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Authors: Laurence Lerner

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Page 74

Yet is this wonderful poem about Catharine? Wordsworth told Isabella Fenwick in old age that it "was suggested by my daughter Catharine, long after her death."
⁴²Lyric poems, we see very clearly here, are about emotions, not about people. (The anonymity of those hundreds of beloved women does not detract from the poetic value of the love sonnets which so many men addressed to them, since the sonnets were about the love, not the women.) This poem, as clearly as any lyric poem I know, imitates the action of an emotion. Two moments of intense feeling are compared, the pang that some other person is not there to share his moment of sudden joy and the remembered pang of first realizing that the person was dead. No attention is wasted on filling in details, such as what the joy was, or whether that earlier moment was the deathbed or the graveside. The poem sets out to do nothing except map the particularities of a specific grief. That being the case, it does not matter whom it is addressed to. It does not even matter that almost every reader, ignorant of the Fenwick note, would assume it to be addressed to a wife or sweetheart. The difference between writing about sexual love and about parental love is simply irrelevant to the expression of this emotion.

To recover emotions from texts: that is what we do to construct history as human happening, and that is what this book has tried to do. As we have frequently observed, this involves theoretical complications: these must not be underestimated, but they must not cause us to abandon the task. One of the complications is that recovering emotion from a poem is very like, and also very unlike, recovering it from a letter. Poems are like letters in that they derive from experience; they are unlike letters in that they turn the experience to a permanent, self-sufficient form that has led some schools of criticism to claim (mistakenly but understandably) that they are purely verbal constructs, pointing to no signified.

And finally, a word on gender. This instance confirms, but also complicates, the conclusions suggested in the cases of Coleridge and Shelley: women suffer, men write poems. Some versions of feminist criticism might wish (mistakenly but understandably) to maintain this oversimplification. It is (I trust) no less feminist for me to state the position as follows. In the case of Coleridge, the male poet poured his feelings effusively into letters and wrote some short, packed poems not explicitly referring to his own loss; the female had silence imposed on her, tried to keep it, but could not always. In the case of Shelley, the male wrote effusive, fragmentary poems of grief and loss; the female grieved in silence. In the case of Wordsworth,

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the two females split the feminine response: one grieved and despaired, like Mary Shelley, and the other wrote warm-hearted outbursts of grief, blotted with tears (these are the two traditional feminine responses); while the male poet, showing tight-lipped restraint in his letter, wrote one controlled and polished expression of grief, formal and deeply movingboth less and more moving than his sister's heartbroken letters.

A True Poem

Here the chapter should end, but there is a postscript. For Wordsworth wrote one more poem about the death of a child, a poem which has little relation to the rest of this chapter but that it is impossible to omit.

There was a Boy: ye knew him well, ye cliffs
And islands of Winander!many a time
At evening, when the earliest stars began
To move along the edges of the hills,
Rising or setting, would he stand alone
Beneath the trees or by the glimmering lake,
And there, with fingers interwoven, both hands
Pressed closely palm to palm, and to his mouth
Uplifted, he, as through an instrument,
Blew mimic hootings to the silent owls,
That they might answer him; and they would shout
Across the watery vale, and shout again,
Responsive to his call, with quivering peals,
And long halloos and screams, and echoes loud,
Redoubled and redoubled, concourse wild
Of jocund din; and, when a lengthened pause
Of silence came and baffled his best skill,
Then sometimes, in that silence while he hung
Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise
Has carried far into his heart the voice
Of mountain torrents; or the visible scene
Would enter unawares into his mind,
With all its solemn imagery, its rocks,
Its woods, and that uncertain heaven, received
Into the bosom of the steady lake.

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This Boy was taken from his mates, and died In childhood, ere he was full twelve years old. Fair is the spot, most beautiful the vale Where he was born; the grassy churchyard hangs Upon a slope above the village school, And through that churchyard when my way has led On summer evenings, I believe that there A long half-hour together I have stood Mute, looking at the grave in which he lies! ⁴³

Perhaps the best starting point for discussing this poem will be Francis Jeffrey's stern remarks in the
Edinburgh Review:

The sports of childhood and the untimely death of promising youth, is also a common topic of poetry. Mr Wordsworth has made some blank verse about it; but, instead of the delightful and picturesque sketches with which so many authors of moderate talents have presented us on this inviting subject, all that he is pleased to communicate of the rustic child, is, that he used to amuse himself with shouting to the owls, and hearing them answer. To make amends for this brevity, the process of his mimicry is most accurately described (Jeffrey then quotes ''And there, with fingers interwoven answer him.") This is all we hear of him; and for the sake of this one accomplishment, we are told, that the author has frequently stood mute, and gazed on his grave for half an hour together!
⁴⁴

This influential representative of pre-Romantic taste clearly had definite expectations of how this subject should be handled: what are they? What are the "delightful and picturesque sketches with which so many authors of moderate talents have presented us?" Looking through the likely authorsGoldsmith, Cowper, Crabbe, Mary RobinsonI have found that it was not quite so common a topic as Jeffrey suggests. Because his remarks come in a review of Crabbe's
Poems
of 1807, that would seem the obvious place to look (even though Jeffrey might not have been willing to relegate Crabbe to the ranks of "moderate talents"), and there is indeed an infant death in Part III of the
Parish Register
, which Jeffrey mentions in passing, but he does not link it with Wordsworth, and indeed it has nothing in common:

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But why thus lent, if thus recall'd again, To cause and feel, to live and die in, pain?" Or rather say, Why grievous these appear, If all it pays for Heaven's eternal year; If these sad sobs and piteous sighs secure Delights that live, when worlds no more endure? ⁴⁵

These contorted lines are a kind of desperate theology: what interpretation of the death, they ask, best fits our picture of God's purposes? The debate continues with a brief account of "the common ills of life" and the burden of having to wait a whole lifetime until the sad spirit attains rest, followed by a counterassertion that it is nonetheless better to live out one's life, since otherwise we'd be forced to believe that


Love Divine in vain Send[s] all the burthens weary men sustain.

Crabbe was, after all, a clergyman, and his poem dutifully addresses the need to demonstrate that living must be better than dying; otherwise, no theodicy would be possible.

This is not a delightful and picturesque sketch; indeed, it is not a sketch at all, since the infant did not survive long enough to become a subject. The sort of poem Jeffrey is referring to will be marked by pathos, and as an example of what he is thinking of I suggest "Childhood," by Henry Kirk White. Kirk White was an infant prodigy who died in 1806 at the age of twenty-one and who clearly owed his fame to his success in emulating the taste and catering to the expectations of what was still, for conventional readers, the Age of Sensibility. "Childhood" has two parts: an account of the poet's ''beloved age of innocence and smiles" in a Goldsmithian village, and a reminiscence of his childhood friend George (who apparently became a sailor), now no doubt dead in foreign lands: