Oxford Lectures on Poetry

Now we may prefer the Wordsworth of the daffodils to the Wordsworth of the yew-trees, and we may even believe the poet’s mysticism to be moonshine; but it is certain that to neglect or throw into the shade this aspect of his poetry is neither to take Wordsworth as he really was nor to judge his poetry truly, since this aspect appears in much of it that we cannot deny to be first-rate. Yet there is, I think, and has been for some time, a tendency to this mistake. It is exemplified in Arnold’s Introduction and has been increased by it, and it is visible in some degree even in Pater’s essay. Arnold wished to make Wordsworth more popular; and so he was tempted to represent Wordsworth’s poetry as much more simple and unambitious than it really was, and as much more easily apprehended than it ever can be. He was also annoyed by attempts to formulate a systematic Wordsworthian philosophy; partly, doubtless, because he knew that, however great the philosophical value of a poet’s ideas may be, it cannot by itself determine the value of his poetry; but partly also because, having himself but little turn for philosophy, he was disposed to regard it as illusory; and further because, even in the poetic sphere, he was somewhat deficient in that kind of imagination which is allied to metaphysical thought. This is one reason of his curious failure to appreciate Shelley, and of the evident irritation which Shelley produced in him. And it is also one reason why, both in his Memorial Verses and in the introduction to his selection from Wordsworth, he either ignores or depreciates that aspect of the poetry with which we are just now concerned. It is not true, we must bluntly say, that the cause of the greatness of this poetry ‘is simple and may be told quite simply.’ It is true, and it is admirably said, that this poetry ‘is great because of the extraordinary power with which Wordsworth feels the joy offered to us in nature, the joy offered to us in the simple primary affections and duties.’ But this is only half the truth.

Pater’s essay is not thus one-sided. It is, to my mind, an extremely fine piece of criticism. Yet the tendency to which I am objecting does appear in it. Pater says, for example, that Wordsworth is the poet of nature, ‘and of nature, after all, in her modesty. The English Lake country has, of course, its grandeurs. But the peculiar function of Wordsworth’s genius, as carrying in it a power to open out the soul of apparently little and familiar things, would have found its true test had he become the poet of Surrey, say! and the prophet of its life.’ This last sentence is, in one sense, doubtless true. The ‘function’ referred to could have been exercised in Surrey, and was exercised in Dorset and Somerset, as well as in the Lake country. And this function was a ‘peculiar function of Wordsworth’s genius.’ But that it was the peculiar function of his genius, or more peculiar than that other function which forms our present subject, I venture to deny; and for the full exercise of this latter function, it is hardly hazardous to assert, Wordsworth’s childhood in a mountain district, and his subsequent residence there, were indispensable. This will be doubted for a moment, I believe, only by those readers (and they are not a few) who ignore the Prelude and the Excursion. But the Prelude and the Excursion, though there are dull pages in both, contain much of Wordsworth’s best and most characteristic poetry. And even in a selection like Arnold’s, which, perhaps wisely, makes hardly any use of them, many famous poems will be found which deal with nature but not with nature ‘in her modesty.’

My main object was to insist that the ‘mystic,’ ‘visionary,’ ‘sublime,’ aspect of Wordsworth’s poetry must not be slighted. I wish to add a few remarks on it, but to consider it fully would carry us far beyond our bounds; and, even if I attempted the task, I should not formulate its results in a body of doctrines. Such a formulation is useful, and I see no objection to it in principle, as one method of exploring Wordsworth’s mind with a view to the better apprehension of his poetry. But the method has its dangers, and it is another matter to put forward the results as philosophically adequate, or to take the position that ‘Wordsworth was first and foremost a philosophical thinker, a man whose intention and purpose it was to think out for himself, faithfully and seriously, the questions concerning man and nature and human life’ (Dean Church). If this were true, he should have given himself to philosophy and not to poetry; and there is no reason to think that he would have been eminently successful. Nobody ever was so who was not forced by a special natural power and an imperious impulsion into the business of ‘thinking out,’ and who did not develope this power by years of arduous discipline. Wordsworth does not show it in any marked degree; and, though he reflected deeply and acutely, he was without philosophical training. His poetry is immensely interesting as an imaginative expression of the same mind which, in his day, produced in Germany great philosophies. His poetic experience, his intuitions, his single thoughts, even his large views, correspond in a striking way, sometimes in a startling way, with ideas methodically developed by Kant, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer. They remain admirable material for philosophy; and a philosophy which found itself driven to treat them as moonshine would probably be a very poor affair. But they are like the experience and the utterances of men of religious genius: great truths are enshrined in them, but generally the shrine would have to be broken to liberate these truths in a form which would satisfy the desire to understand. To claim for them the power to satisfy that desire is an error, and it tempts those in whom that desire is predominant to treat them as mere beautiful illusions.

Setting aside, then, any questions as to the ultimate import of the ‘mystic’ strain in Wordsworth’s poetry, I intend only to call attention to certain traits in the kind of poetic experience which exhibits it most plainly. And we may observe at once that in this there is always traceable a certain hostility to ‘sense.’ I do not mean that hostility which is present in all poetic experience, and of which Wordsworth was very distinctly aware. The regular action of the senses on their customary material produces, in his view, a ‘tyranny’ over the soul. It helps to construct that every-day picture of the world, of sensible objects and events ‘in disconnection dead and spiritless,’ which we take for reality. In relation to this reality we become passive slaves;53 it lies on us with a weight ‘heavy as frost and deep almost as life.’ It is the origin alike of our torpor and our superficiality. All poetic experience frees us from it to some extent, or breaks into it, and so may be called hostile to sense. But this experience is, broadly speaking, of two different kinds. The perception of the daffodils as dancing in glee, and in sympathy with other gleeful beings, shows us a living, joyous, loving world, and so a ‘spiritual’ world, not a merely ‘sensible’ one. But the hostility to sense is here no more than a hostility to mere sense: this ‘spiritual’ world is itself the sensible world more fully apprehended: the daffodils do not change or lose their colour in disclosing their glee. On the other hand, in the kind of experience which forms our present subject, there is always some feeling of definite contrast with the limited sensible world. The arresting feature or object is felt in some way against this background, or even as in some way a denial of it. Sometimes it is a visionary unearthly light resting on a scene or on some strange figure. Sometimes it is the feeling that the scene or figure belongs to the world of dream. Sometimes it is an intimation of boundlessness, contradicting or abolishing the fixed limits of our habitual view. Sometimes it is the obscure sense of ‘unknown modes of being,’ unlike the familiar modes. This kind of experience, further, comes often with a distinct shock, which may bewilder, confuse or trouble the mind. And, lastly, it is especially, though not invariably, associated with mountains, and again with solitude. Some of these bald statements I will go on to illustrate, only remarking that the boundary between these modes of imagination is, naturally, less marked and more wavering in Wordsworth’s poetry than in my brief analysis.

We may begin with a poem standing near this boundary, the famous verses To the Cuckoo, ‘O blithe new-comer.’ It stands near the boundary because, like the poem on the Daffodils, it is entirely happy. But it stands unmistakably on the further side of the boundary, and is, in truth, more nearly allied to the Ode on Immortality than to the poem on the Daffodils. The sense of sight is baffled, and its tyranny broken. Only a cry is heard, which makes the listener look a thousand ways, so shifting is the direction from which it reaches him. It seems to come from a mere ‘voice,’ ‘an invisible thing,’ ‘a mystery.’ It brings him ‘a tale of visionary hours,’ – hours of childhood, when he sought this invisible thing in vain, and the earth appeared to his bewildered but liberated fancy ‘an unsubstantial fairy place.’ And still, when he hears it, the great globe itself, we may say, fades like an unsubstantial pageant; or, to quote from the Immortality Ode, the ‘shades of the prison house’ melt into air. These words are much more solemn than the Cuckoo poem; but the experience is of the same type, and ‘the visionary gleam’ of the ode, like the ‘wandering voice’ of the poem, is the expression through sense of something beyond sense.

Take another passage referring to childhood. It is from the Prelude, ii. Here there is something more than perplexity. There is apprehension, and we are approaching the sublime:

One summer evening (led by her54) I foundA little boat tied to a willow treeWithin a rocky cave, its usual home.Straight I unloosed her chain, and stepping inPushed from the shore. It was an act of stealthAnd troubled pleasure, nor without the voiceOf mountain-echoes did my boat move on;Leaving behind her still, on either side,Small circles glittering idly in the moon,Until they melted all into one trackOf sparkling light. But now, like one who rows,Proud of his skill, to reach a chosen pointWith an unswerving line, I fixed my viewUpon the summit of a craggy ridge,The horizon’s utmost boundary; far aboveWas nothing but the stars and the grey sky.She was an elfin pinnace; lustilyI dipped my oars into the silent lake,And, as I rose upon the stroke, my boatWent heaving through the water like a swan;When, from behind that craggy steep till thenThe horizon’s bound, a huge peak, black and huge,As if with voluntary power instinct,Upreared its head. I struck and struck again,And growing still in stature the grim shapeTowered up between me and the stars, and still,For so it seemed, with purpose of its ownAnd measured motion like a living thing,Strode after me. With trembling oars I turned,And through the silent water stole my wayBack to the covert of the willow tree;There in her mooring-place I left my bark, —And through the meadows homeward went, in graveAnd serious mood; but after I had seenThat spectacle, for many days, my brainWorked with a dim and undetermined senseOf unknown modes of being; o’er my thoughtsThere hung a darkness, call it solitudeOr blank desertion. No familiar shapesRemained, no pleasant images of trees,Of sea or sky, no colours of green fields;But huge and mighty forms, that do not liveLike living men, moved slowly through the mindBy day, and were a trouble to my dreams.

The best commentary on a poem is generally to be found in the poet’s other works. And those last dozen lines furnish the best commentary on that famous passage in the Ode, where the poet, looking back to his childhood, gives thanks for it, – not however for its careless delight and liberty,

But for those obstinate questioningsOf sense and outward things,Fallings from us, vanishings;Blank misgivings of a CreatureMoving about in worlds not realised,High instincts before which our mortal NatureDid tremble like a guilty thing surprised.

Whether, or how, these experiences afford ‘intimations of immortality’ is not in question here; but it will never do to dismiss them so airily as Arnold did. Without them Wordsworth is not Wordsworth.

The most striking recollections of his childhood have not in all cases this manifest affinity to the Ode, but wherever the visionary feeling appears in them (and it appears in many), this affinity is still traceable. There is, for instance, in Prelude, xii., the description of the crag, from which, on a wild dark day, the boy watched eagerly the two highways below for the ponies that were coming to take him home for the holidays. It is too long to quote, but every reader of it will remember

the wind and sleety rain,And all the business of the elements,The single sheep, and the one blasted tree,And the bleak music from that old stone wall,The noise of wood and water, and the mistThat on the line of each of those two roadsAdvanced in such indisputable shapes.

Everything here is natural, but everything is apocalyptic. And we happen to know why. Wordsworth is describing the scene in the light of memory. In that eagerly expected holiday his father died; and the scene, as he recalled it, was charged with the sense of contrast between the narrow world of common pleasures and blind and easy hopes, and the vast unseen world which encloses it in beneficent yet dark and inexorable arms. The visionary feeling has here a peculiar tone; but always, openly or covertly, it is the intimation of something illimitable, over-arching or breaking into the customary ‘reality.’ Its character varies; and so sometimes at its touch the soul, suddenly conscious of its own infinity, melts in rapture into that infinite being; while at other times the ‘mortal nature’ stands dumb, incapable of thought, or shrinking from some presence

Not un-informed with Phantasy, and looksThat threaten the profane.

This feeling is so essential to many of Wordsworth’s most characteristic poems that it may almost be called their soul; and failure to understand them frequently arises from obtuseness to it. It appears in a mild and tender form, but quite openly, in the lines To a Highland Girl, where the child, and the rocks and trees and lake and road by her home, seem to the poet

Like something fashioned in a dream.

It gives to The Solitary Reaper its note of remoteness and wonder; and even the slight shock of bewilderment due to it is felt in the opening line of the most famous stanza:

Will no one tell me what she sings?

Its etherial music accompanies every vision of the White Doe, and sounds faintly to us from far away through all the tale of failure and anguish. Without it such shorter narratives as Hartleap Well and Resolution and Independence would lose the imaginative atmosphere which adds mystery and grandeur to the apparently simple ‘moral.’

In Hartleap Well it is conveyed at first by slight touches of contrast. Sir Walter, in his long pursuit of the Hart, has mounted his third horse.

Joy sparkled in the prancing courser’s eyes;The horse and horseman are a happy pair;But, though Sir Walter like a falcon flies,There is a doleful silence in the air.A rout this morning left Sir Walter’s hall,That as they galloped made the echoes roar;But horse and man are vanished, one and all;Such race, I think, was never seen before.

At last even the dogs are left behind, stretched one by one among the mountain fern.

Where is the throng, the tumult of the race?The bugles that so joyfully were blown?– This chase it looks not like an earthly chase;Sir Walter and the Hart are left alone.

Thus the poem begins. At the end we have the old shepherd’s description of the utter desolation of the spot where the waters of the little spring had trembled with the last deep groan of the dying stag, and where the Knight, to commemorate his exploit, had built a basin for the spring, three pillars to mark the last three leaps of his victim, and a pleasure-house, surrounded by trees and trailing plants, for the summer joy of himself and his paramour. But now ‘the pleasure-house is dust,’ and the trees are grey, ‘with neither arms nor head’:

Now, here is neither grass nor pleasant shade;The sun on drearier hollow never shone;So will it be, as I have often said,Till trees, and stones, and fountain all are gone.

It is only this feeling of the presence of mysterious inviolable Powers, behind the momentary powers of hard pleasure and empty pride, that justifies the solemnity of the stanza:

The Being, that is in the clouds and air,That is in the green leaves among the groves,Maintains a deep and reverential careFor the unoffending creatures whom he loves.

Hartleap Well is a beautiful poem, but whether it is entirely successful is, perhaps, doubtful. There can be no sort of doubt as to Resolution and Independence, probably, if we must choose, the most Wordsworthian of Wordsworth’s poems, and the best test of ability to understand him. The story, if given in a brief argument, would sound far from promising. We should expect for it, too, a ballad form somewhat like that of Simon Lee. When we read it, we find instead lines of extraordinary grandeur, but, mingled with them, lines more pedestrian than could be found in an impressive poem from any other hand, – for instance,

And, drawing to his side, to him did say,‘This morning gives us promise of a glorious day.’

or,

‘How is it that you live, and what is it you do?’

We meet also with that perplexed persistence, and that helpless reiteration of a question (in this case one already clearly answered), which in other poems threatens to become ludicrous, and on which a writer with a keener sense of the ludicrous would hardly have ventured. Yet with all this, and by dint of all this, we read with bated breath, almost as if we were in the presence of that ‘majestical’ Spirit in Hamlet, come to ‘admonish’ from another world, though not this time by terror. And one source of this effect is the confusion, the almost hypnotic obliteration of the habitual reasoning mind, that falls on the poet as he gazes at the leech-gatherer, and hears, without understanding, his plain reply to the enquiry about himself and the prosaic ‘occupation’ he ‘pursues’:

The old man still stood talking by my side;But now his voice to me was like a streamScarce heard; nor word from word could I divide;And the whole body of the man did seemLike one whom I had met with in a dream;Or like a man from some far region sent,To give me human strength, by apt admonishment.

The same question was asked again, and the answer was repeated. But

While he was talking thus, the lonely place,The old man’s shape, and speech, all troubled me.

‘Trouble’ is a word not seldom employed by the poet to denote the confusion caused by some visionary experience. Here are, again, the fallings from us, vanishings, blank misgivings, dim fore-feelings of the soul’s infinity.

Out of many illustrations I will choose three more. There is in the Prelude, iv., the passage (so strongly resembling Resolution and Independence that I merely refer to it) where Wordsworth describes an old soldier suddenly seen, leaning against a milestone on the moon-lit road, all alone:

No living thing appeared in earth or air;And, save the flowing water’s peaceful voice,Sound there was none …… still his formKept the same awful steadiness – at his feetHis shadow lay, and moved not.

His shadow proves he was no ghost; but a ghost was never ghostlier than he. And by him we may place the London beggar of Prelude, vii.:

How oft, amid those overflowing streets,Have I gone forward with the crowd, and saidUnto myself, ‘The face of every oneThat passes by me is a mystery!’Thus have I looked, nor ceased to look, oppressedBy thoughts of what and whither, when and how,Until the shapes before my eyes becameA second-sight procession, such as glidesOver still mountains, or appears in dreams;And once, far-travelled in such mood, beyondThe reach of common indication, lostAmid the moving pageant, I was smittenAbruptly, with the view (a sight not rare)Of a blind Beggar, who, with upright face,Stood, propped against a wall, upon his chestWearing a written paper, to explainHis story, whence he came, and who he was.Caught by the spectacle my mind turned roundAs with the might of waters; an apt typeThis label seemed of the utmost we can know,Both of ourselves and of the universe;And, on the shape of that unmoving man,His steadfast face and sightless eyes, I gazed,As if admonished from another world.

Still more curious psychologically is the passage, in the preceding book of the Prelude, which tells us of a similar shock and leads to the description of its effects. The more prosaically I introduce the passage, the better. Wordsworth and Jones (‘Jones, as from Calais southward you and I’) set out to walk over the Simplon, then traversed only by a rough mule-track. They wandered out of the way, and, meeting a peasant, discovered from his answers to their questions that, without knowing it, they ‘had crossed the Alps.’ This may not sound important, and the italics are Wordsworth’s, not mine. But the next words are these:

Imagination – here the Power so calledThrough sad incompetence of human speech,That awful Power rose from the mind’s abyssLike an unfathered vapour that enwraps,At once, some lonely traveller. I was lost;Halted without an effort to break through;But to my conscious soul I now can say —‘I recognise thy glory’: in such strengthOf usurpation, when the light of senseGoes out, but with a flash that has revealedThe invisible world, doth greatness make abode,There harbours; whether we be young or old,Our destiny, our being’s heart and 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.

And what was the result of this shock? The poet may answer for himself in some of the greatest lines in English poetry. The travellers proceeded on their way down the Defile of Gondo.

Downwards we hurried fast,And, with the half-shaped road which we had missed,Entered a narrow chasm. The brook and roadWere fellow-travellers in this gloomy strait,And with them did we journey several hoursAt a slow pace. The immeasurable heightOf woods decaying, never to be decayed,The stationary blasts of waterfalls,And in the narrow rent at every turnWinds 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-sideAs if a voice were in them, the sick sightAnd 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 featuresOf 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.55

I hardly think that ‘the poet of Surrey, say, and the prophet of its life’ could have written thus. And of all the poems to which I have lately referred, and all the passages I have quoted, there are but two or three which do not cry aloud that their birth-place was the moor or the mountain, and that severed from their birth-place they would perish. The more sublime they are, or the nearer they approach sublimity, the more is this true. The cry of the cuckoo in O blithe new-comer, though visionary, is not sublime; but, echoed by the mountain, it is

Like – but oh, how different!56

It was among the mountains that Wordsworth, as he says of his Wanderer, felt his faith. It was there that all things

Breathed immortality, revolving life,And greatness still revolving; infinite.There littleness was not; the least of thingsSeemed infinite; and there his spirit shapedHer prospects, nor did he believe, – he saw.

And even if we count his vision a mere dream, still he put into words, as no other poet has, the spirit of the mountains.

Two voices are there; one is of the sea,One of the mountains; each a mighty voice.

And of the second of these we may say that ‘few or none hears it right’ now he is gone.

Partly because he is the poet of mountains he is, even more pre-eminently, the poet of solitude. For there are tones in the mountain voice scarcely audible except in solitude, and the reader whom Wordsworth’s greatest poetry baffles could have no better advice offered him than to do what he has probably never done in his life – to be on a mountain alone. But for Wordsworth not this solitude only, but all solitude and all things solitary had an extraordinary fascination.