit certainly expresses a frustration similar to Klingeman’s at the disenchanting commodification of the supposedly sublime cave by the new accessibility given to all and sundry: We saw, but surely, in the motley crowd, Not One of us has felt the far-famed sight;

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Wordsworth’s Bardic Vacation How ‘could’ we feel it? each the other’s blight, Hurried and hurrying, volatile and loud. O for those motions only that invite The Ghost of Fingal to his tuneful Cave By the breeze entered, and wave after wave Softly embosoming the timid light! And by ‘one’ Votary who at will might stand Gazing and take into his mind and heart, With undistracted reverence, the effect Of those proportions where the almighty hand That made the worlds, the sovereign Architect, Has deigned to work as if with human Art!

(‘Cave of Staffa’, YR, p. , Sonnets, p. )

If Wordsworth had gone to the cave so as to enter a dialogue with the dead Fingal, intimating the vatic spirit of Scottish poetry from its remaining traces, he was disappointed. The sonnet memorialises the drowning of bardic vocation under a wave of trippers. Steam power now enables people to reach the cave but allows nobody the solitary stance necessary to become a ‘votary’ there. They see each other trying to see the cave, rather than seeing the cave itself. Unable to commune ‘at will’, the tourist Wordsworth can only yearn to perform his characteristic way of internalising the place – to gaze and listen and then ‘take into his mind and heart / With undistracted reverence, the effect’. He can conjure the spirit of the dead Fingal only in its absence (‘O for those motions’). Bardic vacation and evacuation prevail; he is left recording the failure of his internalisation – seeing but unable to ‘feel it’. His entire poetic collapses as a result of the material conditions of his visit. Steam transport prevents poetic transport. (By contrast, J.M.W. Turner, who went to Staffa on the Maid in , generated from it an industrial sublime.) To recover himself and have the dialogue with Fingal as echoed in the sounds and sights of the place, Wordsworth had to resort to a trick. ‘At the risk of incurring the reasonable displeasure of the master of the steamboat’, he noted, ‘I returned to the cave after the crowd had departed, and explored it under circumstances more favourable to those impressions which it is so wonderfully fitted to make upon the mind’. There’s something comic as well as pathetic about the poet of the Gondo Gorge and the Snowdon summit dodging out of the line for the boats and making the entire company wait while he searched for the spirit of Fingal. The compression of the sublime experience into a surreptitious ten minutes tells us of the bathetic effects of the hurried timetable. The poet’s heroic will to communicate with his bardic predecessors is reduced

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Figure 



J.M.W. Turner, ‘Staffa, Fingal’s Cave’, –, Oil on canvas, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, B...

to a moment stolen from the schedule. In other words, modern mass travel dictated time as well as compartmentalising space. The cave was a decontextualised ‘sight’ divorced from its surroundings by the nature of the visit and there was little time to reconnect it to either the island or the self. But he had seen Staffa, and gathered enough thoughts in the brief time he had there for three further sonnets on the cave, the first of them declaring that its extraordinary geology refuted ‘presumptuous thoughts’ that ‘agency divine’ operated according to ‘mechanic laws’ (YR, p. , Sonnets, pp. –; –). By this point, it was a brief refuge from subjugation to the ‘hurrying’ and ‘loud’ ‘motions’ delivered by the steamer that overwhelmed the rhythms of the waves and winds – the sounds of ancient Bards echoing in the cave. Back onto the boat and onwards, as per the advertised route, to Iona, where Klingemann had observed the culture shock caused to the isolated islanders by the tourists’ brief stopovers: If I had my home on Iona, and lived there upon melancholy as other people do on their rents, my darkest moment would be when in that wide space,

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Wordsworth’s Bardic Vacation that deals in nothing but cliffs and sea-gulls, suddenly a curl of steam should appear, followed by a ship and finally by a gay party in veils and frock-coats, who would look for an hour at tin ruins and graves and the three little huts for the living, and then move off again. This highly unjustifiable joke, occurring twice a week, and being almost the only thing to make one aware that there are such things as time and clocks in the world, would be as if the inhabitants of those old graves haunted the place in a ludicrous disguise.

Crabb Robinson thought that the ‘steam boats by [?furnishing] the people with sight of strangers will soon take away the most amiable features simplicity of manners & integrity of characters’. The islanders also, if Klingemann is to be believed, became subordinated to steamboat time, learning to rush to the landing passengers in order to sell their island in the forms of spectacle and souvenir to visitors wanting a quick fix of romantic primitivism. Wordsworth’s sonnet on the place lamented the commercialisation, contrasting it with the intercourse between voyagers and locals in former times: With earnest look! To every voyager Some ragged child holds up for sale his store Of wave-worn pebbles, pleading on the shore Where once came monk and nun with gentle stir, Blessings to give, news ask, or suit prefer.

(YR, p. , Sonnets, p. ; –)

Iona was the final sightseeing stop. On the way back to the mainland, the boat passed St Kilda, over the horizon, and Wordsworth was happy to address the invisible island as a ‘beloved sea-mark / For many a voyage made in Fancy’s bark’ (YR, p. , Sonnets, pp. –; –). Imagining islands from fantasy ships presented fewer problems for his muse than did seeing or visiting them on a steamer but, of course, provided no material encounter to fascinate or challenge him. It was later, when his feet were firmly on the ground, that Wordsworth would address the meaning of the steam-powered journey. After returning home to Rydal, he made a trip to Carlisle, on foot, accompanied by his wife Mary. This pedestrian excursion with a beloved and trusted single companion contrasted with the boat trips, and it led to several sonnets that he incorporated in the Scottish tour sequence. Thus, on the pages of Yarrow Revisited, if not in reality, these poems were of a piece with the poems arising from his first-hand experience of mechanised mass tourism. Coming at the end of the sequence, they gather and reflect on its main themes. ‘Nunnery’ is named after a village in the Eden valley, formerly the site of a convent, where in the eighteenth century the landowner had made picturesque walks along the riverbanks, which were later supplemented by

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paths hacked through the rock. Wordsworth had enjoyed the walks during summer holidays spent there as a boy. Seeing them again in , he was less keen on the new rock-cut additions. The floods are roused, and will not soon be weary; Down from the Pennine Alps how fiercely sweeps Croglin, the stately Eden’s tributary! He raves, or through some moody passage creeps Plotting new mischief, out again he leaps Into broad light, and sends, through regions airy, That voice which soothed the Nuns while on the steeps They knelt in prayer, or sang to blissful Mary. That union ceased: then, cleaving easy walks Through crags, and smoothing paths beset with danger, Came studious Taste; and many a pensive stranger Dreams on the banks, and to the river talks. What change shall happen next to Nunnery Dell? Canal, and Viaduct, and Railway, tell!

(YR, p. , Sonnets, p. )

Although the point of view is abstracted and the poet does not appear in the poem, the sonnet bespeaks familiarity and dwelling. It knows the local names; it imagines the long dead as if present and gives a long history of successive occupations of the ‘dell’. It traces, as did the stanzas on St Bees, the gradual humanisation of wild nature: the Croglin’s fierce, raving, mischievous current is recouped, by the nuns’ spiritual unison, as a soothing voice (whence it is revoiced, centuries later, by the visiting poet). Here, over time, civilisation emerges as a harmony between wild, masculine energy (the male-gendered river) and static female community, recollected by the poet moving slowly enough on foot to let the sound speak through him. It all depends on staying in place: no rapid transit in or out of the dell for the inhabitants (neither for the poet, who is on foot and knows the place of old). ‘Studious taste’, superseding the nuns, is presented as less gentle than they: if it still aims for emplaced communion, now in the form of aesthetic appreciation (‘dreams on the banks, and to the river talks’), it is less local and less familiar – it aims to open the dell to the ‘pensive stranger’. And to effect this opening, it interferes with the nature of the place, rather than growing into its topography: ‘cleaving easy walks / Through crags, and smoothing paths beset with danger’. This improvement is all too easy and neat; though it requires violence to achieve it (‘cleaving’), it verges on the facile. And then there is the unexpected final couplet, which retrospectively alters the view of the rock-cut walks. ‘Canal, and Viaduct, and Railway’

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suggest that the dell is about to be traversed by new, more drastic cuts – by linear routes that disregard its enclosed shape and overleap the fiercely sweeping stream that made it. These were major infrastructure projects requiring large capital investment, making the dell part of a through-route for the raw materials for industry. They were of a different order to the small steamboats, subjecting the land to massive and permanent engineered structures, with its natural contours made to yield a measured level. The proposed canal was a coast-to-coast waterway to take coal traffic from Newcastle-upon-Tyne via Carlisle to the Solway Firth, with a branch down the Eden valley to service slate quarries near Ullswater. The first section opened in , but further work had not been done because the Newcastle and Carlisle Railway Company had, in the meantime, got funding to traverse the same area. When Wordsworth walked along the Eden, the  feet-long and  feet-high Corby Bridge (Wetherall railway viaduct) was nearing completion. It had five substantial brick arches and was a larger structure by far than any building in the Lake District. Although in  the rail company commissioned publicity images that depicted it as a part of a picturesque, bucolic landscape complete with rustic labourers and contented cows, it was in reality still a raw, new industrial construction site, over which rushed noisy and smoky steam trains at a speed never before seen in the area. It visibly decentred the valley, rendering it not a place to itself but merely a somewhere that is passed, with its curves and depths far below the viaduct’s engineered track and dwarfed by the earth embankments that flanked it. From the trackbed, the Eden below was no pastoral garden but a void to be transited en route from the commercial town of Carlisle to the coalmines and port of Newcastle. To see the viaduct from ground level was to look up to a world of speed and wealth that had no time to dwell – because no profit to make – in the dell. Wordsworth is less prepared to perpetuate the picturesque than were the commissioned artists. He portrays the canal and railway as the modern culmination of what the cleaved pleasure rambles presaged – new cuttings that disregard the river and nunnery. As such, the new transport lines are not seen as sudden desecrations, despite their appearance in the final, formally unexpected couplet, but viewed as new-order continuations of the prior technological opening-up of local enclosure. The ending is quizzical rather than condemnatory: ‘What change shall happen next?’ Wordsworth asks, presuming that he can conjure the materiality of modernity to answer in his voice as he did cliffs and lakes: ‘Canal, and Viaduct, and Railway, tell!’. This invocation is a notably more confident response to the technology of mechanised motion than were the steamboat

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Figure  A. Picken, after Matthew Ellis Nutter, ‘The Viaduct over the River Eden at Wetheral’, published by Charles Thurnam, Carlisle, Cumberland, . Public domain.

poems, and this confidence stems from the fact that his poetic stance is firm and unmoving and his grasp of the place’s past is emotional and historical. Undisturbed by the tourist crowd, walking and lingering at will over his home ground, knowing its origins and its past, Wordsworth could venture a bardic, apostrophising poetry that might resound with the voice of a rapidly arriving future. He could, he hoped, by calling modernity to voice, become its prophet. An attempt to answer the question that ends ‘Nunnery’ is made in one of the last poems in the tour sequence, ‘Steamboats, Viaducts and Railways’. This sonnet is one of Wordsworth’s most extraordinary, not to say bizarre, poems. It evinces a degree of allegorisation that is, I suggest, a symptom of the extreme difficulty he faced in trying, without abandoning his poetic of dwelling in and on place, to diagnose the forces of modernity and to prophesy their course. Prophecy, of course, was a mark of poetic power; Wordsworth had claimed the bard’s vatic role as a voicer of the dead and prophet of nature at the end of The Prelude. Now he tried to take that role again to bring futurity to voice, to make its motions his motions – incorporated in the rhythms, rhymes and figures of his verse. Motions and Means, on land and sea at war With old poetic feeling, not for this, Shall ye, by Poets even, be judged amiss!

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Wordsworth’s Bardic Vacation Nor shall your presence, howsoe’er it mar The loveliness of Nature, prove a bar To the Mind’s gaining that prophetic sense Of future change, that point of vision, whence May be discovered what in soul ye are.

(YR, p. , Sonnets, p. ; –)

The poem proper abstracts its title. The machines and the infrastructure that visibly subject a place to the new technology become ‘Motions and Means’ addressed by the poet. By this manoeuvre, they are brought within the realm of his saying – positioned similarly to the dread powers of nature that he saw it as the poet’s mission to invoke. Rather than material modernity indifferent to poets’ imagination in their mechanised efficiency, they become like the spirits from the vasty deep that Glendower, in Henry IV Pt , claims to be able to summon. ‘Aye but will they come?’ is the practical Hotspur’s reply. To assure himself and readers that they will come, that he is fit to deliver their meaning, Wordsworth, the vatic poet, has to set aside a large part of his vocation of staying in place until he can intimate the spirits of the dead who dwelt before him. Motions and means are at war with ‘old poetic feeling’ but, surprisingly, he will not fight on its behalf, though they ‘mar / The loveliness of nature’. ‘Poets’, he decides, will not judge modernity amiss, even if it despoils nature and poets’ aestheticisation of nature. This poem, then, will be no reactionary rejection of or retreat from steamboats, viaducts and railways criss-crossing land and sea, though it is reluctant to confront them in their messy material ordinariness. Wordsworth wants to be the bard who brings such objects and the world that builds such objects within the human imagination (as Turner had in picturing Fingal’s Cave as a smoky steamboat), rather than a King Canute commanding the tide of modernity to stop coming in. He will be no nimby. From what rhetorical vantage point can he speak for modernity? What ‘point of vision’ will allow him to prophesy its progress – to escape Hotspur’s scepticism and the viaduct’s indifference? The sestet offers an extraordinary scenario: In spite of all that beauty may disown In your harsh features, Nature doth embrace Her lawful offspring in Man’s art; and Time, Pleased with your triumphs o’er his brother Space, Accepts from your bold hands the proffered crown Of hope, and smiles on you with cheer sublime. (–)

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These allegorical figures hold an awards ceremony in which Time welcomes technology’s new infrastructure of rapid connectivity (the triumph of Man’s art over Space) and then rewards technology with ‘cheer sublime’ for its gift of hope. Time, that is, welcomes being speeded up by man’s invention of motions and means. Everything in this conjectural scene is sunny; it is also, implicitly, monarchical: Time is to be crowned as if he were King William IV, whose coronation had taken place in September . Wordsworth conceives an orderly, traditional transfer of power, resolving the tensions between, on the one hand, nature and old poetic feeling and, on the other, engines, bridges, track and trains. However, the allegorical figures are so far detached from the material reality named in the poem’s title that the resolution appears empty. It seems too far removed from matters of fact and from the plainer, more emphatic language of feeling that Wordsworth had once made it his task to write. The imaginary vantage point will not reconcile the conflict on the ground, nor will it prevent his oscillation between welcoming improved travel (as when he took a steamer across the English channel) and feeling outraged by the violation of locality (as when steam trains were to bring mass tourism to the Lakes as steamboats had to the Highlands). That oscillation is one that all of us are now familiar with: it is a condition of modernity to want technology’s benefits while lamenting its drawbacks. Even in an era in which climate change has become obvious, we are little better than Wordsworth at finding a philosophical position able to resolve our conflicting desires, fears and needs. And if his suggestion that the crown proferred by technology to time is ‘hope’ seems naïve as the ice caps melt, we should neither blame him for not occupying our present-day viewpoint nor forget that the motions and means about which he was cautiously optimistic did bring about the labour-saving and disease-curing devices from which humanity benefits. To the extent that the sonnet holds together at all, it does so through control of form and by echo. The latter braces its effort to take a lofty, prophetic position above the mundane fray, from which the relations between forces can be discerned. It does so because of both what and who is echoed. Behind Wordsworth’s pronouncement ‘Nature doth embrace / Her lawful offspring in Man’s art’ is an affirmation of the final dependence of human ‘art’ on ‘nature’ made by Shakespeare, the Bard, the epitome of vatic insight. In A Winter’s Tale, he writes Yet nature is made better by no mean But nature makes that mean: so, over that art Which you say adds to nature, is an art That nature makes. You see, sweet maid, we marry

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Wordsworth’s Bardic Vacation A gentler scion to the wildest stock, And make conceive a bark of baser kind By bud of nobler race: this is an art Which does mend nature, change it rather, but The art itself is nature. (Winter’s Tale, Act IV, scene iv)

By riffing on this famous speech, Wordsworth gains authority both for his argument and for his assumption of an Olympian viewpoint granted to great poets. He is bolstered in his bid for the sublime elevation required if one is to address, in intimate terms (‘ye’), the forces that alter space and time. Control of form boosts the sonnet’s claims to adjudicate the relationship between technology, space and time because it enables the poem to practise what it preaches – to be, or attempt to be, an emblem of the man-made compression of time in a shortened space. A microcosm of temporal organisation interlocked with spatial organisation. A time capsule. Endrhyme ties forward movement to past instances (or, if the sonnet is seen on the page, links what is below to what is above, cutting across the linear flow like a railway route bridging a winding stream). Metre subjects temporal flow to a steady beat – more like the exhaust of a steam engine than the ‘raving’ of the Croglin beck. The visual array of the pentameter lines creates what Wordsworth called a ‘narrow room’ and an ‘orb’ on the page. The scene at the end of the sonnet is in fact as much an allegorisation of the practice of sonnet-writing as it is of railways and steamers – with ‘motions’ and ‘means’ being the poet’s prosodic and formal techniques for achieving a compression of time – or the illusion of stasis – in a defined and interconnected, spatial network. Here, then, poetic form, allegorical figures and abstracted diction align the poet with a delocalised, dehistoricised atemporality where once he had looked to dwell in place so as to channel the dead who had lived in that place and to voice its past in his present. ‘Steamboats, Viaducts and Railways’ was the apogee of Wordsworth’s attempts to welcome the new even as he saw its depredations on the local that he valued as a repository of the inherited spirit of the past that had been fundamental. It reveals his willingness to set aside his old, deep concerns and to try to shape new terms to understand the world of modernity. It shows the confidence that control of his medium gave him: many of his later poems base the poet’s power to address major issues on the authority he gains from control of form, prosody and diction. But the extent of its abstraction and allegorisation also shows the extreme of dematerialisation he had to resort to in order to reconcile the speedily arriving world of machines with the slow things, and rooted word use, that he held dear.

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As the last treatment of the subject in the  tour sequence, the sonnet completes an extended trajectory of exploration of and response to mechanised modernity. It is the conclusion of Wordsworth’s detailed attempt to understand the new technological systems and their consequences for place, people and poets from both the inside (on board) and from a distance. Although the stakes are higher, it succeeds in establishing an overall, confident viewpoint more than the earlier steam poems had done to the extent that it overcomes the frustrations caused by the shifting and interrupted view that he suffered on the rapid, scheduled and crowded steamboats. He can cope better with the meaning of the modern when he stands back from and above it. The sonnet is a brave, if strangely conjectural, rhetorical tour de force made in the acceptance that head-in-the-sand fantasies of pastoral bliss, or of inviolate retreat, are inadequate responses to the new world. The sonnet had an unexpected offspring in  when Wordsworth proposed to his publisher Edward Moxon that he issue a new kind of book – a railway guide in the form of strip maps that illustrated the position of ‘a Church, a Castle, a Gentleman’s seat, a conspicuous hill, brook, or river . . . marking its distance from the line’ (LY, IV, ). By turning the pages as the train moved, the traveller would be able visually to relate its linear progress to the local objects of note that it traversed. He would regain the historical and geographical orientation that steam locomotion erased, locating himself in a place by its human and natural landmarks, rather than speeding through unreadable space. Books of this kind had been produced for road users, some of them featuring objects mentioned in Wordsworth’s poems, tagged with verse quotations. A similar publication for rail users would embed a Wordsworthian poetic viewpoint into a graphic representation of space that had speed built into it. The features of ‘Wordsworthshire’ could be transferred from a scaled page featuring printed quotations and ‘small drawings of the object signified’, to the landscape unrolling beyond the train carriage window. This would be an innovative remediation of the poetry so as to make sense of modern ‘motions and means’ via the latest print technology that allowed books to feature visual material on an increased scale at an affordable price. Moxon did not take up the suggestion, but the firm of Henry Blacklock did. Their Bradshaw’s Railway Guides sold tens of thousands of copies and became the bibles of the Victorians, though they were less pictorial than Wordsworth envisaged. Wordsworth was less prepared to embrace locomotion when transport threatened to make the Lake District not just a transit zone threaded by canals and railway lines but also a destination for industry and tourism in itself. In , Wordsworth imagined that steam power had allowed the

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area to escape the industrialisation that threatened it when factories were water-powered. Speaking about the depiction of such mills in The Excursion, he noted the change . . . in rural life by the introduction of machinery, is truly described from what I myself saw during my boyhood and early youth, and from what was often told me by persons of this humble calling. Happily, most happily, for these mountains, the mischief was diverted from the banks of their beautiful streams, and transferred to open and flat counties abounding in coal, where the agency of steam was found much more effectual for carrying on those demoralising works. Had it not been for this invention, long before the present time, every torrent and river in this district would have had its factory, large and populous in proportion to the power of the water that could there be commanded.

The worst effects of modernity had bypassed Lakeland landscape and society; Wordsworth was consoled (as we are today after arriving in the National Park – ironically enough by train or car). In , however, plans to build the Kendal and Windermere railway into the centre of the Lakes made his relief feel premature. He expressed his vehement opposition in the form of alarmist letters to a government minister and to The Morning Post. He imagined the overwhelming of the place and commodification of its people on behalf of ignorant trippers, unschooled in the need for slow, local appreciation and keen on cheap, vulgar entertainments (anyone who has been by accident to the town that grew around the railway’s terminus – Bowness – on August Bank Holiday will think that he was right; a further irony is that delegates to the Wordsworth Summer Conference are encouraged to use the line). This was to extrapolate from his own experience of being a steamboat tourist in the once pristine Scottish islands: the begging children of Iona, selling the very rocks of the place as souvenirs, must have been at the back of his mind. The sonnet ‘On the Projected Kendal and Windermere Railway’, published in The Morning Post on  October , was his poetic final word on the issue (though there would be campaigning by letter against a proposed extension to Ambleside and Keswick and against the route of the Workington to Cockermouth line). An apotheosis of nimbyism, it abandons the carefully constructed Olympian position of ‘Steamboats, Viaducts and Railways’ and defends dwelling in the dell, as the poet of Grasmere’s hills and hill farmers would be expected to do: Is then no nook of English ground secure From rash assault? Schemes of retirement sown In youth, and ’mid the busy world kept pure

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Wordsworth’s Bardic Vacation As when their earliest flowers of hope were blown, Must perish; – how can they this blight endure? And must he too the ruthless change bemoan Who scorns a false utilitarian lure ’Mid his paternal fields at random thrown?

(Last Poems, pp. –, –)

Time no longer smiles paternally as it is crowned by technology on behalf of Space. It is, instead, pressing, while space now becomes habitat and tradition, under immediate threat. The tone is urgent; modernity is no longer uneasily embraced but vilified; it is a cheat and a tempting trap. The poet no longer prophetically voices the abstracted Motions and Means, but appears instead as the bard who brings the beauty and sublimity of nature to speech. The voices of nature are invoked by name: Baffle the threat, bright Scene, from Orresthead Given to the pausing traveller’s rapturous glance: Plead for thy peace, thou beautiful romance Of nature; and, if human hearts be dead, Speak, passing winds; ye torrents, with your strong And constant voice, protest against the wrong. (–)

Feeling for landscape involves both the perception of beauty aided by story (‘romance’) and attachment to tradition (‘paternal fields’). Railways, as he argued in the prose letter that accompanied the sonnet, epitomise the philosophy of utilitarianism, ignoring the local, the traditional and the felt in favour of an abstract moral calculus (the greatest good for the greatest number) which is in practice a mask for financial self-interest and for naive worship of technology (W Prose, III, –). A simple subjective/objective, feeling/reason, localist/universalist, agricultural/commercial, handwork/machine binary is established – a reversion to a cruder, more simplistic version of Wordsworth’s old ruralism versus urban modernism. Reactionary in the strict sense. The railway opened to passengers in , but Wordsworth’s protests eventually ramified into a conservation movement that defended the Lake District against some of the effects that railways brought and symbolised. The National Trust and National Park are, for this reason, his legacy – and very good they are. Yet, these institutions’ fulfilment of our need for an apparently unviolated, authentic Wordsworthian place (albeit one easily visitable from our modern lives by mechanised transport) should not blind us to his attempts to make his poetry responsive to the new machines and infrastructures, while counting their social and environmental cost. These

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attempts were uneasy and unstable rather than wholly successful, but they reveal a determination to account for the new that bespeaks a continued determination to make poetry adequate to the largest questions. It also bespeaks a commitment to keep experimenting poetically. Trying out new viewpoints, moving to the rhythm of machines even if the journey sometimes sickened him, Wordsworth refused to stand still, even though standing still had been his characteristic stance for speaking to and for the dead whose spirits were recoverable from a place.

Notes  On the centrality of footwork to Wordsworth’s poetry, see, among others, Robin Jarvis, Romantic Writing and Pedestrian Travel (Basingstoke and New York, ).  The Steam Boat Companion; and Stranger’s Guide to the Western Islands and Highlands of Scotland (Glasgow, ), p. .  Though in  he had taken a steamboat from Liverpool down the North Wales coast. On his  tour of Scotland he mostly walked by the side of their carriage but took a Loch Lomond steamer.  On Banks’s, Johnson’s and Wordsworth’s earlier tours of Scotland, see Nigel Leask, Stepping Westward: Writing the Highland Tour, c.– (Oxford, ).  This romanticisation of local tradition was made in the context of a controversy about local corruption and coercion stemming from Wordsworth’s patron the Earl of Lonsdale. St Bees became a vexed issue, skirted by the poem. Two incisive readings of the poem in this context are Peter J. Manning, Reading Romantics: Texts and Contexts (Oxford, ), pp. –, and Tim Burke, ‘Lord Lonsdale and His Protégés: William Wordsworth and John Hardie’, Criticism,  (), –.  Steam trains moved faster than steamboats, but passenger railways did not become common until the mid-s.  On the picturesque tour, see Malcolm Andrews, The Search for the Picturesque: Landscape Aesthetics and Tourism in Britain, – (Stanford, ).  Crabb Robinson, Travel Journals, vol.  ( June– October ). Held at Dr Williams’s Library, London. Thanks to Tim Whelan for this reference.  From a translation by Donald Meek of a Gaelic prose account published in  in An Teachdaire Gaelach (‘The Highland Messenger’), a journal edited and largely written by the Rev. Dr Norman MacLeod (–). See Donald E. Meek, ‘Early Steamship Travel from the Other Side: An  Gaelic Account of the Maid of Morven’, http://meekwrite.blogspot.com///nineteenthcentury-studies-gaelic_.html Posted Wednesday,  March . Accessed  January .  Quoted in Meek, ‘Early Steamship Travel from the Other Side’.

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

 In The Mendelssohn Family (–) from Letters and Journal by Sebastian Hensel, nd edn. (New York, ), I, –.  Christopher Wordsworth, Memoirs of William Wordsworth,  vols (London, ), II, .  The Mendelssohn Family, I, –.  Robinson, Travel Journals, vol.  ( June– October ).  See Fenwick, p. : ‘Nunnery. I became acquainted with the walks of Nunnery when a boy – they are within easy reach of a days pleasant excursion from the town of Penrith where I used to pass my summer holydays under the roof of my maternal grand Father. The place is well worth visiting tho’ within these few years its privacy, & therefore the pleasure wh. the scene is so well fitted to give, has been injuriously affected by walks cut in the rocks on that side the stream which had been left in its natural state’.  On this canal see Charles Hadfield and Gordon Biddle, The Canals of North West England, vol  (Newton Abbott, ), pp. –. On the railway see Bill Fawcett, A History of the Newcastle and Carlisle Railway,  to : The First Line across Britain (Manchester, ).  On the national development of the rail network, see P. J. G. Ransom, The Victorian Railway and How It Evolved (London, ), pp. –.  Railways shrank ‘transport time’ and ‘destroyed the space between points’, detaching passengers from places en route (Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: Trains and Travel in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Anselm Hollo (Oxford, ), pp. , ). On the perception of railways see Michael Freeman, Railways and the Victorian Imagination (New Haven and London, ).  Here I take issue with an otherwise astute reading of the poem by David Sigler on the grounds that it convicts Wordsworth of making poetry an ideological support of ‘industrial capitalism’ (a concept that was not available pre-Marx). Sigler suggests the idea that Time will ‘smile’ on motions and means is ‘basically horrific: capitalism doesn’t “smile on you” – it truly doesn’t care about you except as a market or demographic – and it’s not our duty to smile on it, either!’. This is a simplistic reading of the poem, which does not and could not in  address ‘capitalism’ (with all that this concept means now). It also forgets that capitalism, to the extent that, as well as exploiting people, it made the benefits of modernity widely available by fostering technology, also smiled on generations whom it released from labour and disease. See Sigler, ‘The Intimacy of Infrastructure: Teaching Wordsworth with Bataille’, Romantic Circles Pedagogies www.romantic-circles.org/pedagogies/commons/ teaching_romanticism/pedagogies.commons..teaching_romanticism.sigler .html Accessed  January .  On this use of Wordsworth’s verse, see Julia S. Carlson, ‘Topographical Measures: Wordsworth’s and Crosthwaite’s Lines on the Lake District’, Romanticism,  (), –.  An  note in Memoirs of William Wordsworth, II, .  His campaign is helpfully discussed by James Mulvihill, ‘Consuming Nature: Wordsworth and the Kendal and Windermere Railway Controversy’, Modern

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Language Quarterly,  (), –. It is also ably discussed in Scott Hess, William Wordsworth and the Ecology of Authorship: The Roots of Environmentalism in Nineteenth-Century Culture (Charlottesville, ), chapter , James McKusick, Green Writing: Romanticism and Ecology (New York, ), pp. – and Saeko Yoshikawa, William Wordsworth and Modern Travel: Railways, Motorcars and the Lake District, – (Liverpool, ).  On the Wordsworthian railway protest and the growth of the Lakes conservation movements, see James Winter, Secure from Rash Assault: Sustaining the Victorian Environment (Berkeley, ), Melanie Hall, ‘American Tourists in Wordsworthshire: From “National Property” to “National Park”’, in The Making of a Cultural Landscape: The English Lake District as Tourist Destination, –, ed. John K. Walton and Jason Wood (Farnham, ), pp. –, Dewey Hall, Romantic Naturalists, Early Environmentalists: An Ecocritical Study, – (Farnham, ), pp. –, and Saeko Yoshikawa, William Wordsworth and the Invention of Tourism, – (Farnham, ).

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Hybrids, Hermits and Hut Dwellers: Late Lyrical Ballads

Several poems in Lyrical Ballads had narrated the feelings of women who verged on death or who spoke to the dead – ‘The Mad Mother’, ‘The Thorn’, ‘The Complaint of the Forsaken Indian Woman’ and the Lucy poems. Later, The White Doe of Rylstone, written in emulation of Scott’s medieval romances, attempted to give heroic status to the dwelling-ondeath of a reclusive, multiply bereaved young lady. These poems had been composed within the supportive community of writers and readers that centred on Coleridge and Dorothy Wordsworth. But their strange, socially levelling radicalism and their unusual feminism had met incomprehension and hostility from reviewers, who made Wordsworth a by-word for puerility, namby-pambyism and egotism. Meanwhile, Scott’s ballads and romances became bestsellers, as, in the s, did the female-centric lyrics and laments of Felicia Hemans. In the s and s, to replace the broken Coleridge/Dorothy circle, and to respond to critical hostility and other poets’ popularity, Wordsworth wrote a series of late lyrical ballad-like poems, adapting the forms and motifs that Scott and Hemans had made popular. He identified these poems as products of a new circle of writers and readers. This circle was more distant than his old, close Grasmere community and also more gentlemanly; it comprised men and woman of established social reputation – arbiters of taste. The new poems spoke, and were shown to speak, out of and back to a socially acceptable interpretive community that conformed to conventional standards. In this way, the hostility with which the oddly innovative and socially radical Lyrical Ballads had been met might be obviated. Yet the new pieces were by no means sell-outs of his old need to justify the feelings of ordinary, unimportant rustics. They show Wordsworth reworking, within the popular genres of the chivalric tale and the sentimental romance, his old preoccupation with people who dwell at the margins of society (people, especially women, on the verge of the world of death). He produced hybrids of his old poems and the genres now in vogue that reshaped those genres – 

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undermining several of their central conventions and taking them in a feminist direction. He did this by formal and prosodic experimentation, so as to prevent the verse becoming smooth and facile and so as to concentrate attention on the extraordinary ways of living and feeling of his characters.

‘The Somnambulist’ By the late  and s, Wordsworth had largely lost the support of his closest companions: Coleridge was dead, Dorothy suffering from dementia. His informing dialogues with them, underpinning his sense of meaningful emplacedness in the world, were now with their past, textual, selves. However, he gained substitutes for these dialogues with the dead by receiving textual input from other, sometimes unexpected sources, including from readers who sent him letters. In response to these, he wrote what amounted to a series of new lyrical hybrids – not the lyrical ballads of  and  but poems lyricising other genres such as the chivalric romance and the sonnet sequence. These new poems, as before, versified local incidents among rustics and/or narrated romantic and supernatural stories. Increasingly, though, Wordsworth revealed that their origin was not in personal witness – even when they presented matters at first-hand – but in the reports of correspondents or the pages of books. Their claim to authentic knowledge was no longer based on conversation with his old, close collaborators. His poems were introduced as participating in a more distant and more textual community that preserved local events when they became extraordinary or significant, even or especially if that community had been brought into being by his own earlier poetic efforts (as when correspondents fed him stories that their knowledge of Lyrical Ballads had sensitised them to collect). He, as it were, showed himself to be informed by and responding to public report, and even to fan narratives. By doing so, he sought to pre-empt the kind of critical dismissal that Lyrical Ballads and the  poems had received on the basis that they reported insignificant matters from the singular perspective of a crank and his tiny cult of acolytes. On this basis, they and their subjects were ruled out of the literary community: readers were told to ignore their claims to be representative of human feelings; they had no general currency; they spoke only of the peculiar view of a naïve and egotistical oddball. Nobody else was or should be interested. In ‘The Somnambulist’ (written late ), Wordsworth responded to this dismissal of his work by deriving his narrative from an interpretive

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community of gentlemen who had experience of the locality and of the wider, literary world. He produced the poem, that is, not from a direct encounter with a Lakeland inhabitant but as a text arising from and circulating among trusted readers who were accustomed to (and indeed arbiters of ) the ways of representing the local and the extra-literate that were agreed to be culturally appropriate (tasteful). Among these men were the Ullswaterbased landscape painter John Glover, founder of the Society of British Artists, the London poet and host Samuel Rogers, who knew everyone on the literary scene, and Sir George Beaumont, patron of artists including Constable and Wilkie and benefactor of poets including Coleridge, Southey and Wordsworth himself. As Wordsworth later explained to Isabella Fenwick, these men, touring the Ullswater area of the Lakes in , together agreed how a local story could be made into verse: This poem might be dedicated to my friends. Sir G. Beaumont and Mr. Rogers, jointly. While we were making an excursion together in this part of the Lake District we heard that Mr. Glover, the artist, while lodging at Lyulph’s Tower, had been disturbed by a loud shriek, and upon rising he had learnt that it had come from a young woman in the house who was in the habit of walking in her sleep. In that state she had gone downstairs, and, while attempting to open the outer door, either from some difficulty or the effect of the cold stone upon her feet, had uttered the cry which alarmed him. It seemed to us all that this might serve as a hint for a poem, and the story here told was constructed and soon after put into verse by me as it now stands. (Fenwick, p. )

In , Wordsworth wrote to Rogers declaring that ‘The Somnambulist’ was ‘one of several pieces, written at a heat, which I should have much pleasure in submitting to your judgement’ (LY, II, ). Also part of the interpretive community, at least textually, was Walter Scott, collector of local stories and ballads and the author of a ballad romance set in the Lake District that featured both Lyulph’s Tower and somnambulism. It was to this poem, The Bridal of Triermain; Or, the Vale of St John (), that ‘The Somnambulist’ responded, not without critical dissonance centring on the representation of women. Scott and the other gentlemen were invoked as ideal interpreters in Yarrow Revisited and Other Poems (), where ‘The Somnambulist’ was first published. This volume contained a dedication to Rogers, an elegy for Beaumont (who had died since the poem’s occasioning encounter), and an extensive response to Scott’s Border country and to Scott’s poeticisation of that country’s lore and legends. A supplementary member of the circle, not quite on equal terms because a new acquaintance and because a woman, was Felicia

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Hemans, who had dedicated her  collection Records of Woman to Wordsworth, who visited him at Rydal Mount in  and whom he elegised in  in the ‘Extempore Effusion Upon the Death of James Hogg’. In that poem, he commemorated the ‘love-lorn Maid’ who was the hallmark figure of Hemans’s verse alongside the ‘slaughtered youth’ of the Yarrow ballads published by Scott (Last Poems, pp. –; ). If in its published context ‘The Somnambulist’ was a response to Hemans and to Scott and part of a poetic community also featuring Rogers and Beaumont, its subject reworked that of several lyrical ballads while its form adapted that of the chivalric romance. Making his old verse more conventionally literary, Wordsworth nevertheless subjected conventional literature to experimental warping. The conventionalisation began with historical distancing. The poem displaces the sleepwalking story related by Glover to a distant, legendary past, blurring its origin so that it seems as if Wordsworth is reporting a traditional legend from the medieval period – a chivalric tale of the kind Scott had made wildly popular. The warping is apparent formally: the poem is not written in one of Scott’s forms, nor in one of those used in Lyrical Ballads, but in an experimental nine-line stanza of Wordsworth’s design. The verse is evidently literary; the poem does not aim to resemble a ‘man speaking to men’ but neither do its stanzas sound like Scott’s. At its centre is a woman’s experience; having accepted the love of a knight, Sir Eglamore, the ‘Maid’ waits at home on the shore of Ullswater by Lyulph’s Tower, like a bird in a cage, while he performs martial deeds ‘through wide-spread regions errant’ (Sonnets, p. ; ). He enjoys honour and reputation; she, as his absence lengthens, is left to wait and pine, and falls into a depression, becoming fixated on the brief past occasions when they were together. Living in her thoughts and feelings, she becomes a sleepwalker, haunting a nearby river (Aira Force), where, unbeknownst to her, she is seen in the darkness by the returned Eglamore, who cannot at first tell whether she is alive or a ghost: While ’mid the fern-brake sleeps the doe, And owls alone are waking, In white arrayed, glides on the Maid The downward pathway taking, That leads her to the torrent’s side And to a holly bower; By whom on this still night descried? By whom in that lone place espied? By thee, Sir Eglamore!

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A wandering Ghost, so thinks the Knight, His coming step has thwarted, Beneath the boughs that heard their vows, Within whose shade they parted. Hush, hush, the busy Sleeper see! Perplexed her fingers seem, As if they from the holly tree Green twigs would pluck, as rapidly Flung from her to the stream.

(Sonnets, p. ; –)

When he reaches out to touch her, she falls into the torrent; he rescues her and she regains consciousness long enough to recognise her beloved, and then dies: She heard, ere to the throne of grace Her faithful Spirit flew, His voice – beheld his speaking face; And, dying, from his own embrace, She felt that he was true. (–)

He then becomes a hermit, living as reclusively and piously at the spot by choice as the maid had been forced to live by the restrictions placed on her gender. His aim is so to dwell in the place that he may commune with her ghost or at least live as his dead beloved lived. The poem ends by invoking the stream so as to demonstrate Wordsworth’s aim of making the Aira valley as legendary a place of poetry as Scott’s (and Hogg’s) ballads had made Yarrow, the Scottish river synonymous with a bereft woman lamenting the death of her lover, murdered on its banks (‘Rare Willie drowned in Yarrow’): Wild stream of Aira, hold thy course, Nor fear memorial lays, Where clouds that spread in solemn shade, Are edged with golden rays! Dear art thou to the light of heaven, Though minister of sorrow; Sweet is thy voice at pensive even; And thou, in lovers’ hearts forgiven, Shalt take thy place with Yarrow! (–)

This final gesture, framing Wordsworth’s Arthurian romance by naming the river and by alluding to the songs of Scott’s river, recalls the Poems on the

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Naming of Places included in the  Lyrical Ballads. But if the poem is a new lyrical ballad, it is a remodelled one: the deathly incident that made the place extraordinary and thus worth naming in verse is no longer rendered in its contemporary ordinariness but is instead packaged in decorous, antique dress. To some readers, this has seemed a tame retreat from the awkward, challenging, enigmatic stories Wordsworth used to tell and is an indication of his succumbing to a commodity culture in which verse was marketed in literary annuals to a predominantly female readership, with all plainness and strangeness smoothed away to fit the fashion for chivalric tales with conventional storylines and sentimental endings. As such, it could be safely passed from the circle of arbiters of taste within which it had originated and circulated – Rogers, Beaumont and Scott – to a wider readership without fear of the incomprehension and derision that his radical poetic experiments of ,  and  had received. Wordsworth would no longer look like an isolated crank overvaluing his own peculiar, unrepresentative interests. Limited as it is by its pseudo-medieval conventionality, the poem is nonetheless not merely an example of a tired Wordsworth giving up his insistence on differing from popular taste. To argue that it simply pandered to a bowdlerised and feminised taste that preferred a regulated emotional frisson to the challenge of independent thinking would be to miss its critical revision of the chivalric romance that Scott had made the fashion, a feminist revision rejecting the salacious and chauvinist voyeurism of Scott’s eroticised portraits of women as willing sexual playthings. For all his acknowledgement of Scott, Wordsworth was provoked by The Bridal of Triermain into an imitation that effectively turned the romance genre inside out. As ‘The Somnambulist’ would be, The Bridal was set near Lyulph’s Tower and the nearby Vale of St John: it was Scott’s effort to retrofit the locality in which Wordsworth had walked with him with legends and traditions dating from the medieval period (cf. Scott’s response to climbing Helvellyn discussed in Chapter ). Beginning in modern times with Arthur and Lucy, a courting couple, The Bridal soon turns to a supposedly local tale about Sir Roland de Vaux and his quest to liberate – and marry – Gyneth, the illegitimate daughter of King Arthur and Arthur’s mistress Guendolen. Gyneth, desirable yet cruel, as Sir Roland hears, has been spellbound by Merlin, lest all the Arthurian knights slay each other in competition to win her in marriage. She is left alive but asleep, sequestered in an enchanted castle that is only occasionally visible, in visions or dreams, to those who quest for it. Depending on how well-disposed one was to Scott, The Bridal seemed either a homage to or a plagiarism from Lyrical Ballads. Coleridge was

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certainly ambivalent about Scott’s borrowings from Christabel (where Sir Roland first appears); Wordsworth was also inclined both to admire and resent Scott’s development of his poetry, so much more popular than his own when it converted Lakeland places and people into story. Scott’s easy appropriation of the Lyrical Ballads’ surface features is never more apparent than in The Bridal’s opening stanzas: Come Lucy! while ’tis morning hour The woodland brook we needs must pass; So, ere the sun assume his power, We shelter in our poplar bower, Where dew lies long upon the flower, Though vanish’d from the velvet grass. Curbing the stream, this stony ridge May serve us for a silvan bridge; For here, compell’d to disunite, Round petty isles the runnels glide, And chafing off their puny spite, The shallow murmurers waste their might, Yielding to footstep free and light A dry-shod pass from side to side.

(Bridal, p. , canto I, stanza )

These lines tame the lyrics in which, for Dorothy and Lucy, Wordsworth made the Lake District configure revolutionary liberty and catastrophic loss; here, Scott’s narrator and his companion are not so much exposed to the wild woods and desolate fells as afraid of getting their shoes wet. Scott’s modern landscape is domesticated and his contemporary lovers timorous; wildness and heroism are confined to its past and to their ancestors – available only as vicarious thrills in the ancient legends that Arthur recites. Arthur tells Lucy an antique tale narrating King Arthur’s seduction in a magic Lakeland castle. An errant knight indeed, the King is charmed by the sensual ministrations of the young damsels he encounters there (Bridal, pp. –, canto I, stanza ). Adoring and nubile handmaidens (the oldest is but eighteen, Scott points out), they offer the reader a soft-porn wish-fulfilment fantasy of willing compliance that is intensified when Queen Guendolen herself appears – beautiful, regal, yet skilled in rendering herself seductive with a faux naiveté. Scott arouses an erotic frisson as she and the King come closer and closer to a clinch: Oft did she pause in full reply, And oft cast down her large dark eye,

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Hybrids, Hermits and Hut Dwellers Oft check’d the soft voluptuous sigh That heav’d her bosom’s pride. Slight symptoms these, but shepherds know How hot the mid-day sun shall glow From the midst of morning sky; And so the wily Monarch guess’d That this assumed restraint express’d More ardent passions in the breast Than ventured to the eye. Closer he press’d, while beakers rang, While maidens laugh’d and minstrels sang, Still closer to her ear

(Bridal, p. , canto I, stanza )

But Scott then fades to black, teasingly denying the reader the salacious climax in the tone of a man of the world who is too well-used to sexual liaisons to want to rehearse the details of this one (Bridal, pp. –, canto I, stanza ). Arthur lingers adulterously in Guendolen’s magic bower, only to leave her when he feels the need to return to knightly action. Her revenge, years later, is to send him their beautiful daughter Gyneth. Stunned by her beauty, Arthur makes her the prize of a tournament; she is authorised by him to decide the victor who will win her. She refuses to commit, watching on while his knights slaughter each other in their enchanted desire to win her. Merlin then appears to end the destruction caused by her beauty and cruelty (and men’s sexual desire). He spellbinds Gyneth for her failure to show the compassion that it was women’s function to deliver. In this world – Scott’s update of the courtly love topos – women are made to fascinate men; they may themselves feel desire and even act on this desire, but they will be punished if they do not minister to men’s needs and do not become emotionally dependent on them. She, as a ‘fair cause of mischief’, is condemned to bear thy penance lone In the Valley of Saint John, And this weird shall overtake thee; Sleep, until a knight shall awake thee, For feats of arms as far renown’d As warrior of the Table Round.

(Bridal, pp. –, canto II, stanza )

That warrior is Sir Roland, and he is fitted for the task because although he is aroused by women’s sexual charms, he is not overwhelmed by them. Entering the enchanted castle in which she sleeps, he passes courteously

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through a chamber in which women offer themselves as his private dancers. Excited by their allure, he nevertheless stops only briefly to kiss. Here, Scott takes another opportunity to put on an erotic show: ‘Gentle knight, a while delay,’ Thus they sung, ‘thy toilsome way, While we pay the duty due To our Master and to you. Over avarice, over fear, Love triumphant led thee here; Warrior, list to us, for we Are slaves to love, are friends to thee. Though no treasured gems have we, To proffer on the bended knee, Though we boast nor arm nor heart, For the assagay or dart, Swains allow each simple girl Ruby lip and teeth of pearl; Or, if dangers more you prize, Flatters find them in our eyes. ‘Stay, then, gentle warrior, stay, Rest till evening steal on day; Stay, O stay! in yonder bowers We will braid thy locks with flowers, Spread the feast and fill the wine, Charm thy ear with sounds divine, Weave our dances till delight Yield to languor, day to night. Then shall she you most approve, Sing thee lays that best you love, Soft thy mossy couch shall spread, Watch thy pillow, prop thy head, Till the weary night be o’er; Gentle warrior, wouldst thou more? Wouldst thou more, fair warrior? She Is slave to love and slave to thee.’

(Bridal, pp. –, canto III, stanza )

Passing on, Sir Roland and the (male) reader are able to enjoy the prospect of willing sex slaves but still maintain their virtue intact: the poet offers erotic entertainment but maintains an air of respectability because the showgirls are not touched. When the hero enters Gyneth’s chamber, she too is presented for his sexual desire: she is waiting and vulnerable, all the more tempting because, being asleep, she is not coquettishly attempting to attract him, though her

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‘charms’ are visible (Bridal, p. , canto III, stanza ). Sir Roland touches her and the spell is broken; she will now be his bride, with her beauty possessed by him and her previous identity erased. What she thinks of this, or anything else, Scott does not say: she is reduced to her body, flowering sensually again but now held in Sir Roland’s grasp: ‘Safe and free from magic power, / Blushing like the rose’s flower / Opening to the day’ (Bridal, p. , canto III, stanza ). The voyeurism in which Scott indulges the reader is kept within the medieval romance. In the frame narrative concerning the modern Arthur and his love, Lucy, all is genteel courtesy. Lucy will learn from the old story to be led by her man, retreating from the prospect of wildness rather than following the examples of Guendolen’s and Gyneth’s untamed sexuality and imperious conduct; she will not exploit her attractiveness but will depend on his leadership. Jacketed thus by conventional gender and sexual relations, The Bridal would not be branded by reviewers, as Keats’s, Coleridge’s and Byron’s chivalric romances all were, as improperly erotic, the work of a libertine. Nevertheless, it made the Lake District, in its old legends and tales, a place of titillation in which women exist to tempt men by their bodies and in which men become heroes when, by muscular action, they bring women’s sexuality under their control. Scott also made sure that his poem would not, unlike Lyrical Ballads, appear so rustic as to be uncouth or so local as to be idiosyncratic. It turns out that his Arthur and Lucy are only excursionists to the wilds, not natives of the place. They have merely been picnicking. Calling to their ‘menials’ (servants), they will pack up and leave; their carriage is waiting. This scenario was, with regard to the poems to Dorothy and Lucy from which Scott borrowed, to gentrify Wordsworth’s verse, turning into touristic entertainment its rootedness in the place’s unique culture. It was to transform its commitment to valuing the specific texture of the local into an exportable, ready-to-wear form: St John’s Vale became a mere brand name intended to give an aura of authenticity to a generic product. ‘The Somnambulist’ is both a tribute and an act of resistance to The Bridal of Triermain. It turns Glover’s recent story of the real sleepwalking girl in Lyulph’s Tower into an Arthurian tale within a tale; it borrows the central device of a sleeping woman being claimed by her knight. In these respects, it conforms to the genre that Scott had made so popular, as if marketing the Lakes, just as Scott had marketed them, as a place where lore and legend could still be encountered. If it seems for this reason a commodification of Lyrical Ballads into a conventional package, nevertheless it has beneath its elegant and tasteful appearance a determination to

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demonstrate Wordsworth’s independent mastery and his faithfulness to the specific contours of human feeling discernible in local stories – especially stories about women. Scott was well known for the metrical and formal variety of his romances; in ‘The Somnambulist’ Wordsworth concocted a unique nine-line stanza beginning in common metre but expanding beyond it. Its intricate rhyme scheme (abcbdedde) includes internal rhymes in the third line: it is the form of a virtuoso – a slow form intended to concentrate readers’ attention on each discrete stanza rather than rush them through a fast-moving story, as in The Bridal. Content is also markedly revisionist: Wordsworth’s fascination with the psychology of female suffering as indicated by the sleepwalking girl breaches generic expectations. Wordsworth’s heroine is nothing like Scott’s women; what characterises her is an irreducible mental individuality derived from her isolated occupation of one specific place, rather than a compliant physical attractiveness that is exhibited by beautiful women everywhere. In fact, she resembles Margaret in The Ruined Cottage and Emily in The White Doe of Rylstone in that her identity is so stubbornly built upon a location she has inhabited with the man she loves that when he leaves and she loses hope of his return she stays put, dwelling there with her memories of companionship. The poem shows Wordsworth trying, by transposing Glover’s anecdote about a local occurrence into a popular, easily accessible genre, to give the rustic event national currency. It also shows him at his most feminist: he evokes sympathy and admiration for the abandoned woman, showing the tragic effects of her sincere love for a man in a society that forces her to remain static, passive and alone while her lover leaves to become a man of violence, seeking the honour and glory that he had been educated to believe heroic: They parted. – Well with him it fared Through wide-spread regions errant; A knight of proof in love’s behoof, The thirst of fame his warrant: And She her happiness can build On woman’s quiet hours; Though faint, compared with spear and shield, The solace beads and masses yield, And needlework and flowers. (Sonnets, p. ; –)

‘Though faint’: with these words, Wordsworth highlights men and women’s unequal lots. Her pastimes are feeble sources of happiness and

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her attempts to amuse herself fade, even when she recites to herself a chivalric romance: Yet blest was Emma when she heard Her Champion’s praise recounted; Though brain would swim, and eyes grow dim, And high her blushes mounted; Or when a bold heroic lay She warbled from full heart; Delightful blossoms for the ‘May’ Of absence! but they will not stay, Born only to depart. (–)

Tellingly, Wordsworth here invokes, only to alter, the ‘gather ye rosebuds while ye may’ topos: rather than using the passing of spring blossom to urge a woman to come to bed, he uses it to image the psychological effects of abandonment by the seductive man. The failure to compensate for the lover’s absence by stories and poems about his prowess – which inevitably fade as flowers do – critiques a trope that is usually associated with male boasting and with poets’ seduction of innocent women by the persuasive images of their verse (Scott’s Arthur, impressing Lucy with his ‘lay’ about King Arthur and Sir Roland, is in Wordsworth’s sights here). Wordsworth’s version of knight errantry is remarkable for what is almost never articulated in the romance genre – the woman’s exploitation by the chivalric system. In ‘The Somnambulist’, the hero is parasitic: Sir Eglamore’s fame feeds on her obscurity, his freedom on her confinement, his deeds on her fancies. His light is her shadow: Hope wanes with her, while lustre fills Whatever path he chooses; As if his orb, that owns no curb, Received the light hers loses. He comes not back; an ampler space Requires for nobler deeds; He ranges on from place to place, Till of his doings is no trace, But what her fancy breeds. (–)

The entire psychology, plot and purpose of The Bridal of Triermain are rejected in these lines, and in the next stanza, when the maid finds a centre for herself in recollecting the past rather than in yearning for her knight’s presence:

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His fame may spread, but in the past Her spirit finds its centre; Clear sight She has of what he was, And that would now content her. (–)

The power of memory cannot, however, sustain her against the suspicion and anxiety that beset her mind: ‘Still is he my devoted Knight?’ The tear in answer flows; Month falls on month with heavier weight; Day sickens round her, and the night Is empty of repose. (–)

Faced with life-destroying depression (so powerfully indicated by the free indirect discourse of ‘day sickens’ – the narrator’s objectification of her point of view), she preserves her memory, and her sense of self, below the level of consciousness. In a somnambulistic trance, she nightly returns to the place where she and her knight had pledged their love. This is to recollect lost experience by repeatedly occupying the ground associated with that experience – a personal ritualisation that sacralises the spot, as Wordsworth recorded himself and his companions doing in the Poems on the Naming of Places and in ‘Tintern Abbey’. She, however, embodies Wordsworth’s late-life disenchantment about the efficacy of such ritualisation. She sleepwalks to shield the core of her being from the awareness that besets her when awake that the lover on whom she predicated herself may have abandoned her. The beloved may not return and memory will not revive his past presence (cf. the sea poems discussed in Chapter ). Sir Eglamore does return, but too late. He witnesses her sleepwalking beside the rushing stream, but is unable to make sense of what he sees: A wandering Ghost, so thinks the Knight, His coming step has thwarted, Beneath the boughs that heard their vows, Within whose shade they parted. Hush, hush, the busy Sleeper see! Perplexed her fingers seem, As if they from the holly tree Green twigs would pluck, as rapidly Flung from her to the stream. (–)

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Because the reader knows her history and Sir Eglamore does not, his reaction seems laughably unimaginative: dramatic irony undermines his chivalric assumptions about his own importance: What means the Spectre? Why intent To violate the Tree, Thought Eglamore, by which I swore, Unfading constancy? Here am I, and to-morrow’s sun, To her I left, shall prove That bliss is ne’er so surely won As when a circuit has been run Of valour, truth, and love. (–)

Bliss, the reader already knows, is not a prize to be won elsewhere and presented, gift-wrapped, on return; the chivalric code may benefit the knight, but it destroys the lady. Sir Eglamore abandons it after her death, rooting himself to the spot as a hermit as he belatedly tries to recollect their past by dwelling where she lived and died – communing there with his dead lover and, thereby, devoting himself to the spiritual world. This death-orientated communing takes the poem beyond its incorporation in the polite literary community of Glover, Beaumont and Rogers. The knight, the poem and Wordsworth himself take a more radical turn than the poem’s framing allows for. The late Wordsworth is more radical than he knows, or more likely takes the reader by gradual steps from a ‘safe’ tasteful framing towards this more disturbing endorsement of dwelling with the dead. ‘The Somnambulist’ never leaves Lyulph’s Tower and Aira Force. Although Wordsworth transposes a contemporary, local encounter into a typical pseudo-medieval tale, he resists the implications of having done so. Beginning and ending at the same spot, he not only refuses the tale of adventure, exoticism and derring-do expected in the genre but also eschews the ‘take-away’ ending by which, in The Bridal, Scott showed readers how to export the tale’s affect to their modern lives. If Scott’s Lucy learns from the tale she has been told to follow her Arthur’s lead, there is no reinforcement of conventional gender relations to be derived from Wordsworth’s story. While it appears to be a fashionable romance, thus achieving a conversion of local report into ubiquitous literary currency, it remains too suspicious of the transfer of a particular local story into a generic one to meet the expectation of mobility that is inherent in the romance genre. It stays in place because it is by so doing that Wordsworth

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can get close enough, for long enough, to women whose enforced stasis causes them to become monuments to the effects of abandonment and passivity. Dwelling on their gradual depression, he achieves a psychological history of their feelings and a dramatisation of the injustice of the roles dictated to them by the sexual and social mores of the time. It is the damsel, resisting and then succumbing to abandonment, who is offered as heroic and tragic, as was the case in ‘The Complaint of the Forsaken Indian Woman’, ‘The Mad Mother’ and ‘Ruth’ – a feminist focus, although limited in its feminism because Wordsworth envisages no positive transformation of the female role whose effects he laments. In sum, if the turn to chivalric romance resulted from Wordsworth’s nervousness about the reception of his unadorned tales of encounters with local rustics, and if it made for ‘Wordsworth-lite’, nevertheless the results were too heavy to be a neat packaging of the local for popular taste and polite literature. ‘The Somnambulist’s’ awkwardness is its strength, the sign of its resistance to the sensual, sentimental and conservative depiction of love and desire found in Scott and the fashionable romancers of the day who followed in his wake. By its end, the chastened Eglamore has become a Wordsworthian solitary, rejecting his man-of-action ethos in favour of a hermitic brooding through which he can channel the spirit of the dead as invested in their place of death: nature is haunted but not revivified by its past; the departed is embodied and enspirited, as dead, rather than resurrected, in the survivor. I mentioned above that a supplementary member of the interpretive community that Wordsworth summoned was Felicia Hemans, in  by far the most popular living poet still writing verse. It may be that Hemans’s poetry inflected Wordsworth’s chivalric tale of female abandonment, for her collection Records of Woman was published a few months before Wordsworth drafted ‘The Somnambulist’ and contained several such tales – some of them set alongside forest streams. These tales were responses to and developments of Wordsworth, for the collection featured an epigraph about women’s feelings from his ‘Laodamia’: Mightier far Than strength of nerve or sinew, or the sway Of magic potent over sun and star, Is love, though oft to agony distrest, And though his favourite seat be feeble woman’s breast. (Records of Woman, title page)

Among the tales, ‘The Last Wish’ is informed by such lyrical ballads as ‘The Mad Mother’; it features a dying woman haunting a spot and

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imploring her absent beloved also to haunt it in her memory after her imminent death: And oh! if thou wouldst ask Wherefore thy steps I task, The grove, the stream, the hamlet-vale to trace; ’Tis that some thought of me, When I am gone, may be The spirit bound to each familiar place. I bid mine image dwell, (Oh! break not thou the spell!) In the deep wood and by the fountain-side; Thou must not, my belov’d! Rove where we two have rov’d, Forgetting her that in her spring-time died!

(Records of Woman, p. , –)

The lament of the lonely, love-lorn or dying woman sounds throughout Hemans’s collection and this poem with its location at the waterside must have been suggestive for Wordsworth, especially when Hemans had her speaker echo his words. In ‘Arabella Stuart’, the final Duddon sonnet informs the titular heroine’s lament at her lengthening abandonment: My friend! my friend! where art thou? Day by day, Gliding, like some dark mournful stream, away, My silent youth flows from me. Spring, the while, Comes and rains beauty on the kindling boughs Round hall and hamlet; Summer, with her smile, Fills the green forest; – young hearts breathe their vows; Brothers, long parted, meet; fair children rise Round the glad board; Hope laughs from loving eyes; – All this is in the world! – These joys lie sown, The dew of every path. On one alone Their freshness may not fall – the stricken deer, Dying of thirst with all the waters near.

(Records of Woman, p. , stanza )

‘The Somnambulist’ resonates with these poems, and in the period between its initial drafting and its publication, Wordsworth also came to know Hemans personally. She stayed at Rydal Mount in , much to the excitement of Dora Wordsworth, who was a fan. William was fearful that a person as ‘famous’ as she would demand a great deal of attention, but told Rogers, ‘we like Mrs Hemans much – her conversation is what might be expected from her Poetry – full of sensibility’ (LY, II, ). Although he found her sometimes affected in manner, he concluded that

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‘there was much sympathy between us & if opportunity had been allowed me to see more of her I should have loved & valued her accordingly’ (Fenwick, p. ). Meanwhile, he had become increasingly interested in poetry written by women and in  proposed publishing an account of the ‘poetesses of Great Britain’, following up this idea by requesting to be consulted about the second edition of Alexander Dyce’s Specimens of British Poetesses ( October  and  December ; LY, II,  and ). In , he published an account of Hemans in the form of an elegiac verse paying tribute to her after her early death: Mourn rather for that holy Spirit, Sweet as the spring, as ocean deep; For Her who, ere her summer faded, Has sunk into a breathless sleep. No more of old romantic sorrows, For slaughtered Youth or love-lorn Maid! With sharper grief is Yarrow smitten, And Ettrick mourns with her their Poet dead. (Last Poems, p. ; –)

Here, the ‘love-lorn Maid’ refers both to the abandoned women of the Yarrow ballads that Scott and Hogg collected and to Hemans’s staple character; the phrase also applies to the ‘Maid’ of ‘The Somnambulist’: it neatly epitomises the convergence of Wordsworth’s female-centred romances with Hemans’s and his predilection for dramatising abandoned women as embodiments of life’s closeness to death.

Wordsworth’s Hut Dwellers: ‘The Russian Fugitive’ and ‘The Norman Boy’ Dwelling close to death is a still stronger theme in another poem that makes – within certain limits – a feminist response to Hemans’s depictions of abandoned women. ‘The Russian Fugitive’ was composed at the end of  and published in Yarrow Revisited. An antidote to Hemans’s trademark tale of a dying abandoned, love-lorn maid, it is a conventional romance about a persecuted woman of virtue – ‘Ina’ – who flees to the wilds from the advances of a sexual predator, is rescued by a nobleman, marries him, returns to society and lives happily ever after. But Wordsworth takes care to show that it is a story from a specific place, rather than a generic confection. He openly declares that it derives from a reliable literary source, as if to demonstrate to readers that the extraordinary incident it narrated was attested to be both true and worthy of public

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interest. Like Scott, he framed his tale with a prologue demonstrating that it had been approved by reliable (male) authorities. The rustic lyrical ballad was now reworked, and hostile criticism pre-empted, by an imprimatur; its emotional currency as a record of female character was guaranteed by a prologue citing the words of a gentleman who acted as researcher, witness and reporter: ‘Peter Henry Bruce, having given in his entertaining Memoirs the substance of the following Tale, affirms, that besides the concurring reports of others, he had the story from the Lady’s own mouth’. Bruce’s narrative told how the daughter of a foreign merchant was pressured by the Czar to become his mistress. Refusing but fearing abduction by his agents, she fled overnight from the town to the village of her nurse, and then hid in a ‘hut built for her habitation’ by the nurse’s husband in a ‘little dry spot in the middle of a morass’. She dwelt there for a year until discovered by a colonel out hunting. After an intercession by Lady Catherine of Russia, it was agreed that the colonel and she should marry and the Czar, impressed by the story, would bless the match. It was evidently the sequestration in a rural hut that interested Wordsworth, for he devotes far more of his poem to describing Ina’s dwelling there than he does to her escape from and return to the city, her ‘rescue’ by the hunting ‘cavalier’ and her subsequent wedding. Judged as a chivalric romance in the popular manner, the poem is skewed by this bias. Judged by Wordsworth’s long-term interests, it is a significant revision of his fascination with reclusive figures and socially marginalised women. Time and again, he wrote of huts as places in which a way of living on the edge, beyond the conventions of society and close to the inspiration of nature, could be practised. Wordsworth’s huts are shelters that open their inhabitants to the total habitat of which they are part; they are buildings, hardly buildings. They are handmade from local materials; inside and outside, culture and nature, intermingle there. In his hut, the builder, dwelling, may form a long and deep connection with the life of a particular place. This way of dwelling is manifested in a simplified and purified human culture and character from which a plainer, more emphatic language, more emotionally honest and saturated, can be discovered by the visitor (especially the poet-visitor). Huts, in other words, are fundamental to Wordsworth’s poetic. They are places where imaginative interaction between humanity and nature is manifest because it is lived out; from the language spoken there, his poetry can be drawn. But this is not all. As J. H Prynne notes, an aspect of huts’ implication ‘in the practices of the Romantic imagination’ is their ‘dual aspect of benign and hostile shelter, human life simple and serene or under ominous

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threat’: as in King Lear, a hut is a place of ‘crushing poverty and exclusion from the ordered domains of humankind’ wherein human vulnerability to destruction is experienced. Vanity is pulled down; social status is insignificant: the dweller learns to bear the weight of loss and to acknowledge human need. Wordsworth discovers in huts not simply a primal, rooted language emerging from the starkest, plainest relation between humanity and world (the hut as a temple of being-in-language) but also the fact that at this ground almost zero, this marginal outpost, injustice – social, political and natural – stands out undraped. Wordsworth needs to visit huts to confront the facts of destruction, ruin and death that challenge speech and to discover a poetic language that arises to meet this challenge. The Ruined Cottage charts the destruction of a virtuous, simple cottage economy on the margins of human society – the unenclosed plain – when poverty forces the husband to join the army, never to return. The hut decays as Margaret, the abandoned wife, loses morale; its decay is accompanied by the decline of Margaret’s plain, rustic language of feeling: she lapses into silence. The visiting pedlar, who repairs there regularly to renew his faith in human nature, finds her gone and ‘a roofless Hut; four naked walls / That stared upon each other!’ (Excursion, I, –). Several of the Lyrical Ballads feature huts: in ‘Goody Blake and Harry Gill’, the hut is the dwelling of a woman brought by age and poverty to the margins of village society; her marginality means that she embodies the villagers’ superstitious belief in supernatural justice. In ‘The Thorn’, the hut, built in noman’s-land, echoes to the cry of poverty, grief and exclusion that signifies the woman’s identity and that eludes the languages in which the villagers and the visiting stranger seek to explain her way of life. In ‘Simon Lee’, likewise, the ‘moss-grown hut of clay’ (LB, pp. –; ) is home to a rooted way of dwelling at the limit of human endurance on the border of culture and nature, or civilisation and wildness, or life and death. It is a dwelling wherein humanity is reduced to its barest essentials, but the dignity of resolution and independence that is there revealed stands clear in its specific, lived nature. It is not to be exported in a conventional story. The authenticity born of the concentration of being in one place is desired by the poet for himself: retiring to a hut or a hermitage is always attractive to Wordsworth as his means of clearing his language of the cultural babble that infects discourse in the commercial, urban world. In ‘Written with a Pencil upon a Stone in the Wall of the House (an Outhouse) on the Island at Grasmere’, he imagines such a retreat as a pastoral escape from the human to the animal world, giving the poet a point of vantage on nature and a place of meditation (LB, pp. –; –).

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In , Wordsworth constructed his own version of such a place, a ‘little circular hut lined with moss like a wren’s nest’, in the garden of Dove Cottage with a view of the fells (EY, p. ). Here, he retired from his crowded cottage to write. By then, however, he knew that such places were merely cosy, domestic summer houses a few steps from comfort, unless they also placed the writer in touch with the vulnerability constantly endured by the poor who lived in huts of necessity as their only dwelling. For this reason, he praised, in the ‘Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle’, the shepherd Lord Clifford – the boy of noble birth who was sent to live with shepherds to prevent his being captured and killed. By virtue of living, rather than occasionally holidaying, in shelters exposed to all the risks posed to the poor by nature and to all the powers of mountains’ human-dwarfing scale, he grew up humble, renouncing war, embracing peace, concentred on the need for love: ‘Love had he found in huts where poor men lie; / His daily teachers had been woods and rills, /. The silence that is in the starry sky, / The sleep that is among the lonely hills’ (, pp. –; –). Here, the hut is a kind of advanced signal post, a way of dwelling in place that opens the dweller to influences beyond the human that he can then transmit back to society. When grown and restored to his title and lands, Clifford refuses to resume the old feuding with other clans. The Solitary’s cabin in The Excursion is another such place; his misanthropy is counteracted by the routines of kindness practised as part of their ordinary lives by his companions there. Cradled by these, he avoids despair at the failure of political reform and retains, despite his depression, an aperture towards the natural forces that both threaten and inspire the human. These inform his sight, revive his language and, in the telling, renew his trust in communication’s power to benefit others. Speaking of the twin peaks he watches from the hut’s window and doorway, he says to his visitors, Nor have nature’s laws Left them ungifted with a power to yield Music of finer tone; a harmony, So do I call it, though it be the hand Of silence, though there be no voice; – the clouds, The mist, the shadows, light of golden suns, Motions of moonlight, all come thither – touch, And have an answer – thither come, and shape A language not unwelcome to sick hearts And idle spirits: – there the sun himself, At the calm close of summer’s longest day, Rests his substantial orb; – between those heights

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And on the top of either pinnacle, More keenly than elsewhere in night’s blue vault, Sparkle the stars, as of their station proud. Thoughts are not busier in the mind of man Than the mute agents stirring there: – alone Here do I sit and watch.

(Excursion, p. ; II, –)

A watcher of the skies and fells, the Solitary stands for the poet poised on the edge of life and death, and of human society and wild nature. He is a philosopher of the hut, self-consciously reflecting upon the meaning of dwelling thus. That meaning, as Book V’s depiction of the hut-dwelling quarryman and his wife shows, is defined as humility before nature (V, –). In ‘The Russian Fugitive’, the hut is the centre of the drama of retreat and hermitage. First, the escaping Ina arrives at her foster-parents’ hut in a village outside the city. This dwelling resembles that of the quarryman and his wife, a haven of honesty and housewifery away from the evils of high society: She led the Lady to a seat Beside the glimmering fire, Bathed duteously her wayworn feet, Prevented each desire: – The cricket chirped, the house-dog dozed, And on that simple bed, Where she in childhood had reposed, Now rests her weary head.

(Last Poems, p. ; –)

Sheltered by a maternal solicitude, on a level with the animals, she is able briefly to return to girlhood, free from the sexual advances that her mature beauty attracts from tyrannical men of power. Yet, she cannot remain there, lest the Czar should discover her whereabouts. She retreats to a more remote hut, an improvised shelter made by the foster-father that is as much natural as human: The Woodman knew, for such the craft This Russian vassal plied, That never fowler’s gun, nor shaft Of archer, there was tried; A sanctuary seemed the spot From all intrusion free; And there he planned an artful Cot For perfect secrecy.

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Hybrids, Hermits and Hut Dwellers With earnest pains unchecked by dread Of Power’s far-stretching hand, The bold good Man his labor sped At nature‘s pure command; Heart-soothed, and busy as a wren, While, in a hollow nook, She moulds her sight-eluding den Above a murmuring brook. (–)

Built by his own hands, the hut is a materialisation of the father’s paternal care and a shelter so natural in construction and appearance that he resembles a bird in making it. Nature and culture are in harmony in it: No threshold could be seen, Nor roof, nor window; all seemed wild As it had ever been. Advancing, you might guess an hour, The front with such nice care Is masked, ‘if house it be or bower,’ But in they entered are; As shaggy as were wall and roof With branches intertwined, So smooth was all within, air-proof, And delicately lined: And hearth was there, and maple dish, And cups in seemly rows, And couch – all ready to a wish For nurture or repose; And Heaven doth to her virtue grant That here she may abide In solitude, with every want By cautious love supplied. (–)

It must be a solitary hiding place, and the solitude there effects a transformation in Ina. She becomes a hermit: No saintly anchoress E’er took possession of her cell With deeper thankfulness. ‘Father of all, upon thy care And mercy am I thrown; Be thou my safeguard!’ – such her prayer

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When she was left alone, Kneeling amid the wilderness When joy had passed away, And smiles, fond efforts of distress To hide what they betray! The prayer is heard, the Saints have seen, Diffused through form and face, Resolves devotedly serene; That monumental grace Of Faith, which doth all passions tame That Reason should control; And shows in the untrembling frame A statue of the soul. (–)

Devotion to her earthly and heavenly fathers – the former materialising the latter’s paternal care in the hut he crafts – tames passion. In seclusion, nearer animals than humans, she discovers a way of living to herself so simple that it manifests spirit. This way depends on dwelling at the edge of civilisation, in isolation – a clearing in space and time from activities, anxieties and business. So reclusive and self-sufficient is it that it is not to be made the stuff of a conventional poetic tale. Wordsworth explicitly rules out subjecting her to the mythologising of ‘ancient minstrelsy’ and ‘poets sage’ who have, far back into ‘the mists of fabling Time’, praised beautiful women who prefer death to being given to a man they do not love. His own ‘word, not breathed in vain’ will, rather than glorify her self-sacrifice, celebrate her secluded discovery of a way of being in which she is selfsustained by a newly possible communication with animals, icons and foster-parents: word, not breathed in vain, Might tell what intercourse she found, Her silence to endear; What birds she tamed, what flowers the ground Sent forth her peace to cheer. To one mute Presence, above all, Her soothed affections clung, A picture on the cabin wall By Russian usage hung – The Mother-maid, whose countenance bright With love abridged the day; And, communed with by taper light, Chased spectral fears away.

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Hybrids, Hermits and Hut Dwellers And oft as either Guardian came, The joy in that retreat Might any common friendship shame, So high their heart would beat; And to the lone Recluse, whate’er They brought, each visiting Was like the crowding of the year With a new burst of spring. (–)

Vulnerable as she is, secreted in the heart of nature, Ina is a descendant of Lucy, albeit an exile rather than a native of the vale. ‘Seven days she lurked in brake and field’, Wordsworth says of her escape, echoing ‘three years she grew in sun and shower’. But this Lucy does not die, unlike the abandoned women of Lyrical Ballads whom Hemans had developed into her stock heroine pining away and dying off. Rather than lamenting her plight and anticipating her decease, Wordsworth bears witness to Ina’s hut-dwelling as a mode of self-centring based on an isolation that makes each surviving form of contact valuable. In a conventional romance, this mode of being cannot be exported with any degree of veracity into a generic tragic or happy ending. But while he refuses the tragic, Wordsworth does make an attempt to conform to romance conventions by ending Ina’s tale with a wedding. The best that can be said for this ending is that it is over quickly, for it cannot bear the weight of what has preceded it: the romance genre does not allow Wordsworth to show how Ina’s hermitic experience might change the terms on which she re-enters society; her altered way of being is not visibly transformative of the ‘knight rescues virtuous beautiful damsel and marries her’ topos. Nevertheless, what lingers for the reader is Ina’s difference from the glamorisation of female lament often found in the fashionable verse of Hemans and L.E.L. Resourceful rather than helpless, dwelling rather than pining, Ina forges, in her seclusion in the hut, a selfsufficient selfhood that is resistant to the sexual exploitation with which an unjust, male-dominated society threatens young women. It is, for this reason, a feminist poem, with its feminism arising from Wordsworth’s reluctance to translate what interested him in the local source material – the rugged individuality a woman finds at the border of the social and the natural – into the standard motifs of the romance genre he had chosen in a bid to be as popular as Scott and Hemans. In , Wordsworth wrote another tale about a hut builder. ‘The Norman Boy’ was first published in  in the Saturday Magazine and then in Poems, Chiefly of Early and Late Years. On this occasion, he did not

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choose the romance genre but opted for a form and diction as apparently simple as those in Lyrical Ballads that had been accused of puerility. As if anticipating a repetition of such criticism, he now suggested that the story was both about a child and suitable for child readers: thus its claims on adults were hedged. He also ensured that the apparent oddness of focusing so closely on a seemingly trivial incident was pre-empted. He alerted readers to the fact that the encounter the poem narrated had come to him via the report of a literary person (‘from an English Dame, / . . . a simple notice came’). It was already textual, already shown to be worthy of notice by the lettered classes. Not only this: the report that vouchsafed the encounter to him was a fan-letter to which the poem was a reply (Elizabeth Francis Ogle wrote in May ; Wordsworth replied with the poem the same month). The poem’s public circulation via print to a national readership was, in this way, insured by its prior existence in a private dialogue in an interpretive community composed of the poet and an appreciative reader/correspondent. It was, firstly, a limited, authorised response to the insignificant boy who was its subject and only secondly a public text that translated that boy into verse at his expense and for the poet’s profit (financial and reputational). Thus the device of acknowledging a source in a private dialogue protected Wordsworth both from seeming naïvely (childishly) fascinated by an unimportant peasant boy and from appearing too eager to translate the local and real into the conventional and marketable. The poem’s presentation of metre was another defamiliarising device: the four-line stanzas are in iambic fourteeners and fifteeners, actually a version of ballad metre, written out in long lines; the fifteeners use anacrusis. The resultant jogging rhythm, combined with simple, colloquial diction and couplet rhyme, creates a visual pattern so extended beyond the pentameter norm that it becomes marked – mnemonic. While this experiment smacked of poetry for children, it was also a way for Wordsworth to keep himself honest – that is, to avoid presenting familiar ballad stanzas with which he, or the reader, was so familiar that they seemed facile in their ease. As when he invented a unique stanza for ‘The Somnambulist’, Wordsworth preferred to risk awkward unfamiliarity than adopt mellifluous conventionality. His prosody is estranged from the mainstream in an effort to honour an encounter with otherness that challenges the poet’s fundamental ability to find words to comprehend humanity’s place in the world. The encounter is with a child labourer taking shelter at the margin, in a wasteland defined by what it is not. According to Ogle’s letter, it happened

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Hybrids, Hermits and Hut Dwellers In Normandy on one of those bare uninclosed downs skirted by a wood (dignified by the name of forest) which are the characteristic scenery of that part of the country. The day was bitter cold – towards the end of December; a little snow had fallen in the night, and the sky seemed charged with more. Under the shelter of the wood, a few miserable sheep and goats were cropping the tufts of grass where the snow did not lie – and tending them, was a little boy, a ragged urchin, who had succeeded in forming for himself a tiny hut, composed of the decayed branches of the trees, to shelter him from the cold north-wind that blew directly across the downs – a frail tenement it may be believed, materials & builder considered. The hut was finished; and the little boy had shaped a wooden cross (of twisted twigs) and this he was now fixing on the top of his construction – as the best means of supplying all deficiencies. (Letter of May ; Wordsworth Library MS A / Ogle, Elizabeth Francis / )

This is all. Ogle provides no before or after story, no explanation about the boy or herself as his witness. The challenge posed Wordsworth by her short account of a brief encounter is at once manifest in the poem. It begins with a proliferation of negatives, oppositions and prepositions: High on a broad unfertile tract of forest-skirted Down, Nor kept by Nature for herself, nor made by man his own, From home and company remote and every playful joy, Served, tending a few sheep and goats, a ragged Norman Boy.

(Last Poems, pp. –; –)

This place of excluded possibilities and unfixed distances, neither social nor natural, takes shape only through the Norman Boy and his labour: the stanza and sentence delay the main verb and subject noun, only for his service and stance, so strongly asserted at the end, to be undermined in the next stanza, after the visual gap of a blank line: Him never saw I, nor the spot;

With this strange inversion of word order (for, ‘I never saw him’), the poet confuses the conventional linguistic way of establishing the subject/object relationship. Who never saw whom is doubtful; likewise, the ‘spot’ is signified only as a related absence. Wordsworth’s lack of first-hand witness subverts his statements in their very making so that the boy’s place in the world, although established by spatial markers, is suddenly in question. It is as if he inhabits a non-existence, a self-cancelling zone (he is ‘high’ on a ‘down’). Nowhere boy: Wordsworth risks losing him over the edge of the knowable; he is humanity vanishing from the ken of those who remain within the social world, a male Lucy or young Discharged Soldier. What stabilises the poet now, unlike  and , is the receipt of a

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manuscript: Wordsworth’s struggle to bear witness to what he did not witness is calmed by the reassuring realisation that the boy is already textualised. The boy’s alienated, extra-literary reality is already subject to writing’s ability to hold together in tension the opposites that threatened to cancel each other out: but from an English Dame, Stranger to me and yet my friend, a simple notice came, With suit that I would speak in verse of that sequestered child Whom, one bleak winter‘s day, she met upon the dreary Wild. (–)

Here, the Dame’s letter, arriving at home from somewhere remote, makes the unseen imaginable, the Norman English, the foreign local, the absent present and thus turns a stranger into a friend – while also anchoring its report in the specificities of direct encounter. The boy’s neither/nor dwelling place becomes a both/and zone once it is written down and mailed off to the unexpecting Wordsworth, who is relieved that the burden of first putting the strange meeting into the familiar form of words has been borne by someone else. He is not alone with the task of turning an encounter with otherness into discourse both faithful to the encounter and legible by those who were not there. His own fictive verse is both licensed and guaranteed by the ‘Dame’s’ factual letter. Mailed to her, it is a contribution to a literary dialogue: the boy’s translation into poetry can be sent to the boy’s original writer and verified against her text and, beyond that, against her memory of the first-hand encounter. The textual circulation of the encounter has not, that is to say, uprooted it from its witnessed reality: writing’s re-presentation still defers, in this limited interpretive community of two, to a memory-trace carried in the witness’s mind, whatever has become of the real, original boy who was one bleak winter’s day actually present. A second-hand encounter via the mail, it turns out, has its advantages: the burden of the mystery is shared; the duty of witness dispersed; the perils of representation circumscribed. Here, the dialogue with Ogle takes the strain of channelling the ghostly that the intimate circle of Coleridge, Dorothy and the Hutchinsons had once taken. His view underwritten, Wordsworth can begin to focus the boy’s marginal position – a fragile, vanishing point in space and time. He is defined only in relation to his sheep (if they are busy, he is busier) and they are ‘along . . . the edge’ among the detritus of the past and under the threat of the future: His flock, along the woodland’s edge with relics sprinkled o’er Of last night’s snow, beneath a sky threatening the fall of more,

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Hybrids, Hermits and Hut Dwellers Where tufts of herbage tempted each, were busy at their feed, And the poor Boy was busier still, with work of anxious heed. (–)

What gives the boy a foothold on this no-man’s-land that is besieged by more defined places and by more marked time is the building of the hut, an act that converts the natural to the cultural: There was he, where of branches rent and withered and decayed, For covert from the keen north wind, his hands a hut had made. A tiny tenement, forsooth, and frail, as needs must be A thing of such materials framed, by a builder such as he. (–)

This hut is as basic a shelter as can be. It is a primal assertion of human culture: making a house for his head separates the boy from his sheep. However, it is far less snug and secure than the Russian fugitive’s. Not only is it tiny and frail but it is also composed of dead and decomposing matter – a place for living associated with death in nature. This dwelling is perched on the edge separating life from death as well as culture from nature. In the version published in Poems, Chiefly of Early and Late Years ‘was’ (in ‘There was he’) is italicised (though not in the manuscript sent to Ogle). This addition of emphasis did not, I think, serve to accentuate the pastness of the events narrated. It is italicisation as deixis: there to show the readers of the book, who are, unlike Ogle, unknown to Wordsworth and remote from the encounter, that the boy’s building is a reality materialising his existence as an embodiment of the particular place. He builds; he dwells; he is autochthonous. He is not a pastoral shepherd idealised piping in the fields but a real boy at the very limit of culture/cultivation. He is a human so marginal that he, of necessity, lives as ‘poor Tom’ in Lear does by choice – so minimally housed, so open to the ‘Wild’, that he undergoes a vulnerability to death that neither ‘Nature . . . herself’ nor ‘Man . . . in his own’ can willingly accept within their domains. He is uncanny for this reason, like the Ancient Mariner. Moreover, he is also like the Mariner because his living exposure to death (Life in Death) puts him in need of prayer. His own actions manifest this need: The hut stood finished by his pains, nor seemingly lacked aught That skill or means of his could add, but the architect had wrought Some limber twigs into a Cross, well-shaped with fingers nice, To be engrafted on the top of his small edifice. That Cross he now was fastening there, as the surest power and best For supplying all deficiencies, all wants of the rude nest

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Wordsworth’s Hut Dwellers In which, from burning heat, or tempest driving far and wide, The innocent Boy, else shelterless, his lonely head must hide. (–)

‘Innocent’ is a significant word, because it brings the poem’s admiration of the boy’s Christian piety into doubt. If, as a child, he is naturally innocent, then what guilt leaves him almost shelterless, beyond civilisation? What God forces him to replay the fate of Adam when first exiled from Eden? The cruelty of the doctrine of original sin, operating even on frail children, is behind the scenes at this point. It is the unspoken yet implicit question by which the poet is challenged when he offers religious solace for what is discovered in the hut. How to justify religion and sustain faith – and the civilisation built on religion and faith (from and to which the poet writes) – when faced (facing oneself ) with what the hut shows about the pain that the world offers even to the innocent? The answer to the implicit question is not a solution but an approved deferral – Providence: That Cross belike he also raised as a standard for the true And faithful service of his heart in the worst that might ensue Of hardship and distressful fear, amid the houseless waste Where he, in his poor self so weak, by Providence was placed. (–)

But Providence, so apparently cruel in leaving boy and man exposed, is hard for weak boys and witnessing poets to fathom. The boy may seek divine protection by placing the cross on his hut, but will it be offered him? Wordsworth ends the poem by making an appeal that was not in the account sent him by Ogle. He and she are to be not just an interpretive but also a praying community, cherishing the lonely boy by a joint act of care – a communal prayer forged by writing and thus overcoming separation and distance. This will supplement the boy’s isolated efforts and transform his witnesses’ – his writers’ – accounts of him into an offered blessing that cherishes him. It will thereby, to an extent, substitute for Providence’s uncertain help as well as appeal to God: Here, Lady! might I cease; but nay, let ‘us’ before we part With this dear holy shepherd-boy breathe a prayer of earnest heart, That unto him, where’er shall lie his life‘s appointed way, The Cross, fixed in his soul, may prove an all-sufficing stay. (–)

It might be said of this that the boy is too easily used as an example of humanity-in-general’s vulnerability in a world of death: that the proffered

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wish assuages the poet’s guilt about using the boy as an example and thus betraying his specific, encountered being; that it serves to make poet, correspondent and reader feel better about themselves in the face of the destruction all humans suffer but that it puts no food in the boy’s belly. It might also be said that the social and political injustice that exploits the poor’s labour is not addressed, as it was in the hut poems of Wordsworth’s earlier years such as ‘Goody Blake and Harry Gill’, ‘Simon Lee’ and ‘The Ruined Cottage’. ‘Providence’, here, seems to mystify but does not justify the cruelty of the God who permits such injustice. Such a criticism would not be wholly unfair, although not quite alive to the poem’s implicit register that causes these very issues to be raised. The uncomfortable questions are engendered by the poem’s affiliation to the boy’s particular, extreme position just as much as are the pious hopes with which it concludes. To put this another way, Wordsworth had, in reworking old concerns in these late poems, developed the hut topos in such a way that the monitory human exposure that it revealed was still powerfully registered, but an uneasy attempt was added to compensate for the vulnerability endured. In ‘The Russian Fugitive’, he sought to show how the emblematic hut dweller could be returned, renewed, to a society chastened by her example; in ‘The Norman Boy’, he offered the hut builder spiritual recompense for struggling faithfully to cope with a plight that was his own and more than his own. Neither of these attempts was completely successful, but the fact that he made them indicates that he wished to show how the hut dweller’s encounter with otherness and destruction could educate mainstream society via its preferred literary genres and approved religious discourses. No longer would his uncanny stories of living on the edge of death be regarded as too perverse to be worth paying attention to.

The Widow on Windermere Side Wordsworth’s  collection contained another poem of unusual form derived from the conversation of a member of his social circle (a circle that supplemented the core group that had been depleted by the deaths of Coleridge and Sarah Hutchinson and the dementia of Dorothy). ‘The Widow on Windermere Side’ narrated, in three linked sonnets, the extraordinary communication between a local widow and her dead son. The ‘facts recorded in the Poem were given me’, Wordsworth noted to Isabella Fenwick, ‘and the character of the person described by my friend the Rev R. P. Graves, who has long officiated as curate at Bowness, to the

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great benefit of the parish and neighbourhood. The individual was well known to him. She died before these verses were composed’ (Last Poems, pp. –). Concerning the supernatural beliefs of a Lakeland villager whom many judged to be mad, the poem’s story recalls those of ‘The Mad Mother’ and ‘Goody Blake and Harry Gill’. However, the choice of sonnet form and the acknowledgement of an educated source distance the narrative from any immediate encounter with the widow or direct rendition of her speech. The poem was a revised lyrical ballad, eschewing the colloquial diction, first-hand witness and everyday form that critics had scorned when reviewing Wordsworth’s  and  collections. It distanced the woman by applying to her the standards of aesthetic judgement agreed by men and women of taste, thus placing the rustic narrative within the purlieu of polite readers: How beautiful when up a lofty height Honour ascends among the humblest poor, And feeling sinks as deep! See there the door

(Last Poems, pp. –; –)

Wordsworth’s aestheticisation is less conventional than it at first might seem, for it is characteristically rural. Honour, usually an abstract concept attained as a prize, here originates in the poor. It is a quality rising up from the grassroots like a mountain mist. It is naturalised by this spatialisation and for this reason reduces the danger involved in invoking aesthetic categories – that the poem might too readily make available to distant readers a real way of being. It allays the nagging question: will what the third line hails as a depth of feeling be deracinated from a specific, material locality, thus cheapening it? Evidently, there is a tension that Wordsworth wishes to defuse, since the title does insist on a specific person in a particular place – between Windermere and the surrounding heights – and the third line reinforces this titular specificity by deixis (‘see there’). What is to be seen? A determination to work to redeem debt and maintain independence that relates the widow to Michael in Lyrical Ballads and to Margaret in The Ruined Cottage. The poem deals with issues at the heart of Wordsworth’s concerns – issues about labour, independence and loss. See there the door Of One, a Widow, left beneath a weight Of blameless debt. On evil Fortune’s spite She wasted no complaint, but strove to make

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Hybrids, Hermits and Hut Dwellers A just repayment, both for conscience-sake And that herself and hers should stand upright In the world’s eye. Her work when daylight failed Paused not, and through the depth of night she kept Such earnest vigils, that belief prevailed With some, the noble Creature never slept; But, one by one, the hand of death assailed Her children from her inmost heart bewept. (–)

What is the price of independence? What is the worth of labour? The widow performs her work not just to pay off owed money but also to preserve selfrespect and maintain local reputation. More than this even, for the word ‘vigils’ implies that her nightly labour is a form of prayer: its value is a form of spiritual work. This valence makes the turn of the two final lines all the more shocking. Virtuous sleep-denying labour is not rewarded but persecuted, since death’s mode of destruction seems a cruel parody of the widow’s identity as a woman who, night after night, redeems her debts by work. Death takes her children one by one, like a regular debt collector, undoing her incremental, vigilant labour by its own incremental diminution (note how the preposition ‘from’ before ‘her inmost heart’ can apply to ‘assailed’ as well as ‘bewept’ – making death’s attack seem spatial – a taking away from). Her self-dependent effort to ‘stand upright’ is subjected to a logic of subtraction that leaves her not independent but isolated. As with the shepherd in ‘The Last of the Flock’, an identity of uprightness built on labour is reduced, offspring by offspring, to tears. Self-denying work leads not to restitution but prostration, to self-emptying grief. ‘Never slept’, a sign of her earnest faithfulness, rhymes with ‘heart bewept’, an indication of grief at the core. Her work is in vain; her selfhood is rent: she is an example of all people’s terrible vulnerability, no matter how hard they try. The next sonnet is about the recompense that the bereft may derive from the dead – the theme of the Immortality Ode, though the bereavement is now more fundamental and the compensation more tenuous. In her grief, the mother sees her dead son, in an intimation of immortality that Wordsworth narrates as fact, using free indirect discourse to blur her point of view with the narrator’s. No longer does he ‘place’ her experience in relation to moral and aesthetic categories that the reader recognises; the gap between narrating poet and the subject he narrates is closed just when one might expect it to open wider. He does not call her experience a hallucination or a vision; it comes to her from the ordinary material world – the winter’s noonday – rather than from her grief-stricken mind.

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The Widow on Windermere Side The Mother mourned, nor ceased her tears to flow, Till a winter‘s noonday placed her buried Son Before her eyes, last child of many gone His raiment of angelic white, and lo! His very feet bright as the dazzling snow Which they are touching (–)

‘Lo!’ is typically a poet’s exclamation used to call something into the mind’s-eye view offered by words. As used here, it makes her sighting of her resurrected son the poet’s too, as the shift to the present tense (‘are touching’) also does. The angelic child, white as the snow, is here to the reader’s as well as to her eye. And in what follows the only hint of difference between widow and poet concerns certainty about the origin of the sight, not its reality – the poet allowing for the possibility that the son’s brightness does not: yea far brighter, even As that which comes, or seems to come, from heaven, Surpasses aught these elements can show. (–)

‘Or seems to come’ is a matter of tact: Wordsworth does not affirm the heaven-sent nature of the apparition – so like that of the risen Christ – as a Catholic poet, looking for miracles, might, but nor does he deny it (denial would relegate what the widow saw to the levels of natural phenomenon or psychological delusion). Instead, he adopts a dispassionate, distant tone when describing the widow’s actions and feelings (‘Much she rejoiced, trusting that from that hour / Whate’er befell she could not grieve or pine’). This tone also allows him to depict the appearance of the angelic son as an objective reality: But the Transfigured, in and out of season, Appeared, and spiritual presence gained a power Over material forms that mastered reason. Oh, gracious Heaven, in pity make her thine! (–)

It is not her seeing her dead son in transfigured shape that shows her to be mad, but rather that the frequency and power of his presence make the material world seem too weak for her reason to stay anchored in it. Her unreason is recompense for her loss; it benefits her as an access of joy by allowing her to give and receive love rather than endlessly labour her way towards independence. An affirmation of spiritual dialogue, it unfits her

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for a material world in which unremitting work was her only means of attaining worth ‘in the world’s eye’ and in her own, and it is in sudden recognition of this that the poet cries out, his appeal to heaven injecting pathos into the poem because it is an unexpected turn to direct emotional appeal. No longer distant, he is involved, and moved, and so therefore are readers. Love trumps labour; companionship beats independence; madness defeats loss, but only when the inimical natural world is subsumed within the spiritual. The third of the linked sonnets was added a little later. It shows the poet questioning his reaction and guiding himself and his readers to a revised view. Rather than wish the widow the translation to the heavenly world that her spiritual raptures seem to presage, we are to learn to see her earthly state of being as a blessing. But why that prayer? as if to her could come No good but by the way that leads to bliss Through Death, so judging we should judge amiss. Since reason failed want is her threatened doom, Yet frequent transports mitigate the gloom (–)

Wordsworth then distinguishes her from the ‘Crazy Kate’ figures – melodramatically mad abandoned women – who appear in poems by Cowper, Bloomfield and Charlotte Smith. ‘Nor of those maniacs is she one that kiss / The air or laugh upon a precipice’. He then effectively provides an interpretive readers’ guide, the absence of which in the Lucy poems, ‘The Mad Mother’ and ‘The Thorn’, left critics baffled and dismissive: No, passing through strange sufferings toward the tomb She smiles as if a martyr’s crown were won: Oft, when light breaks through clouds or waving trees, With outspread arms and fallen upon her knees The Mother hails in her descending Son An Angel, and in earthly ecstasies Her own angelic glory seems begun. (–)

Like the ‘strange fits’ suffered by Lucy’s lover, her greetings of her descending, transfigured son are intimations of the realm of death, derived from the feelingly apprehended material world. They resemble the uncanny transgressions of mortal boundaries that haunt the Boy of Winander and the bird-nesting and boat-stealing boy of The Prelude. They verge upon, but never allude to, Mother Mary apprehending the risen Christ. For this

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mother, though, there is no return from her exposure. She remains alienated from mortality towards immortality as disclosed by nature; the boundaries of self, once breached, are not just expanded as for the boypoet but overwhelmed. Her ecstatic experience comes close to the centre of Wordsworth’s deepest concerns; it exemplifies his remark, first published in the same  collection of poems, ‘Suffering is permanent, obscure and dark, / And shares the nature of infinity’ (, p. ). And while he does not explicitly endorse her ecstatic state as that of a martyr who is enraptured by survival through pain, or as a proof of her angelic glory, the doubts indicated by ‘as if’ and ‘seems’ are counterbalanced by the vividness of the picture of her kneeling, hailing her lost boy, now returned. This picture also gains weight by being placed at the end of the poem and by being emphasised by rhyme: son is echoed by begun: the poem’s final word indicates a new start and as it does so takes up the sound of her beloved offspring. ‘The Widow on Windermere Side’ is a new lyrical ballad in all but form and diction – that is, it credits as the lyrical ballads did a villager’s supernatural intuitions and in so doing vindicates the emotional heroism of common people. It highlights the material and spiritual effects of poverty and labour; it finds spiritual vision in the substantial, physical world. Yet, the form and diction are markedly different – it is a lyrical sonnet, or lyrical sonnet-poem, rather than a colloquial ballad, stemming from a curate’s report rather than an actual encounter, and is for both these reasons more distant and literary a narration of her story than were the ballads of . As well as avoiding more adverse criticism for quirky poems in namby-pamby style, the triple sonnet structure demonstrates virtuosity and achieves control. The poem has three discrete stages, each tied together by complex rhyme. The limited space available ensures that the narration is terse, so that the poet is not dismissed as a garrulous religious enthusiast or credulous neighbour. Mastery of compressed form lends the writer authority; it exemplifies rationality and concentration. Narrated thus, the widow’s belief emerges as a psychologically legible response to events, with which it is possible for the reader to sympathise because he perceives that they give her strength and joy in what remains behind. The point is not whether her visions are real, but that they are spiritual blessings because they allow her identity to survive, though fractured and bereaved. To be illumined by spirit may presage our postdeath condition; whether or not it does, it is a self-saving grace because it allows the continuation (in some form) of the material companionship/ relation (parental/maternal) on which individual identity in fact depends.

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Together, the poems examined in this chapter demonstrate Wordsworth’s renewed commitment to finding among ordinary people – poor people – monitory and moving examples of living more authentically. These involve dwelling at or beyond the social border, exposed to forces from which ‘civilisation’ normally shields us: suffering, isolation, vulnerability, death. Accruing spiritual otherness, the people living thus demand to be faithfully witnessed rather than packaged in generic terms. This requirement had been the case in ,  and  but the poems that Wordsworth then wrote were dismissed as puerile, oddball and vulgar. In the face of these reactions, he worked out new ways to bear witness to humanity in extremis while showing how that extreme can be brought back into normal society and to its preferred, conventional aesthetic forms – so as to transform them. He foregrounded the poems’ emergence from a dialogic community of sources and correspondents to bring the narratives within the purview of literary culture; he created formally and metrically innovative lyricisations – new hybrids, not lyrical ballads as such but lyrical romances, lyrical sonnet sequences, lyrical children’s tales. In ‘The Russian Fugitive’, the romance narrative is adapted to deal with a woman’s reclusion and return to society; in ‘The Somnambulist’, the chivalric romance is reworked in a unique stanza form so as to make female seclusion and suffering, rather than knight errantry, heroic; in ‘The Norman Boy’, the use of long-lined fourteeners defamiliarises children’s verse so as to put beyond category the story of a boy living on the margin of social and natural domains; in ‘The Widow of Windermere Side’, the sonnet is put to narrative use to give power to a rustic tale of a madwoman’s dialogue with the dead. The success of these hybrids varied in proportion to the degree of compromise that use of a conventional genre entailed. ‘The Somnambulist’ and ‘The Russian Fugitive’ are limited by the love plot and its gendered expectations to which they residually conform; ‘The Norman Boy’ hedges its bets about the efficacy of piety to protect and about the alignment of poetic sympathy with Christian prayer. ‘The Widow on Windermere Side’ is least trammelled by its generic affiliation because by  the sonnet was for Wordsworth a flexible medium rather than a genre that demanded adherence to a set of themes or a mode of argument. He was able to make it serve both storytelling and reflection. While for this reason ‘The Widow’ is, of these poems, the experimental lyrical narrative that best achieves a through-written harmony, all of them at least contain extraordinarily realised passages of acute insight into humanity at its most unaccommodated and bearing its heaviest burdens. Characteristically stark yet sympathetic, only Wordsworth could

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have written them – and he could only write them this late in his career, by turning from the ballad to formal and prosodic challenges that were demanding enough to push him to new formulations of old concerns. Experimentalism was a sign of his continuing, honest determination to press himself to discover what it is to stand naked in a world where fellowship and love are the only frail resources against a terrifying isolation – an isolation that marks those who embrace and bear it as strange, othered, existential heroes.

Notes  Francis Jeffrey attacked Wordsworth’s ‘puerility’; ‘self-indulgence and selfadmiration’, he said, betrayed him (review of The Excursion; Edinburgh Review,  (November ), –, reprinted in William Wordsworth: The Critical Heritage: Volume I, –, ed. Robert Woof (London, ), pp. –. The White Doe of Rylstone was ‘the very worst poem we ever saw printed in a quarto’ (Jeffrey’s review in the Edinburgh Review,  (October ), –). Wordsworth was ‘the buffoon of Nature herself’ (review of Peter Bell, Monthly Review,  (August ), ). Just how widespread was the abuse of Wordsworth for egotism and puerility is revealed by Nicola Trott, ‘Wordsworth and the Parodic School of Criticism’, in The Satiric Eye: Forms of Satire in the Romantic Period, ed. Steven E. Jones (New York and Basingstoke, ), pp. –.  (Edinburgh, ).  Felicia Hemans, Records of Woman, with Other Poems (London, ).  Deborah Kennedy, ‘Hemans, Wordsworth, and the “Literary Lady”’, Victorian Poetry,  (), –. See Julie Melnyk, ‘William Wordsworth and Felicia Hemans’, in Fellow Romantics: Male and Female British Writers, –, ed. Beth Lau (Burlington, ), pp. –; Benjamin Kim, Wordsworth, Hemans, and Politics, –: Romantic Crises (Lewisburg, ).  Memoirs of Peter Henry Bruce, Esq., a Military Officer, in the Services of Prussia, Russia, and Great Britain (London, ), p. .  J. H. Prynne, ‘Huts’, Textual Practice,  (), – (pp. , –).  Thomas Percy had pointed out in his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry that some of the ballads he printed in quatrains were, in the MS folio from which he worked, written as long couplets. Wordsworth may also have had Chapman’s translation of Homer in mind.  The first two sonnets were written sometime between August  and November ; the third was added when they were being revised for publication between December  and March .

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An Aged Man Writes about an Aged Man Wordsworth’s Last Poems and the New Poor Law

On  August , the MP for Finsbury Thomas Wakley rose to his feet in the House of Commons and asked a disconcerting question of the Home Secretary. Had he any information about conditions in Andover workhouse, for it was reported that the poor people confined there ‘were employed in crushing bones, and that, while so employed, they were in the habit of quarrelling with each other about the bones, of extracting the marrow from them, and of gnawing the meat which they sometimes found at their extremities’? The minister had no information, but, shocked, instituted an enquiry the next day. Wakley, however, already knew from his local informant that the paupers were kept so hungry that they ate the marrow even when the bones were so old that they were putrid. As he intended, his question gained the attention of the national press. Both The Times and The Evening Mail reported that the master of the workhouse had ignored the medical officer’s instructions to improve the paupers’ diet, that he and others had siphoned off money from the food budget raised from ratepayers and that he had sexually abused the women inmates. Their reports were picked up by regional papers; the affair became a national scandal, considered to show the failings of the whole workhouse system. Across England, Wales and Ireland, the poor had been starved for profit by unscrupulous officials who were not properly supervised by their distant, London-based superiors. Medical officers – local doctors – risked being dismissed and blacklisted if they raised concerns. In July , Wakley put further pressure on ministers by arguing that the Andover scandal was simply an extreme instance of a general system designed to save money at the poor’s expense, the unintended consequence of which was to depress wages below survival level. What would hon. Members think of the administration of the Poor Laws when they were informed that in the Bromley Union, situated in the county of Kent – the garden of England, as it had been called – the allowance of animal food for the able-bodied paupers, men of strong 

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constitution and vigorous health, was only four ounces in the course of an entire week. Yes, four ounces of meat in the course of seven days, and nineteen ounces of bread per diem – seven ounces of bread for breakfast, six for dinner, and six for supper – that was the dietary prescribed in Bromley union for men of strong constitutions, and in the full possession of their health, who were unfortunately compelled, through the inability to procure employment, to seek refuge in a poorhouse. The inquiry into the proceedings at the Andover Union presented a horrible picture of the treatment of the poor; but in Bromley, nearer to London, he found a worse diet table.. . . speaking medically, he would not hesitate to say that if an ablebodied man were to be kept a year on such an allowance of food, his constitution must be inevitably ruined. Foundations of disease would be laid which would be fatal to him. Was it to be endured that the Commissioners should pocket their ,l. a year for thus treating the poor – torturing men in order to drive them from the House? What did the aged and infirm receive? Fifteen ounces of animal food per week; yet the able-bodied had only four ounces per week, and thirteen ounces of bread per diem. Then, he said, the object of the Commissioners appeared to him to be the object originally designed, – to make the workhouse a place of misery and torture to the able-bodied man; . . . It was evident that if in the workhouse relief were given at the rates he had mentioned, the poor man would rather starve, having his liberty, than starve in the workhouse. Therefore he remained out, determining to subsist, as he could, upon any pittance he might pick up, than enter the workhouse. That being known to the employers of labour, they offered wages according to the scale of the poor man’s necessities, and the consequence was, that wages, throughout England ranged from s. to s. or s. a week. But s. a week was not sufficient for a man to support himself and his wife and children upon. It was quite evident, that as the poorhouse system was conducted, the poor would subsist on anything rather than go into the workhouse.

The Andover scandal and the Bromley figures were salient examples of the anti-Poor Law campaigners’ strategy of using real cases to expose the legislation’s underlying economic assumptions as not merely flawed but inhuman. Other opponents of the system had already told parliament of the workhouses’ deliberately humiliating nature. In , Captain Pechell had pointed out the great difficulty relatives experienced in gaining permission to see their loved ones; Mr Yorke argued that the policy of separating family members from each other placed paupers in the situation from which slaves had been liberated by the Act for Abolishing Slavery in the West Indies. Workhouses were just one part of a planned national solution to the problem of poor relief. In , the new Poor Law replaced the old practices that had centred on each parish, in which local guardians had

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relieved the parish poor with money contributed by local ratepayers. With increased population, and with economic fluctuations that were exacerbated by war, weather and the self-interest of the landed classes, more and more people had become poor. Paupers were no longer primarily the old, infirm and insane, but also able-bodied men unable to support themselves and their families because they were unemployed or, if employed as fieldhands, paid below subsistence level. Ratepayers found their contributions rising; each parish attempted to reduce its bills by moving paupers on if they could not prove their right to ‘settlement’ there. The new Poor Law aimed to end this practice by creating larger administrative units: parishes were banded together into ‘unions’. Each union was supposed to erect a workhouse to keep vagrancy to a minimum, and conditions in these workhouses would meet uniform national standards. These standards were deliberately Spartan, the idea being that this would render the workhouse unattractive to shirkers and idlers, forcing the poor to find work and thus reducing the expense of paupers to ratepayers. To opponents such as Wakley and Pechell, the law’s stigmatisation of poverty was obnoxious. It was also, in practice, counter-productive, driving wages down and thus creating more poverty, as became brutally clear in  during the failure of the Irish potato crop. The law insisted that poor rates had to be paid by landlords on behalf of every tenant whose yearly rent was £ or less. Without a crop, tenants could not meet their rent, and so landlords were unable to recoup the rate payment made on the tenants’ behalf. Facing large bills, landlords removed small tenants from their lands, often by coercion. This action meant that contributions to the poor rates diminished while the numbers of uprooted poor increased. These new landless, starving paupers were supposed to be housed in the workhouses, but there were not enough places for them. Thus, the guardians of the poor paid for longer-term workhouse inmates to emigrate to make room for newer ones. Thousands of people were packed off to America in ‘coffin’ ships, so called because contagious diseases killed up to  per cent of the poorest passengers. A similar consequence had arisen in the crowded textile-producing districts of northern England. During periods of economic recession, whole cotton and wool towns would suffer mass unemployment, overwhelming the capacity of workhouses to accommodate the poor. The rigid requirement to end the old practice of relieving paupers ‘outdoors’ (that is, in their own cottages, huts and hovels) did not meet the cycle of impoverishment caused by single-industry capitalist expansion. Moreover, the deliberately harsh conditions designed to deter the ‘workshy’ from

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claiming relief – the limited workhouse diet, the separation of husbands and wives, the prospect of being buried in an unmarked grave or one’s body being dissected by trainee surgeons – were particularly resented when the millhands knew that there was no prospect of their gaining employment. Wordsworth had been opposed to workhouses long before the new legislation. In , he had written privately to Charles James Fox, leader of the Whig opposition in parliament, presenting him with a copy of Lyrical Ballads. In that letter, he lamented that by the spreading of manufactures through every part of the country, by the heavy taxes upon postage, by workhouses, Houses of Industry, and the invention of Soup-shops &c. &c. 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, as far as the influence of these things has extended, have been weakened, and in innumerable instances entirely destroyed. ( January ; EY, pp. –)

He gave a moving local example of an elderly woman prevented by lameness from tending her now bedridden husband. Helped out by neighbours, she was terrified of being sent to Ambleside poor house, where husbands and wives were separated: ‘she said, it was hard, having kept house together so long, to come to this, and she was sure that “it would burst her heart”’. In , he was appalled that workhouses, operating on deliberately harsh terms, were now a national requirement. He went public on the issue, including in Yarrow Revisited an indictment of the new Poor Law as a means of punishing labouring people for the failures of a modern, systematised and theorised economy over which they had no say: large masses of men are so liable to be thrown out of their ordinary means of gaining bread, by changes in commercial intercourse, subject mainly or solely to the will of foreign powers; by new discoveries in arts and manufactures; and by reckless laws, in conformity with theories of political economy, which, whether right or wrong in the abstract, have proved a scourge to tens of thousands, by the abruptness with which they have been carried into practice. (YR, p. )

He especially objected to the economic determinism that underlaid the new national policy. On the old model, parishes had decided how, and to whom, to administer poor relief, so that the local ratepayers knew the recipients as people – and knew too that their own time of need might come. The new system, however, applied a uniform test at a less local level. If the pauper applying for relief was able-bodied, the system presumed that

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he was financially motivated and could labour if he wished to: so it offered relief only on terms calculated to be so unattractive that they would not deter him from finding work. To Wordsworth, this calculation was ignorant of the realities of the labour market and immoral in its dehumanisation of the common people: Affecting proofs occur in every one’s experience, who is acquainted with the unfortunate and the indigent, of their unwillingness to derive their subsistence from aught but their own funds or labor, or to be indebted to parochial assistance for the attainment of any object, however dear to them. A case was reported, the other day, from a coroner’s inquest, of a pair who, through the space of four years, had carried about their dead infant from house to house, and from lodging to lodging, as their necessities drove them, rather than ask the parish to bear the expense of its interment: the poor creatures lived in the hope of one day being able to bury their child at their own cost. It must have been heart-rending to see and hear the mother, who had been called upon to account for the state in which the body was found, make this deposition. She and her husband had, it is true, been once in prosperity. But examples, where the spirit of independence works with equal strength, though not with like miserable accompaniments, are frequently to be found even yet among the humblest peasantry and mechanics. (YR, p. )

Here, by giving an affecting example of the desperate measures resorted to by a particular couple, Wordsworth ranged his own discourse against that of the legislators. He used real people’s lives as part of his argument in order to highlight, by contrast, the depersonalisation and consequent inhumanity of the abstracted language of what he recognised as a new, modern state: But even, if the surfaces of things only are to be examined, we have a right to expect that lawgivers should take into account the various tempers and dispositions of mankind: while some are led, by the existence of a legislative provision, into idleness and extravagance, the economical virtues might be cherished in others by the knowledge, that if all their efforts fail, they have in the Poor Laws a ‘refuge from the storm and a shadow from the heat’. Despondency and distraction are no friends to prudence: the springs of industry will relax, if cheerfulness be destroyed by anxiety; without hope men become reckless, and have a sullen pride in adding to the heap of their own wretchedness. He who feels that he is abandoned by his fellow men will be almost irresistibly driven to care little for himself; will lose his self-respect accordingly, and with that loss what remains to him of virtue. (YR, p. )

Wordsworth’s publication changed no minds in government, but it was warmly received by campaigners for recognition of the labouring classes. It brought Wordsworth into a political alignment that, only two years earlier,

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would have made him very uneasy. In , while supporting efforts to reduce factory working hours and end child labour, he had been strongly opposed to labouring men being given the vote and deeply suspicious of their leaders. Now, those leaders, themselves working men, used his words in newspapers, poems and stories aimed at raising political awareness and instilling class consciousness among labouring people. In speeches at mass meetings, men such as Feargus O’Connor and Thomas Cooper combined attacks on the new Poor Law with calls to resist the driving down of wages and to demand the vote. Some Chartist leaders urged labouring people to arm themselves, as they were legally entitled to do, to add to the pressure on government that was brought about by meetings, petitions and propaganda. The authorities’ response was to arrest leaders when they could: both O’Connor and Cooper were jailed in the early s. The campaign continued despite their imprisonment. In , G.R.W. Baxter collected anti-Poor Law writings and speeches in The Book of the Bastiles: Or, The History of the Working of the New Poor Law. This work began with an appeal to the enfranchised classes that rapidly became a threat of violent revolution: Noblemen and Gentlemen, assume what your fathers were. – Repeal the New Poor-Law – that law which they would never have suffered to be – and declare yourselves your country’s saviours. Do so; and perform, by peaceful means, what, if left undone by you, will most assuredly at last be consummated by popular fire, sword, and fury. No people could long endure the barbarities of such despots as the trio of Somerset-house – they would indeed be base if they did – and least of all will those sprung from earth’s best blood, the British people. From such an ignominious yoke they must be free or die, who speak the tongue That Shakspeare spake; the faith and morals hold Which Milton held

The quotation recruited Wordsworth’s  sonnet calling on Britons to resist French invasion so as to prophesy and justify class warfare. It effectively enlisted the onetime admirer of the French Revolution as the bard of a new, violent, English revolution. Nor was it the only quotation from Wordsworth. Baxter reprinted Wordsworth’s remarks from Yarrow Revisited reminding the architects of the Poor Law that the right to preserve one’s life trumped the rights of property (that is, that the poor facing starvation might be justified in taking what belonged to the rich). Baxter immediately followed these remarks with O’Connor’s assertion that ‘The New Poor Law is only one branch of the Factory system, intended to

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drive the agricultural poor into the Factories’ (p. ). The conjunction implied that the agricultural poor would be justified in resisting the law because it was a class conspiracy against them – a lightly veiled piece of social engineering designed to increase the profits of the already wealthy by enlarging the pool of cheap industrial labour. Wordsworth was being radicalised by association: Baxter also used snippets of his verse to lend authority to his personal attacks on the advocates of the law. For those who were too old to labour, the new law offered bleak prospects that the campaigners were quick to highlight as particularly unjust. Baxter amplified the fears Wordsworth expressed in Yarrow Revisited about the separation of the aged poor from their communities. He instanced a case designed to alarm readers about the dangers of institutionalisation for both inmate and relatives: One poor girl ( years of age) went to see her grandfather, and the porter, not content with searching her pockets. Etc., for fear she might carry the old man any tobacco, insisted upon putting his hand into her bosom. The girl would not submit to this, and was sent back, poor thing! without seeing the old man, who was nearly  years old, at all! Yet the Guardians, the Governors, Matrons, Porters, etc etc, will all shamefully swear through thick and thin, that no such things are practiced – they never deny or refuse anything but frivolous and vexatious cases. (p. )

Baxter also quoted a speech at the Bradford Anti-Poor-Law Meeting of  December : ‘Does the new law draw the line of demarcation between the virtuous and the vicious, the deserving and the undeserving, when they are immured in the Bastile? No. Here, you find that deserving old age, which has stood a series of calamities for nearly half-a-century, is compelled to mingle amongst the most vicious outcasts that have plagued society – and the treatment of the one is equally the same as the treatment of the other – and both remain there as felons in a common gaol’ (p. ). Thomas Cooper’s fictional writings interlocked with the real-life examples and general warnings that Baxter and others used. In the stories he composed during his two-year prison term for inciting riot, he drew upon the portraits of elderly villagers that he admired in Lyrical Ballads and The Excursion, marrying these to Yarrow Revisited’s warnings about workhouses’s assaults on resolution and independence. His aim was to use affecting tales to dramatise the impersonality of the Poor Law’s language and the injustice of its effects. One story concerns ‘Matthew’, an elderly sailor who had fought in several battles against Britain’s enemies. Like his namesake in Wordsworth’s poems, he is an aged figure who is independent and respected; his one-room cottage, with hammock and armchair, is lovingly

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described, as is his courtesy to guests. Like the Old Cumberland Beggar, he is embedded in the local community, poor but sustained by longestablished local connections: And whoever met Matthew on the causeway, rocking as he went with a regular naval kind of motion, and supporting his aged steps by a bamboo in either hand, was sure to say, ‘Good morning to you, Matthew! I hope you are quite well this morning!’ if they were considered to be his equals or superiors in rank; while all the little boys and girls were wont to stop and bow or courtesy to him, and say, ‘Your sarvant, Matthew!’ Such was the real honour paid to the aged sailor who had fought ‘the battles of his country,’ as they were called.

The advent of the factory system and the new Poor Law that sustains that system are shown to be destructive of the community and Matthew’s place within it: He lived till hungry and ragged labourers began to stand daily in melancholy groups, and with folded arms, in the streets, and till the parish authorities began to talk of pulling down the old workhouse, to build a new ‘bastile’ on the lovely green spot where the children used to resort to play at sand-mills! (p. )

Matthew learns to fear the workhouse, and, as he grows infirm, his fears come to pass. In proportion as Matthew became helpless, people were wearied with waiting upon him; and, disgraceful to relate! the old warrior-seaman was, at length, neglected till his aged body swarmed with filth. Instead of respect, disgust was now expressed for him, by an unreasonable world. Paul Perkins’ prophecy came true to the letter: the parish ’worthies’ came to ‘take care of him;’ they took him to the poor-house; he was stripped stark-naked in the wash-house; and cold water was ‘swabbed,’ as he himself would have said, upon his aged body to cleanse him! Even in that moment, the brave companion of Howe and Nelson strove to keep up the gaiety of his noble heart, and once essayed his old saying, ‘Butter your shirt! sing’ – – But his aged lips quivered, and his jaws chattered with the cold, – and his bold old heart broke with the barbarous treatment he was undergoing! (pp. –)

The naval hero, his bravery forgotten, will die in an institution that subjects him, mind and body, to its standardised, humiliating regime. It was in September  that Cooper visited Wordsworth unannounced at Rydal Mount, where he was delighted to be warmly welcomed. Whether or not Wordsworth knew of the working-class campaigners’ use of Yarrow Revisited and Lyrical Ballads in their radical publications, he

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declared himself sympathetic to their political aims. Cooper reported his endorsement: ‘“You were right”, he said; “I have always said the people were right in what they asked; but you went the wrong way to get it”. I almost doubted my ears – being in the presence of the “Tory” Wordsworth. He read the inquiring expression of my look in a moment, and immediately repeated what he had said. “You were quite right: there is nothing unreasonable in your Charter: it is the foolish attempt at physical force, for which many of you have been blamable.”’ What motivated these statements was the law’s wilful disregard of poor people’s human hopes and fears, and its destruction of the dignity derived from independent labour. By , Wordsworth recognised that the Chartists were his heirs in campaigning for recognition of labouring people’s needs; he also saw, his own decade-old arguments having been ignored by government, that remedies for these social injustices were unlikely to be granted unless labouring men were able to vote. He had local reasons for sympathising with the Chartists’ aims, for the failings of the new Poor Law, even in its own terms, were starkly apparent in the two places nearest to Rydal – Grasmere and Ambleside. Under the terms of the Act, parish poor relief had been reorganised and local ratepayers now funded a union centred on the town of Kendal, fifteen miles away over rough roads. There, a large workhouse was built to house the able-bodied poor from this extended region. The official regimen of reduced diet and institutional uniform applied, though the local guardians for a long time resisted the instruction that husbands and wives should be separated, on the grounds that it was unchristian. The elderly and those who were infirm in body or mind were held in an older building still further way, in Milnthorpe, known for its severe regime. The system now meant that if the labourers and widows of Grasmere were judged by local overseers to be in need and deserving of relief, they would be uprooted from their village and despatched to a workhouse over a day’s walk away, where they knew nobody and were too distant to be visited. For the able-bodied, the workhouse was so unattractive that they took to the roads to find work, begging along the way. Thus, the problem of vagrancy that Wordsworth had dramatised so powerfully in Lyrical Ballads was not solved. And it remained in the interest of each Poor Law union to move vagrants out of their area if they could not claim a legal ‘settlement’ there. The s were years of economic recession; there were plenty of unemployed labourers being shifted by the authorities along the road to Keswick, past Rydal Mount (where they would stop and beg food from the cook). The  notebook of the

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Ambleside Assistant Constable and Superintendent of the Vagrancy Office, John Longmire, lays bare their plight. He aimed to intercept vagrants and forcibly search them to see if they were destitute or if they were concealing a few pence on their persons. Only if they were penniless would he pay for a night’s stay for them in Huddlestone’s lodging house. If they were able to walk, this relief was given them on condition they moved on, out of the area: There was an old man came from Kendal . . . he was don up . . . he had nothing to keep himself so I ordered him onward to Grasmere. I took him to the Reverend Fell who said he was able to go forward. The man went back to Huddlestone’s for his shirt and I went again to get him off but he was sitting by the fire and would not stir. I told Mrs Huddlestone that if he stayed I would not give him ought. I did not like to use force on him because he was so old. A deal of tramps are going north nowadays. I must go down in an evening to Waterhead and get them before they prepare for searching

Here, the Kendal man’s age pricks Longmire’s conscience, but only to an extent. The vicar (a Poor Law Guardian) being unsympathetic, Longmire threatens the old man when he will not move but does not use physical force against him. Not having a local ‘settlement’, the man is not sent to the workhouse where he will be a burden to ratepayers. He is a problem to be got rid of, rather than an elder to be helped. He will be pushed northwards past Grasmere, out of the Ambleside district. As Wordsworth had predicted, the Poor Law dehumanised and uprooted the vulnerable: the elderly were so afraid of being sent to their local workhouse that they would tramp, and beg, for as long as they could ‘go forward’ – with the connivance of the authorities. In January , Wordsworth was sufficiently concerned by this state of affairs to compose a poem – one of the very last he wrote – about a local old man unable to ‘go forward’ or even ‘creep about’. Himself now seventy-five, he portrayed a villager scarcely older than he was, disabled by age and unable to walk (like his sister Dorothy). The poem revisited ‘Old Man Travelling’ and ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’ from a perspective changed by the poet’s advancing years and by his disgust at the Poor Law. It was both personal and political, printed just as Wakley and other MPs raised the case of the Bromley workhouse in parliament and attempted to vote down the legislation funding the Poor Law Commission and the Commissioners’ salaries. It was exactly the kind of poem that Cooper and Baxter admired for it exemplified a poor man’s depth of feeling and

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attachment to his home while showing that the workhouse would be his soul-destroying fate. I know an aged Man constrained to dwell In a large house of public charity, Where he abides, as in a Prisoner’s cell, With numbers near, alas! no company. When he could creep about, at will, though poor And forced to live on alms, this old Man fed A Redbreast, one that to his cottage door Came not, but in a lane partook his bread. There, at the root of one particular tree, An easy seat this worn-out Labourer found While Robin pecked the crumbs upon his knee Laid one by one, or scattered on the ground.

(Last Poems, pp. –; –)

In the opening lines, Wordsworth ranges himself against what we now recognise as the liberal, bureaucratic modern state, here manifest in the generalities and abstractions of the ‘house of public charity’ with its distant, supervisory system centred on a London-based Commission of administrators. He writes not of ‘the poor’ but as a witness of one, specific, individual who is long familiar. ‘I know’, he begins, insisting on personal knowledge, then piling up factual detail to show that this knowledge, though subjective, is reliable – a history of the man’s later life to which the new, delocalised, law would be blind. Poetry, here, takes on the role of accurate newspaper reporting, calling to account the theorised orthodoxy of economic and social policy. It is not a question of poetic emotion versus official objectivity but of the local against the national and the specific against the abstract. Wordsworth is much closer in method to radical investigative journalism – to Wakley and The Times – than he is to Matthew Arnold’s and J. S. Mill’s accounts of him as a ‘poet of feeling’ offering consolation to the bereaved and world-weary. For Wordsworth, here as in , facts matter, however small; like the robin, they allow attachment to place and time – to a way of life. The reader becomes attached to the man who is established in granular detail, just as the man is to the bird that focuses his need to give and receive care. So does the longknown locality: being at home means taking an ‘easy seat’ on the root of ‘one particular tree’ – the man and tree have grown, by long familiarity, to accommodate each other. In the unfamiliar, distant workhouse, by contrast, there is no foreground, no context and no stay onto which the man can latch. All is depersonalised and deindividualised – a past-less,

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comfortless present in which other people appear only as ‘numbers’. This is the institutionalised situation about which the poet allows himself, though only as brief aside, an emotional ejaculation – ‘alas’ – before resuming the slow narration of the old man’s daily life. This life remains uncategorised – the angel is in the detail; Wordsworth does not, though he could, generalise what he depicts as ‘The best portion of a good man’s life / His little, nameless, unremembered acts / Of kindness and of love’. He does not, so as to avoid seeming to have designs upon the reader: the poem offers factuality speaking for itself rather than didactic sentimentalism or propaganda points. Wordsworth continues by describing the relationship of trust between man and bird: Dear intercourse was theirs, day after day; What signs of mutual gladness when they met! Think of their common peace, their simple play, The parting moment and its fond regret. Months passed in love that failed not to fulfil, In spite of season’s change, its own demand, By fluttering pinions here and busy bill; There by caresses from a tremulous hand. Thus in the chosen spot a tie so strong Was formed between the solitary pair (–)

Here is a local community that extends beyond the human. Interspecies relationships bespeak familiarity, trust and emplaced being. The mutual dependence and succor of human and animal is a form of love that sustains the man as well as the bird, since renewing the routine daily involves demanding of himself that he continue to acknowledge and meet another’s need: commitment. Wordsworth marks the relationship for the reader’s attention, inflecting the reportage with instruction: ‘Think’. He also echoes the metrical pattern of a line he had written about poverty and love in . In ‘Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle’ (, pp. –), he replaces the first foot of line  ‘Love had he found in huts where poor men lie’ (trochee or spondee for iamb). Here, he does the same with the first foot of ‘Months passed in love that failed not to fulfil’. The inversion highlights the love’s duration: it gives it importance; the metrical echo inflects this  piece with the rhythm of the nigh-on forty-year-old Song’s objectification of love as a thing discoverable in the dwellings of the poor, close as they are to nature. The ‘aged man’, like the Russian fugitive and Norman boy discussed in Chapter , is so marginal to

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the civilised, sheltered world that he is able to find a commonality with animals; his sharing of his scanty food is an act of selflessness when selfishness might be expected, and it is born of a recognition that the bird’s vulnerability resembles his own and that sharing sustains them both. The tremulous hand is like the fluttering pinions. The poem is a sequel to ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’, in which Wordsworth preached about the importance of beggars to the rural community. the villagers in him Behold a record which together binds Past deeds and offices of charity, Else unremembered, and so keeps alive The kindly mood in hearts which lapse of years, And that half-wisdom half-experience gives, Make slow to feel, and by sure steps resign To selfishness and cold oblivious cares. Among the farms and solitary huts, Hamlets and thinly-scattered villages, Where’er the aged Beggar takes his rounds, The mild necessity of use compels The acts of love

(–; LB, pp. –)

In that poem, the beggar’s meal was also shared with the birds He sat, and ate his food in solitude: And ever, scattered from his palsied hand, That, still attempting to prevent the waste, Was baffled still, the crumbs in little showers Fell on the ground; and the small mountain birds Not venturing yet to peck their destined meal, Approached within the length of half his staff. (–)

The new poem significantly revises this scenario in a tragic direction. Whereas the beggar is merely so familiar to the birds that they venture near to eat what he cannot help but scatter, the aged man deliberately shares his food. Wordsworth now emphasises an act of love that gives the aged man a continued place and purpose – a dwelling-in-place, a stayed identity. He emphasises this so as to make its destruction by his removal to the workhouse all the more appalling by contrast. The habitus that Wordsworth celebrated in ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’ is now, in ‘I know an aged man’, decisively broken:

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That when his fate had housed him ’mid a throng The Captive shunned all converse proffered there. Wife, children, kindred, they were dead and gone; But, if no evil hap his wishes crossed, One living Stay was left, and on that one Some recompence for all that he had lost. Oh that the good old Man had power to prove, By message sent through air or visible token, That still he loves the Bird, and still must love; That friendship lasts though fellowship is broken!

(‘I Know an Aged Man’; –)

Milnthorpe workhouse, south of Kendal, housed the aged but also the demented and insane. In , the Poor Law Guardians dismissed the master of the house after an elderly inmate ‘in a state of mental imbecility’, Thomas Robinson, died from neglect. Robinson ‘was not under the care of a nurse nor a medical attendant . . . [and] was subjected to an unwarrantable exposure of cold under the plea of cleansing him and to the shameful exposure of his person’. Cooper’s fictional Matthew could have been based on this case, while Wordsworth’s aged man, ‘captive’ amid a ‘throng’, responds to the hostility of such an institution with silence – whether bewildered, terrified or alienated or all three the reader can only suspect. In a terrible irony, he is now alone among many in a modern, faceless institution, whereas when still in his cottage, he had, and was, a single companion – the bird substituting for the dead wife, children and kindred. Unable to practise love by daily renewing his meeting with the robin, he is denied his identity, allowed no means of dwelling, even in diminished form, towards the imminent end towards which he is living out his days, on the edge, in line with his past. With local custom severed by social coercion, there is no hope that the incarcerated man will be able to revisit his home; both he and the bird will be lost. Moreover, the message that the poet wants to send on his behalf, ‘That friendship lasts though fellowship is broken’, can never be delivered, save to the reader who cannot help and therefore must receive it as too late and too distant. We end the poem having had our fellow feeling roused but allowed no outlet; we are frustrated, full of pity and fear that we cannot purge, no more able to release ourselves than the aged man himself is. By thus frustrating us, Wordsworth gives us a tiny taste of what it might be like to need, yet lack, the power to act and a place to love. In this readerly predicament, sadness turns into anger: we feel as well as see the outrageous inhumanity of the aged man’s imprisonment and hate the faceless ‘charity’ that put him there. Impotence makes sympathisers – and opponents of the Poor Law – of us all.

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An Aged Man Writes about an Aged Man

As a capstone to his grim reworking of ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’ as ‘I Know an Aged Man’, Wordsworth wrote a sonnet, ‘To an Octogenarian’, sending it for publication in  alongside his intervention in the campaign against the Poor Law. This was, perhaps, the last new poem Wordsworth wrote, and if so, it ends his oeuvre with a searing, bleak honesty about being very old – the losses endured and the weakness of what persists: Affections lose their object; Time brings forth No successors; and, lodged in memory, If love exist no longer, it must die, Wanting accustomed food, must pass from earth, Or never hope to reach a second birth. This sad belief, the happiest that is left To thousands, share not Thou; howe’er bereft, Scorned, or neglected, fear not such a dearth. Though poor and destitute of friends thou art, Perhaps the sole survivor of thy race, One to whom Heaven assigns that mournful part The utmost solitude of age to face, Still shall be left some corner of the heart Where Love for living Thing can find a place.

(Last Poems, pp. –)

The string of declaratives with which the poem begins builds an apparently irrefutable general case: this sonnet does not argue; it tells. The experienced world is abstracted as a series of propositions: syllogistic. Loss is universal; it is not to be gainsaid. As in ‘I Know an Aged Man’, it becomes clear to experienced readers of Wordsworth that, aged and contemplating age, he finds his central beliefs about the redemption of past things threatened. Here, the over-determined phrase is ‘second birth’, which he had used in The Prelude when describing a world in which violence recurs (it then becoming the poet’s task to turn this vicious circle into a virtuous cycle by restoring a past self that is bonded to nature). Thus The Prelude: For the spent hurricane the air provides As fierce a successor; the tide retreats But to return out of its hiding-place In the great deep; all things have second-birth; The earthquake is not satisfied at once; And in this way I wrought upon myself, Until I seemed to hear a voice that cried, To the whole city, ‘Sleep no more.’

(Prelude, X, –)

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In , neither recurring violence nor its cure, redeemed love, is born again. Time, depriving the elderly of loved ones, prevents the renewal of feeling through daily practice. Unexercised, confined to failing memory, love wastes away (as in ‘The Somnambulist’). The poet’s mission to be its restorer is ruled out. Instead, he is left with the bleak certainty of disillusion – able to see what is not and cannot be. Such is the state of agedness that the sonnet presents as a general case. In lines  and , a counter-drift begins, in the form of a minor exception to the rule rather than a refutation of it. Moving into second-person address, Wordsworth assures the octogenarian that he does not believe in the universality of the rule. In what then follows, he establishes the old man as a saving grace, an embodiment of love’s survival in the most hostile circumstances, albeit in vestigial form. ‘Thou art’, he says, but here, description is legislation: the poet tells the octogenarian what he is, and the reader too. He is the embodiment of humanity on the edge of life and death, so marked by loss that he is cut adrift from human connection, but still a man because he is able, just, to sustain love by remaining attached to living things. He is ‘stayed’, whereas the ‘aged man’ sent to the workhouse loses himself because he is deprived of the things he loved. Indeed, the sonnet works as a general partner to the specific story told in ‘I Know an Aged Man’. ‘Wanting accustomed food’ is a metaphor rooted in the bird-feeding incident; ‘sole survivor of thy race’ relates to the aged man’s outliving wife, children and kindred, as well as to the reclusive refugee Wordsworth had described in his anti-Ossianic, deromanticising ‘The Brownie’s Cell’ (); ‘Love for living thing’ evokes the man’s love for the tiny bird. Together, these two last poems show Wordsworth writing as powerfully at the end of his career – and towards the end of his life – as he did in the s. As a pair, they recall the distilled bleakness of the two sea-view poems of the mid-s. Like them, and like the poems written for the demented and the insane, they generate from a specific case a general, even abstract discourse about isolation and emptiness as a feature of the human condition in which loss is inevitable and death is close: life seen from a vantage point of lateness, when one knows that there is no time to recover from damage by changing course or beginning again. Like the sea poems, they also search for ‘stays’ – small indications that the poet observes of love persisting in extreme circumstances, although it may survive only as an internalised trace and have no mode of action other than to allow one to maintain oneself in place as death approaches. They are Wordsworth looking starkly at suffering as he had always been able to do, but now from a changed perspective of terse disillusion and tentative hope.

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An Aged Man Writes about an Aged Man

What prompted this final clear-eyed, masterful meditation on old age? Anger at the predicament into which modernity, in the shape of the Poor Law, sent a particular, known, villager led Wordsworth to rework his old poetry and prose about the monitory dignity of beggars, as figures close to the life/death border and as foci for a community’s humankindness. That anger was stirred not just by what happened to his neighbours in Grasmere and Ambleside but also by the public campaigning of people like Cooper who used his published words in their speeches and writings. The old poet was invigorated by younger admirers’ use of his work and was thus able to forge a passionate new version of the radical portrayal of the poor he had made nearly fifty years before – a version still more acute about the need for love because it is written from late-life experience of loss and death.

Notes  ‘Crushing Bones in Workhouses’, House of Commons Debates,  August : Hansard, vol  cc–.  ‘The Andover Union’, Evening Mail,  September . ‘Provincial News: Bone-Crushing’, Hampshire Advertiser,  August , reproduced as ‘Andover Union: Horrible Disclosures’, Northern Star and Leeds General Advertiser,  August , p. . ‘Andover Union: Horrible Disclosures’, Evening Mail,  August , ‘The Andover Union’, Evening Mail,  September , ‘The Charges Against the Master of the Andover Union’, Morning Advertiser,  August , letter (Westlake to Poor Law Commissioners, dated  August ) read out at inquiry, ‘Andover Union’, Evening Mail,  August . From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andover_ workhouse_scandal  ‘On the Question that ,l. be granted to defray the annual expenses incurred in administering the Laws for the Relief of the Poor’, House of Commons Debates,  July : Hansard, vol  cc.  ‘Poor Law’, House of Commons Debates,  July : Hansard, vol  cc–.  p. x, quoting lines – of ‘It is not to be thought of that the flood’.  ‘The Last Days of an Old Sailor’ in Wise Saws and Modern Instances,  vols (London, ), II, –.  The Life of Thomas Cooper Written by Himself (London, ), p. .  A history of this institution is given at www.workhouses.org.uk/Kendal/  From the notebook held in the Armitt Library, Ambleside. Quoted in Barbara Crossley, Poverty in Ambleside (self-published, ), p. . See also Michael Winstanley, The Poor Law in Cumbria www.cumbriacountyhistory.org.uk/ sites/default/files/county-info/the_poor_law_ccht.pdf) and R. N. Thompson, ‘The New Poor Law in Cumberland and Westmorland (–)’. PhD dissertation, University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, .

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 Stephen Gill, in Wordsworth’s Revisitings (Oxford, ), p. , sees the poem as a paradigm of Wordsworthian revisiting of old material for new ends. It is helpfully discussed in relation to his earlier poems by Mark Sandy, ‘“Strength in What Remains Behind”: Wordsworth and the Question of Ageing’, Romanticism,  (), – and Heidi J. Snow, William Wordsworth and the Theology of Poverty (Farnham, ), pp. –. Many critics have discussed the old men of Wordsworth’s earlier poems. On his tramps and beggars see Gary Harrison, Wordsworth’s Vagrant Muse: Poetry, Poverty, and Power (Detroit, ), Celeste Langan, Romantic Vagrancy: Wordsworth and the Simulation of Freedom (Cambridge, ), Toby Benis, Romanticism on the Road: The Marginal Gains of Wordsworth’s Homeless (New York, ).  It was printed in July and published in September .  ‘Tintern Abbey’, –.  On the importance of slowness and unchangingness in Wordsworth’s poems about old beggars and vagrants see Jonathan Sachs, The Poetics of Decline in British Romanticism (Cambridge, ), pp. –.  Phil Connell studies this community in the context of almsgiving and rural poverty in Romanticism, Economics and the Question of ‘Culture’ (Oxford, ); Alan Bewell considers the beggar in Wordsworth and the Enlightenment: Nature, Man, and Society in the Experimental Poetry (New Haven and London, ).  Crossley, Poverty in Ambleside, p. .  For an incisive reading of it see Peter J. Manning, ‘Wordsworth in Youth and Age’, European Romantic Review,  (), –.  On this poem and the Ossianic figure of the last of the race, see my Wordsworth’s Poetry – (Philadelphia, ), pp. –.

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Index

Aira Force, –,  Ambleside, , –,  America,  Andover Workhouse, – Antrim,  Argyll,  Arnold, Matthew, ,  Arran, – Auvergne, 

Byron, Lord,  ‘The Giaour’,  Carlisle, , , ,  Catstye Cam, ,  Chamounix,  Clucas, Tom,  Cockermouth,  Coleorton, –, –, – Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, , –, –, –, , –, , , , , , , , , , –, , , –, –, , ,  Conversation poems, , ,  ‘Christabel’, ,  ‘Dejection, an Ode’,  ‘Frost at Midnight’, , –, – ‘Hymn before Sun-rise, in the Vale of Chamouny’,  ‘Kubla Khan’,  ‘Letter to Sarah Hutchinson’,  ‘Nightingale, The’,  ‘Religious Musings’,  ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner, The’, –, , ,  ‘This Lime Tree Bower My Prison’, ,  Collins, William,  Constable, John, ,  Cooper, Thomas, , ,  ‘Last Days of an Old Sailor, The’, –,  Corby Bridge,  Cowper, William,  Task, The,  Cox, Jeffrey,  Crabb Robinson, Henry, , –, ,  Crinan canal,  Crosthwaite church,  Culler, Jonathan, – Cumbria, , , –, –, –

Banks, Sir Joseph,  Barrow in Furness,  Baxter, George Robert Wythen,  Book of the Bastiles, The, – Beaumont, Francis, , , ,  ‘Epistle to Ben Jonson’, ,  Beaumont, John, , , ,  ‘To my Lord Viscount Purbeck a Congratulation for his Health’, – Beaumont, Lady, ,  Beaumont, Sir George, , –, , –, , –, , –, ,  Beckett, Samuel, , , – Blacklock, Henry,  Blackwood’s Magazine,  Blake, William Book of Urizen, The,  Bloomfield, Robert Farmer’s Boy, The,  Bootle,  Bowness, ,  Bradford,  Bradshaw’s Railway Guides,  Brecht, Bertolt,  Bristol, – Bromley Union Workhouse, –,  Browning, Robert,  Bruce, Peter Henry,  Burke, Edmund, ,  Burns, Robert, , 



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

Index

Curran, Stuart,  Currie, James, – Darwin, Erasmus, ,  Davy, Humphry, , –, –, – ‘Mount’s Bay’, –, , ,  ‘The Spinosist’, –, – Consolations in Travel, or, the Last Days of a Philosopher,  Discourse Introductory to a Course of Lectures on Chemistry,  Fairhead, – De Quincey, Thomas, – Confessions of an English Opium Eater,  Denham, Sir John ‘Cooper’s Hill’,  Dickinson, Emily,  Douglas, – Dovaston, John,  Dove Cottage, ,  Dryden, John, ,  Dumfries,  Dunkeld,  Dyce, Alexander Specimens of British Poetesses,  Dyer, John,  ‘Grongar Hill’,  East India House,  Eddowes Bowman, John,  Eden Valley, – Edinburgh,  Edinburgh Review, The, , ,  English Channel,  Esthwaite water,  Evening Mail, The, 

Jackson, Geoffrey,  Jakobson, Roman,  Jarvis, Simon,  Jeffrey, Francis, –, ,  John Ward,  Johnson, Samuel,  Johnston, Kenneth R.,  Jonson, Ben, –, , , , ,  ‘Celebration of Charis’, ,  ‘To Penshurst’, – Keats, John, , ,  Kendal, , –,  Kendal and Windermere railway, 

Galperin, William,  Germany, 

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Hamilton, Emma,  Hardy, Thomas,  Hartman, Geoffrey,  Helvellyn, , –, , , –,  Hemans, Felicia, , , –, –,  ‘Arabella Stuart’,  ‘Last Wish, The’, – Records of Woman, , – Highlander,  Hogg, James, , –,  Horace, –, – Howe, Richard,  Hutchinson, Joanna, , , ,  Hutchinson, Sarah, –, , , –, , , , ,  Hutton, James, , , ,  Inverary,  Inverness,  Iona, , –,  Ireland, –, , ,  Isle of Man, –, ,  Isle of Man Steam Packet Company, – Italy, 

Fairfax, Edward,  Fairfield, , , ,  Fairhead, – Fay, Jessica,  Fenwick, Elizabeth,  Fenwick, Isabella, , ,  Fermor, Frances, , –, ,  Finch, Anne, – ‘A Nocturnal Reverie’,  Fingal’s Cave, –, –,  Finsbury,  Fort William,  Fox, Charles James, ,  Foxley, – Fuss, Diana, 

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Gill, Stephen, ,  Glaramara,  Glasgow,  Glover, John, –, –,  Gondo Gorge,  Gough, Charles, –,  Grace Dieu,  Grasmere, , , , –, , , , , , , , , , , –,  Graves, R. P., ,  Gray, Thomas, , ,  ‘Elegy in a Country Churchyard’, , , ,  Greenock, , , ,  Greyfriars’ kirkyard, 

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Index Kennedy, David,  Kent,  Keswick, , , ,  King Canute,  King William IV,  Kirkstone,  Klingemann, Carl, , –

Newcastle-upon-Tyne,  Newlyn, Lucy,  O’Connor, Feargus,  O’Donnell, Brennan, ,  Oban, ,  Ogle, Elizabeth Francis, , – Orwell, George Down and Out in Paris and London, 

Lake District National Park,  Lamb, Charles, , , , –,  Lamb, Elizabeth,  Lamb, Mary, , , , –, – Land’s End, , ,  Landon, Letitia Elizabeth,  Larkin, Peter, , , ,  Leaderhaugh,  Leicestershire,  Liverpool, ,  Liverpool Mercury,  Loch Awe,  Loch Goil,  Lockhart, J.G.,  Lodore,  London, , , ,  Longmire, John, – Loughrigg, , – Lowther, Lady Mary, ,  Lyulph’s Tower, –, , , 

Pechell, Captain George, – Pennines,  Petrarch,  Playfair, John,  Pope, Alexander, ,  Portland Bill,  Price, Uvedale,  Prynne, J. H., – Purkis, Samuel,  Ramazani, Jahan,  Renfrewshire,  River Bran,  River Clyde,  River Croglin, ,  River Derwent,  Robinson, Henry Crabb,  Robinson, Jeffrey C.,  Robinson, Thomas,  Rogers, Samuel, , –, ,  Royal Institution,  Rutherford, John, , ,  Rydal Mount, , , , , , , 

Macpherson, James,  Maid of Morvern, – Manning, Peter J.,  Marvell, Andrew, ,  ‘On a Drop of Dew’, , ,  Mendelssohn, Felix,  Mickle, Julius Sir Martyn, A Poem, in the manner of Spenser,  Mill, John Stuart,  Milnthorpe Workhouse, ,  Milton, John, , ,  ‘Il Penseroso’,  Montagu, Basil,  Moore, Thomas Lalla Rookh,  Moresby, –,  Morning Post,  Moxon, Edward,  Muncaster Castle, –

Sacks, Peter,  Saint Bega, – Saturday Magazine,  Schor, Esther,  Scotland, ,  Scott, Walter, –, , –, –, –, , –, – ‘Helvellyn’, –, , ,  Bridal of Triermain, The, , –,  Lay of the Last Minstrel, The, –, ,  Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border,  Scottish Highlands, –, –, ,  Seward, Anna,  Shakespeare, William, ,  Hamlet, , ,  Henry IV Pt ,  King Lear, ,  Sonnet , – Sonnet ,  Winter’s Tale, The, – Shaw, Philip, 

Naples,  National Trust,  Nelson, Horatio, , –,  Nether Stowey,  Newcastle and Carlisle Railway Company, 

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

Index

Shelley, Mary Frankenstein, ,  Shelley, Percy Bysshe,  Hellas: A Lyrical Drama,  Mont Blanc,  Shenstone, William,  Sidney, Sir Robert, ,  Siebers, Tobin,  Skiddaw, ,  Smart, Christopher ‘A Song to David’, – Smith, Charlotte, –, , ,  Elegiac Sonnets, ,  Snowdon, ,  Solway Firth,  Somerset, ,  Southey, Edith, , , , – Southey, Robert, –, –, –, –, , , –, –, –,  Curse of Kehama, The,  Thalaba the Destroyer, ,  Spenser, Edmund Faerie Queene, The,  St Bees Head, – St George Steam Packet Company, – St. Helena, – St John’s Vale,  St Kilda,  Staffa, , – Steamboat Companion, – Striding Edge, , ,  Swirral Edge,  Switzerland,  Tait’s Magazine,  Tasso, Torquato,  Tenerife, – Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, , ,  In Memoriam,  Thomson, James,  Times, The, ,  Tintern Abbey, ,  Tobermory, ,  Turner, J.M.W., ,  Tweedside,  Ullswater, , – Vale of St John,  Vesuvius,  Virgil, ,  Wakley, Thomas, –, – Walden, Ann, 

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Walden, Frederick,  Wales, ,  Walker, Eric C.,  Werner, Abraham, ,  West Indies,  Westmorland,  Wetherall railway viaduct,  Whitehaven, , – Wilkie, David,  Windermere, ,  Wordsworth, Catherine, , , –, , –, –, , – Wordsworth, Dora, , – Wordsworth, Dorothy, , –, , , , , , –, , –, , –, –, , , , ,  Wordsworth, John, , , , , –, , , , , , , , ,  Wordsworth, John (son), ,  Wordsworth, Mary, , , , –, , , –,  Wordsworth, Thomas, , , –, , –, , , – Wordsworth, William, Essays on Epitaphs, –, ,  Evening Voluntaries, , , –, , – Lucy poems, , , , , , , , , , , , ,  Matthew poems,  Poems on the Naming of Places, , , , , ,  Translations from Horace,  ‘A slumber did my spirit seal’,  ‘An Evening Walk’, ,  ‘At Sea off the Isle of Man’, – ‘Brothers, The’, ,  ‘Brownie’s Cell, The’,  ‘Cave of Staffa’, – ‘Cenotaph’, – ‘Complaint of the Forsaken Indian Woman, The’, ,  ‘Composed by the Seashore’, –, –, , ,  ‘Descriptive Sketches’,  ‘Desire we past illusions to recall?’,  ‘Discharged Soldier, The’, ,  ‘Elegiac Musings in the Grounds of Coleorton Hall, the Seat of the Late G.H. Beaumont, Bart’, , – ‘Elegiac Stanzas Addressed to Sir G. H. B. Upon the Death of His Sister-in-law’, , –,  ‘Elegiac Stanzas Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle in a Storm’, , , , , , 

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Index ‘Elegiac Verses in Memory of My Brother, John Wordsworth’,  ‘Epistle to Sir George Howland Beaumont, Bart. From the South-west Coast of Cumberland—’, , –,  ‘Extempore Effusion Upon the Death of James Hogg’,  ‘Fidelity’, –,  ‘Forth from a ridge, around whose base’, – ‘Goody Blake and Harry Gill’, , , – ‘Home at Grasmere’, , –, ,  ‘Homeward we turn. Isle of Columba’s cell’, – ‘I know an aged Man constrained to dwell’, – ‘I thought of Thee, my partner and my guide’,  ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’,  ‘In a Garden of the same’, ,  ‘In the Grounds of Coleorton, the Seat of Sir George Beaumont, Bart.’, ,  ‘Inscription for a Monument in Crosthwaite Church in the Vale of Keswick’, – ‘Inscription for a Seat in the groves of Coleorton’, ,  ‘Iona. (Upon Landing)’,  ‘It is not to be thought of that the Flood’,  ‘Laodamia’,  ‘Last of the Flock, The’,  ‘Leechgatherer, The’, , ,  ‘Lines Written at a Small Distance from My House’,  ‘Louisa’, – ‘Mad Mother, The’, , , ,  ‘Michael’, , ,  ‘Musings near Acquapendente’,  ‘Norman Boy, The’, , –, ,  ‘Not in the lucid intervals of life’,  ‘Nunnery’, – ‘Ode to Duty’,  ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’, , , , , ,  ‘Oh what a wreck! how changed in mien and speech!’, – ‘Old Cumberland Beggar, The’, , , ,  ‘Old Man Travelling’, –,  ‘On the Frith of Clyde (in a Steamboat)’, – ‘On the Projected Kendal and Windermere Railway’, – ‘Russian Fugitive, The’, –, –, , , 

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‘Ruth’, ,  ‘September ’,  ‘Simon Lee’, , ,  ‘Somnambulist, The’, , –, –, , ,  ‘Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle’, ,  ‘Stanzas Suggested In A Steamboat Off Saint Bees’ Head, On The Coast Of Cumberland’, , –,  ‘Steamboats, Viaducts and Railways’, – ‘Surprised by Joy’, ,  ‘The leaves that rustled on this oak-crowned hill’, –, –,  ‘The world is too much with us’,  ‘There was a Boy’, , –,  ‘Thorn, The’, , , , , ,  ‘Three Years She Grew In Sun and Shower’,  ‘Tintern Abbey’, , , , , , , , –, , , , –, ,  ‘To a good Man of most dear memory’, –, – ‘To an Octogenarian’,  ‘To Joanna’, , , , ,  ‘To R.S.’, –, – ‘To the Moon Composed by the Seaside,—on the Coast of Cumberland’, , –, ,  ‘To the Moon. Rydal’, –, –,  ‘Upon perusing the foregoing Epistle thirty years after its composition’,  ‘View from the Top of Black Comb’, –, , ,  ‘Widow on Windermere Side, The’, –, – ‘Written at the Request of Sir George Beaumont, Bart. and in his Name, for an Urn, placed by him at the Termination of a newly-planted Avenue, in the same Grounds’, ,  ‘Written with a Pencil upon a Stone in the Wall of the House (an Out-house) on the Island at Grasmere’,  ‘Yarrow Unvisited’, – A Guide through the District of the Lakes,  Ecclesiastical Sonnets, ,  Essay Supplementary to the Preface to Lyrical Ballads,  Excursion, The, , , –, , –,  Letter to a Friend of Robert Burns,  Lyrical Ballads, –, , –, –, , , , , , , , , , , –, , –, , –, –, , –, , –

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

Index

Wordsworth, William (cont.) Peter Bell, – Poems, Chiefly of Early and Late Years, , ,  Poems, in Two Volumes, –, , , , ,  Preface to Lyrical Ballads, –, ,  Prelude, The, –, , , , , , , –, , , , , , , –, , , – Recluse, The, –,  River Duddon, a Series of Sonnets, The, 

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Ruined Cottage, The, , , , ,  White Doe of Rylstone, The, , ,  Yarrow Revisited, , , , , , – Yarrow, –, –, – Yeats, W.B., ,  ‘Easter ’,  York Retreat, ,  Yorke, Mr,  Young, Edward,  ‘Night Thoughts’, 

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CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN ROMANTICISM General Editor  , University of Chicago . Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics and the Fiction of Letters  .  . British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire   . Poetry as an Occupation and an Art in Britain, –   . Edmund Burke’s Aesthetic Ideology: Language, Gender and Political Economy in Revolution   . In the Theatre of Romanticism: Coleridge, Nationalism, Women  .  . Keats, Narrative and Audience   . Romance and Revolution: Shelley and the Politics of a Genre   . Literature, Education, and Romanticism: Reading as Social Practice, –   . Women Writing about Money: Women’s Fiction in England, –   . Shelley and the Revolution in Taste: The Body and the Natural World   . William Cobbett: The Politics of Style   . The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, – . .  . Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics, –  .  . Napoleon and English Romanticism   . Romantic Vagrancy: Wordsworth and the Simulation of Freedom  

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. Wordsworth and the Geologists   . Wordsworth’s Pope: A Study in Literary Historiography  .  . The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel   . Reading Daughters’ Fictions, –: Novels and Society from Manley to Edgeworth   . Romantic Identities: Varieties of Subjectivity, –  .  . Print Politics: The Press and Radical Opposition in Early Nineteenth-Century England   . Reinventing Allegory  .  . British Satire and the Politics of Style, –   . The Romantic Reformation: Religious Politics in English Literature, –  .  . De Quincey’s Romanticism: Canonical Minority and the Forms of Transmission   . Coleridge on Dreaming: Romanticism, Dreams and the Medical Imagination   . Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity   . Ideology and Utopia in the Poetry of William Blake  .  . Sexual Politics and the Romantic Author   . Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition   . Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School: Keats, Shelley, Hunt and their Circle  .  . Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism  

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. Contesting the Gothic: Fiction, Genre and Cultural Conflict, –   . Romanticism, Aesthetics, and Nationalism    . Romantic Poets and the Culture of Posterity   . The Crisis of Literature in the s: Print Culture and the Public Sphere   . Romantic Atheism: Poetry and Freethought, –   . Romanticism and Slave Narratives: Transatlantic Testimonies   . Imagination under Pressure, -: Aesthetics, Politics, and Utility   . Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception, and Canon Formation, –   . Romanticism and the Human Sciences: Poetry, Population, and the Discourse of the Species  .  . The Poetics of Spice: Romantic Consumerism and the Exotic   . British Fiction and the Production of Social Order, –  .  . Women Writers and the English Nation in the s   . Literary Magazines and British Romanticism   . Women, Nationalism and the Romantic Stage: Theatre and Politics in Britain, –   . British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind   . The Anti-Jacobin Novel: British Conservatism and the French Revolution . .  . Romantic Austen: Sexual Politics and the Literary Canon  

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. Byron and Romanticism      . The Romantic National Tale and the Question of Ireland   . Byron, Poetics and History   . Religion, Toleration, and British Writing, –   . Fatal Women of Romanticism   . Knowledge and Indifference in English Romantic Prose   . Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination   . Romanticism, Maternity and the Body Politic   . Romanticism and Animal Rights   . Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism: Poetry and the Mediation of History   . Literature, Science and Exploration in the Romantic Era: Bodies of Knowledge  ,  ,   .  . Romantic Colonization and British Anti-Slavery   . Anger, Revolution, and Romanticism  .  . Shelley and the Revolutionary Sublime   . Fictions and Fakes: Forging Romantic Authenticity, –   . Early Romanticism and Religious Dissent  .  . The Invention of Evening: Perception and Time in Romantic Poetry  . 

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. Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song   . Romanticism and the Rise of the Mass Public   . Writing against Revolution: Literary Conservatism in Britain, –   . Women, Sociability and Theatre in Georgian London   . The Lake Poets and Professional Identity   . Wordsworth Writing   . Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry   . Advertising and Satirical Culture in the Romantic Period   . Romanticism and the Painful Pleasures of Modern Life  .  . Balladeering, Minstrelsy, and the Making of British Romantic Poetry  .  . Romanticism and Improvisation, –   . Scotland and the Fictions of Geography: North Britain, –   . Wordsworth, Commodification and Social Concern: The Poetics of Modernity   . Sentimental Masculinity and the Rise of History, –   . Fracture and Fragmentation in British Romanticism   . Romanticism and Music Culture in Britain, –: Virtue and Virtuosity  ’  . The Truth about Romanticism: Pragmatism and Idealism in Keats, Shelley, Coleridge  

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. Blake’s Gifts: Poetry and the Politics of Exchange   . Real Money and Romanticism   . Sentimental Literature and Anglo-Scottish Identity, –   . Romantic Tragedies: The Dark Employments of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley   . Blake, Sexuality and Bourgeois Politeness   . Idleness, Contemplation and the Aesthetic   . Shelley’s Visual Imagination    . A Cultural History of the Irish Novel, –   . Literature, Commerce, and the Spectacle of Modernity, –   . Romanticism and Childhood: The Infantilization of British Literary Culture    . Metropolitan Art and Literature, –: Cockney Adventures   . Wordsworth and the Enlightenment Idea of Pleasure   . John Clare and Community   . The Romantic Crowd   . Romantic Women Writers, Revolution and Prophecy   . Britain, France and the Gothic, –   . Transfiguring the Arts and Sciences  

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. Shelley and the Apprehension of Life   . Poetics of Character: Transatlantic Encounters -   . Romanticism and Caricature   . The Late Poetry of the Lake Poets: Romanticism Revised   . Forging Romantic China: Sino-British Cultural Exchange -  .  . Coleridge and the Philosophy of Poetic Form    . Romanticism in the Shadow of War: Literary Culture in the Napoleonic War Years  .  . Slavery and the Politics of Place: Representing the Colonial Caribbean, –  .  . The Orient and the Young Romantics   . Lord Byron and Scandalous Celebrity   . Radical Orientalism: Rights, Reform, and Romanticism  - . Print, Publicity, and Popular Radicalism in the s   . Wordsworth and the Art of Philosophical Travel   . Romanticism, Self-Canonization, and the Business of Poetry   . Women Wanderers and the Writing of Mobility, –   . Eighteen Hundred and Eleven: Poetry, Protest and Economic Crisis . .  . Urbanization and English Romantic Poetry  

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. The Poetics of Decline in British Romanticism   . The Caribbean and the Medical Imagination, –: Slavery, Disease and Colonial Modernity   . Science, Form, and the Problem of Induction in British Romanticism   . Wordsworth and the Poetics of Air  .  . Romantic Art in Practice: Cultural Work and the Sister Arts, –   . European Literatures in Britain, –: Romantic Translations   . Romanticism and Theatrical Experience: Kean, Hazlitt and Keats in the the Age of Theatrical News   . The Romantic Tavern: Literature and Conviviality in the Age of Revolution   . British Orientalisms, –   . Print and Performance in the s: Improvisation, Speculation, Identity   . The Italian Idea: Anglo-Italian Radical Literary Culture, –   . The Ephemeral Eighteenth Century: Print, Sociability, and the Cultures of Collecting   . Physical Disability in British Romantic Literature   . William Wordsworth, Second-Generation Romantic: Contesting Poetry after Waterloo   . Walter Scott and the Greening of Scotland: The Emergent Ecologies of a Nation   . Art, Science and the Body in Early Romanticism  ’

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. Honor, Romanticism, and the Hidden Value of Modernity   . Romanticism and the Biopolitics of Modern War Writing   . Jane Austen and Other Minds: Ordinary Language Philosophy in Literary Fiction    . Orientation in European Romanticism: The Art of Falling Upwards   . Romanticism, Republicanism, and the Swiss Myth   . Coleridge and the Geometric Idiom: Walking with Euclid  .  . Late Romanticism and the End of Politics: Byron, Mary Shelley and the Last Men   . Experimentalism in Wordsworth’s Later Poetry: Dialogues with the Dead   . Romantic Fiction and Literary Excess in the Minerva Press Era    . Byron’s     . Sound and Sense in British Romanticism      . Wordsworth After War: Recovering Peace in the Later Poetry  

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