CHAPTER 28
William Wordsworth
Go forth from Babylon, flee from Chaldea,
Declare this with a shout of joy, proclaim it,
Send it forth to the end of the earth. (Isaiah 48:20)
O welcome messenger! O welcome friend!
A captive greets thee, coming from a house
Of bondage, from yon city’s walls set free. (The Prelude 1:5–7)1
O, blank confusion, and a type not false
Of what the mighty city is itself. (The Prelude 7:696–7)
The first fifty-four lines of The Prelude, a passage Wordsworth called his “glad preamble” (The Prelude 7:4), insinuate major themes developed in that work. There are the “glad” themes of inspiration, blessing, “miraculous gift,” freedom, election, and dedication to the poetic/prophetic calling. But as a muted ground bass, scarcely noticeable themes of confusion, wandering, lost direction, bondage, captivity, and exile may also be heard. Both sorts of theme are carried in intertextual allusions that demonstrate the complexity of the poet’s integration of the Bible and its poetics into his masterwork, a complexity marked by a separation between the poet’s mind and body and between “the spirit” and “the letter.” Pertinent to this discussion is the fact that the biblical plot of humanity’s fall and redemption finds an echo in the equally devastating myth of fallen language. In that myth, an originally perfect language lapses into confusion, a garbled speech that will endure through history, finally to be redeemed at the apocalypse when it takes the form of a hymn of praise sung in unison by those few singled out for salvation.2 This myth is grounded in two key biblical figures: the ruined Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1–9) and the City/Whore of Babylon (Revelation 17–19). The biblical idea that human language has fallen from an original perfection creates an understandable bias against polyphony, ambiguity, and hidden meaning, yet in order to record sacred history or speak the divine message, biblical authors resorted to parable, allegory, figure, and image. For it was to these very “Babylonians” in their own “confused” language that God’s instructions and prophecies were spoken and reported.3 This chapter demonstrates that the myth of fallen language plays a crucial and structuring role in The Prelude, and that it is a muted theme in the open-ing lines.
Wordsworth’s poetic career reflects conflicting attitudes toward language – its triumphs and its inadequacies – its potential, as an “awful … instrument for good and evil.” Words, he declared, “hold above all other external powers a dominion over thoughts” (Prose Works 2:84). From the biblical perspective, after the confusion, humans speak the language of confusion; all the world’s languages are descendants of Babel. These include the languages of Scripture: Hebrew, spoken by Old Testament patriarchs, prophets, and lyricists; Aramaic and Greek, used by the four evangelists, by Paul and John of Patmos, and, of course, by Jesus. Human language is unable to produce the congruity of thought, imagination, word, and act said to exist at both the beginning and the end of history, manifest in the first divine fiat (Genesis 1:3) and “The Word of God” (Revelation 19:13).
An examination of The Prelude’s opening lines reveals some of the intricacies of Wordsworth’s artistry in response to biblical authors and texts and introduces a theme pervasive in the work – that of wandering and lost direction. As Wordsworth begins his epic work, he finds himself, like the Old Testament patriarchs and prophets, confronted by a seemingly transcendent entity, an animate, personified breeze who delights the poet by blessing him, and whom he welcomes as a “messenger” and “friend”:
A captive greets thee, coming from a house
Of bondage, from yon city’s walls set free,
A prison where he hath been long immured. (The Prelude 1:5–8)
Using biblical metaphors, the narrator characterizes himself, rather insistently, as socially beleaguered. He is a freed Babylonian captive, an escaped Egyptian slave, and a convict. The poet’s joyous declaration might have been made in response to Isaiah’s instruction in the epigraph to “go forth from Babylon” with joy. Two biblical events are invoked within these three lines – the release of the Israelite captives from the city of Babylon (home of confusion)4 and the fearful, even reluctant, escape from Egypt, the “house of bondage” (e.g. Exodus 13:3). The destination of the former Egyptian slaves is Canaan, the Promised Land; the destination of the freed Babylonian captives is Jerusalem, the holy city. Bringing together two biblical events separated by hundreds of years during which the Promised Land has been gained and lost raises intriguing questions: how are these situations alike? how different? how do they comment on each other? Adding further complexity, Wordsworth figuratively associates the departures from Egypt and Babylon with the exile of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden: in an echo of Milton’s description of the expulsion of the first couple from paradise, the poet exclaims, “The earth is all before me” (The Prelude 1:15; cf. Paradise Lost 12:646–7). Is the speaker to be thought of as an escaped slave, a released captive, a lapsed soul, a universal Everyman whose wandering and exile are figured in the expulsion? As the biblical intertexts meet and resonate, their already figurative meanings are multiplied and deepened. If it is desirable to be released from Babylon, is it also desirable to be expelled from paradise? Or, conversely, if it is disastrous to be expelled from Eden, is it likewise disastrous to be freed from Babylon? Milton provides “Providence” to guide the first couple as they leave Eden “with wandering steps and slow” (Paradise Lost 12:646–7); Yahweh as pillar of cloud and fire guides the forty-year wanderings of the Israelite slaves. In either case, how much freedom is implied? Tension resides in the fact that although Wordsworth’s persona makes a motif of freedom and self-determination (“and should the guide I chuse / Be nothing better than a wandering cloud / I cannot miss my way”), his astonishing choice, as he says, might be “nothing better” than a “wandering cloud”! The wandering cloud is an image of an image representing the God who led the Israelites in their protracted and torturous wandering in the wilderness. Is there anything better? Anything worse? The passage ends with further irony:
Whither shall I turn,
By road or pathway, or through open field,
Or shall a twig or any floating thing
Upon the river point me out my course?
Wordsworth’s unlimited possibilities for wandering and “turning” suggest what Northrop Frye calls “an image of lost direction,” to be distinguished from the “apocalyptic way”:
Corresponding to the apocalyptic way or straight road, the highway in the desert for God prophesied by Isaiah, we have in this world the labyrinth or maze, the image of lost direction. … The labyrinthine wanderings of Israel in the desert, repeated by Jesus when in the company of the devil … fit the same pattern. (Anatomy of Criticism 150; emphasis added)
Although the poet insists that he cannot miss his way, to introduce the song of the self as Wordsworth does – as a tale of escape, flight, exile, wandering, and turning – is to make the “image of lost direction” the central trope of the poet’s life and the growth of his mind. Yet at the same time, as the biblical echoes suggest, if the wandering is guided by God or Providence, the way of the poet is not free but determined. The released captive, the freed slave, the paroled prisoner is given a one-way ticket that bears no indication of its destination. To complicate the situation further, the narrator’s future seems to consist in relating the story of his own (past) wandering and captivity. The future and its task are thus as constrained as was the recent captivity and enslavement. Like the Old Testament prophets, the poet understands that he has been “clothed in priestly robe” and “singled out … / For holy service.”5 The conscription of a divine spokesperson is never “free,”6 so when the poet says that “poetic numbers came / Spontaneously” (The Prelude 1:60–3), he suggests not only a usurpation of his language, but also the imposition of another sort of captivity. The joyous announcement of freedom – from captivity, from poetic silence – is shadowed by an ironic denial of freedom, that escape and freedom are played against exile and lost direction, and that the compulsion to speak “spontaneously” is at once an image of divine inspiration and utter loss of poetic freedom. It is in the collision of such irreconcilable concepts that the poem reveals the direction of its unfolding.
My point here is not to exhaust the interpretative possibilities of these opening lines, but simply to suggest that the references to biblical texts and images and even individual words lend Wordsworth’s preamble multiple meanings and ironic reversals characteristic of the language of Babylon and quite distinct from the prelapsarian language depicted in Genesis when Adam at God’s direction names (co-creates) the animals (2:19) or when “the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech” (11:1). My concern is with the appeal of biblical language as it manifests itself in two key, but related, respects: first, in what Stephen Prickett (2002, p. 38) identifies as the irony of the “unspoken or ‘hidden’ meaning” in biblical texts, the sense that divine revelation cannot be spoken directly in human speech; second, in the motifs associated with the Tower of Babel, the confusion of tongues, the subsequent wandering, and the city of Babylon, site of the ruined Tower. In the biblical account, interruption of the building of the Tower had put an end to an era of perfect communication and cooperation, when human beings had only to imagine and to speak in order to accomplish. As God observes the building of the Tower to heaven, he remarks, “Behold the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do” (Genesis 11:6). His response is to “confuse the tongues” of earth’s inhabitants and thereby to initiate a history of human wandering (scattering) across the face of the earth, of confusion and inability to say exactly what one means. The Tower, confusion, and wandering form an imbricated pattern in the biblical narrative, making the Tower a vertical “image of lost direction” corresponding to the horizontal labyrinthine way of the world. Though Wordsworth’s persona may claim that he cannot miss his way and that cloud or floating twig will guide him, both “guides” are suspect, and The Prelude itself takes the very form of wandering, confusion, and lost direction in a landscape that is both physical and mental. M. H. Abrams has observed that “The Prelude is an involuted poem which is about its own genesis, a prelude to itself. Its structural end is its own beginning; and its temporal beginning … is Wordsworth’s entrance upon the stage of his life at which it ends.” The temporal beginning is recorded in the “glad preamble.” The stage of his life at which The Prelude ends is the flight from London/Babylon. A bit later Abrams adds, “the narrator, moving bewilderingly back and forth through time, is persistently concerned with the nature of voluntary and involuntary memory” (Abrams, 1971, pp. 79, 81), another variation on the conflicting themes of freedom and restraint.
As mentioned, God’s confusion of tongues at Babel imposed the necessity of his using now-fallen language for his own messages, even as it rendered some matters inaccessible through human speech. Too high or mysterious, they could not be spoken of directly, but only imperfectly through figure or parable. It became necessary, as Jesus suggests in his parables purporting to speak of “things hidden since the foundation of the world,” to “accommodate” sublime mystery to fallen human speech (Matthew 13:35). As Steven Goldsmith has shown, biblical authors, working with confused language in a fallen world, return obsessively to the story of the Tower, failed language, and the cultural trauma of captivity in Babylon.7 In Psalm 137, a lament “by the waters of Babylon,” a poet who has hung up his lyre asks, “How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?” (137:4). The question identifies what Wordsworth saw as a universal difficulty for a poet singing in the world of wandering, the foreign land of captivity. Attempting to articulate the “genius, power, / Creation, and divinity” that “passed within” him in childhood, Wordsworth declares the inadequacy of language, for what passed within is unspeakable: “It lies far hidden from the reach of words.” All the poet can do is “make breathings for incommunicable powers” (The Prelude 3:174, 185–8).
Addressing the “daughter of Babylon,” the psalmist anticipates Babylon’s destruction and the joy of one “who takes your little ones / and dashes them against the rock!” (137:9). Such shocking attitudes toward the city of captivity and confusion are carried into the New Testament, where the city provides figural form not only for Rome, but for the entire degenerate world, all its evils and injustices, its incessant clamor of voices.8 The thematic crescendo of Revelation with its intense apocalyptic longing discloses at the apocalypse the defeat and destruction of Babylon (the city now personified as the Whore of Babylon) along with the linguistic confusion she has come to embody, all enunciated figuratively in the word mystery emblazoned upon her forehead: “Upon her forehead was a name written, MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH” (Revelation 17:5). The refrain of fall and destruction of Babylon continues in chapter 18, when the captives (now representative of the world’s population of the righteous) are admonished once more to flee from the city, where light and life, poetry and music are soon to be extinguished: “And the voice of the harpers, and musicians, and of pipers, and trumpeters, shall be heard no more at all” (Revelation 18:22). Thus Babylon and the Tower of Babel draw to themselves a cluster of meanings: evils of every ilk (the abominations of the earth), foreign nations and religions associated with the ubiquitous biblical theme of harlotry in the worshiping of “other gods,” the confusion of tongues, and the failure of meaning in the resulting cacophony. The poet approaching the Bible as poetic model is confronted by a tension between, on the one hand, admiration for the rich complexity of common language pressed into service for uncommon ends and, on the other, what may be called the biblical bias against all human language – poetic or prosaic – the babble of “nations and tongues.”
Wordsworth’s Parabolic Style
Visionary Power
Attends upon the motions of the winds
Embodied in the mystery of words. (The Prelude 5:619–21)
The genius of Wordsworth lies in part in his singular ability to fuse the literal with the figurative so that readers, if they are so inclined, may ignore the figurative altogether; an intriguing alternative is that they may discount the literal, as readers tend to do in approaching, for example, biblical or literary parables and fables. Robert Lowth’s term “parabolic style” is an apt name for this aspect of Wordsworth’s poetic practice. It is a style constituted of different forms of irony. It consists in part of the irony that Harold Bloom (1989, p. 4) discovers in the Yahwist’s strand of biblical narratives: “It is the irony … in which absolutely incommensurate realities collide and cannot be resolved.” A collision of incommensurates will inevitably result when intertextual allusion and the language of nature and society are made to speak of things and conditions, spiritual or psychological, that lie “hidden from the reach of words.” Biblical ideas of escape and exile in the opening lines of The Prelude are incommensurate – both by themselves and as figurative for the narrator’s outrageously indeterminate/overdetermined circumstances.
In Wordsworth’s parabolic style the irony of incommensurates is joined with another sort – the irony of the “hidden.”9 This is the irony Robert Lowth explores at length in his The Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews and his introduction to his New Translation of Isaiah. It is one in which “from the letter” one must deduce “deep and recondite senses” (Lowth, Isaiah 1:ixviii).10 Lowth’s metaphors of depth and obscurity imply that in sacred discourse, beneath a text’s literal surface, there extends, perhaps infinitely, an abyss of meanings of which even an author may be ignorant, and the task of whose discovery may well prove endless. Nevertheless, the way to the “deep and recondite” lies through the intricacies of the surface.11 On this point Paul de Man (1983, p. 211) comments, “Curiously enough, it seems to be only in describing a mode of language which does not mean what it says that one can actually say what one means.”12
The question arises, what is it about a text that invites readers to “see” that it contains hidden depths of meaning? Is it something that strikes one as too obvious, too obscure, too elliptical, or absurdly contradictory? Is it a perceived echo of an earlier text? Prickett offers possible answers in his analysis of a passage from Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Irony, where Kierkegaard argues that in Socratic irony there is “what amounts to a prototype of the via negativa,” the way to God or truth through negation. Kierkegaard explains what he means by the Socratic “ironic totality, a spiritual condition that was infinitely bottomless, invisible, and indivisible,” by the example of a print called Napoleon’s Tomb. As Kierkegaard describes it,
Two tall trees shade the grave. There is nothing else to see in the work, and the unsophisticated observer sees nothing else. Between the two trees there is an empty space; as the eye follows the outline, suddenly Napoleon himself emerges from this nothing, and now it is impossible to have him disappear again. Once the eye has seen him, it goes on seeing him with almost alarming necessity.
Socrates’ words are like the two trees. Meaning lies in the blank spaces surrounding his words as it does in the relationship between the trees, and in the emptiness between them – “this nothing … [that] hides that which is most important” (quoted in Prickett, 2002, p. 43). Prickett comments, “that image of the Napoleonic profile in the outline of the trees … hidden, yet once seen, quite unmistakable, re-shaping our reading of everything else in the frame, is one of the great metaphors of irony” (ibid.).13 The trees are the manifest or literal; the absent Napoleon, made present in his name, a haunting void between the trees, is a painterly trope, a virtual abyss of potential meaning.14 However, one might further observe that one’s eye lingers on the print because of an incongruity, an odd relationship between the title and the picture. There is no grave, no tomb visible; the trees dominate one’s view and invite the viewer’s attention. Implicit in this metaphor of irony is the notion that there are those who do not see (Kierkegaard’s “unsophisticated observer”) and those who do. For those who see, who question the oddness, perhaps, everything changes in that glimpse into the emptiness that hides and reveals what is “most important.” Irony, especially biblical irony, engages readers in the discovery of hidden meaning; it exploits the virtues of the indirect, the obscure, the aphoristic, and the sententious. Thus, once seen, the incongruities and absurdities of The Prelude’s opening lines – the clashes of sense among escape, flight, and expulsion, between finding one’s way and potentially endless wandering – shape one’s reading of everything that follows.
Jesus relates his ironic parables purporting to speak of what has been “hidden since the foundation of the earth” to “those outside” – “so that they may indeed see but not perceive, and may indeed hear but not understand” (Mark 4:12). The disciples are supposedly sophisticated observers, who can “read” the true meanings because they have been given a key – “the secret of the kingdom of God” – but nevertheless they seem as mystified as the outsiders. As Frank Kermode (1979, p. 3) comments, “Outsiders must content themselves with the manifest, and pay a supreme penalty for doing so.” Parabolic style is the appropriate form for expressing this supreme irony – the use of language to conceal as it reveals its important meanings, the meanings that often lie “far hidden from the reach of words” (The Prelude 3:185).
Speaking of sacred literature, Lowth emphasizes the relationship between the surface of a text (the manifest or literal) and its depths, between what he thinks of as the fictional and the true. Speaking specifically of biblical parables, he says, “Parable is thus the paradoxical way through fiction to truth.” The parabolic allegory allows “no room for literal … expressions; every word is figurative” (Lectures 1:233). Yet it must be the case that at times “every word” becomes figurative only after the hidden is uncovered. This possibility is suggested by Harold Bloom – that texts considered spiritual may be “literally true, as well as metaphorically” (Bloom, 2005, p. 211). Wordsworth understood that the genuine could, and perhaps should, exist in both the manifest and hidden meanings of a text, and that literal language may be, like the trees in the print, the Tomb of Napoleon, manifestly “true” even though they shelter important but hidden meanings. One might argue that the irony would dissolve into naive allegory, and the hidden would not be hidden, if the trees did not strike viewers as “real.”
In this vein Wordsworth stressed that the first requisite power for the production of poetry was “the ability to observe with accuracy things as they are in themselves, and with fidelity to describe them, unmodified by any passion or feeling existing in the mind of the describer.” This first power, that of faithful representation in which the “higher faculties” are passive, must, however, be augmented by other powers – “sensibility,” “reflection,” and, most crucially, “imagination” and “fancy” (Preface of 1815, Prose Works 3:26). Imagination is the poet’s ability “to glance from earth to heaven, whose spiritual attributes body forth what his pen is prompt in turning to shape; fancy “insinuat[es] herself into the heart of objects with creative activity.” Imagination is a word “denoting operations of the mind upon [external] objects and processes of creation or of composition, governed by certain fixed laws” (Preface of 1815, Prose Works 3:30–1). What is of interest in Wordsworth’s remarks is their explicit identification of the essentially double nature of imaginative works – the literal (accurate description) and the figurative expressed through language that “bodies forth” glimpses of “heaven” and “spiritual” or psychological attributes. According to Wordsworth, this imaginative doubleness is epitomized in biblical texts: “The grand storehouses of enthusiastic and meditative Imagination, of poetical … Imagination, are the prophetic and lyrical parts of the Holy Scriptures, and the works of Milton” (Preface of 1815, Prose Works 3:34).
“Lines Written with a Slate-Pencil upon a Stone”
I have discussed Wordsworth’s parabolic style elsewhere;15 here I would like to examine briefly Wordsworth’s “Lines Written with a Slate-Pencil upon a Stone, the Largest of a Heap Lying Near a Deserted Quarry, upon One of the Islands at Rydale.” I call this poem a parable, and in my discussion I want both to demonstrate the poet’s irony of the hidden and the incommensurate and to prepare the way for the discussion of Babylon to follow.
The poem begins, “Stranger!” – an address to the reader, as well, perhaps, as an announcement of theme or attitude. A linguistic strangeness certainly follows:
this hillock of misshapen stones
Is not a ruin of an ancient time,
Nor, as perchance thou rashly deem’st, the Cairn
Of some old British Chief …
In calling attention to the stones and saying what they are not, the poet takes the via negativa. Naming the thing that is not there – the ancient ruin or monumental pyramid of rough stones – calls up their images and has the effect of making the absent present, and so the ruin and the cairn “appear” despite the effort to dismiss them.16 Before the poet identifies the hillock of misshapen stones in positive terms it has taken on an elusive significance in the minds of readers. Even then the poet dismisses the pile as “nothing”:
’tis nothing more
Than the rude embryo of a little dome
Or pleasure-house, which was to have been built
Among the birch-trees of this rocky isle.
Wordsworth’s “’tis nothing more” echoes the denials of the opening lines and parallels the ironic characterization at the opening of The Prelude of the poet’s potential guide as “nothing better than a wandering cloud.” This is no great matter, the poet asserts, merely the “rude embryo” of an aborted building project. But by now the specter of the ancient ruin that is not and is, which, like the profile of Napoleon in the anonymous print, haunts the scene, assumes a new facet. The ancient ruin that represents an interrupted building project is the Tower of Babel – that structure “conceived” and reared toward the heavens by perfect language before the work was “rudely” interrupted by God’s confusion of tongues (Genesis 11). The “quarry and the mound,” the poet says, “Are monuments of [the Knight’s] unfinished task” (emphasis added).
Cynthia Chase (1987, pp. 66–7) has emphasized the ambiguity of the word monument, whose multiple meanings permit the word to refer to objects commemorating the past (historical persons and events and the dead) as well as to written documents, legal and literary (especially a classic work of literature). Monuments to past events and the dead typically carry their own inscriptions and thus may be monuments in both senses. The narrative of the Tower of Babel in Genesis, one might say, is a monument of literature; its subject is a monument to devastating, world-changing events in the past. The Genesis account does not appear inscribed on the ruined Tower, but the name Babel, “confusion,” taken from that narrative and its interpretation of the name,17 has been so intimately attached that the narrative might well have been inscribed thereon. In “Lines,” the “monument” of the unfinished task, once inscribed by the poet, embodies both monumental functions and fuses the unfinished building project with Wordsworth’s poem, which as a result takes on a stony density and permanence.
Wordsworth’s “Lines” are written on what he thinks of as “the corner-stone / Of the intended pile.” In this scene this stone corresponds to the biblical “stone which the builders refused” (Psalm 118:22) or the “stone which the builders rejected” (Matthew 21:42).18 In both cases, the stone becomes primary – the cornerstone. New Testament echoes of Psalm 118 make the refused or rejected stone a metaphor for Jesus, the Word. In Wordsworth’s “Lines,” an ironic juxtaposition of a stone of confusion (from Babel’s ruin) with the figure of perfect language – the Logos – renders the tale of Sir William’s failed building project intriguingly parabolic. As parable, the poem requires yet resists interpretation.19 The explanation the poet offers, like Jesus’ explanations of his own parables, raises more questions than it answers. Wordsworth addresses a reader who might be “on fire,” “disturbed / By beautiful conceptions” (an ironic echo of Sir William’s aborted and “rude embryo” and the “ill-conceived” attempt of the Tower builders to build beyond the realm of nature) to construct a “mansion” of “snow-white splendour.” The juxtaposition of mansion and snow-white suggests the too ambitious or grand aspiration or other-worldly perfection20 – another sort of reaching beyond nature. His advice: “leave / Thy fragments to the bramble and the rose” (the thorns of fallen nature and the rose of perfection). “Fragments” is, of course, a common enough word for unfinished texts. Human pride figured in the Tower of Babel and human mortality figured in the cairn (both under erasure) are merged in the image of the interrupted building project and its rejected cornerstone, now become a bearer of the word, if not the Word. The tower of language, the poet advises, should – indeed must – be left unfinished, in fragments, a broken text, and the “outrage”21 entirely forgiven.
This analysis of Wordsworth’s “parable” of the interrupted building project is intended merely to demonstrate the ironic ways of the text, which as in the Tomb of Napoleon hides what is most important: The “rude embryo” as degraded image of absent tower and tomb is a sort of historical abstract of the relationships among human beings, their aspirations, their pride, their failures, and their ruined “monuments” – of both stone and word (Word). Confusion, fragmentation, hidden meanings, parabolic speech – these, for good or ill, are the legacy of Babylon and its rubble of language. And these, too, characterize Wordsworth’s record of wandering through the “mighty city.”
Wordsworth in Babylon
The quick dance
Of colours, lights and forms, the Babel din. (The Prelude 7:156–7)
I behold Babylon in the opening Street of London. (William Blake, Jerusalem 74:16)
After his richly crafted and problematic opening of The Prelude, with its ironic invocations of Eden, Babylon, and wilderness wandering, Wordsworth indeed wanders figuratively into his own mind and leads readers through a maze of memories and years (years recalled and years spent in writing about those years) from childhood to manhood. It is noteworthy that, after a long silence, the first mention of that highly charged opening occurs some six books and, Wordsworth says, five years22 later as he opens Book 7, “Residence in London,” by reminding readers of his “glad preamble”:
Five years are vanished since I first poured out,
Saluted by that animating breeze
Which met me issuing from the city’s walls,
A glad preamble to this verse. (7:1–4)
Reference to the opening lines of Book 1 at the outset of the London books recalls and stresses the warring themes of flight, release, exile, freedom, restraint, and wandering. In Wordsworth’s parabolic style, London is merely and literally – at the level of the dead letter – London. The poet names landmarks, events, and activities of the “real” city. At the figurative level, however, it is Babylon, the city of captivity and fallen language, the city of earthly corruption; more broadly, it is all cities (including Paris and Goslar), and the very image of lost direction – in the labyrinthine way of the world as in the spiritual and textual wandering way of the mind.
As he begins to describe the “look and aspect” of London, Wordsworth singles out for attention the “broad highway appearance,” the “quick dance / Of colours, lights and forms,” and the “Babel din, / The endless stream of men and moving things” (The Prelude 7:154–8).23 Babel/Babylon in Revelation is seated “upon many waters” (17:1), and the waters are “peoples and multitudes and nations and tongues” (17:15). These waters appear as Wordsworth’s “endless stream of men” and “the tide” of humanity that flows through London (The Prelude 7:206). The wanderer hears the sound of the “Babel din” as a “roar” punctuated by “some female vendor’s scream” (The Prelude 7:197), the scream perhaps a metaphor for the death cry of the biblically doomed Babylon, the fallen world. Certainly London, as Wordsworth encounters it, is a form of Babylon, a city of “peoples and multitudes and nations and tongues” – “all specimens of man / Through all the colours which the sun bestows” (The Prelude 7:236–43). “Foolishness, and madness on parade” are “most at home” there (The Prelude 7:589–90). Nevertheless, one reaction belongs “to this great city by exclusive right”:
How often in the overflowing streets
Have I gone forwards with the crowd, and said
Unto myself, “The face of every one
That passes by me is a mystery.” (The Prelude 7:593–8)
Mystery, as noticed above, is another name for Babylon; it is the name written her forehead. Goldsmith (1993, p. 62) has suggested that mystery “designates Babylon as a figure of indeterminacy … with the danger of proliferating unregulated meanings,” such unregulated meanings an attribute of fallen human language. A case in point is the word mystery itself: mystery has its etymological roots in secret ritual and religious truth, especially a truth “known or understood by divine revelation”; but mystery in another sense, as “the obscure” or “enigmatic,” is difficult to reconcile with truth. When Wordsworth declares that “The face of every one / That passes by me is a mystery,” the very statement carries the dual senses of enigma and truth. “Mystery” written on the forehead of Babylon, this figure of fallen humanity and confusion of language, implies as well a startling glimpse of truth. To be confronted by mystery (in the sense of enigma) is also the common condition of humankind and its struggles with fallen language. Wordsworth’s blind beggar, “Wearing a written paper, to explain / The story of the man,” is a metaphor for the human condition. Wordsworth suggests that we are all blind beggars, citizens of Babylon, with “mystery” on our foreheads, and our written papers – the indeterminacy of our labels, texts, Scriptures – to explain our story:
… it seemed
To me that in this label was a type
Or emblem of the utmost that we know
Both of ourselves and of the universe,
And on the shape of this unmoving man,
His fixed face and sightless eyes, I looked,
As if admonished from another world. (The Prelude 7:610–23)
Just as Wordsworth singles out the blind beggar (with the haunting image of “fixed face and sightless eyes”) as a figure for humanity, so he represents Bartholomew Fair as a type of London, and her ancestress, Babel (“confusion”), or Babylon (“mystery”); London, like Babel, comes indeed to mean “confusion” – “blank confusion”; like Babel it represents all manner of evils and all failure of meaning and purpose:
O, blank confusion, and a type not false
Of what the mighty city is itself
To all, except a straggler here and there –
To the whole swarm of its inhabitants –
An undistinguishable world to men,
The slaves unrespited of low pursuits,
Living amid the same perpetual flow
Of trivial objects, melted and reduced
To one identity by differences
That have no law, no meaning, and no end. (The Prelude 7:696–705)
Blank suggests a sheer emptiness – of law, meaning, and end – and confusion, the “mighty city” itself, a metonymy of “an undistinguishable world.” The “hubbub” (7:213) of the unreal city is a roar like that which might have issued from Babylon on the very day of the confusion, as from Milton’s Chaos: “A universal hubbub wilde / Of stunning sounds and voices all confus’d / Borne through the hollow dark” (Paradise Lost 2:951–3); for Wordsworth, it is produced by “all specimens of man / Through all the colours which the sun bestows” (7:236–7). As the poet wanders through the city, surveying its various languages – not only of its residents, but also of theater, court, parliament, and church – the deceit and confusion multiply:
I glance but at a few conspicuous marks,
Leaving ten thousand others that do each –
In hall or court, conventicle, or shop,
In public room or private, park or street –
With fondness reared on its own pedestal,
Look out for admiration … –
Lies to the ear, and lies to every sense –
Of these and of the living shapes they wear
There is no end. (7:567–77)
It is from this “city” – this blank confusion, this “universal hubbub,” this place of failed language, of “Lies to the ear, and lies to every sense” – that the poet flees and to which the poet’s “glad preamble” to his tale of wandering and lost direction will lead again. As mentioned, it is not a tale that proceeds chronologically as along a straight road through the desert to the Promised Land or the holy city. In fact the “autobiography” is a retrospective that tends to conceal the chronology of the life lived. The departure from London – figured in the preamble as a flight from Babylon, Egypt, and Eden – is the chronological end of the tale, and it is where the narrative will begin to recount a life of wandering in time and space, in the “real” world and the figurative reaches of the mind. Central to the poet’s journey is his paradoxical celebration of confusion – the real, but fallen, language of the poet and of men. The confusion of Babel encompasses all of human time and place, a confusion that characterizes the difficult and miraculous language of biblical poetry – the model Wordsworth selects for himself.24
A recurrent image in Wordsworth’s poetry is that of ascending voices, songs, murmurs, and roars, often associated with water. The “Babel-din” and “roar” of London/Babylon is human language, seeming to arise from a figurative “endless stream of men” (The Prelude 7:157–8, 184) that reaches like the Tower of Babel toward heaven. This roar is echoed – with a difference – in the climactic Snowdon vision in the last book of The Prelude. There, from a “deep and gloomy breathing-place” the poet hears “the roar of waters, torrents, streams / Innumerable, roaring with one voice” (13:57–9). This roar, unlike that of London/Babylon, seems to be undergoing a transformation toward the “one song” of nature heard when the physical ear sleeps (The Prelude 2:431–4) and the song sung in unison by the living beings and the elders surrounding God’s throne in Revelation. Ideally, Wordsworth suggests, the human din of confusion would be adapted to nature’s song, and nature’s song to a universal harmony. Wordsworth’s late poems reveal increasingly that his admiration for the richness and complexity of fallen human language wanes as he abandons, one might say, Babylonian lyric for kiddusha, a “hallelujah sent / From all that breathes and is” (The Prelude 13:262–3).25 Wordsworth’s dilemma is that of the psalmist: “How shall we sing the Lord’s song” in Babylon? (137:4). Wordsworth’s flight from Babylon will take him step by step from acceptance of – even reverence for – the tropological, deceptive, ambiguous, confused, and beautiful language of the biblical authors and the “real language of men” to a longing for perfect communication and communion, a desire celebrated most overtly in the magnificent late poem, “On the Power of Sound”:26
O for some soul-affecting scheme
Of moral music, to unite
Wanderers whose portion is the faintest dream
Of memory! – O that they [angels] might stoop to bear
Chains, such precious chains of sight
As laboured minstrelsies through ages wear!
O for a balance fit the truth to tell
Of the Unsubstantial, pondered well. (169–76; emphasis added)
If angels could wear chains of physical sight, if the unsubstantial could be weighed in a true balance, the scattered wanderers of the world might once more become one people with one language (Genesis 11:6). “O for a balance fit the truth to tell / Of the Unsubstantial, pondered well” – this is Wordsworth’s version of the psalmist’s lament, “How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?” Where is the balance in which to weigh, to tell (speak) the truth, of “the Unsubstantial”? Poets of the ages elapsed since the confusion (the “laboured minstrelsies”) are Babylonian captives, slaves in a mundane house of bondage – in chains to the material realms that prevent their hearing and participating in the song of praise to the “Unsubstantial,” the “Ever-living” (195), the universal hymn (the kiddusha) from all of creation transmitted to heaven “by flaming Seraphim” and poured “Into the ear of God.” The longed-for harmony is the Alpha and Omega – the Word of the beginning and the end – timeless, divine, and perfect. Harmony’s “stay / Is in the Word, that shall not pass away” (223–4).
If the rift between thought and expression, between imagination and speech, inflicted at the fall of Babel were healed in the perfect language of the Word, there would be no confusion. A monoglot society would speak as one and would sing one song – carried in a single word – Hallelujah. In the Apocalypse of Paul, an angel explains to Paul the meaning of the word: “Let us bless him all together.” He instructs that “whoever is able, and does not join in the singing, you know that he is a despiser of the word” (Hennecke, 1964, vol. 2, pp. 778–9). In Revelation, John of Patmos hears “what sounded like the roar of a great multitude in heaven shouting: ‘Hallelujah! Salvation and glory and power belong to our God’ ” and then “what sounded like a great multitude, like the roar of rushing waters … shouting: ‘Hallelujah! For our Lord God Almighty reigns’ ” (Revelation 19:1, 6). When the confused voices of Babylon have been silenced, yielding to the Word, all the redeemed will shout one hymn of praise, whereupon poets and the need for poets will have been eliminated: “And the voice of the harpers, and musicians, and of pipers, and trumpeters, shall be heard no more at all” (Revelation 18:22).
Although he may flee from Babylon and the voice of its harpers, Wordsworth’s attitude toward the elimination of earthly music is not settled in The Prelude. In Book 5, for example, contemplating the perishable nature of human texts, he comments, “Tremblings of the heart / It gives, to think that the immortal being / No more shall need such garments” (21–3). And though his final vision in Book 13 is of “one song,” it is a song like and eerily unlike that heard by John from heaven: “a roar of waters, torrents, streams / Innumerable, roaring with one voice” but emerging darkly as a “homeless voice” through Nature’s “dark, deep thoroughfare,” seat of the “imagination of the whole” (13:57–65). The roar from the fractured mist seems not to be “Hallelujah”; it is not yet the “moral music” of “On the Power of Sound” that will unite earth’s wanderers; and its univocal harmony is not yet that of the perfect Word “that shall not pass away” (170–1; 224).
Notes
1 Unless otherwise indicated, citations to The Prelude are to the 1805 version.
2 M. H. Abrams argues that The Prelude is a secular, personal, and figurative recapitulation of biblical history and the “sharply defined plot with a beginning, a middle, and an end” (Abrams, 1971, p. 35, and see pp. 278–92. William A. Ulmer intriguingly claims that “in The Prelude Wordsworth creates a modern religious myth, a secularized reaffirmation of Christian insights into the way of the soul” (Ulmer, 2006, p. 278; emphasis added). Ulmer’s argument is that Wordsworth’s “Fall” is framed by the Simplon and Snowdon visions, representing a movement from a “disruptive confrontation with the sublime” to a “saving return to the beautiful” (ibid., p. 272). My position is that such architectural structure disguises the thematic coherence carried in the emphasis on language and what I am calling the “flight from Babylon.”
3 Stephen Prickett (1986, pp. 37–94) provides an excellent history of evolving understanding of the relationship between the religious and the poetic and the adaptation of biblical to secular poetics.
4 Goldsmith (1993, p. 63) draws attention to the “embedding of Babel within the figure of Babylon,” in later millenarian traditions, citing as an example a seventeenth-century hymn that associates Babylon with the tower and both with fallen humanity: “The Whore that rides in us abides, / A strong beast is within … / Alas, we may most of us say / We’re stones of Babel’s tower.”
5 In this same passage, Wordsworth declares, “To the open fields I told / A prophecy,” which invokes God’s instruction to Ezekiel, “Prophesy to the wind [or breath]” and recalls the breeze that blesses the poet in the opening lines.
6 Moses’s poignant plea, “Oh, my Lord, send, I pray, some other person” (Exod. 4:13), is typical of the chosen prophet’s unsuccessful attempt to avoid the divine commission. The Lord rejects Jeremiah’s similar request and declares, “Behold, I have put my words in your mouth” (Jer. 1:9).
7 Biblical references to Babylon are numerous and insistent. In all, there are some 300 mentions of Babel, Babylon, or forms thereof in the King James Version of the Bible.
8 As Goldsmith (1993, p. 58) asserts, “the polyglot of history” is in Revelation rendered in the formula “peoples and multitudes and nations and tongues.”
9 In my discussion of the irony of the hidden, I am indebted to both Frank Kermode (1979) and Stephen Prickett’s (2002) fine analysis of irony.
10 Taking his metaphors from the Bible, Wordsworth refers to the literal as “the dead letter” as opposed to the figurative “spirit of things” (The Prelude, 1850, 8:296–7).
11 Stephen Prickett (2002, p. 37) shows that, although he does not mention the word, Lowth recognized a pervasive irony in biblical texts: “for Lowth, irony – the contrast between explicit and implied meaning – lay right at the structural centre of Hebrew poetry … it was now possible to see biblical poetry, and … much of biblical prose as well, in terms of dramatic and ironic narrative.”
12 De Man’s sharp distinction between allegory and irony is not as useful as Kevin Hart’s observation that the sort of reading both require leads to the conclusion that “allegory supplies the necessary structure for its ironic subversion, and of course the subversion brought about by irony is itself open to be overturned to the extent to which the ironic becomes canonized as ‘literature’ … or ‘philosophy’ ” (Hart, 1989, p. 158). De Man denies that Wordsworth is an ironic writer (although he does raise the interesting possibility of an allegory that is “meta-ironic”; de Man, 1983, p. 223) and wishes to make a clear distinction between allegory and irony, even though, as he says, in both “the relationship between sign and meaning is discontinuous” (ibid., p. 209).
13 The Tomb of Napoleon is reproduced as the frontispiece of Prickett’s Narrative, Religion and Science.
14 Of interest here is the fact that Napoleon was buried beneath weeping willows, the trees associated with Babylon.
15 See Westbrook (2001), especially chapters 4, 5, and 6.
16 J. Hillis Miller speaks of what he calls the poetic “act of displacement, substitution or stepping aside” which “mark a thing so that it ceases to be itself and becomes a sign pointing toward something absent.” He says, “That absent something exists, already and elsewhere, or not yet. It exists … in the signs for it.” (Miller, 1985, p. 96).
17 Babel meant “gate of God” in Babylonian; the interpretation of the word as “confusion” comes from a similarity between Babel and the Hebrew verb balal, “to confuse.” The creative misinterpretation ironically demonstrates the very confusion which is the subject of the narrative.
18 This same language is found in Mark 12:10 and Luke 20:17. Similar language occurs in Acts 4:11.
19 See my chapter “Wordsworth’s Prodigal Son” for a fuller discussion of the problems presented by parables (Westbrook, 2001, pp. 99–121).
20 Mansion seems to echo Jesus’ description of heaven as consisting of “many mansions” (John 14:2), and snow-white suggests a condition of righteousness or perfection – associated with God and Jesus (Ps. 51:7, Dan. 7:9, Matt. 28:3, Rev. 1:14).
21 “Outrage” seems too big a word to describe the knight’s “conception” and aborted building project, but not for the human attempt, using perfect, prelapsarian language, to build a tower to heaven.
22 In the 1850 Prelude, Wordsworth calculates the interval as six years, rather than five.
23 It is intriguing to notice that in the more orthodox and conservative 1850 Prelude “Babel din” is revised to “deafening din” (7:155).
24 For an argument to this effect, see chapter 1 of Westbrook (2001).
25 Goldsmith (1993, chapter 1) offers a fine analysis of the kiddusha and the language of End Times. I discuss Wordsworth’s “one song” as kiddusha (Westbrook, 2001, chapter 7).
26 Wordsworth thought that “some passages in ‘The Power of Sound’ [are] equal to anything I have produced” and gave it the emphatic last position in both Yarrow Revisited and “the Poems of Imagination” in the “last edition” of his poems (The Major Works, p. 725n).
References
Abrams, M. H. (1971) Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature. W. W. Norton & Company, New York.
Blake, William (1966) Complete Writings with Variant Readings, ed. Geoffrey Keynes. Oxford University Press, London.
Bloom, Harold (1989) Ruin the Sacred Truths, Poetry and Belief from the Bible to the Present. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.
Bloom, Harold (2005) Jesus and Yahweh, The Names Divine. Riverhead Books, New York.
Chase, Cynthia (1987) “Monument and Inscription: Wordsworth’s ‘Lines’,” Diacritics 17:4, 66–77.
de Man, Paul (1983) Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd edn, rev. intro. Wlad Godzich. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.
Frye, Northrop (1967) Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton University Press, Atheneum, NY.
Goldsmith, Steven (1993) Unbuilding Jerusalem: Apocalypse and Romantic Representation. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY.
Hart, Kevin (1989) The Trespass of the Sign: Deconstruction, Theology and Philosophy. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Hennecke, Edgar (1964) New Testament Apocrypha, ed. R. McL. Wilson, 2 volumes. The Westminster Press, Philadelphia.
Kermode, Frank (1979) The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.
Larue, Gerald A. (1969) Babylon and the Bible. Baker Book House, Grand Rapids, MI.
Lowth, Robert (1787) Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews, trans. G. Gregory, 2 volumes. London, reprinted Georg Olms Verlag, Hildesheim, 1969.
Lowth, Robert (1807) Isaiah: A New Translation; With a Preliminary Dissertation and Notes, 5th edn, 2 volumes. George Caw, Edinburgh.
Miller, J. Hillis (1985) The Linguistic Moment from Wordsworth to Stevens. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.
Milton, John (1968) Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, ed. Christopher Ricks. New American Library, New York.
Owen, W. J. B. and Worthington Smyser, Jane, eds (1974) The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, 3 volumes. Clarendon Press, Oxford.
Prickett, Stephen (1986) Words and The Word: Language, Poetics and Biblical Interpretation. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Prickett, Stephen (2002) Narrative, Religion, and Science: Fundamentalism versus Irony, 1700–1999. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Said, Edward W. (1975) Beginnings: Intention and Method. Basic Books, New York.
Ulmer, William A. (2006) “Simplon Pass to Moount Snowdon,” in Stephen Gill, ed., William Wordsworth’s The Prelude: A Casebook. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 259–92.
Westbrook, Deeanne (2001) Wordsworth’s Biblical Ghosts. Palgrave, New York.
Wordsworth, William (1974) The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, 3 volumes. Clarendon Press, Oxford.
Wordsworth, William (1979) The Prelude, 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill. W. W. Norton & Company, New York.
Wordsworth, William (1984) The Major Works, intro. and ed. Stephen Gill. Oxford University Press, Oxford.