Wordsworth's Prelude, the "Boat-stealing episode, "(i.357-400)

One of the key concepts of Wordsworth's autobiographical epic The Prelude is that our identity and character are shaped by distinct "spots of time" (xii.208ff.) that, throughout our confused and complex lives, maintain a "renovating virtue" by which "our minds / Are nourished and invisibly repaired."  For Wordsworth himself, of course, these "spots of time" typically involve some memorable encounter with the natural world. 

One famous instance is the so-called boat-stealing episode in the opening book (lines 357-400; all quotations in this post are from the 1850, 14 book version):

One summer evening (led by her) I found
A little Boat tied to a Willow-tree
Within a rocky cave, its usual home.
Straight I unloosed her chain, and stepping in
Pushed from the shore. It was an act of stealth
And troubled pleasure, nor without the voice
Of 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 track
Of sparkling light. But now, like one who rows,
(Proud of his skill) to reach a chosen point
With an unswerving line, I fixed my view
Upon the summit of a craggy ridge,
The horizon's utmost boundary; far above
Was nothing but the stars and the grey sky.
She was an elfin Pinnace; lustily
I dipped my oars into the silent lake,
And, as I rose upon the stroke, my boat
Went heaving through the Water like a swan;
When, from behind that craggy Steep till then
The 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 Shape
Towered up between me and the stars, and still,
For so it seemed, with purpose of its own
And measured motion like a living Thing,
Strode after me. With trembling oars I turned,
And through the silent water stole my way
Back to the Covert of the Willow-tree;
There in her mooring-place I left my Bark,—
And through the meadows homeward went, in grave
And serious mood; but after I had seen
That spectacle, for many days, my brain
Worked with a dim and undetermined sense
Of unknown modes of being; o'er my thoughts
There hung a darkness, call it solitude
Or blank desertion. No familiar Shapes
Remained, no pleasant images of trees,
Of sea or Sky, no colours of green fields;
But huge and mighty Forms, that do not live
Like living men, moved slowly through the mind
By day, and were a trouble to my dreams.

The central narrative here is simple enough.  The young Wordsworth, led by Nature, finds a boat hidden in a lakeside covert.  He steals the boat, and—vigorous and proud of his youthful skill—heads out onto the lake on a joy-ride.  It's a beautiful scene, with the oars leaving a trail of rippling circles shining in the moonlight and the boy himself admiring the surrounding ridges and the stars and the sky beyond.

But then this peaceful image takes a scary turn.  To understand what happens here, it is helpful to keep in mind the geometry of this lakeside landscape:

When rowing a boat, the oarsman actually faces backward so that, in order to steer a straight line, he needs to pick some spot on the horizon and keep that spot directly behind the boat.  Accordingly, the boy Wordsworth fixes his view "Upon the summit of a craggy ridge, / The horizon's utmost boundary."  At the beginning of the voyage, the boat is still close to the willow covert at position (A) on the diagram, and as the boy looks up he sees nothing but the "craggy ridge" and the stars beyond. But then as the headstrong boy warms to his task and starts "lustily" dipping his oars, he advances to position (B) and beyond.  Now the sight lines have changed, and behind the first "craggy ridge" a "huge, peak, black and huge, / As if with voluntary power instinct, / Upreared its head."  Imagine how this would look from the point of view of the boy: as he moves from (A) to (B), the "huge peak" will appear to rise up from behind the first "craggy Steep."  The sight frightens the boy, but the harder he rows, the more the "huge peak" seems to come after him:

I struck and struck again,
And growing still in stature the grim Shape
Towered up between me and the stars, and still,
For so it seemed, with purpose of its own
And measured motion like a living Thing,
Strode after me.

Frightened and trembling, the boy—now humbled—turns around and returns the boat to its mooring and heads for home, "in grave / And serious mood."

Wordsworth, even as a boy, recognizes that this sense of a "huge peak, black and huge" rising up from the horizon and striding after him is really only an optical illusion—the peak "seemed" to have a "purpose of its own"; the mountain rises up "As if with voluntary power instinct."  But this after-the-fact rationalization does not matter—one doesn't simply explain away the boy's experience, his sense of having been pursued by a "huge and mighty Form."  Such is the point of the passage's closing lines.  This has been a formative experience, a Wordsworthian "spot of time" that has shaped and continues to shape the poet's adult consciousness. 

Taken as a whole, the boat-stealing passage offers an instructive glimpse into Wordsworth's childhood—the beauty of the Cumbrian lakes, the thrilling (if audacious) vigor of youth, the chastening power of nature, and so on.  It's a useful episode to bear in mind while considering other celebrated poems.  To offer just one example, in "Tintern Abbey," Wordsworth describes his boyish relationship to the natural world as one of raw enthusiasm,

           when like a roe
I bounded o'er the mountains, by the sides
Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams,
Wherever nature led.  (67-70)

This energetic interaction with nature is then likened to a flight "from something that he dreads" (71), but eventually—after the recollections in the interceding years—it awakens in Wordsworth an awareness of a "presence that disturbs me with the joy / Of elevated thoughts" (94-95).  The movement here seems analogous to the headstrong oarsman in the boat-stealing episode who subsequently is "chastened and subdued" (to adapt the phrase from "Tintern Abbey") and becomes dimly aware of "huge and mighty Forms, that do not live / Like living men."

Coleridge's "Dejection: An Ode," Stanza 4.

O Lady! we receive but what we give,
And in our life alone does Nature live:
Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud!
And would we aught behold, of higher worth,
Than that inanimate cold world allowed
To the poor loveless ever-anxious crowd,
Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth
A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud
Enveloping the Earth--
And from the would itself must there be sent
A sweet and potent voice, of its own birth,
Of all sweet sounds the life and element!

This is the fourth stanza of Coleridge's "Dejection: An Ode," which was begun in April 1802 in response to Coleridge's hearing the opening stanzas of Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality." Both poems focus on the speaker/poet's loss--loss of an ability to perceive "glory" in Nature, and thus to receive a dynamic, spiritual sustenance from the fusion of mind and nature. This was, of course, the great theme of Wordsworth and Coleridge's poems from the later 1790s, but now for both poets that capacity for a feeling, emotional, even visionary perception of natural beauty seems to be fading. As Coleridge explains in the first stanzas of "Dejection," he gazes with a "blank" eye upon the images of a beautiful sunset, and instead of being inspired by the beauty of nature, he merely registers these images as perceptions: "I see them all so excellently fair, / I see, not feel, how beautiful they are!" Images that previously would have provided emotional and spiritual inspiration are now the mere stuff of mechanical perception.

The loss of the former mode of "glorious" perception raises implicit questions for Coleridge as it raised explicit questions for Wordsworth: Where did the glory come from? Where has it gone? Can it be rekindled? Wordsworth, of course, eventually resolved these questions by positing a supernatural and immortal soul which preexists our mortal selves and that will presumably continue even after we are no longer living our natural lives. Coleridge's response, written before Wordsworth's, is less optimistic: "I may not hope from outward forms to win / The passion and the life, whose fountains are within." For Coleridge, then, the failure of the heretofore sustaining "marriage" between mind and nature is attributable exclusively to the "soul" and not to any failing on the part of nature. Further, the marriage itself, as Coleridge suggests in Stanza 4, has been a very one-sided affair.

The stanza opens (after the "O Lady!" apostrophe, an echo of the poem's origins in an April 1802 letter to Sara Hutchinson) with the claim that "we receive but what we give, / And in our life alone does Nature live: / Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud!" In other words, whatever glory we once attributed to a creative fusion of mind and nature was really a projection of mind alone. Coleridge had, in effect, mistakenly posited a dynamic and reciprocal interchange between mind and nature, but it turns out that nature, itself passive, was really only reflecting back the projections of the speaker/poet--he receives but what he gives. Thus, if nature ever appeared to offer anything of "higher worth" than a mere "inanimate cold world," that "higher worth" was actually "A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud" that "issue[d] forth" from the soul. It is not (nor was it ever) the product of a fruitful interchange between mind and nature.

An analogy may help to clarify this argument. Suppose a person is sitting in a theatre, watching a film, and becoming emotionally engaged in and perhaps even inspired by the action and images presented on the screen. Initially one might conceive of this movie-goer's experience in holistic terms: the inspired, emotionally engaged condition is "caused" by a marriage of the viewer's emotional capacity to respond to the images presented on the screen, and the images themselves which are designed and organized by a filmmaker to foster just such a reaction on the viewer's part. Following through on this model, the filmmaker would be something akin to God, or, as Coleridge says in "Frost at Midnight," the "Great Universal Teacher." Hence, one might imagine a kind of visionary inspiration to derive from a "marriage" of perceiver and imagery, mind and nature, subject and object, and the viewer's inspired condition thus constitutes a feeling response to the divinity that flows in and through the perceived images. Such is the original, glorious mode of perception eulogized by Wordsworth's Ode and Coleridge's "Dejection."

But now imagine the same scene a few years later: this time the viewer does not respond emotionally to the images on the screen. The viewer still sees the images on the screen, but this is now just an indifferent and mechanical perception. The images are registered, but they are void of any particular meaning or emotional affect. They are no longer conceived as the inspired and inspiring work of some filmmaker/God figure--now they are just so much color and line with no particular significance attached. This second viewer can recall that at one time he was emotionally and spiritually engaged, but now the perceptual world is nothing but an empty show, and the viewer is left to grieve for his lost capacity to respond. (This is the "grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear, / A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief" that the "Dejection" speaker expresses in the second stanza.) What is perhaps worst of all, from his current impassive and detached perspective, the speaker now sees that his former emotionally inspired condition, his assumption that he was intuiting the intentions of the filmmaker/God, was merely an illusion born of his own enthusiasm. Rather than sensing the willful purposes of a filmmaker/God in the images on the screen, he was actually "seeing" a reflection of his own enthusiasm. Now that the enthusiasm has faded, so too does the whole emotionally inspiring experience: there is finally no filmmaker/God, no "Great Universal Teacher," no "vast ... intellectual breeze."

Under the circumstances, one can certainly understand the gloominess of Coleridge's title. The poem calls into question the central philosophical, even theological position that had dominated Coleridge's poetry in the 1790s. By poem's end, the speaker has recovered somewhat--at least he hopes that Sara's experience will be happier than his own: "May all the stars hang bright above her dwelling, / Silent as though they watched the sleeping Earth!" But for the numbed and grieving speaker of this poem, there is little hope of escape-- "afflictions bow me down to earth" and "each visitation / Suspends what nature gave me at my birth, / My shaping spirit of Imagination."

P. B. Shelley's Alastor, (lines 192-205)

Roused by the shock he started from his trance—
The cold white light of morning, the blue moon
Low in the west, the clear and garish hills,
The distinct valley and the vacant woods,
Spread round him where he stood. Whither have fled
The hues of heaven that canopied his bower
Of yesternight? The sounds that soothed his sleep,
The mystery and the majesty of Earth,
The joy, the exultation? His wan eyes
Gaze on the empty scene as vacantly
As ocean's moon looks on the moon in heaven.
The spirit of sweet human love has sent
A vision to the sleep of him who spurned
Her choicest gifts.

This passage describes a psycho-spiritual condition that frequently recurs in Shelley's poetry and, indeed, that captures a familiar theme of romantic literature as a whole.

At this point in the poem, the Alastor Poet has been wandering through sites of ancient ruins while an "Arab maiden"—despite the Poet's neglect of her affections and even of her very presence—tends to his physical needs. Shortly thereafter, the Poet has an erotic, visionary dream in which he sees a "veiled maid" who seems to be his very soul-mate. In his dream, the maid—apparently a poet herself—sings about "Knowledge," "truth," "virtue," "lofty hopes," and "divine liberty," themes that mirror the most ardent thoughts and dreams of the Poet himself. Both the Poet and the dream maiden are enraptured, and eventually she gives in to the "irresistible joy" and "With frantic gesture and short breathless cry / Fold[s] his frame in her dissolving arms" (184-86). In a distinctly Shelleyan figure, visionary fulfillment is figured in baldly sexual terms. Such ecstasy does not last, and once the vision fades, the Poet is left with his solitary "vacant brain." The quotation above follows immediately on the heels of this visionary consummation. The Poet awakens with a start back in a cold physical reality which now seems inadequate—with "garish hills" and "vacant woods"—and he is left with nothing but questions: "Whither have fled / The hues of heaven that canopied his bower / Of yesternight?" Now he can only "Gaze on the empty scene."

This sense of extraordinary fulfillment followed by longing and emptiness suggests that Shelley has been reading his Wordsworth and his Coleridge. Wordsworth's Intimations Ode presents a similar pattern as his speaker is struck with a sense of loss and then wonders "Whither has fled the visionary gleam" (Ode, line 56), and Coleridge, in his "Dejection: An Ode" (written in direct response to the initial stanzas of Wordsworth's Ode), writes about a remarkably beautiful sunset: "And still I gaze--and with how blank an eye!" (Dejection, line 30). Alastor would seem to be Shelley's contribution to this poetic conversation, and the differences in how each poet copes with his particular post-vision depression are instructive. Wordsworth, famously, posits a notion of pre-existence which, if it doesn't necessarily rekindle the same sort of joy he once knew, at least provides an assurance that soul itself is immortal and thus destined for a realm beyond the mutability of Nature. Coleridge is not so optimistic. His own "Joy" has been extinguished by "abstruse research" (89) among other things, and it will not return for him, though his poem concludes with a prayer that Joy and solace might visit his beloved friend.

Shelley takes a somewhat different approach. Certainly his Poet-protagonist feels acutely the pain of a lost visionary fulfillment, but his response to that loss is to ignore the actual world (as he was oblivious to the Arab maiden who loved him and tended to his needs), and to orient his quest toward another encounter with his dream-ideal. Unlike Wordsworth and Coleridge, Shelley—at least in my reading—does not come to a decisive answer about the fleetingness of his encounter with this visionary moment of fulfillment. Instead, Shelley sees this interesting psychological/spiritual condition in the context of social ethics, and readers are left with a question: Are we supposed to admire the Alastor Poet's dedicated the pursuit of his ideal? Or are we supposed to question the value of such an other-worldly pursuit if it causes a real, mortal, natural world to seem inadequate by comparison?

Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey," lines 36-50

         Nor less, I trust,
To them I may have owed another gift,
Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened:—that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on,—
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.

This is one of the most often quoted, most often remembered passages from Wordsworth's poetry. "Tintern Abbey"—for such the poem is almost always called, though the actual title is the ungainly "Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey..."—offers an early formulation of Wordsworth's pantheistic philosophy. It may be the first full-blown expression of a Wordsworthian High-Romantic ideology (perhaps theology); much of the rest of Wordsworth's poetry is essentially an expansion on, clarification of, or reaction to the lyrically measured claims of "Tintern Abbey."

Prior to the quoted lines, Wordsworth describes the immediate "here and now" of the poem—a visit to the Wye Valley, ostensibly on 14 July 1798—and he then details the benign influences of his recollections of nature when, during the five years since his last visit, he was living "in lonely rooms, and mid the din / Of towns and cities" (26-27). Thus, the chronology represented in the poem thus far has a visit to the Wye Valley (in 1793, presumably) followed by a five-year span in which the poet was in a lonely urban space, and now in 1798 he has returned to the natural scene. This recent history allows the poet both to admire the beauty of the natural scene before him and also to reflect on the value of his recollections of that scene even when he is removed from its immediate presence. This last reflection is the focus of the lines quoted above.

Initially, when the poet is lonely and stuck in the city, his recollections of natural beauty offer a kind of psychological solace and comfort: they provide "tranquil restoration" in "hours of weariness." But this is something more significant than a mere psychological palliative against urban alienation. The recollections have a moral element since they are involved with "acts / Of kindness and of love," and they lead ultimately to the moment of spiritual vision recorded above.

The central idea of the passage is that contemporary life is confused and often oppressive—it is a "heavy and ... weary weight" that makes up an "unintelligible world." But these recollections of natural beauty serve as a sort of catalyst producing a "serene and blessed mood" which Wordsworth describes in terms that seem almost mystical. The ordinary motions of the "corporeal frame" (respiration, circulation of the blood, etc.) are "almost suspended" while the mind (or "living soul") can suddenly "see into the life of things." Clearly this is a visionary moment, a momentary revelation of some "life" beyond the ephemeral appearances of "things" and beyond the confusion and alienation of ordinary urban life.

One aspect of such a passage that I find particularly intriguing is the context it provides for Wordsworthian nature ideology. It is clear everywhere in Wordsworth's writing that nature, or, more accurately, a feeling response to natural beauty, is the source of psychological comfort, moral judgment, and now even spiritual vision. What is sometimes overlooked, though, is the necessity of some non-natural space as well, some space like the "lonely rooms" described in "Tintern Abbey." One cannot fully appreciate nature unless one can recollect images of nature from a vantage point outside of nature. That non-natural vantage point is thus an essential element of the psycho-spiritual development expressed here in "Tintern Abbey" and elaborated throughout Wordsworth's life in The Prelude.

Following through on this observation, I would suggest that calling Wordsworth a "nature poet" is much too simple if one sees the term in a sort of binary system where nature is positive and non-nature (i.e. the city) is negative. It would be much more accurate to identify Wordsworth as a poet concerned with the movement back and forth between natural and non-natural environments, for in that movement Wordsworth can trace the development of his own poetic sensibilities. The fact that Wordsworth was writing at a time when England itself was being transformed from an agrarian/agricultural to an urban/industrial culture likely has some significant relationship to this central thematic concern of his poetry.

Wordsworth's "We Are Seven," (lines 65-69)

"We Are Seven" is one of the most evocative, yet disarmingly simple of Wordsworth's contributions to the famous Lyrical Ballads of 1798. The poem describes an encounter between the first-person speaker and an eight-year-old "cottage girl." This encounter represents the contrast between a relatively experienced, urbane, and rather patronizing speaker and the simple, innocent, rural life represented by the girl, and one might expect the weight of the "argument" to favor the more sophisticated speaker. As the final stanza (below) illustrates, however, the speaker is unable to persuade the girl that his view is "correct." Thus, the contrast between these characters is not resolved within the poem—they never agree with one another—but the poem as a whole is suffused with a gentle, sometimes comical irony that undercuts the speaker's supposed "superiority."

Initially, the speaker meets the girl, asks how many brothers and sisters she has, and finds out that, of the seven original siblings, four have moved to distant locations and two have died. By the speaker's reckoning, the dead siblings no longer "count," so the girl should have said that there are now a total of five siblings. The girl, however, insists on "counting" the dead siblings. After all, they are perhaps even more present to her than her absent living siblings—she still goes to their graves to knit her stockings or eat her porridge. The speaker, of course, tries repeatedly to get the girl to see the "error" in her thinking, but, to the speaker's growing exasperation, she sticks to her claim. Finally, in the last stanza the speaker exclaims

"But they are dead; those two are dead!
Their spirits are in heaven!"
'Twas throwing words away; for still
The little Maid would have her will,
And said, "Nay, we are seven!"

It's an amusing conclusion to the poem, and perhaps more subtle than it might first appear. The speaker, of course, expresses a kind of half-genuine, half-mock exasperation at the girl's stubborn refusal to acknowledge his accounting. This is followed by the common expression, "'Twas throwing words away"—the line seems to me to have a familiar tone, as one might adopt in telling the story to a confidant who (you were certain) agreed with your way of thinking. Ironically, however, it is the speaker who has been "throwing words away"—it is the speaker's arguments that have failed to convince the girl, and she is the one with the poem's final words.

Potentially even more significant here are the religious overtones to the "argument." From the speaker's point of view, death is a matter of transcendence and complete separation. The spirits of the departed are...well...departed—they no longer "count" in the world of nature. Or, to put this another way, the speaker sees human identity in metaphysical terms. Once the "spirit" is in "heaven," the body no longer counts for anything. From the girl's perspective, however, this absolute identification with the spirit and consequent dismissal of the body is simply wrong. While she fully acknowledges that, at some level, her sister Jane "went away" and that her brother John "was forced to go," she also recognizes that they still—in the actual practice of her daily life—are very much physically present. She insists, in effect, that one cannot make such a clean distinction between the spirit and the flesh, between body and soul, as the speaker assumes. The tangible, physical world of porridge and knitting and singing and Nature itself offers a comforting and companionable presence even when the spirit has departed.

The poem is a short easy read, and easily accessible on the web. One tidy reading copy is on Bartleby.com; or, check the edition from the University of Oregon. For a full-blown and beautifully edited electronic edition, complete with the many different versions of Lyrical Ballads and "We Are Seven," see the Electronic Scholarly Edition at Romantic Circles.

Read well.

Preface to Lyrical Ballads; "gross and violent stimulants"

For the human mind is capable of being excited without the application of gross and violent stimulants; and he must have a very faint perception of its beauty and dignity who does not know this, and who does not further know, that one being is elevated above another, in proportion as he possesses this capability. It has therefore appeared to me, that to endeavour to produce or enlarge this capability is one of the best services in which, at any period, a Writer can be engaged; but this service, excellent at all times, is especially so at the present day. For a multitude of causes, unknown to former times, are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and, unfitting it for all voluntary exertion, to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor. The most effective of these causes are the great national events which are daily taking place, and the increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident, which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies. to this tendency of life and manners the literature and theatrical exhibitions of the country have conformed themselves.

This remarkable passage comes from Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads (2nd. ed., 1800). Here, Wordsworth explains his purposes in writing poems that are so seemingly artless and rustic--poems that eschew the high-minded diction typical of the 18th-century poetic tradition that Wordsworth is writing against just as they eschew the spectacular extremes of an emerging popular press. At this point in the argument, Wordsworth turns his attention to a brief but pointed analysis of his contemporary culture. It sounds surprisingly like our own.

In Wordsworth's view, people are increasingly attracted to what he famously calls "gross and violent stimulants," and consequently they lose touch with the human mind's native "beauty and dignity." His poems are intended to counteract this cultural trend and to restore readers' sensitivity to their inherent "beauty and dignity." If Wordsworth left the argument here, it would certainly define his aesthetic and cultural aims, but it would be otherwise unremarkable. But Wordsworth pushes forward, offering his analysis of the current (that is, current at the turn of the 19th century) cultural moment.

As Wordsworth has it, his historical moment is distinguished by several unprecedented social and cultural forces which combine to "blunt the discriminating power of the mind" and "reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor." He identifies three such forces:

The "great national events which are daily taking place" — It's difficult to know exactly what Wordsworth means by this (and probably there is not a single referent) but given the historical moment it seems likely that he is referring obliquely to the French Revolution and the violence which followed on its heels, including the war between England and France. England, too, was struck with considerable domestic unrest which threatened to become a national insurrection of "the People" against the established aristocratic and ecclesiastical orders. (See the commentary on Charlotte Smith's Emigrants for further discussion.)

The "accumulation of men in cities" — This demographic marker indicates that Wordsworth wrote during an era when England was being transformed from an agrarian to an industrial society. One consequence of this shift of the economic base, in Wordsworth's eyes, was catastrophic because it uprooted people from any sustaining relationship with the natural world, leaving them stuck in mindless industrial jobs and, to relieve their boredom, "craving ... extraordinary incident." In other words, these are the people who have come so unmoored from the native dignity of the human mind that they can only be momentarily thrilled by "gross and violent stimulants" which they seek with an ever-increasing fervency.

The "rapid communication of intelligence" — In other words, the historical moment was also distinguished by an exponential advance in the circulation of print media. Suddenly at the end of the eighteenth century, newspapers and broadsheets could be produced with sufficient speed and at sufficiently low prices to be attractive to a large swath of the English population, and people responded with an increasing demand for news, particularly "news" of the most outrageous and spectacular kind.

All of these cultural, economic, and social forces were having their influence on the literary output of the British press (the "literature and theatrical exhibitions of the country"). It is precisely the "gross and violent [literary] stimulants" that Wordsworth's poems in Lyrical Ballads are implicitly arguing against.

In this sense, Wordsworth's critique of his contemporary culture sounds very much like the critiques one hears about our own historical moment, as pundits from both the Left and Right strike out against violent video games, outrageous TV and radio talk shows, and the psycho-social toll of an increasingly pervasive media--from cell phones to the internet. Much as these cultural critics today bemoan the fact that some older social order, some earlier form of small-townish community, is being demolished by our own seeking after "gross and violent stimulants" that our information technology hourly gratifies, so too did Wordsworth level similar charges against the media-fed culture of spectacle in his own day. The analysis certainly lends a significant cultural and historical backdrop for the better understanding of such poems as Wordsworth's Michael.

Intimations Ode, st. 5

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home[.]

Wordsworth's awkwardly titled "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood" is one of a handful of absolute canonical standards from the romantics. The lines quoted above come from the beginning of the fifth stanza, immediately after the speaker's troubled question about the loss of "glory": "Whither is fled the visionary gleam? / Where is it now, the glory and the dream?" In essence, we have a speaker who recalls a time when he was charged with a spiritual energy by gazing on and interacting with a beautiful natural world, but now, as he says at the end of the first stanza, "The things which I have seen I now can see no more." Indeed, the opening four stanzas repeatedly express the speaker's distress at his lost vision culminating in the questions about the fate of the "visionary gleam," the "glory," and the "dream."

The lines at the top of this post present Wordsworth's answer to these questions in the notion of a pre-existent soul. An explication of the passage might go something like this: While we typically think of birth as a kind of awakening, Wordsworth here calls it a "sleep and a forgetting." Why? Well, waking up (e.g. being born) into this natural, physical world is a matter of temporarily leaving behind some realm where we existed before being embodied here in nature. Using the metaphor of a sunrise (that is, the rise of our "life's Star"), Wordsworth suggests that our emergence into this physical natural world means that we had our "sunset" in some previous existence. For the most part--and certainly as adults--we forget this pre-existent condition. But when we are still young, we still can recall a few things about our original home. In other words, birth may be a "forgetting," but we haven't forgotten everything just yet; on the contrary, we come into this world "trailing clouds of glory" from our still recent contact with "God, who is our home." As the stanza continues Wordsworth describes how these youthful recollections of the Divine are eventually forgotten as the youth grows into full maturity and becomes ever more thoroughly incorporated into a natural life.

Especially relevant here in relation to the speaker's initial distress is the word "glory." In the previous stanza, the speaker wondered where the "glory" went. Now he knows. He had initially thought that nature itself was "glorious" but that he could no longer perceive that glory. Hence, the distress of the opening stanzas. Now he recognizes that "glory" was not an aspect of nature, but rather a way of perceiving nature when looking through those "clouds of glory" whose origins are in God rather than in nature. This may seem to be small comfort--after all, forgetting one's divine origins may be even worse than feeling unable to interact in meaningful ways with nature. But for Wordsworth, this is sincerely comforting--if he can recall a time when he did perceive this divine glory, that means that the glory still exists! It is not an aspect of nature and thus subject to time, mutability, mortality; instead, glory comes "From God, who is our home," and God, presumably, is beyond nature, beyond the vicissitudes of time, change, and loss.

A moment's reflection on an analogy will clarify the point: Consider the statement "Ahh! I remember the days when I had an immortal Soul. That was great while it lasted, but now I'm sad." Such an argument is, of course, absurd--one does not, by definition, "get over" being immortal. This is something like the speaker's condition in the Ode. He recalls a day when the objects of nature seemed glorious, as though "Apparelled in celestial light," but now he's gloomy, thinking that the glorious celestial light is for him extinguished. In fact, if he can recall a time when he was confident in the existence of such glory, then such glory must still exist. And this observation serves to explain Wordsworth's clumsy title--his recollections of the "clouds of glory" of early childhood are intimations of the immortality of the now rational, mature, adult speaker's soul.

Childe Harold III, stanza 6, lines 46-54

'Tis to create, and in creating live
A being more intense, that we endow
With form our fancy, gaining as we give
The life we image--even as I do now.
What am I? Nothing. But not so art thou,
Soul of my thought, with whom I traverse earth,
Invisible but gazing, as I glow
Mixed with thy spirit, blended with thy birth,
And feeling still with thee in my crushed feelings' dearth.

This fascinating stanza comes from the introductory section of Byron's Childe Harold, Canto III, composed in 1816. Byron had become famous--one of the first bona fide media celebrities in the modern world--as a result of the publication of Childe Harold I and II in 1812. Since that time, the poet's wayward sexual morality and disastrous marriage had caused many to recoil from his society, though many also remained fascinated, even entranced, by his larger-than-life personality. Eventually, in early 1816, Byron went into self-exile, leaving England and taking up residence on the shores of Lake Geneva in Switzerland (where he would be visited by Percy and Mary Shelley). At this point he took up the earlier poem once again, and at Shelley's urging he produced the very Wordsworthian Childe Harold Canto III.

One extraordinary element of this passage is the deliberate self-fashioning that, as Byron explains it, underlies his current poetic effort. The creation of art--in this case writing the present poem--is a way to "live / A being more intense." The act of artistic creation--endowing our "fancy" with some tangible "form"--enables the artist to gain something akin to the life he creates. Artistic creation, in other words, is not simply the production of some verbal artifact such as a poem; it is also a remaking of the life of the artist. As the stanza continues, Byron identifies himself, perhaps disingenuously, as "Nothing." Put another way, the artist is a kind of cipher or blank slate until endowed with life and character in the act of creation. And for Byron such creation has a double reference: the "Soul of my thought" is both his own earlier Childe Harold character (the figure who took the English readership by storm in 1812) and his months-old daughter Ada whom he left behind in England as he fled to the Continent.

The passage might be fruitfully compared with other romantic descriptions of the practice and purposes of artistic creation. One thinks, for instance, of Wordsworth's "recollection in tranquility" which occurs when the poet is in a "vacant or a pensive mood." (See Wordsworth's Preface and his "I wander'd lonely....") Or one might think of Keats's letter to Woodhouse (27 October 1818) claiming that true poets have "no identity" themselves and are continually filling the vacuum with "some other body." Such texts, and there are no doubt others, point to one strand of romantic theories of aesthetic creation.

New Series intro; "Michael " 74-79

With the new year, it's time to start a new series here on UAB-Romantics. The idea is to provide something like a "quote of the week" that will remind readers of the central joys of reading romantic literature. I'll follow each brief passage from the literature with a short commentary describing the context of the passage and offering some brief note about its significance. I'm hoping it will encourage people to seek out the whole work and read to their hearts' content. As always, I welcome all comments, questions and suggestions, and would particularly welcome suggestions for favorite passages to feature in future posts.

This week's passage comes from Wordsworth's "Michael" (74-79). Having described Michael's attachment to and labors on his ancestral lands, the narrator says,

these fields, these hills,
Which were his living being even more
Than his own blood (what could they less?), had laid
Strong hold on his affections, were to him
A pleasurable feeling of blind love,
The pleasure there is in life itself.

The passage points to one of the central "messages" of the poem, one that is particularly relevant to a modern and postmodern age. Wordsworth's celebration of Michael is a celebration of a mode of life anchored to and sustained by a close and informing attachment to place--to "these fields, these hills." As such, Michael's mode of existence conflicts irresolvably with a modern world that sees land--and, by extension, Nature--as a commodity to be bought and sold according to the purely quantitative valuations of the market. Such a modern world has no place for and eventually destroys the place-bound, physically and psychologically anchored existence represented by Michael. Modernity, in other words, is incompatible with "The pleasure there is in life itself."