Radical Wordsworth

He went up in October, accompanied by a cousin who had been admitted to the same college. They travelled via York, where they stayed with the cousin’s sister. On the journey south via the Great York Road, he saw a prostitute for the first time, a harbinger of his loss of innocence upon entering into the world. His sensitivity was such that he claimed in The Prelude that the sight created within him a sense of a ‘barrier’ between the spirit of ‘humanity’ and the human body, ‘splitting the race of Man / In twain, yet leaving the same outward shape’.[5] He would always be a man of strong sexual passions, nearly always repressed or displaced from the ‘outward shape’ of his poems.

Grey fenny weather. A shiver of delight at the first glimpse of Cambridge’s most famous sight, the roof of King’s College Chapel. Then, outside the carriage window, a student striding hurriedly along ‘in Gown and tassell’d Cap’. Across Magdalene Bridge. Another river along which memories would flow: the Cam. Into the famed university town. The Gothic architecture of the three quadrangles (‘courts’) of St John’s, one of the largest and most prestigious of the colleges.

His first-year room was small, tucked away in an obscure nook of the college, above the noisy kitchens. There were sounds, too, from Cambridge’s grandest college, Trinity, which stood next door and which his room overlooked: the clock striking every quarter of an hour, day and night, and the organ bellowing out during divine service or when the scholar was practising. The one good thing about the location was that at night, by moon or starlight, he could gaze down from his bed and see the statue of Sir Isaac Newton in the Trinity antechapel, prism in hand, face rapt in contemplation, ‘The marble index of a Mind for ever / Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone’.[6] The statue at once invoked the awe-inspiring quality of intellectual inquiry and projected the freshman’s loneliness onto an embodiment of genius.

He began to get to know his fellow students. A handful were familiar from school, but as a ‘a mountain Youth’ – a ‘northern Villager’ – it felt almost dreamlike to be in Cambridge. ‘Questions, directions, warnings, and advice’ flowed in from all sides. Preparation for that nervous first tutorial. Settling into a routine of compulsory chapel and morning lectures. Becoming master of your own budget: going to buy an academic gown, which had to be worn whenever out and about, but also a silk dressing gown for posing in one’s rooms. ‘Invitations, suppers, wine and fruit.’ He slicked his hair in the fashionable style, so that it glittered like frost on a tree. Often, though, he would leave the student throng and walk alone across the flat fields, the fenland landscape so different from his own. His communion with the simple, solid things of nature was as much a part of his education as the lectures and tutorials:

To every natural form, rock, fruit or flower,

Even the loose stones that cover the high-way,

I gave a moral life, I saw them feel,

Or link’d them to some feeling: the great mass

Lay bedded in a quickening soul, and all

That I beheld respired with inward meaning.[7]

Where Newton had explained the physical forces of nature, the student Wordsworth tried to discover the agency that binds human feelings to nature. In so doing, his mind turned in on itself, cleaving him to ‘Solitude’. He did not seek out some kindred spirit to share his inner quest – that would come later, when he met Coleridge. Instead, he threw himself into casual friendships, lazy reading in ‘trivial books’ that had nothing to do with the syllabus, riding across the fields or floating down the Cam. He was supposed to be studying classical texts, mathematics and philosophy with a theological slant. He enjoyed geometry and the translation of Latin poetry, but devoted more time to private study of the great English poets who had Cambridge associations – Chaucer, who had set his Reeve’s Tale down the road in Trumpington village; and Spenser and Milton, who had been students at the university.

When he returned home for the summer vacation at the end of his freshman year, Wordsworth realized how much he loved his native place. Climbing over a bare ridge, he looked down on Windermere, the lake resembling ‘a vast river stretching in the sun’:

With exultation at my feet I saw

Lake, islands, promontories, gleaming bays,

A universe of Nature’s fairest forms

Proudly revealed with instantaneous burst,

Magnificent and beautiful and gay.[8]

He was far more comfortable among the woodmen, shepherds and village ‘dames’, or listening to the life story of a skeletal and impoverished discharged soldier who had once served in the tropics, than in the academic world of Cambridge.

Back he went for his second year. At this point in The Prelude’s narrative of his university years, Wordsworth inserts a dream. In the final version published shortly after his death in 1850, he tells of how, sitting in a rocky cave by the seaside on a still summer day, he had been reading Cervantes’ Don Quixote, one of the favourite books of his youth. He looked out to sea and began reflecting upon poetry on the one hand and ‘geometric truth’ on the other. Drifting into sleep, he dreamed that he was in the desert of the Middle East. A figure resembling ‘an Arab of the Bedouin Tribes’, carrying a lance, rode towards him, perched high on the back of a dromedary. This is clearly a dream version of Don Quixote on his rickety horse Rocinante. The Arab has a stone tucked under the arm that holds his spear. In his other hand, he holds a shell. Glad to have found a guide to lead him through the desert, the dreamer questions the arrivant and is told that the stone is Euclid’s Elements but the shell, beautifully shaped and brightly coloured, is ‘something of more worth’. The dreamer is told to hold it to his ear, and when he does so he hears, in an unknown language which he mysteriously understands, ‘articulate sounds’,

A loud prophetic blast of harmony –

An Ode, in passion uttered, which foretold

Destruction to the Children of the Earth,

By Deluge now at hand.[9]

The Arab then says that he is going to bury his books, presumably so that they would survive the impending deluge. In classic dream fashion, the dreamer has no difficulty in perceiving the stone and the shell as books even as they remain stone and shell. By the same account, the figure remains the Arab but now explicitly becomes Don Quixote as well. He rides on, with the dreamer initially keeping pace. Then the Arab looks back over his shoulder, sees a glimmer of light and says that it is the waters of the deep gathering upon them, causing him to speed his camel into the distance across the desert sands, ‘With the fleet waters of the drowning world / In chace of him’. At which point Wordsworth awakes in terror, and sees the real sea in front of him, his copy of Don Quixote beside him. He then interprets his own dream: it will be his destiny to follow the example of the Arab and ensure that the great books of the past will survive beyond the catastrophe that he sensed was about to engulf the present. He would hold in his hand a book by Shakespeare or Milton (‘Labourers divine’) and imagine it as an ‘earthly casket of immortal Verse’. Rather than burying it beneath the desert sand, it would be his task to absorb the spirit of the mighty dead into his own poetry and so to keep their legacy alive.[10]

Wordsworth’s placing of the dream at this point in his autobiographical narrative, together with the image of the prophetic ode being of more worth than Euclid’s mathematical textbook, might be read as a moment of awakening akin to that in the oft-recounted dream of a later Cambridge student who would eventually follow in Wordsworth’s footsteps as Poet Laureate: Ted Hughes. In his dream, Hughes is slaving over a literature essay late at night in his room at Pembroke College when a tall figure, half-man, half-fox, comes through his door, puts a burning paw-mark on the essay and tells the writer that by engaging in critical analysis he is killing the thought-creatures of his imagination. Hughes interpreted this as a call to switch his degree from English to Archaeology and Anthropology. In the spirit of Wordsworth’s line ‘We murder to dissect’, Hughes determined to abandon literary criticism and turn instead to a rich body of mythological and ritualistic lore that would provide him with raw material for poetic creation. By analogy, the Arab is telling Wordsworth to become a visionary poet instead of following in his uncle’s footsteps and remaining in academe (which is what his brother Christopher did, with such success that he eventually rose to the pinnacle of becoming master of Newton’s college). In his second and third years at Cambridge, Wordsworth did indeed begin to believe that it was his vocation to become a poet. He grew in confidence that the past masters could be as friends rather than inhibiting shadows:

Those were the days

Which also first encouraged me to trust

With firmness, hitherto but lightly touch’d

With such a daring thought, that I might leave

Some monument behind me which pure hearts

Should reverence. The instinctive humbleness,

Upheld even by the very name and thought

Of printed books and authorship, began

To melt away; and further, the dread awe

Of mighty names was soften’d down, and seem’d

Approachable, admitting fellowship

Of modest sympathy.[11]

The fellowship of the literary tradition instead of the College Fellowship that was the ambition of many of his contemporaries and the expectation of his relatives: a symbolic licensing of this vocation seems to have been Wordsworth’s intention in claiming the Arab dream for himself in the final version of The Prelude.

But this was a trick: in the original version of the poem, it is a ‘studious friend’ who has the dream and narrates it to Wordsworth. The friend is not identified. It is not Coleridge, to whom The Prelude is addressed – as when, directly after the narration of the Arab dream, Wordsworth writes ‘O Friend! O Poet! Brother of my soul, / Think not that I could ever pass along / Untouch’d by these remembrances’.[12] The strong likelihood is that it was the third Lake Poet, the exceptionally ‘studious’ Robert Southey, who became close to Wordsworth in the early 1800s, when The Prelude was being drafted, and who at exactly this time was having terrifying dreams of the world being engulfed by a deluge. Indeed, Southey contemplated writing an epic poem on the subject.[13] Poems, like dreams, absorb and conflate different sources and memories, so other influences were also at work, including that of a very unusual man whom Wordsworth would meet in France.

*

He didn’t do badly at Cambridge. In the college exams at the end of the first term of his second year, he was among ‘those who did not go thro’ the whole of the examination and yet had considerable merit’ – that is to say, he ran out of time, but did well on the questions that he succeeded in answering. When it came to the end-of-year exams, he was unclassed but got a distinction in the Classics paper. A year later, in June 1790, he was again unclassed but showed ‘considerable merit’ in the subjects that he undertook.[14] He was content to get by. He knew by this time that he would not be seeking to stay on and gain a Fellowship. For all his love of books and his breadth of reading through his teenage years and at Cambridge, he always knew that his greatest inspiration was what John Keats would call ‘the poetry of earth’.

Immediately after the passage in The Prelude where he recalls the sense of vocation that grew during his time at Cambridge, he tells of how he found happiness in ‘loveliness of imagery and thought’. At dusk, he would walk in the groves along the Backs of the colleges until he heard the porter’s bell summoning him to the nightly curfew. He remembers looking intensely upon a single ash tree lit by moonlight on a sharp frosty evening:

Up from the ground and almost to the top

The trunk and master branches every where

Were green with ivy; and the lightsome twigs

And outer spray profusely tipp’d with seeds

That hung in yellow tassels and festoons,

Moving or still.[15]

There is a natural historian’s precision in the art of observation here, combined with a poet’s gift for the choice of animating words. He was beginning, as he would put it in ‘Tintern Abbey’, to ‘see into the life of things’.

His love of nature meant that his summer vacations were his most joyful months. Doubly so, because he was with Dorothy, and sometimes Mary Hutchinson as well. They wandered through their native ground, into Dovedale and across into the Yorkshire Dales. By the end of his third year, though, he was ready to broaden his horizons. It was time to witness Nature in her grander aspect. He came up with the idea of walking to the Alps. He had made a good friend in a fellow grammar-school boy from the north, Robert Jones, son of a Welsh lawyer. Though of very different temperaments, they were drawn together by a love of mountain terrain and a passion for walking. Wordsworth – tall, with a long face and a serious expression – was ‘apt to be irritable in travelling’, and in Jones – tubby, round-faced and red-cheeked – he was lucky enough to find a companion who was ‘the best-tempered Creature imaginable’.[16] The Welshman was game. They had crossed the Channel before Wordsworth wrote to tell his family where he was.

*

Casting off the burdens of academe, they strode through France. In just over a week, they were at Troyes in the Loire Valley, in another at Chalon on the river Saône, where they embarked on a boat to Lyons, along with a group of delegates returning from the festivities in Paris.

Three years later, Wordsworth published an account of their journey under the title Descriptive Sketches. In Verse. Taken during a Pedestrian Tour in the Italian, Grison, Swiss, and Savoyard Alps. In the poem’s dedication to Jones, Wordsworth wrote of how two travellers plodding along the road side by side ‘each with his little knapsack of necessaries upon his shoulders’ will inevitably have a closer bond – ‘more of heart’ between them – than ‘two companions lolling in a post-chaise’. Walking also grounds the pedestrian more firmly in the landscape. Moving at human pace and without the sound of hoof or wheel, walkers see and hear their surroundings more fully, more immediately, than travellers borne at speed to their destination.

Wordsworth and Jones were following in the tracks of a pair of student adventurers sixty years before, the Etonian poet Thomas Gray and his intimate friend the novelist Horace Walpole – though they had gone by carriage and sometimes horse, not on foot. Following Gray’s death in 1771, his letters home describing their journey through France, over the Alps and into Italy had been published with his poems in 1775. His account of the approach to the monastery of the Grande Chartreuse high in the mountains of Savoy inspired generations of artists and students to head for the wild landscapes of the south:

It is six miles to the top; the road runs winding up it, commonly not six feet broad; on one hand is the rock, with woods of pine trees hanging over head; on the other, a monstrous precipice, almost perpendicular, at the bottom of which rolls a torrent, that sometimes tumbling among the fragments of stone that have fallen from on high, and sometimes precipitating itself down vast descents with a noise like thunder, which is still made greater by the echo from the mountains on each side, concurs to form one of the most solemn, the most romantic, and the most astonishing scenes I ever beheld.[17]

This is a highly influential early usage of the word ‘romantic’ to describe mountain scenery. It is also a classic instance of what Edmund Burke classified as a ‘sublime’ as opposed to a ‘beautiful’ scene, the distinction being that the sublime creates a reaction of awe with an element of fear, in this case created by the raging torrent, the noise resembling thunder, the echo from the mountain walls. For Wordsworth and Jones, as for Gray and Walpole before them, the approach to the Grande Chartreuse was one of the most ‘astonishing’ scenes that they ever beheld. Astonishment – being struck dumb with awe – was the hallmark of the sublime.

They spent two days hosted by the monks, contemplating the ‘wonderful scenery’ with ever-increasing pleasure.[18] As they reached the mountainous terrain of the south, Wordsworth began to think about how to capture his sensual immersion in the landscape. There was a conventional language available to him in the form of the ‘picturesque’: literally, composing the scene as if it were a picture. He originally thought of calling his poem of the tour Picturesque Sketches, but came to the conclusion that ‘the Alps are insulted in applying to them that term’. ‘The cold rules of painting’ were an obstacle to the work of giving the reader an idea of the emotions which the Alps had ‘the irresistible power of communicating to the most impassive imaginations’. In describing a fiery sunset over the Swiss mountains after a storm, he refused to follow the picturesque convention of always mingling light with shade. Instead, he explained in a footnote to the poem, ‘I consulted nature and my feelings’: ‘The ideas excited by the stormy sunset … owed their sublimity to that deluge of light, or rather of fire, in which nature had wrapped the immense forms around me; any intrusion of shade, by destroying the unity of the impression, had necessarily diminished its grandeur.’[19] The key words here are ‘sublimity’ and ‘grandeur’.

Their next destination was Geneva, then the glaciers of the Alps, the Vale of Chamonix and the sight of snow-capped Mont Blanc. Wordsworth’s attempt to describe it in the poem of his tour was among his first efforts at rendering the sublime:

Alone ascends that mountain nam’d of white,

That dallies with the Sun the summer night.

Six thousand years amid his lonely bounds

The voice of Ruin, day and night, resounds.

Where Horror-led his sea of ice assails,

Havoc and Chaos blast a thousand vales.[20]

Constrained by his chosen form of rhyming couplets and reaching for hand-me-down abstractions out of the realm of Gothic (Ruin, Horror, Havoc, Chaos), the apprentice poet has not yet found a voice of his own.

Both his style and his emphasis were very different in The Prelude a decade later, when he once again reconstructed his walking tour in verse. This time his memory was of how his heart leapt up when he looked down into the Vale of Chamonix. The valley presented him with an image of what he calls a ‘green recess’ inhabited by an ‘aboriginal’ community of pastoral dwellers in simple huts resembling ‘Indian cabins’. He is conjuring up an image of humankind living harmoniously in what Jean-Jacques Rousseau, citizen of Geneva, called the ‘state of nature’. ‘The summit of Mont Blanc’, by contrast, offered ‘a soulless image on the eye’ that ‘usurped upon a living thought / That never more could be’. The limitation of the sublime, he implies, is that its power to astonish may erase the little things and ordinary working people that deserve the affections of the human heart. Looking down on Chamonix, he trained his eye on ‘small birds’ warbling in ‘leafy trees’, a reaper binding ‘the yellow sheaf’ and a young woman spreading a haystack in the sun.[21]

The literal high point of an Alpine tour was the moment when one reached the summit of the Simplon Pass. Wordsworth and Jones made their way up the ‘steep and rugged road’ in the company of a group of traders carrying their wares on mules. They all stopped for lunch. Their mountain guide wanted to get going, but the Englishman and the Welshman lingered a while. When they set off, they followed a path downwards until it came to a dead end by a stream. The only path now visible was on the other side of the stream, winding back up the mountainside. So they waded across and climbed quickly, trying to catch up with the group. Failing to find them, they began to panic. Fortunately, they met a mountain-dwelling peasant. He told them that they needed to go back down to the stream and to follow its course further downwards. They were puzzled and kept questioning him: shouldn’t they be going up, not down? The peasant was insistent. Comprehension then dawned. The language barrier was ‘translated by [their] feelings’: they realized ‘that we had crossed the Alps’.

It was a profound moment of anticlimax. But in The Prelude the mature Wordsworth would recuperate it by way of a reflection on the power of the human imagination.[22] In recollecting moments of sorrow or disappointment and turning them to poetry, we can remake them as visions of a better world. Human greatness, he proposes, resides in this capacity to transport us from what we see to what we desire. Paradoxically, it is as if a flash of mental lightning illuminates us in the very instant that physical light is darkened by a cloud: ‘When the light of sense / Goes out in flashes that have shewn to us / The invisible world’.[23] Our mental triumphs, Wordsworth argues, are in the anticipation and not the realization, the hope and not the achievement:

Our destiny, our nature, and our home,

Is with infinitude – and only there;

With hope it is, hope that can never die,

Effort, and expectation, and desire,

And something evermore about to be.[24]

In Wordsworth’s Christian society, most people hoped for – or were told to hope for – salvation and an eternity in heaven with Jesus. Wordsworth is saying, albeit less explicitly, something akin to William Blake’s provocative aphorism in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: ‘all deities reside in the human breast’. The human imagination is the only place where heaven is to be found on this earth.

Wordsworth was steeped in the poetry of John Milton. He was thrilled that one of his Cambridge friends was lucky enough to be bunked in rooms at Christ’s College that were once Milton’s. Some of the most glorious poetry in Paradise Lost occurs when Adam and Eve give voice to a morning hymn in which they exhort all living things to join them in praise of the goodness and power of God: ‘On Earth join, all ye creatures, to extol / Him first, him last, him midst, and without end.’[25] Wordsworth remembered and adapted these lines as he sought to prove his argument about the transformative power of imagination by turning the anticlimax of having missed the moment of crossing the Alps into a climactic vision of the divine power of the sublime landscape of the Ravine of Gondo, through which they subsequently passed:

The immeasurable height

Of woods decaying, never to be decayed,

The stationary blasts of waterfalls,

And everywhere along the hollow rent

Winds thwarting winds, bewildered and forlorn,

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.[26]

Where Milton’s Adam and Eve praised an invisible transcendent God, Wordsworth finds the voice, mind, and face of the divine in the awe-inspiring environment of the ravine.

All this is part of the retrospective ordering of his narrative of the growth of a poet’s mind. At the time, crossing the Alps with Jones, he noticed the ‘Black drizzling crags, that beaten by the din’ of the waterfalls ‘Vibrate, as if a voice complain’d within’.[27] He did not, however, transpose the scene into an allegory of eternity or a vision of apocalypse now. Writing to Dorothy at the time, he took the more orthodox view that the wonders of nature were to be read as a sign of the power of God the Creator: ‘Among the more awful scenes of the Alps, I had not a thought of man, or a single created being; my whole soul was turned to him who produced the terrible majesty before me.’[28] Jones, no doubt, had similar sentiments: he went on to become a clergyman.