Romantic Paradox

An Essay on the Poetry of Wordsworth

C.C. Clarke

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317204039
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

First published in 1962, this book reveals unexpected complexity or equivocation in Wordsworth's use of certain key words, particularly 'image', 'form' and 'shape'. The author endeavours to show that this complexity is related to the poet's awareness of the ambiguity of the perceptual process. Numerous passages from The Prelude and other poems are analysed to illustrate the argument and to show that, because of this doubt or hidden perplexity, Wordsworth's poetry has a far richer texture, is more concentrated, intricately organised and loaded with ambivalent meanings than it would otherwise have been. New light is also shed on Wordsworth's debt to Akenside.

VI

DOI: 10.4324/9781315562339-6

IN the following section I shall endeavour to consolidate my argument. I shall range over the poems freely to show that the conclusion that Wordsworth uses the words ‘form’, ‘shape’ and ‘image’ equivocally has not been arrived at on the evidence of half a dozen cannily selected instances, and that almost anywhere we turn and dip (in the poetry of the great decade, that is) we discover the same feeling for the ambiguity of perception.

The first passage is taken from the 1805 version of The Prelude:

Yet in the midst

Of these vagaries, with an eye so rich

As mine was, through the chance, on me not wasted,

Of having been brought up in such a grand

And lovely region, I had forms distinct

To steady me; these thoughts did oft revolve

About some centre palpable, which at once

Incited them to motion, and control’d,

And whatsoever shape the fit might take,

And whensoever it might come, I still

At all times had a real solid world

Of images about me ; …

The primary meaning of ‘images’ here seems to be ‘Nature’s image-work’: the young poet is surrounded by pictures, but real solid pictures. However, given the context, a comparison- and-contrast with mental images seems also to be implied: ‘the images were pictures, as all images are, including images in the mind; yet they were not images in the mind, for they were solid’. As so often in poetry the effect of this denial of a meaning is that the meaning denied begins to assert itself as a positive value, thus: ‘The images were solid and yet were optical appearances’. Moreover we have learnt a few lines earlier that the ‘forms distinct’ steadied the mind and the thoughts revolved ‘About some centre palpable’ as though both thoughts and forms were operating in a space at once mental and physical. When therefore the metaphor of the circle (About some centre …’) is covertly repeated (‘… a real solid world Of images about me’) the reader tends to assume that the relationship between the images and the self, like that between the forms and the thoughts, is not purely external: in other words ‘about me’ is not interpreted simply as ‘outside and independent of me’ but also as ‘centred upon me’ and even perhaps, in some sense, ‘dependent upon me’.

Here, from The Prelude, is a further example of ingenious double-talk:

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.

Wisdom and Spirit of the universe!

Thou Soul that art the eternity of thought,

That givest to forms and images a breath

And everlasting motion, not in vain

By day or star-light thus from my first dawn

Of childhood didst thou intertwine for me

The passions that build up our human soul…

Shapes, images, forms—our three key terms do a great deal of work here. Moreover ‘shape’ has been used shortly before, in reference to the ‘huge peak’:

I struck and struck again,

And growing still in stature the grim shape

Towered up between me and the stars…

The solidity of the peak is a distinctly qualified solidity, for ‘shape’, we know, can mean spectre or phantom. (Compare Paradise Lost 11.649,666 ff., and 681. For ‘grim’ see P.L. 11.804; and also Fragment Of A Gothic Tale—de Selincourt’s edition, Volume 1, p. 291.) When we come upon the next usage we shall not have forgotten the mobility and ambiguous status of the huge, black peak—the grim shape—and this will predispose us to find in the familiar shapes or pleasant images a like mobility, a capacity to be at once there and here, to exist both outwardly and inwardly. (It was precisely this mobility that Hobbes denied to the image: ‘… and yet the introducing of Species visible and intelligible [which is necessary for the maintenance of that Opinion] passing to and fro from the Object, is worse than any Paradox as being a plain impossibility.’) ‘To remain’ can mean both ‘to continue in the same state’ and ‘to be left over—as a residue or trace’. The shapes are, first and foremost, impressions left on the mind. But ‘familiar’, taken in conjunction with the alternative meaning of ‘Remained’, suggests that they are also objects in the natural world—well-known objects that endure: no familiar shapes remained either inwardly or outwardly. In short the sinister power of the language can largely be traced to an unstated meaning: viz. that the darkness hangs over both the boy’s thoughts and the whole visible world. (The ‘huge and mighty forms… moved slowly through the mind’ not only at night but also ‘by day’.) The inner chaos has spread outwards and engulfed the entire imagery of nature.

In his invocation to the ‘Wisdom and Spirit of the universe’ Wordsworth is elaborating and modifying some earlier lines which are to be found in Manuscript V. (de Selincourt publishes them as a footnote.)

Oh not in vain, ye Beings of the hills,

And ye that walk the woods and open heaths

By moon or starlight, thus from my first dawn

Of childhood, did ye love to intertwine…

The rural and pagan charm of these lines gives way to splendour and sublimity in the published version. And it is largely because of the substitution of those ‘forms and images’ for the ‘hills … (and) woods and open heaths’ of the original that Wordsworth’s sudden ascent to the sublime is so easy and convincing. For the ‘forms and images’ are both configurations in the mind and configurations in the external world; so their presence justifies the appeal to a Spirit diffused widely through time and place and residing, indifferently, in nature or the mind of man. Moreover, because of the preceding lines about the pleasant images and huge and mighty forms, the mobility of the natural world is already suggested by the equivocal ‘forms and images’ before we reach the words ‘breath’ and ‘motion’ ; and indeed without this equivocation the reality of the Spirit would have been largely a matter of assertion.

Wordsworth’s ‘imagination’—in the sense of inner vision or ‘inward eye’—seems to have been most active when the outward vision was also engaged (despite what the poem ‘I wandered lonely…’ might suggest).

At length, the dead Man, ‘mid that beauteous scene

Of trees, and hills and water, bolt upright

Rose with his ghastly face; a spectre shape

Of terror even! and yet no vulgar fear,

Young as I was, a Child not nine years old,

Possess’d me; for my inner eye had seen

Such sights before, among the shining streams

Of Fairy land, the Forests of Romance:

Hence came a spirit hallowing what I saw

With decoration and ideal grace;

A dignity, a smoothness, like the works

Of Grecian Art, and purest Poesy.

This 1805 version is a clear improvement on the lines to be found in MS V:

Rose with his ghastly face. I might advert

To numerous accidents in flood or field

Quarry or moor, or mid the winter snows

Distresses and disasters, tragic facts

Of rural history that impressed my mind

With images to which in following years

Far other feelings were attached, with forms

That yet exist with independent life

And like their archetypes know no decay.

There is a sharp disjunction here of outer and inner—i.e. of tragic facts and impressions on the mind, inward forms and their outward archetypes—and the lines are colourless and flat. In the 1805 version all this gives way to characteristic equivocation: the scene is now both actual and ideal. The word ‘scene’ itself, in MS V, already implies that the eye is contemplating a picture or image, and this suggests however faintly that the existence of the trees and hills and water is not merely objective—a meaning (or intimation of a meaning) that is confirmed in the 1805 version by the introduction of the word ‘shape’. Because the child’s mind is not confronted by a reality entirely alien to itself—that is, because the anxiety-experience occurs within a scenic context, a realm of shapes as much as things—we easily accept the statement about the transforming power of the ‘inner eye’ and the assurance that the soul was not debased by terror. (In MS V the record of this incident is followed by the lines that became XI, 258 ff. of The Prelude— i.e. the famous passage about the ‘spots of time’, those moments of high significance when we feel deeply

that the mind

Is lord and master, and that outward sense

Is but the obedient servant of her will.)

The inward streams and forests, and the dead man and beauteous scene, are alike ‘sights’—or intervenient images. Incidentally, the comparison of the spectre shape with an artefact is in accordance with Wordsworth’s inclination to merge art and nature—his partial equation of natural (or sense) images, ideal (or inward) images, and poetic images:

On Man, on Nature, and on Human Life,

Musing in solitude, I oft perceive

Fair trains of imagery before me rise …

or:

Some lovely Image in the song rose up

Fsull-formed, like Venus rising from the sea …

In the Fenwick note to Resolution And Independence he makes the quaint rem...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• I
• II
• III
• IV
• V
• VI
• VII
• VIII