Radical Wordsworth

Wordsworth acknowledged that The Task was a significant precedent for his own project. He described Cowper’s work as a ‘composite’ of ‘idyllium’ (which he defined as observation of ‘the processes and appearances of external nature’), didactic poem (offering ‘direct instruction’ to the reader) and ‘philosophical satire’. His own longer works were just such composites.[20] But there was a key difference. Thomson and Cowper always proceeded from natural description to moral generalization. Wordsworth inherited their art of sermonizing about nature. What he added was a much more individual voice and, above all, a particularity lodged in personal memory. Cowper had his local affections, but the perambulations of The Task have a generic quality. The poet could be leading the reader through any English field or grove, whereas when Wordsworth begins his epic task, the starting point is specifically the Derwent of his first home, the alder tree bending into his father’s garden, the sound of the river merging into his dreams as he falls asleep as a child and as he dreams that childhood back to life in the act of writing poetry. The power of the unconscious, as manifested in memories and dreams; the child as father of the man: these are not ideas to be found in the ‘loco-descriptive’ verse of Wordsworth’s predecessors.

Cowper’s verse moves at a leisurely pace, so in order to make a fair comparison we need to settle into an extended quotation, ideally reading it aloud, imagining ourselves sitting on a sofa by the fire on a winter’s night in an English country parsonage:

Nor rural sights alone, but rural sounds

Exhilarate the spirit, and restore

The tone of languid Nature. Mighty winds,

That sweep the skirt of some far-spreading wood

Of ancient growth, make music not unlike

The dash of ocean on his winding shore,

And lull the spirit while they fill the mind,

Unnumbered branches waving in the blast,

And all their leaves fast fluttering, all at once.

Nor less composure waits upon the roar

Of distant floods, or on the softer voice

Of neighbouring fountain, or of rills that slip

Through the cleft rock, and, chiming as they fall

Upon loose pebbles, lose themselves at length

In matted grass, that with a livelier green

Betrays the secret of their silent course.

Nature inanimate employs sweet sounds,

But animated Nature sweeter still

To soothe and satisfy the human ear.

Ten thousand warblers cheer the day, and one

The livelong night: nor these alone whose notes

Nice-fingered art must emulate in vain,

But cawing rooks, and kites that swim sublime

In still repeated circles, screaming loud,

The jay, the pie, and even the boding owl

That hails the rising moon, have charms for me.

Sounds inharmonious in themselves and harsh,

Yet heard in scenes where peace for ever reigns,

And only there, please highly for their sake.[21]

‘Languid’ is the word. These lines are comforting, but never startling. Granted, there are many elements that anticipate Wordsworth in both form and substance: the running on of the sentences across the line endings (‘roar / Of’, ‘voice / Of’, ‘slip / Through’, ‘fall / Upon’), the attunement to sounds as well as sights, the sense of harmony in the natural world (‘the secret of their silent course’), the movement between precise description (‘loose pebbles’, ‘matted grass’) and a general concept of ‘animated Nature’. But when it comes to the owl whose nightly note ‘Nice-fingered art must emulate in vain’, there is no personal connection, no specific memory, no sense of the inner being of the child in the landscape. Although the words ‘secret’ and ‘sublime’ are used, they have none of the strangeness and fear that animate the Wordsworthian landscape. Cowper finds composure in listening to the wind, the rill and the birdsong, whereas in Wordsworth something much more mysterious occurs.

We may see this by making another comparison. It is possible that some time before writing ‘There was a Boy’ Wordsworth read a collection of verse dramas by Joanna Baillie, a writer whom he later befriended and for whose work he expressed considerable admiration. In one of her plays, De Monfort, he would have found a twilight scene:

Enter Rezenvelt, and continues his way slowly across the stage, but just as he is going off the owl screams, he stops and listens, and the owl screams again.

REZENVELT: Ha! Does the night-bird greet me on my way?

How much his hooting is in harmony

With such a scene as this! I like it well.

Oft when a boy, at the still twilight hour,

I’ve leant my back against some knotted oak,

And loudly mimick’d him, till to my call

He answer would return, and thro’ the gloom

We friendly converse held.[22]

Wordsworth, clearly, was not the first to make poetry out of the memory of a boy mimicking the hoot of an owl in fading evening light. The difference is that in Baillie’s play the memory is of ‘friendly converse’ with the bird, whereas in Wordsworth the thing that makes the memory a ‘spot of time’ is the moment when the owls do not reply. It is signalled by one of his most characteristic line endings: at ‘hung / Listening’, the pause of the beat enacts the suspension of sound. And in that moment, the ‘shock of mild surprize’ at not getting a conscious answer from Nature in the form of a response from the owls is transformed into a mystical union in which the voice of water running from the mountains is carried far into his heart, and the sky reflected in the lake enters unawares into his mind.

Coleridge was one of the most astute readers of poetry ever to walk the planet: he was confident that, should he have encountered these lines running wild in the deserts of Arabia, he would have recognized them as Wordsworth’s rather than Cowper’s or Baillie’s not only because of the personal voice and the sense of mystery, but also because no poet before Wordsworth (other than Shakespeare) had made small words such as ‘far’ and ‘unawares’ do such profound work. When Thomas De Quincey, another highly astute reader, analysed the poem as an example of Wordsworthian psychology at its most characteristic, he noted that ‘This very expression, far, by which space and its infinities are attributed to the human heart, and its capacities of re-echoing the sublimities of nature, has always struck me as with a flash of sublime revelation’.[23]

Given that these lines were so admired by Coleridge and that they were among the earliest fragments of what became The Prelude, we might feel a gentle shock of mild surprise on discovering that they do not appear in the opening books of the poem devoted to ‘Childhood and School-time’. Wordsworth published them independently, as a short poem in the second volume of Lyrical Ballads. Later, he included them in book five of The Prelude, which is devoted mainly to the influence of books. And he made a significant revision: the first-person pronouns were removed. The switch to the self has disappeared, leaving the boy a ‘he’ throughout. Furthermore, a coda was added:

Fair are the woods, and beauteous is the spot,

The vale where he was born: the Church-yard hangs

Upon a slope above the village school,

And there along that bank when I have pass’d

At evening, I believe, that near his grave

A full half-hour together I have stood,

Mute – for he died when he was ten years old.[24]

In the final 1850 Prelude, the age of death is changed to twelve. Wordsworth once told a relative that the grave was of a Hawkshead boy named John Tyson who had been a playmate of his, and whose grave in the churchyard does indeed say that he died at the age of twelve. It is not known whether Tyson excelled at owl-hooting, an art for which Wordsworth’s schoolmate William Raincock was renowned.

The coda answers the moment of silence when the boy ‘hung / Listening’ by way of the image of the churchyard hanging on the slope above the school and the adult Wordsworth standing mute in contemplation of the grave. By transposing what was originally written as his own experience to that of an unnamed boy who died while still a child, Wordsworth transforms the incident into a symbol of how something dies in all of us when we reach our teens and grow into self-consciousness.

This poem was of great importance to Wordsworth. When he gathered his poems for a collected edition in 1815, giving them a distinctive thematic arrangement, he chose to place ‘There was a Boy’ at the head of ‘Poems of the Imagination’, the section that included many of his greatest poems, including the ‘Lucy’ elegies, ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’, ‘Resolution and Independence’, and ‘Tintern Abbey’. In his preface he explained that this was because it represented ‘one of the earliest processes of Nature’ in the development of the faculty of imagination. He describes that process as ‘a commutation and transfer of internal feelings, co-operating with external accidents, to plant, for immortality, images of sound and sight, in the celestial soil of the Imagination’. The key, he suggests, is the surprise felt at the moment when the ‘intenseness’ of the boy’s mind is ‘beginning to remit’. The pattern recurs at several other peculiarly Wordsworthian moments in which intensity is achieved in a moment of relaxation, for example when he realizes that he has crossed the highest point of the Alps without noticing and when he is ‘Surprised by joy’ while immersed in grief.

On one occasion, he gave his disciple Thomas De Quincey a masterclass in the process: he told of how he would put his ear on the road to listen intently for the sound of an approaching carriage, but then ‘at the very instant when the organs of attention were all at once relaxing from their tension, the bright star hanging in the air above those outlines of massy blackness fell suddenly upon my eye, and penetrated my capacity of apprehension with a pathos and a sense of the infinite, that would not have arrested me under other circumstances’.[25] Though a loquacious raconteur, De Quincey was also a good listener. He absorbed the idea and adapted it to his own purposes in his ‘Essay on the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth’, where he suggests that the moment of most heightened tension in Shakespeare’s play comes not with the murder of King Duncan but with the breaking of the silence in its aftermath.

*

One day early in 1783, two of Wordsworth’s fellow pupils at the grammar school were scrambling on Yewdale Crags, not far from the village, when they saw a raven’s nest high on a ledge. The black raven is a bird with vicious talons and bill, readily capable of pecking out the eyes of a lamb. There was accordingly a bounty on its head, a ‘Varmen [vermin] Reward’ of fourpence a bird. Wordsworth remembered seeing bunches of unfledged ravens suspended in the churchyard at Hawkshead. For schoolboys, eggs were both a trophy and a contribution to pest control.

The boys went back to the town and found two friends who were accomplished climbers. They took a look: the nest was perched very near the top of the crags, accessible only by a dangerous rope climb. Back they went to town. A lad employed to build drystone walls had a rope and a hook, and was willing to accompany them. A gaggle of other boys went along, including the one they called Bill Wordsworth. They all clawed their way up the crag. Then John Benson, the boy who was supposed to be the best climber, set off along the precipitous ledge, held by a rope and with a satchel on his back to gather the eggs. He got very close to the nest but was then impeded by the overhang of the rock above the ledge. He froze. They tried to talk him down, but he could not make himself move. Some of the boys, among them the two youngest – Bill Raincock and Bill Wordsworth – were sent to get help. It took a long time coming, but eventually a great hulk of a man called Frank Castlehow, together with his equally athletic son Jonathan, scaled the crag, all the way to the top, and Jonathan went down on the ledge to haul up the terrified Benson. Wordsworth’s friends the Raincock brothers never went raven’s nesting again.[26]

The Prelude has a vivid account of the thrill of such a climb:

Oh, when I have hung

Above the raven’s nest, by knots of grass,

Or half-inch fissures in the slipp’ry rock,

But ill sustained, and almost, as it seemed,

Suspended by the blast which blew amain,

Shouldering the naked crag, oh at that time,

While on the perilous ridge I hung alone,

With what strange utterance did the loud dry wind

Blow through my ears! the sky seemed not a sky

Of earth, and with what motion moved the clouds![27]

Benson was stuck below the nest, beneath a jutting rock, and with a gang of boys, whereas Wordsworth in this scene is above and alone, clinging to a clump of grass. We can be fairly sure that in Benson’s case the lad was merely holding on for dear life, but it is impossible to know whether Wordsworth’s sensation of some mystical union with the wind, sky and clouds was felt at the time or imposed in the retrospect of memory. We cannot even be sure that he did ever hang along on a perilous ridge, and that this spot of time is not a fiction embroidered from his recollection of the Benson incident, which became the talk of the town.

Wordsworth himself was eminently aware of the possibility that the act of memory creates rather than recreates a feeling. ‘Of these and other kindred notices’, he observes at one point in The Prelude,

I cannot say what portion is in truth

The naked recollection of that time

And what may rather have been call’d to life

By after-meditation.[28]

Again, writing about ‘the impression of the memory’, he suggested to himself that things remembered idly ‘half seem / The work of Fancy’.[29] And, in a passage that echoes the emphasis in ‘There was a Boy’ on the scene reflected in the lake, he compared memory to the way that if you lean out of a slow-moving boat on a still clear surface of water and look down to see ‘weeds, fishes, flowers, / Grots, pebbles, roots of trees’, you will have difficulty in separating ‘The shadow from the substance’, differentiating the things that are really in the depths from the reflection of the world above. This double vision is, he suggests, exactly what happens when we scan ‘the surface of past time’.[30] These intuitions do indeed anticipate, with remarkable prescience, the conclusions of modern psychologists and cognitive scientists about the nature of memory.[31]

On a series of manuscript pages, replete with half-starts, crossings out, repetitions and variations, Wordsworth argued with himself about how he had been trying to write ‘A history of love from stage to stage / Advancing hand in hand with power & Joy’, but also to capture the ‘reverse’ feeling of ‘sad perplexity’.[32] He imagines himself plumbing the depths of the ‘mystery of man’ and comes to the conclusion that ‘something of the base’ of the human spirit is to be found in ‘simple childhood’. In remembering his own childhood, the ‘very fountains’ of his powers ‘seem open’, but as he approaches them ‘they close’. It is then that he realizes that ‘general feelings’ are insufficient. Particular ‘incidents’ must be ‘culled’ in order to explain ‘the hiding-places’ of his power and the capacity of memory to offer ‘restorations’. These ruminations formed the basis of a passage that he would eventually include between those two key spots of time – the girl with the pitcher on her head, which I have linked to his mother’s death, and waiting for the horses, which he explicitly linked to his father’s – at the climax of the book within his verse autobiography that he called ‘Imagination, How Impaired and Restored’:

The days gone by

Come back upon me from the dawn almost

Of life: the hiding-places of my power

Seem open; I approach, and then they close;

I see by glimpses now; when age comes on

May scarcely see at all, and I would give,

While yet we may, as far as words can give,

A substance and a life to what I feel:

I would enshrine the spirit of the past

For future restoration.[33]

Not ‘to what I felt’ at the time – how can an adult really be sure of what they felt at particular moments when a child? – but ‘to what I feel’. The purpose of the writing is to preserve not the letter but the spirit of the past, as a way of securing a sense of identity for the present and the future by locking in a personal story before memory vanishes with age.

Sometimes when Wordsworth was a child he had to reach out and touch a tree in order to reassure himself that he actually existed. As an adult he held on to his half-invented memories of being fostered alike by beauty and by fear as a way of giving ‘a substance and a life’ to his being in the world.

5

WALKING INTO REVOLUTION

14 JULY 1790

Two Cambridge undergraduates were walking through France. They had hatched a summer vacation scheme that their friends thought was ‘mad and impracticable’: an Alpine walking tour with hardly any money in their pockets and complete uncertainty as to the welcome they would receive. They had crossed from Dover and spent a night in Calais. They were wearing matching coats, purposely made for the journey before they set off from Cambridge. Each of them carried an oak walking stick and bore a bundle of possessions on his head, every bit in the manner of the girl in the mountains carrying the pitcher of water on hers. This, reported one of them to his sister, excited ‘a general smile’ as they passed through village after village.[1]

As they got into their stride, they would often travel thirteen leagues – about forty miles – a day (a ‘league’ was originally defined as the distance you could walk in an hour, so roughly three miles). But on this, their first day on French soil, they covered just ten miles, frequently stopping to absorb the festive atmosphere. They had walked straight into a revolution.

It was the first anniversary of the storming of the Bastille. A National Constituent Assembly had been formed and the powers of the monarchy had been curbed. Communities had begun to form democratic fédérations. There was genuine hope of a peaceful transition from the tyranny of absolute monarchy to a new regime with a mixed constitution, similar to that in Britain. On both sides of the political spectrum, it was agreed that there should be a fête to cement national unity. A day of celebration. The main event was on the Champ de Mars at the edge of Paris, bringing together the king and the royal family, the deputies of the Assembly, delegates from across the nation, and overseas representatives – including John Paul Jones and Thomas Paine from the youngest nation on earth, with its model constitution. They brought along the Stars and Stripes, the first time it was flown outside the United States.

Across the land, each town or village was encouraged to mount its own fête. As the two Cambridge students – William Wordsworth and his Welsh friend Robert Jones – walked the ten miles from Calais to Ardres, they encountered people in festive dress, smiling and singing, on their way to celebrate in one town or the other. They spent the night in Ardres and as they journeyed south over the coming days, they would meet many people returning from celebrations elsewhere, including delegates who had been to the great event in Paris. They ate and danced with them, the spirit of hope in the air.

Wordsworth caught the feeling beautifully in the first eight lines (the ‘octave’) of a sonnet written when he returned to northern France twelve years later. The poem is entitled, with characteristic precision, ‘To a Friend, Composed near Calais, on the Road leading to Ardres, August 7th, 1802’:

Jones! when from Calais southward you and I

Travell’d on foot together; then this Way,

Which I am pacing now, was like the May

With festivals of new-born Liberty:

A homeless sound of joy was in the Sky;

The antiquated Earth, as one might say,

Beat like the heart of Man: songs, garlands, play,

Banners, and happy faces, far and nigh!

In July 1790, Wordsworth was twenty. He had just completed three years at university. He was with his best college friend. He was on foreign soil for the first time in his life, anticipating new adventures and picturesque sights. And now he was witnessing a new dawn in human history. In remembering the day, he projected the joy that beat in his heart onto the earth and the sky. In 1802, the circumstances, both political and personal, were very different, as the last six lines (the ‘sestet’) of the sonnet reveals:

And now, sole register that these things were,

Two solitary greetings have I heard,

‘Good morrow, Citizen!’ a hollow word,

As if a dead Man spake it! Yet despair

I feel not: happy am I as a Bird:

Fair seasons yet will come, and hopes as fair.[2]

He refused to be cast down, but, as will be seen, his hopes were now more personal than political. By this time, ten years of bloodshed across France and Europe had hollowed out the dream of liberty, equality and fraternity. Even if that had not been the case, he would still have sensed that the youthful joy of July 1790 could never return, which was all the more reason to preserve it in poetry.

*

He had left Hawkshead just over three years earlier, in June 1787, clubbing together with fellow pupils to present some books to the school library. Back in Penrith with his grandparents, the Cooksons, he was at last reunited with his sister Dorothy. They spent much of that summer together, walking and sightseeing, sometimes in the company of her friend Mary Hutchinson. Dorothy wrote to another close friend in Halifax, where she had been living with her late mother’s cousin, telling of her joy at seeing her brothers for the first time in nearly ten years: ‘They are just the boys I could wish them, they are so affectionate and so kind to me as makes me love them more and more every day.’ She thought that William and Christopher were very clever; young John, who was to be a sailor, was less bright, but with ‘a most excellent heart’. She went on to describe their misery in the household of their cold-hearted grandparents and the malice of their uncle Christopher Crackanthorpe Cookson. They lived in a perpetual atmosphere of sourness and endured countless petty acts of cruelty and neglect. Dorothy was candid in her letters to her Halifax friend Jane Pollard, who had been like a sister to her. ‘Many a time’, she wrote, ‘have Wm, J, C, and myself shed tears together, tears of the bitterest sorrow, we all of us, each day, feel more sensibly the loss we sustained when we were deprived of our parents.’[3] Feel more sensibly: for some writers in the ‘age of sensibility’ powerful feeling was a performance conjured onto the page, whereas for William and Dorothy Wordsworth it was known in the heart, shaped by the experience of being orphaned and then separated from each other.

More prosaically, their dependence on those cruel relatives was absolute, because of the chaotic state of their father’s financial affairs at the time of his death. His executors had spent three years putting together a claim that old John Wordsworth’s employer Sir James Lowther (now raised to the peerage as the first Earl of Lonsdale) owed his estate more than £4,500. William’s awareness of this lengthy legal battle may have been one reason why he announced to his siblings that he wanted to be a lawyer if his health permitted. He was being troubled by ‘violent headaches and a pain in his side’.[4]

The good news was that he had won a place as a ‘sizar’ – a student in receipt of financial aid – at St John’s College, Cambridge, where his uncle was a tutor. Almost everyone who has been to college or university has a vivid memory of their arrival and first few weeks. Wordsworth was the first to capture in autobiographical poetry the combination of excitement and apprehension at such a time. His recollections of undergraduate life are gathered in books three and six of The Prelude, with intervening memories of his first ‘Summer Vacation’ (book four) and of the influence of ‘Books’ (book five).