The Columbia History of British Poetry (102 page)

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Authors: Carl Woodring,James Shapiro

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BOOK: The Columbia History of British Poetry
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emphases and discreet omissionsthe protagonist's development from childhood to early maturity and the influence on him of natural objectsand of Cambridge, London, and the tumultuous course of the French Revolution. Wordsworth was duly sensitive to the magnitude of his self-history, for on completing the 1805 version, he declared amazement at his prolonged subjectivity. It was, he said, "a thing unprecedented in literary history that a man should talk so much about himself."
The implicit sanction for such self-contemplation derives in both poets from a strong commitment to the vocation of poetry, a lifelong dedication, unequalled since the death of Milton (who was to both a high exemplar) and unmatched in later times. To each the "call" seemed a virtual election, carrying with it the charge to bring a quickened sensibility to bear upon the general human condition or on some particular modern instance. The speaker of
In Memoriam
is unmistakably a poet, drawing at win on the traditions of the pastoral elegy, invoking the classical muses, appraising the tenor of the "wild" lyrics he is writing, and even reminding his readers of the difficulty of communicating a mystical vision in the "matter-moulded forms of speech." He is Tennyson in his representative poet's role with a mission, beyond all private grief, to articulate the sentiments of a whole generationfor the "I" of the poem, he claimed, "is not always the author speaking of himself, but the voice of the human race speaking through him.''
The "I" of
The Prelude
is more specific in denotation: "A Traveller I am / Whose tale is only of himself." As Wordsworth's subtitle indicates, "the growth of a poet's mind" is the poem's exclusive theme, and the "poet" is distinctly Wordsworth himself, or at least as much of the self as he chooses to reveal or invent. If "the Poet" in context sometimes serves as a general epithet representing heightened awareness, Wordsworth assumes his own typicality and readily aligns himself with his ideal. His dedication to his own vision and work is complete and explicit; in Book IV he describes the "blessedness" he experienced as a young man walking through the fields at dawn:
My heart was full; I made no vows, but vows
Were then made for me, bond unknown to me
Was given, that I should be, else sinning greatly,
A dedicated Spirit.
Elsewhere Wordsworth claims himself called to a sacred office (in the 1805 version, "the holy life of music and of verse"); "poetic num-
 
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bers" have come "Spontaneously to clothe in priestly robe / A renovated spirit singled out / . . . for holy services." "The Poet's soul'' attends him in the "indolent society" of secular Cambridge, where he responds with something of poetic fervor to the abstractions of geometry, for his is already "a mind beset / With images, and haunted by herself." The "Genius of the Poet" has guided him to the fixed truths of nature beyond all shattering social revolution, has strengthened his faith in his "own peculiar faculty, / Heaven's gift, a sense that fits him to perceive / Objects unseen before," and has virtually given him in his degree a "power like one of Nature's." At the end of his long "protracted Song," he admits some uneasiness about the extent of his self-analysis and celebration, but at the same time he hopes that his mature work will provide sufficient rationale "for having given this story of myself." In any case, he has convinced himself that "the history of a Poet's mind / Is labour not unworthy of regard."
The Prelude
was indeed a thing unprecedented in literary history, a personal epic, with poet as hero moving with troubled spirit amid social upheaval and receptively among enduring natural forces. Had it appeared in 1805, the Romantics would have had further evidence of the "egotism" that Hazlitt thought Wordsworth's distinctive attribute or of the "egotistical sublime" that Keats both feared and admired. But the other volumes of verse that Wordsworth published before 1820 provided quite ample proof of a central concern with his poetic persona and the quality of his unique endowment.
The Prelude
was intended to introduce a three-part work called
The Recluse
, long planned but never completeda vast enterprise on an unlikely theme: "the sensations and opinions of a poet living in retirement." The second part, however, appeared as
The Excursion
in 1814, running to some eight thousand lines and consisting of the lucubrations of four characters: the Poet, who is narrator, the Wanderer, who accompanies him on his rambles, the Solitary, whom they interview, and the Pastor, who prescribes fortitude and hope. All four seem patently projections of Wordsworth's own thought and personality. But the most vivid of the group is the Solitary, who confesses to a willful retreat from society, even to a longing for release from life itself, after serious afflictions, loss of loved ones, the dashing of political high hopes (as in the French Revolution), and consequent failures of faith in God and nature.
Although the poem as a whole attempts to establish a final assent to living, there is curiously more poetic conviction in the Solitary's nega-
 
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tions than in the positive sentiments of the others. "Despondency" (the actual title of Book III), amounting almost to madness, has become counterpart or shadow to the dedicated blest assurance that dominates
The Prelude
. The melancholia reminds us of the recurrent disaffection of many Romantic and later artists and more specifically of a tragic sense too often denied to the assertive Wordsworth.
Like Tennyson a generation later, the young Wordsworth knew and resisted the attractions of the imagination as escape from painful realities. In
The Prelude
(Book V) he describes his early delight in books as passports to "that delicious world of poesy" where all was "holiday" and "never-ending show." And in his "Elegiac Stanzas Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle, in a Storm'' he confesses that he would once have preferred to depict the castle notas his friend Sir George Beaumont chose to paint itshrouded in gloom by a rough sea, but basking in a perpetual summer, suffused with "The light that never was, on sea or land, / The consecration, and the Poet's dream."
Nowthe time is 1805he salutes the "rugged Pile" as fitting image of the endurance of hardship and pain, for his own recent experience of bereavement (the loss of his brother John at sea) has convinced him that the escapist dream cannot satisfy his art when a "deep distress hath humanised [his] Soul."
Yet long before 1805 a sensitivity to the fallible human condition was challenging Wordsworth's "egotism" and his confident poetic commitment. His
Lyrical Ballads
of 1798 reveals an alert sympathy with rural tragedies, loneliness, suffering, and primitive dreadwith a mad infanticide, a shepherd bereft of his flock, a destitute old woman pilfering firewood. And for many of these ballads he devised a narrator more naive than the simple characters he describes.
The speaker of "The Thorn," for example, as Wordsworth's own note tells us, is a garrulous and superstitious retired sea captain. The "I" of "The Idiot Boy"virtually a burlesque of the dedicated poetintrudes upon his narrative to declare himself apprenticed to the Muses for the past fourteen years, yet still helpless to record half the wonders that befell Johnny on his midnight ride. The "I" of "Simon Lee" awkwardly warns the "gentle reader" not to expect a moral. "We are Seven" involves a speaker pedantically insensitive to a child's sense of ongoing life. And "The Tables Turned" features a cheerful young "William" all too ready to overstate his belief that he may learn more from "one impulse from a vernal wood" than from all the sages of history, and so
 
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prepared gleefully to abandon all science and art so that he may respond to the spontaneous lore of nature.
Other poemsalso first appearing in the
Lyrical Ballads
notably "Tintern Abbey" and in the 1800 edition, "Michael," present the dedicated poet-narrator without irony or distortion, a sober reflective voice in a quiet blank verse, quite unlike that heard in the rapid rhythm of the ballad meters. "Michael" is introduced as the first of "those domestic tales" of Cumberland shepherds told to the poet when he was still a boy, ''careless of books." The present retelling of the plight of a real shepherd betrayed by his delinquent sonwith its subtitle "A Pastoral Poem"makes it clear that the speaker is now bookish enough to reject the artifice of the pastoral convention in favor of a bare poetic realism. And the purpose of the moving story is explicitly to quicken the sympathy of "a few natural hearts" and, above all, to engage the emotion "Of youthful Poets, who among these hills / Will be my second self when I am gone."
The "I" of "Lines composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey" is likewise to be identified with Wordsworth, or at least the persona he adopted in
The Prelude
. Indeed, the poem as self-revelation beautifully forecasts the great autobiography. With none of the intermittent slackness of the latter, it succinctly describesand even recapturesthe process of vision, the communion with Nature and through it at privileged moments the insight into "the life of things" that Wordsworth deemed the poet's highest function to register. Here, perhaps for the first time in his poetry, appears a self-transcending sublimity behind an apparent egotism:
                                       And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.
Not until Book XII of the 1850
Prelude
(though sooner in an early draft) does the poet discursively describe such moments of illumination as "spots of time"the term designating glimpses of some timeless

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