William Wordsworth

The Poetry of Grandeur and of Tenderness

David B. Pirie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317208839
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik

First published in 1982. In this study of Wordsworth's major poetry, the author explores the conflict between the poet's celebration of an impersonal earth and his concern for the most intensely personal relationships. The opening chapter concentrates on Wordsworth's struggle to describe the natural world and the extraordinary claims he makes for the natural landscape — which are shown to derive not from vague mysticism but precisely articulated common sense. The close readings of Michael, The Idiot Boy, Tintern Abbey and The Ruined Cottage, and poems as passages on solitaries are supported by generous quotations and discussion of other critical views.

1 The Types and Symbols of Eternity

‘Crossing the Alps’, ‘The Prelude’: (1805) VI. 488–572 and (1850) VI. 557–640

DOI: 10.4324/9781315617732-1

I

Grandeur, for Wordsworth, is anything but predictable and The Prelude can be a confusingly uneven poem. Its greatest moments often emerge from trivia and then subside into bathos. Conversely such bathos can itself bounce the poetry back into renewed power. Sometimes this seems to be simple incompetence and the reader may justifiably feel irritated. However, there are sequences where such unexpected transitions form the very basis of Wordsworth’s meaning and forcefully signal insights which could not be conveyed in verse which was more concerned with superficial coherence and consistency. Towards the end of Book vi, the innocent reader eagerly approaches the sequence which critics have tended to call ‘Crossing the Alps’. This label may not seem the most helpful introduction to lines where the poet himself admits to having no conscious knowledge of doing any such thing. Yet Wordsworth’s own title for Book vi seems to be a deliberate tease. It announces not only ‘Cambridge’ but also ‘the Alps’ and we might expect some grandiose descriptions of those spectacular mountains. Certainly Wordsworth misled his readers when he published the book’s climax as a self-contained poem under the heading of ‘The Simplon Pass’. Back in context, the extract turns out crucially not to be about that route at its highest and most famous point but about a lower, and far less renowned, stretch of countryside which lies near a tiny Italian village called Gondo.

However, all three titles can be usefully misleading since Wordsworth’s subject here is the folly, and even the destructiveness, of trying to map out a path to peak experiences. The Alps, in his day, were after all the high spot of the Grand Tour’s flirtation with nature. Any young gentleman who claimed an ounce of sensitivity could look forward to profound emotion as he crossed them and an admiring audience back home whenever he chose to recall the grandeur of such a moment. These expectations are defeated for the poet and for the reader in one of The Prelude’s most appropriately fumbling passages.

Wordsworth and his friend, Robert Jones, make a nonsense of it all. They plan to cross the Alps with other travellers who have all stopped to have lunch at an inn before the final ascent, but the two men take longer than the rest over their meal. The main party leaves without them. Hurrying off to catch up, Wordsworth and Jones ‘climb’d with eagerness’ to reach the tourist’s dream, but they never do catch up. Worried that they may be going the wrong way, they ask a local peasant for directions and are given shattering information. Without even noticing it, let alone enjoying suitably passionate sensations, they have already crossed the Alps.

However, out of this moment of dreary disappointment and undignified absurdity, there grows for Wordsworth the traveller – and for the apparently cheated reader – one of the finest experiences of The Prelude:

The dull and heavy slackening that ensued

Upon those tidings by the Peasant given

Was soon dislodg’d; downwards we hurried fast,

And enter’d with the road which we had miss’d

Into a narrow chasm; the brook and road

Were fellow-travellers in this gloomy Pass,

And with them did we journey several hours

At a slow step. The immeasurable height

Of woods decaying, never to be decay’d,

The stationary blasts of water-falls,

And every where along the hollow rent

Winds thwarting winds, bewilder’d and forlorn,

The torrents shooting from the clear blue sky,

The rocks that mutter’d 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 unfetter’d 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.

(The Prelude, vi. 549–72)

It is all happening after all. What could not even be noticed by Wordsworth when he was self-consciously seeking it, what could not be conveyed to the reader who was attentively listening for it, emerges for both when they least expect it.

Verse is an essentially chronological medium, and Wordsworth’s skilfully gradual movement here from the concrete and the specific to the abstract and the generalized is all too easily obscured by commentary. Critical prose may already be preaching where the poetry is at first merely looking. The sequence does not bully the sceptical by leaping to its grandiloquent conclusion. Initially it gently begs a question which seems grounded in the simple facts of wood and waterfall and rock: do the terms of so-called ‘common sense’ adequately describe even such common things as these? Or is the poet compelled by their real oddity to wrench language into self-contradiction? The challenge of Wordsworth’s verse, as Coleridge noted, often derives from ‘something corporeal, a matter-of-factness, a clinging to the palpable’;¹ and it is through a series of palpabilities – however paradoxical as a matter of fact they have to be – that the ‘immeasurable’ life of the Alpine scenery is evoked.

The passage begins lamely enough. Wordsworth and his travelling companion are stranded by ‘The dull and heavy slackening’ of their tense excitement in a dreary world which merely reflects their own disappointment:

the brook and road

Were fellow-travellers in this gloomy Pass,

And with them did we journey several hours

At a slow step.

Then the simple facts of the scene begin to be noticed by minds which do not know that they notice: ‘The immeasurable height/Of woods decaying, never to be decay’d.’ There is no fanciful poeticizing here. The paradox is a truth by which every forester earns his living. Woods seldom die. Each constituent tree, at one stage in its pattern of shifting appearances, will fall or be felled, releasing light and soil for younger trees. The wood itself lives on, flourishing upon the decay which it contains, and The Prelude elsewhere celebrates that strange permanence which as a species, if not as individuals, we can share:

These forests unapproachable by death

That shall endure as long as man endures,

To look with bodily eyes.

(1850. vi. 466–71)

When, by contrast, Tithonus is made by Tenyson to say that ‘The woods decay, the woods decay and fall’,² he is not being more bluntly realistic than Wordsworth; he is being less accurate. His inability to see the woods for the trees is a strange blindness since the two are indeed mutually defining. The intellect which accuses Wordsworth of failing to distinguish between them is itself suspect. To tell things apart may be to tell ourselves lies about a life which actually defines itself as an intricate unity:

Our meddling intellect

Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things: –

We murder to dissect.

(The Tables Turned, 26–8; PW, iv. 57)

Carving experience into verbal categories can turn fluid energies into fixed nouns and

substitute a universe of death

For that which moves with light and life informed,

Actual, divine, and true.

(The Prelude (1850), xiv. 157–62)

In the real world, Wordsworth argues, nothing is ‘defined into absolute independent singleness’, but in the work of a hack poet ‘it is exactly the reverse; everything … is in this manner defined, insulated, dislocated, deadened’.³

Even conventional language admits that a waterfall cannot be ‘defined into absolute independent singleness’. Only a doubling together of two nouns seems adequate. A dissection which tried to separate ‘water’ from ‘fall’ would obviously destroy what it sought to describe. A waterfall is an extreme example of ‘something far more deeply interfused’ (Tintern Abbey, 96; PW, ii. 262).

It typifies a universe which can give us:

Authentic tidings of invisible things;

Of ebb and flow, and ever-during power;

And central peace, subsisting at the heart

Of endless agitation.

(The Excursion, iv. 1144–7; PW,v. 145)

So ‘Crossing the Alps’ follows its paradoxical woods with another of those great Wordsworthian phrases which revealingly confuse the issue: The stationary blasts of water-falls’. A waterfall cannot answer language’s falsely precise questions. It has to express both stability and movement. It cannot be a testament of one or the other, or even of one more than the other. The poet is appropriately uncertain about his own responses: he sees it as ‘stationary’, yet he hears it as a ‘blast’.

So Wordsworth has to struggle with his verbal medium if he is to avoid telling lies about woods and waterfalls and indeed winds: ‘And every where along the hollow rent/Winds thwarting winds, bewilder’d and forlorn.’ The language here is almost as meaningfully confused as the winds themselves. A reader who wishes to remain detached, and to insist on the judicious use of appropriate terms, will at first have difficulties. It is not easy to sort out noun and adjective in ‘hollow rent’ or to decide whether ‘rent’ is a verb whose subject is the ensuing winds. The attempt risks as false a separation as that involved in trying to consider one of the winds in isolation from the others. A wind on its own is unthinkable: bent grass may make it visible; tree-branches sometimes make it audible; skin can make it felt. Its essence is relationship. Meeting something else, even another wind as a cross-current, it lurches into action, finds its voice, is given – and gives – life. The winds’ contrary movements are literally creative. ‘Without contraries’, said Blake, ‘is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate, are necessary to human existence.’⁴ Wordsworth – and with him, the reader – is gradually being led towards an even more inclusive generalization, but the route is still concrete and specific.

Wordsworth’s next line may however seem more vulnerably fanciful: ‘The torrents shooting from the clear blue sky’. This perhaps is going too far for a reader who insists on what he calls the ‘facts’ of a ‘material’ universe. The poet is arguably passing off as observation what he knows to be a mere optical illusion. The mountain streams do not in fact flow from the sky; they merely seem to as they appear over the horizon. Wordsworth knows perfectly well, the sensible reader insists, that somewhere on the mountain-tops is the real source of those streams. But is it? Would not a scientist point out the absurd oversimplification of such a statement? Would he not stress numerous factors that determine the nature of streams, and would he not give a central role to those meteorological forces which – from Wordsworth’s point of view looking up the mountain-side – can fairly, if very roughly, be summed up as ‘sky’? It is from there that the water comes down.

Schoolchildren, of course, are taught that before the moisture falls down as rain it rose up from the earth, that the rain-cycle is a cycle. But that complication – if it does occur to a reader – helps rather than hinders Wordsworth’s evocation. The water in the torrents has been – and will again be – the water in the sky, just as the woods are and are not decaying. The fact that ...