The Columbia History of British Poetry (103 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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order of being encroaching upon the routine of everyday life. The memorable example there is the impression of a girl with a pitcher on her head, forcing her way painfully against a strong wind"an ordinary sight," perhaps, but one with extraordinary reverberations, an arrangement of unforgettable aesthetic intensity. But "spots of time"or psychological epiphaniesanimate the poem from the beginning and impel much of its sustained argument. Childhood episodes recalled in Book I, notably the stealing of a boat and the cliff-hung search for birds' eggs, inculcate a sudden but lasting response to the larger than human, all-encompassing presences of Nature. An encounter with a blind beggar in London offers the poet, bewildered and "lost" in the surging crowd, abrupt admonishment, as if "from another world,'' that we can know but little "of ourselves and of the universe."
Most vividly of alland most distinctly in the sublime mode-the traveler in the Alps, disappointed that he has unknowingly passed the highest point and "lost" to further simple expectation, is suddenly struck by the magnificence of the Simplon Pass, where the tension of opposites, the static in the dynamic (the "woods decaying, never to be decayed" and the "stationary blasts of waterfalls") evokes the ultimate apocalyptic vision:
The torrents shooting from the clear blue sky,
The rocks that muttered close upon our ears,
Black drizzling crags that spake by the way-side
As if a voice were in them, the sick sight
And giddy prospect of the raving stream,
The unfettered clouds and region of the Heavens,
Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light
Were all like workings of one mind, the features
Of the same face, blossoms upon one tree;
Characters of the great Apocalypse,
The types and symbols of Eternity,
Of first, and last, and midst, and without end.
The narrative of
The Prelude
moves not by story line but by links often quite prosaic between sharp impressions and poetic epiphanies. A relaxed tension or aimlessness like the "melancholy slackening" of pace that precedes the experience of the Simplon Pass is, even in some of Wordsworth's shorter poems, the precondition of the spot of time or of its recurrence through memory. The first line of the daffodil lyric "I
 
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wandered lonely as a cloud" fixes the indifference that the dazzling vision of the golden flowers, symbols of the life force, will displace and redeem; and the last lines recall a state of mind much like the first, a "vacant" or "pensive'' mood, which the involuntary recollection of the daffodils will again animate in a sudden "flash" of joy. The great "Ode: Intimations of Immortality" celebrates the child's sense of infinite belonging, which, though apparently lost in the "noisy years" of maturity, may stillin rare spots of timebreak through our "listlessness" and "mad endeavour":
       Hence in a season of calm weather
       Though inland far we be,
Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea
       Which brought us hither,
   Can in a moment travel thither,
And see the Children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.
Wordsworth's mastery of a style less grandly orchestrated than that of the "Ode," but with similar metaphysical overtones, informs his "Resolution and Independence," a more specific account of poet and epiphany. Here an aged leech-gatherer provides the occasion (like the appearance of the beggar in
The Prelude
) of "apt admonishment" to the vacillating poet-narratorthe poem's real subjectwho has begun an early morning walk, well pleased both with himself and with the rain-freshened landscape. But since his mood is self-seeking and unstable, he soon sinks from elation to a "dim sadness" and thence to deeper fears for his own future with its potential "pain of heart, distress and poverty." He ponders the unhappy fate of fellow poets Chatterton and Burns and at once aligns himself with their misfortunes: "We Poets in our youth begin in gladness: / But thereof come in the end despondency and madness."
Then suddenly, as if "by peculiar grace, / A leading from above, a something given," the unexpected sight of the leech-gatherer, as still and elemental as a stone, cuts across his self-pity. A brief exchange of commonplaces intensifies an impression of dignity and stoic courage, until the edges of the image blur, and the old man becomesas in a dreaman archetype of eternal endurance, pacing "about the moors continually," forever silent and alone. When the spot of time, which is a moment's mute entrancement, recedes, the impact of the experience endures as a source of inspiriting strength, rebuking callow self-indulgence.
 
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With the exception of
The White Doe of Rylstone
, his long historical narrative, Wordsworth's most memorable poetry is subjective in method or reference, relating the projected emotion to the peculiar needs of the narrator, and even the
White Doe
was, by his own testimony, designed less to tell a remote story than to illustrate the workings of a pious and often mystical imagination not unlike his own. But few poems are as self-accusing of the poet-speaker as "Resolution and Independence," and many assign to the recurrent "I" a more recessive or detached role. In "The Solitary Reaper," for example (which actually reflects an image from reading rather than direct experience), the ''I" does not signal his presence until the third stanzaand then only with the perplexed question (for the reaper's language is Gaelic), "Will no one tell me what she sings?" But the full melancholy music like something everlasting ("As if her song could have no ending") remains, according to the last lines, as a spot of time to haunt his memory long after he has returned to ordinary life.
In the Lucy lyrics Wordsworth constructs an object of love and loss (for we do not know that a real Lucy ever existed), from which the "I" stands apart in numbed bereavement. In "She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways" the first person appears only in the understated last line: "But she is in her grave, and, oh, / The difference to me!" In "Three Years She Grew" the "I" lets a quite inhuman Nature speak eloquently of incorporating Lucy into a larger order of being and nonbeing, a eulogy in sharp contrast to the sense of emptiness with which the "I" of the last stanza must go on living. And in "A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal" the poet measures his frail humanity, his lack of "human fears," against the inexorable powers that have deprived Lucy of all motion and force, yet paradoxically have made her a part forever of the moving, insensate earth.
Wordsworth's actual or alleged egotism brought a new psychological dimension to English poetry, but also invited the confessional diffuseness and laxity of form that he himself recognized as defects to be considered in revising
The Prelude
, which was to stand as his masterpiece and most original work. Deliberate self-restraint, on the other hand, led to the understatement and admirable concision of the Lucy lyrics, where his only self-assertion is the quiet but complete control of emotion and medium. The "Ode to Duty" describes the subjective poet's burden of too much "being to myself a guide" and "the weight of chance-desires"; and the sonnet "Nuns Fret Not at Their Convent's
 
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Narrow Room" celebrates the sonnet form itself as an aesthetic release from "too much liberty."
Indeed, with the ideal of disciplined form steadily before him, Wordsworth, at the peak of his strength, emerged as one of the greatest sonneteers in the language, worthy of comparison with Shakespeare and Miltonthough much more indebted to the latter, who provided examples of the Italianate form and the moral substance he was consciously to emulate. In the sonnets of 18021804 especially he found his own strong social and political voice, the assurance and energy boldly to exercise his personal dedication. The poet-prophet, now with firm resolution, denounces his contemporary England as decadentguilty of selfishness, glittering materialism, and betrayal of a noble national heritage ("the tongue / That Shakespeare spake," the "faith and morals" of Milton). And in a climactic indictment ("The World Is Too Much with Us'')an attack on the frenetic getting and spending of his time and the consequent loss of reverence and wonderhe combines personal engagement, vehement rhetoric, and superb command of poetic devices (image, cadence, allusion, and assonance) as in the sestet:
                   Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea:
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.
Although his substantial achievement belongs almost entirely to the one decade following 1797, Wordsworth continued to write and revise for many years thereafter, during which he produced much journeyman work and a few piecesmostly sonnetsof higher distinction. He survived the second generation of RomanticsByron, Shelley, and Keatswho had found him a literary presence to be both respected and parodied, and he saw his reputation as a major poet well established by the early-Victorian critics. Yet he rarely recovered in his later verse the visionary gleam of his great spots of time, and his poet's voice retained but little of its past boldness and authority. By the 1830s the new Age of Tennyson was beginning respectfully to question Wordsworth's poetic themes and methods as it defined its own post-Romantic difference.

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