Radical Wordsworth

After describing the days and nights of fearful visions, Wordsworth tries to identify their origin. Who or what is the spirit that haunts him? In the two-part Prelude of 1799, he imagines some combination of the localized nature gods of pagan antiquity and the sprites of native folklore. He begins his invocation: ‘Ah! not in vain ye Beings of the hills! / And ye that walk the woods and open heaths / By moon or star-light’.[25] In the more finished Prelude of 1805, he elevates this force into something grander. The ‘Beings of the hills’ are replaced by what can only be described as a world-soul:

Wisdom and Spirit of the Universe!

Thou Soul that art the Eternity of Thought!

And giv’st to forms and images a breath

And everlasting motion! not in vain,

By day or starlight thus from my first dawn

Of Childhood didst Thou intertwine for me

The passions that build up our human Soul,

Not with the mean and vulgar works of Man,

But with high objects, with enduring things,

With life and nature, purifying thus

The elements of feeling and of thought,

And sanctifying by such discipline

Both pain and fear until we recognise

A grandeur in the beatings of the heart.[26]

It is through his sense of the uncanny that he comes to believe that he has penetrated to the heart of the mystery of being: the human soul is only fully made when, instead of assuming that man is the master of all, we interwine our selves with the ‘enduring things’ of the natural world.

4

THERE WAS A BOY

In school, he began with Latin. Out of school, with fishing. The usher (deputy to the headmaster) taught him more in a fortnight than he had learned in all his time in Cockermouth. Once fluent in Latin, he took special delight in the Metamorphoses of Ovid, with its panoply of mythological tales of humans being transformed into rivers, rocks, flowers, trees and stars. He grew to love and respect the headmaster, Reverend William Taylor, Cambridge-educated, appointed headmaster of Hawkshead at the age of twenty-five, passionate about poetry and described by another poet as a man of ‘sound judgment, a modest demeanour and unblemished morals’.[1] Taylor became a substitute father, as Ann Tyson became a second mother.

There was brotherhood too. Not only with Richard and John, but also with schoolfriends. William and an older boy called Philip Braithwaite carved their names in a window seat in Ann Tyson’s cottage. The son of a hatter, Braithwaite had a limp, later exacerbated by an accident when he was apprenticed to a local farmer. This did not stop him from accompanying Wordsworth on long walks. On one occasion they crossed Windermere ferry and explored an unknown valley, where they found an abandoned charcoal-burner’s hut. They wondered about spending the night there but thought better of the plan. In the autumn, they would go into Graythwaite woods to gather hazelnuts. As an old man, Braithwaite remembered how William was always asking him questions, eager to learn of the world. When Braithwaite returned from a trip to London, in connection with family legal business, Wordsworth quizzed him about the great city – and was disappointed not to see some visible sign of how his friend might have been transformed by the experience.[2]

Another boy, Thomas Maude, described Wordsworth as ‘the uneasiest bedfellow I’ve ever had’.[3] This chimes with the poet’s own memory of nocturnal restlessness. He writes in The Prelude of how, when a student at Cambridge, he went home for the summer vacation and lodged again with Ann Tyson, taking comfort in his return to

That bed whence I had heard the roaring wind

And clamorous rain, that bed where I so oft

Had lain awake on breezy nights to watch

The moon in splendour couched among the leaves

Of a tall ash, that near our cottage stood,

Had watched her with fixed eyes, while to and fro,

In the dark summit of the waving tree,

She rocked with every impulse of the wind.[4]

Sometimes he would walk out alone at night.

Then there was John Fleming, who also loved poetry. The two teenage boys would get up at sunrise and, before the beginning of school, walk around the lake, reciting lines of rural description from James Thomson’s The Seasons, the most popular long poem of the eighteenth century. Wordsworth was becoming a voracious reader. During the Christmas and summer vacations, he worked his way through his father’s library, especially enjoying ‘on the road’ novels such as Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, Alain-René Lesage’s The Adventures of Gil Blas in Tobias Smollett’s translation, and, father of them all, the Don Quixote of Cervantes. In later school years, his teacher lent him all the latest poetry: the meditative Task of William Cowper; the Scottish ballads of Robert Burns and the English ones of Thomas Percy’s Reliques; the pseudo-medieval effusions of the boy wonder Thomas Chatterton; the elegiac sonnets of Thomas Warton and Charlotte Smith; and The Minstrel of James Beattie, in which the rise and progress of poetical genius was expounded in florid stanzas filled with Gothic imagery.

These loans came from a new headmaster, because Taylor died, aged just thirty-two, in the summer of 1786. Eight years later, Wordsworth visited his grave near the sea at Cartmel Priory. It was inscribed with lines from Thomas Gray’s renowned poem ‘Elegy written in a Country Churchyard’, chosen by the master himself. Wordsworth, in his habitual guise of a returning wanderer, recalled how, about a week before his death, Taylor had said to him ‘My head will soon lie low.’ As Wordsworth looked at the turf on the grave, ‘those words’,

With sound of voice, and countenance of the man,

Came back upon me, so that some few tears

Fell from me in my own despite. And now,

Thus travelling smoothly o’er the level sands,

I thought with pleasure of the verses graven

Upon his tombstone, saying to myself

‘He loved the poets, and if now alive

Would have loved me, as one not destitute

Of promise, nor belying the kind hope

Which he had formed when I at his command

Began to spin, at first, my toilsome songs.’

It was indeed Taylor who had set him the exercises that became his first poems: verses on ‘The Summer Vacation’ (to which the precocious William added a sequel called ‘Return to School’) and an ode on the power of education, written in commemoration of the bicentenary of the school’s foundation.

As Wordsworth approached his father’s death obliquely by way of the ‘waiting for the horses’ passage in The Prelude, so he faced the memory of losing Taylor indirectly in a sequence of poems in Lyrical Ballads that take the form of dialogues with a teacher called ‘Mathew’. The figure was, Wordsworth acknowledged, an amalgam of several schoolmasters and other villagers whom he had known. ‘Mathew’ is an old man, in contrast to the Taylor who was cut down in his prime. He was partly based on a figure known in Hawkshead as ‘Mr John’: John Harrison, who for many years kept a small primary (junior) school in the village and who was a keen fisherman. The composite ‘Mathew’ is a representative of the teacher as father figure.

The finest poem in the group, ‘The Two April Mornings’, describes how the poet and the schoolmaster go for a walk at sunrise on a beautiful spring morning. ‘Mathew’ suddenly looks sad. The poet asks him why. He says it is because he has noticed the particular slant of purple light across a cloud over the mountaintop and it has reminded him of another April morning, thirty years ago, when he saw exactly the same fall of light crimsoning a field where the corn was just beginning to show above the ground. On that occasion, he was out with his fishing rod and, passing the churchyard, he stopped to visit the grave of his daughter, who had died at the age of nine. He felt that he had never loved her, or indeed anyone, so much as at that moment:

Six feet in earth my Emma lay,

And yet I lov’d her more,

For so it seem’d, than till that day

I e’er had lov’d before.

He then narrates how, as he turned from the grave, he saw a girl in the full bloom of youth, her flowing hair glistening with the morning dew. She is carrying a basket on her head, tripping along without a care in the world. Mathew sighs with grief as he thinks of his own lost daughter, but then he looks at the girl a second time ‘And did not wish her mine’. He accepts his own loss and rejoices instead that life goes on, that the sun comes up another day on another child. Wordsworth ends the poem by reverting to his own memory:

Mathew is in his grave, yet now

Methinks I see him stand,

As at that moment, with his bough

Of wilding in his hand.[5]

The poem peels away layers of memory. Wordsworth wrote it when he was far from home, in Goslar, Germany, in the depths of the freezing winter of 1798–9. The memory of a conversation with an old schoolmaster becomes a memory of his young schoolmaster; when Mathew remembers the earlier April morning, he remembers his dead child and when Wordsworth remembers the conversation, he brings Mathew back to life in his mind’s eye, with the fishing rod, cut from the branch of a young tree, that he was carrying not on the morning when he walked with the poet, but when he saw the girl dancing away from the graveyard. And this brings back other memories: not only of the two schoolmasters, but also of that other girl with a pitcher on her head in the screen memory of Wordsworth’s mother’s death.

Furthermore, the girl who died when ‘Nine summers had she scarcely seen’ – a similar age to that of Wordsworth at the time of his mother’s death – is called Emma. ‘Mr John’ had a daughter of that name who died as a child, but it was also the name that Wordsworth substitutes for that of his beloved sister Dorothy in several other poems written around the same time. Among these is another spring poem, ‘It was an April morning’, one of his ‘Poems on the Naming of Places’ in which he dedicates a secluded dell with lush foliage to ‘Emma’, making it his ‘other home’, ‘My dwelling, and my out-of-doors abode’.[6] As will be seen, Coleridge thought that the mysterious ‘Lucy’ poems, also written during the winter in Goslar, were Wordsworth’s fearful imaginings of his sister’s death. To have been bereaved of her as well as of his mother and father would have been unbearable. By imagining the worst, he was staving off that fear. During the Hawkshead years, his sister was indeed lost to him – she was far away in Yorkshire. Their reunion was one of the most joyful days of his life, and thereafter they would live together for the rest of his days. Symbolically, the joyful girl dancing away from the grave is not only an image of new life, but a figuration of Dorothy brought back from absence into presence.

Wordsworth’s acute memory and extraordinary ability to make imaginative connections just below the level of overt consciousness extended from his own experience to his literary inheritance. The carefree girl in the graveyard ‘whose hair was wet / With points of morning dew’ seemed, he writes, ‘as happy as a wave / That dances on the sea’. During his childhood, Wordsworth had seen dancing waves on the coast that edges the Lake District and on more than one occasion prior to the writing of the Mathew poems he had ridden the waves of the English Channel on his way to France. But his choice of simile also came from his reading.

The April morning of the poem is characterized by rebirth: the spring sunshine warms the earth and the fresh corn emerges. For centuries, poets have taken comfort in the cycle of the seasons: human life is linear, leading to the grave, but in the natural world new life comes every spring. At school and then university, Wordsworth read deeply in the classics. A fragmentary manuscript survives in which he translates a passage from Virgil’s telling of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice – a tale of a poet’s attempt to bring his beloved back from the grave. But the Roman poet whom the young Wordsworth especially loved was Shakespeare’s favourite, Ovid. This is hardly surprising: Ovid’s Metamorphoses is a storehouse of wonder-filled imaginings of the inseparability of the human and the non-human, in which people are transformed into natural objects. It was in Ovid that Wordsworth found the archetypal story of how, as Shelley would put it some years later, ‘If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?’[7] The lovely girl Proserpina, daughter of the goddess of grain and fertility, is abducted by Pluto, god of the underworld, but allowed to return every spring. Her story is an allegory of the seasons.

William Shakespeare was in William Wordsworth’s bloodstream, as he was in almost every aspect of the culture of the age.[8] ‘Shakespeare’, says Henry Crawford in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, ‘is part of an Englishman’s constitution’: ‘His thoughts and beauties are so spread abroad that one touches them everywhere.’ Crawford’s rival Edmund Bertram agrees and is more exact: ‘we all talk Shakespeare, use his similes, and describe with his descriptions’.[9] Wordsworth was no exception. In The Winter’s Tale, a play about dead children and second chances, the abandoned and adopted daughter Perdita compares herself to Proserpina. This was Shakespeare’s way of indicating that the bleak drama of winter in the first half of the play is turning to joyous spring in the second. In reply to Perdita’s invocation of Proserpina, Florizel, in love with her, says ‘when you do dance, I wish you / A wave o’ the sea, that you might ever do / Nothing but that’.[10] ‘As happy as a wave / That dances on the sea’: the contextual parallel fleetingly turns the girl in the graveyard in Wordsworth’s Mathew poem into Perdita, the lost one who is found.

*

Wordsworth’s poetry of memory sought to reanimate the life of childhood, to recover the sensations that fade as we grow to adulthood. In another fragment in his first notebook of jottings towards his long poem of personal memory, he wrote of the early beginnings of his love affair with nature, of the strange affinity he felt between his own existence and ‘existing things’, of ‘The bond of union betwixt life and joy’. ‘Yes’, he continues, remembering how at the age of ten he

Held unconscious intercourse

With the eternal beauty, drinking in

A pure organic pleasure from the lines

Of curling mist, or from the smooth expanse

Of waters coloured by the cloudless moon.[11]

He calls this sensation the ‘tranquillizing power’ of Nature. It is as if he is her child, drinking nourishment from her smooth breast. Inevitably, though, there is a gulf between the sensations of the ten-year-old child gazing at the lake by moonlight or at the morning mist rising over the hills and the reflective language of the twenty-eight-year-old poet, who was by then both widely read and under the spell of the prodigious intellect of Coleridge. These few lines are very typical of Wordsworth in that they juxtapose precise observation of nature – the curling of the mist, the mirror-like smoothness of water lit by moonlight on a clear night – with abstract, philosophical terms.

‘Unconscious intercourse’ is a phrase that had never appeared in print before. Eighteenth-century philosophers were very interested in the unconscious workings of the human mind, especially the way in which sense perceptions were organized through a process of mental association. The word ‘intercourse’ was generally used to refer to social relations, but did sometimes occur in spiritual contexts as a term for communion with the divine. To yoke the two words and attach them to the youthful Wordsworth’s communion with a trick of light or a meteorological phenomenon was to imply that children – or at least this child – have an innate sense of natural religion. Similarly, ‘eternal beauty’ is a phrase that was common in religious works with titles such as The Practice of Piety: directing a Christian how to walk, that he may please God.[12] To apply it to a landscape was to venture towards the realm of pantheism, the belief that the divine is to be found immanently in nature, not in some transcendent supernatural realm.

What did Wordsworth mean by his third abstract phrase, ‘a pure organic pleasure’? I suspect that he derived the term from one of the most influential books of the Scottish Enlightenment, Lord Kames’s Elements of Criticism. Published in 1762, this was a pioneering work of aesthetics, a newly emergent field of intellectual inquiry that asked such questions as ‘what is the nature of beauty?’ and ‘what constitutes good taste?’ The treatise went through eight editions in twenty years. Kames begins his introduction with a discussion of pleasure, in order to lay the ground for an argument that the best gardening, architecture, painting, sculpture, music and poetry give tasteful human beings their most enduring delights. Pleasure, he argues at the outset, comes from gratification of the sense organs. The pleasures (and displeasures) of three of our senses – touch, smell and taste – are intense and instant because they are felt directly upon the organs that receive the impressions of external things (skin, nose, tongue). For the same reason, such pleasures are ephemeral: ‘Organic pleasures have naturally a short duration; when prolonged, they lose their relish; when indulged to excess, they beget satiety and disgust.’ The pleasures of eye and ear, by contrast, are felt in the mind; they are of a higher order, occupying a rich holding ground between the organic and the intellectual. For this reason, they may be described as therapeutic: ‘being sweet and moderately exhilarating, they are in their tone equally distant from the turbulence of passion, and the languor of indolence; and by that tone are perfectly well qualified, not only to revive the spirits when sunk by sensual gratification, but also to relax them when overstrained in any violent pursuit’. Our first perceptions, Kames argues, are of external objects, and our first attachments are to them. ‘Organic pleasures take the lead’, but as we mature we graduate to the higher pleasures of the eye and ear working upon the mind.[13]

Wordsworth makes this philosophical argument tangible. He imagines his childhood self drinking in pleasure from the lines of mist, as if feeling the impression of nature upon the tongue. In emphasizing the smooth expanse of waters, he metaphorically touches the surface of the lake. These childhood pleasures are thus made into physical sensations; they are purely organic, without reliance on the conscious mind. Hence the ‘unconscious intercourse’, of a kind almost analogous to a sexual union – intriguingly, the Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest record of the use of ‘intercourse’ in a sexual sense is Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population, published in this same year of 1798.

Where Wordsworth departs from Kames is in his mourning for the loss of the child’s pure organic pleasure in the landscape. For Kames, the aesthetic sense is a stepping stone that takes the rational man from the baser passions of the body to the higher pleasures of the intellect and ultimately to the realm of reason and morality. For Wordsworth, growing up is a growing away from the child’s unmediated unity of self, body and environment. The adult can recapture that primal spirit in moments of memory, but the quest to preserve it in writing requires the intervention of the conscious mind and the working intellect, tainting the purity of the organic pleasure. This in a nutshell is the difference between the Enlightenment philosopher and the Romantic poet.

‘But the downward glide / and bias of existing wrings us dry’, wrote Robert Lowell, a later poet deeply versed in the Romantic tradition, ‘Always inside me is the child who died’.[14] Wordsworth’s poetry is essentially elegiac in spirit not only because of the actual deaths that afflicted him in childhood, but also because he knew that he could never recover the child’s untrammelled and untroubled unity with the natural world. In another fragmentary recollection in the notebook in which he began working up scenes for what became The Prelude, he places himself beside Windermere or Esthwaite at twilight. The sequence begins in the third person, detaching the remembering adult from the experiencing child: ‘There was a Boy …’ For a moment, the reader wonders who this boy might have been, but as the writing draws the poet fully into the memory, the voice shifts from ‘he’ to ‘I’, ‘his’ to ‘my’. The childhood self has come back to life:

… would he stand alone

Beneath the trees or by the glimmering lakes,

And through his fingers woven in one close knot

Blow mimic hootings to the silent owls,

And bid them answer him. And they would shout

Across the wat’ry vale, and shout again,

Responsive to my call, with tremulous sobs

And long halloos, and screams, and echoes loud,

Redoubled and redoubled – a wild scene

Of mirth and jocund din. And when it chanced

That pauses of deep silence mocked my skill,

Then often in that silence, while I hung

Listening, a sudden shock of mild surprize

Would carry far into my heart the voice

Of mountain torrents; or the visible scene

Would enter unawares into my mind

With all its solemn imagery, its rocks,

Its woods, and that uncertain heaven, received

Into the bosom of the steady lake.[15]

(I have italicized the pronouns to emphasize the shift towards the self.) Coleridge, who knew Wordsworth’s poetic voice more intuitively than anyone other than Dorothy, wrote in a letter: ‘Had I met these lines running wild in the deserts of Arabia, I should have instantly screamed out “Wordsworth!”’[16] In both style and content, he is sure, this is his friend at his very best, his most characteristic. Let us pause for a moment to test the claim.

Thanks to the influence of Shakespeare, Milton and James Thomson, the supple iambic pentameter blank-verse line – ten syllables, five beats, unstressed, stressed, unstressed, stressed, with rhythmic variation but no neat chime of rhyme – was the favoured medium for meditative poetry in the later eighteenth century. The clipped couplets and urbane wit of Alexander Pope were falling out of favour. Instead, poets such as the manic depressive William Cowper reflected on the solace of rural life in lengthy verse-paragraphs, the fluidity of thought running the sentences across the line endings, setting up a creative tension between the metrical and the syntactical movement. Wordsworth’s blank verse moves in the same vein, so why was Coleridge so sure that ‘There was a Boy’ could have been written only by his friend? What is the difference between Wordsworth and Cowper, whose work was more admired at the time?

In Wordsworth’s twenties, when he lived ‘Among the fretful dwellings of mankind’ in London and Paris, the memory of the river Derwent running beside his earliest home gave him ‘A knowledge, a dim earnest, of the calm / Which nature breathes among the fields and groves’.[17] The restorative power of nature was the central theme of his autobiographical epic. This thought was by no means original. The solace of the country as a bulwark against the stress of the city was an ancient poetic theme. ‘This is the life which those who fret in guilt, / And guilty cities, never knew’, wrote Thomson in The Seasons, that paean to rural scenes which was so widely read throughout the eighteenth century.[18] When Wordsworth was fifteen, Cowper published his long blank-verse poem The Task, which extolled the virtues of country walks and the sounds of nature that ‘exhilarate the spirit’ in contrast to the vices of city life. The most famous line in the poem was ‘God made the country, and man made the town’: for Cowper this distinction explained why ‘health and virtue’ were to be found in ‘fields and groves’.[19]