Wordsworth’s poetry to 1798
The ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’ was prefaced from 1815 on by an excerpt from a lyric written much earlier:
The Child is Father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.
It would be difficult to better this as a characterization of Wordsworth’s own poetic development. All the central preoccupations of his maturity are to be found in his earliest writing. It is as if he were born with his literary identity fully formed. Just how true this is has only recently been revealed, because until 1997 no comprehensive edition of the juvenilia had been published. Now, thanks to the labours of Jared Curtis and Carol Landon for the Cornell Wordsworth series edition of Early Poems and Fragments, 1785–1797, we can fully appreciate the achievement represented by Wordsworth’s first long poem, The Vale of Esthwaite, completed when he was seventeen in 1787. His earliest verses, on the subject of ‘The Summer Vacation’, had been written three years before as a school exercise; inspiration would have come partly from his reading.
Thomas Bowman, the master of Hawkshead Grammar School, was among Wordsworth’s mentors, and lent his precocious charge copies of Cowper’s The Task, Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets, and Burns’ Poems when they were first published.1 Few facts testify so eloquently to Wordsworth’s good fortune in his teachers. Contemporary poetry formed no part of the school curriculum in those days, and would not do so until the twentieth century. Virgil and Horace, on the other hand, were on the syllabus, and Bowman must have understood that their influence fed directly into the literary mainstream of his own time. In retrospect it is possible to see how significant it is that Wordsworth was early reading Cowper, Smith, and Burns. By the 1780s, with the big figures Gray, Collins, and Goldsmith gone, it must have seemed to some that poetry had lost its way: Pope’s imitators thronged the periodicals and newspapers, but even the best of them lacked his originality. Ornamented and artificial in style, they imitated the Classical models, mused on abstraction, and meditated on spiritual matters. For the moment, poetry was closeted in the drawing-room, where it bore little on the outside world.
Against those conventions, such writers as Cowper, Smith, and Burns sought to explore subjects close to their own experience. The blank verse of The Task is a mock-epic whose playfulness masks its author’s desire to redeem himself from the depressive insanity that threatened constantly to destroy him; Smith’s sonnets are an attempt to enshrine in literary form their creator’s response to the disasters that had befallen her and her family; while the locus of Burns’ Poems (Kilmarnock, 1786) is the experience and language of working people. In other words, Wordsworth’s early literary taste favoured poetry that bridged the gap between sentiment and confession – and his early verse bears out that preoccupation. Who, for instance, would have expected a sixteen year old to produce these lines – which display a remarkable insight into his response to his father’s death three years before?
No spot but claims the tender tear
By joy or grief to memory dear
One Evening when the wintry blast
Through the sharp Hawthorn whistling pass’d
And the poor flocks all pinch’d with cold
Sad drooping sought the mountain fold
Long Long upon yon steepy rock
Alone I bore the bitter shock
Long Long my swimming eyes did roam
For little Horse to bear me home
To bear me what avails my tear
To sorrow o’er a Father’s bier.
Flow on, in vain thou hast not flow’d
But eas’d me of a heavy load
For much it gives my soul relief
To pay the mighty debt of Grief
With sighs repeated o’er and o’er
I mourn because I mourn’d no more
For ah! the storm was soon at rest
Soon broke the Sun upon my breast
Nor did my little heart foresee
– She lost a home in losing thee.
(The Vale of Esthwaite 272–93; EP 446)
Wordsworth was to revisit this early trauma twelve years later, for one of the ‘spots of time’ in The Prelude (see Two-Part Prelude i 327–74), where his impatience as he waited for the horses becomes the cause of John Wordsworth’s death – in effect, he becomes his father’s murderer.2 This early account does not go quite that far, but Wordsworth nonetheless makes the two events sequential, as if the domestic tragedy springs out of his vigil on the ‘steepy rock’. The whistling of the hawthorn and the drooping of the flocks all testify to the pervasive presence of the dead even as the poet thinks himself alone. As in the Prelude spot of time, the wait has somehow become the focus for displaced grief at his father’s death – irrationally, as his father did not die until nearly two weeks after Wordsworth had returned to Cockermouth from Hawkshead. Something highly sophisticated is going on here, quite unlike anything to be found in published poetry at this period: it is driven by an intuitive understanding of the psychology of intense emotion. The boy’s imagination has constructed a causal link between his feelings as he waited for the horses to take him home, and the death of his father. The ‘poor flock’ of sheep, ‘Sad drooping’ on the mountain-side, and the ‘whistling’ of the hawthorn, are admonitions that he failed to understand at the time. That failure is construed as the first step in a sequence of events that leads first to his father’s death in December 1783, and then to his delayed ‘debt of Grief’ in the present (1787).
The final step in this chronology is confirmed by Dorothy Wordsworth’s letter to Jane Pollard of late July 1787, in which she reveals that the wait for the horses had just been re-enacted because the guardians of the Wordsworth children delayed sending horses to bring William back to Penrith for the last summer vacation before he went up to Cambridge: ‘I was for a whole week kept in expectation of my Brothers, who staid at school all that time after the vacation begun owing to the ill-nature of my Uncle.’ She goes on to reveal that the July of 1787, when Wordsworth was concluding work on The Vale of Esthwaite, was a highly emotional one: ‘Many a time have W[illia]m, J[ohn], C[hristopher], and myself shed tears together, tears of the bitterest sorrow, we all of us, each day, feel more sensibly the loss we sustained when we were deprived of our parents . . . [We] always finish our conversations which generally take a melancholy turn, with wishing we had a father and a home.’ Dorothy’s letter is probably contemporaneous with the lines quoted from The Vale of Esthwaite, and the grieving she describes is almost certainly that mentioned by her brother: ‘I mourn because I mourn’d no more.’ The line suggests that Wordsworth’s grief in the present (1787) is actuated partly by his failure fully to mourn his parents at the time of their deaths; the response is a common one, especially among children, but it often gives rise to guilt later on. And this seems to have happened to Wordsworth. Such close, accurate, and detailed psychological self-analysis is rare enough among adults; Wordsworth’s ability both to comprehend and articulate his emotions at the age of sixteen testifies to an enviable sanity.
Completion of the 6,000-line The Vale of Esthwaite in summer 1787 was a remarkable achievement in every respect. But it was composed over a lengthy period, and sometimes appears incoherent. As we have seen, the best passages are highly personal, and that, besides anything else, would have discouraged Wordsworth from publishing it. It was not to appear in print until 1940 – and then in an unsatisfactory text. Instead, he seems at some point to have thrown it in the fire, though someone snatched the notebook from the flames before it was badly damaged (it is preserved today at the Wordsworth Library, Grasmere). Having gone up to Cambridge in October 1787, he worked up several extracts which were probably circulated among friends. But his most important poetic project there was his translation from Virgil’s Georgics. Its extent is unknown, because only drafts survive. They were composed 1788–9, and show Wordsworth translating from all four books of the poem.3 Among them is a sustained attempt to render Virgil’s version of the Orpheus and Eurydice legend, which has particular resonance in the context of Wordsworth’s grief at his parents’ death. In the account of the myth followed by Virgil, the poet and lyre-singer Orpheus enters the underworld to recover Eurydice, who has been snatched by Pluto, but he loses her afresh. Orpheus is then set upon by avenging maenads. Thrown on the waves of the river Hebrus, however, Orpheus’s decapitated head remains true to its owner’s poetic vocation to the last:
Ah poor Euridice it feebly cried
All round Euridice the [moaning banks reply’d]
From [s]till small voices heard on every side.
(EP 644)
The last line of the quotation has no equivalent in Virgil, and is pure Wordsworth. Just as it seems that the hero is defeated, the still small voices tell us that, like the spirit of Wordsworth’s father in The Vale of Esthwaite, Orpheus has been absorbed into the natural world that has in some way partaken of his suffering. His song is not silenced, but preserved by nature. The pantheism often detected in Wordsworth’s 1798 poetry has sometimes been cited as evidence of Coleridge’s influence; in fact, its traces are detectable in Wordsworth’s earliest verse, and is rooted in the delayed mourning for his parents. Grief permeates many of the poems dating from Wordsworth’s Hawkshead and Cambridge years – most nakedly, perhaps, in a draft fragment which the Cornell editors date to 1787–8.
husband sons and all
if ye’ve hands oh make a grave
for she dies she dies she dies
She wishes not for a grave
bear into the salt sea, for
Where you lie there she will lie,
Oh bear her into the salt sea
If ye wish her peace [?oh] bear
Bear her to the salt sea bear
[ ] by
The very spot where you do lie
With your [?wives] by day
In the coffins of the rock
What has she [to] do with the churchyard
(EP 670)
It may be incomplete, but the draft reveals Wordsworth’s sense of death at its most elemental. Like the husband and sons who dig the woman’s grave with their bare hands, the poet grapples with the very sense and substance of death: it’s not just the practical business of laying the dead to rest, but the distinctive concern of their integration, physical and spiritual, into the natural world. Refusing to resolve that aspect of its argument, the poem shifts the place of her burial from earth to sea, and finally to ‘the coffins of the rock’. Emphatically, there is no finality about the interment, as if in death the mother is ubiquitous: ‘What has she [to] do with the churchyard’? The question anticipates the Lucy poems, in particular ‘A slumber did my spirit seal’, in which the unnamed corpse is
Roll’d round in earth’s diurnal course
With rocks and stones and trees!
‘Now ye meet in the cave’ is concerned with the apprehension of the natural harmony, the synthesis of nature and humanity that lies beyond death. But there is that important emotional note – almost denoting guilt: ‘If ye wish her peace . . .’ What Wordsworth seems to hope for is the shamanistic promise that grief may be exorcised by a natural order. Nature is capable of incorporating the dead and, in some sense, retrieving them: that process is held to comprise an expiation.
The Cornell Wordsworth Series edition of the juvenilia, which publishes drafts such as these for the first time, enables us to see how consistent this great poet is, from his earliest writings to his last. He was endowed with an intuitive understanding of the human mind, and from the first attempted to describe the inner truth of the emotions.
These explorations led directly to composition of Wordsworth’s first two long poems. On 29 January 1793 the radical publisher Joseph Johnson published An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches, both written over the preceding four years. An Evening Walk was the crowning achievement of Wordsworth’s undergraduate career, a loco-descriptive poem in the manner of Thomson’s The Seasons, Denham’s Cooper’s Hill, Cowper’s The Task, and Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets. It was an extrapolation of much of the landscape poetry that had featured in The Vale of Esthwaite, but there was nothing about Wordsworth’s father, or mother, or any of the overtly confessional material relating to them. Such concerns simmer beneath the poem’s surface, emerging briefly at its culmination – a literary fantasia in which one of the Cumbrian Lakes is thronged with ‘Fair spirits’:
– ’Tis restless magic all; at once the bright
Breaks on the shade, the shade upon the light,
Fair spirits are abroad; in sportive chase
Brushing with lucid wands the water’s face,
While music stealing round the glimmering deeps
Charms the tall circle of th’ enchanted steeps
(An Evening Walk 345–50)
The ‘Fair spirits’ recall Pope’s sylphs in The Rape of the Lock, and the scene as a whole may echo the climax as evening deepens in Marvell’s Upon Appleton House, but these lines are allusive in more than a purely literary sense. Their effect is the same as in the waiting for the horses episode in The Vale of Esthwaite: as the lake acquires a ‘face’, and ‘music’ drifts down the valley, Wordsworth is concerned to convey the immanent numinousness of the natural world – a quality that derives partly from the implicit presence of the dead, perhaps in the form of the ‘Fair spirits’.
This notion is more explicitly revisited in Descriptive Sketches, another loco-descriptive poem, this time based on Wordsworth’s walking tour of the Continent in 1790,4 which he undertook with a College friend, Robert Jones. In the middle of the poem, he breaks off to contemplate the political liberties enjoyed by the inhabitants of Switzerland, as represented by an Alpine peasant:
And as on glorious ground he draws his breath,
With Freedom oft, with Victory and Death,
Hath seen in grim array amid their Storms
Mix’d with auxiliar Rocks, three hundred Forms;
While twice ten thousand corselets at the view
Dropp’d loud at once, Oppression shriek’d, and flew.
Oft as those sainted Rocks before him spread,
An unknown power connects him with the dead.
For images of other worlds are there,
Awful the light, and holy is the air.
Uncertain thro’ his fierce uncultur’d soul
Like lighted tempests troubled transports roll;
To viewless realms his Spirit towers amain,
Beyond the senses and their little reign.
(Descriptive Sketches 536–49)
With its cumbersome allegory, and creaking couplets, this passage is very much of its time, and may seem at first to be of scant interest to Wordsworthians; in fact, it is a vital step forward in his development. On the ‘glorious ground’ on which the Swiss won their freedom from tyrants, the peasant is ‘connected’ to his dead ancestors. Once again, nature mediates between the living and the dead, conducting him into ‘other worlds’ beyond the physical, the ‘viewless realms’ beyond the borders of life and death. This time, the poetry has an important political dimension: the vision granted the peasant is a crucial aspect of his liberty. He is fully realized, almost prelapsarian, in his engagement with the spiritual basis of his rights. The insight of these lines is that political empowerment is as important to our souls as it is to our material well-being: the same idea underlies such mature poems as ‘Michael’, and was evidently fostered by Wordsworth’s first-hand experience of the French Revolution, during which he was at work on Descriptive Sketches.
It seems likely that An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches were meant to raise funds for their author’s return to France to marry his French girlfriend, Annette Vallon, who by the time of their publication had given birth to their child, Anne-Caroline Wordsworth. Unfortunately, publication was preceded also by the execution of Louis XVI, just over a week before, which led quickly to the declaration of war between Britain and France, concluded only by Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo over two decades later. For the moment, Wordsworth was compelled to remain in Britain.
His next long poem, Salisbury Plain, emerged out of a walking-tour from the south of England to Wales which he undertook after the declaration of war, July–August 1793. Not surprisingly, given the circumstances, it is an anti-war poem at the centre of which Wordsworth places modern political barbarism alongside the Druid human sacrifice believed to have taken place at Stonehenge. In one of its central passages, he describes the human sacrifices supposedly consecrated by druid priests at stone circles such as Castlerigg near Keswick:
And oft a night-fire mounting to the clouds
Reveals the desert and with dismal red
Clothes the black bodies of encircling crowds.
It is the sacrificial altar fed
With living men. How deep it groans – the dead
Thrilled in their yawning tombs their helms uprear;
The sword that slept beneath the warriour’s head
Thunders in fiery air: red arms appear
Uplifted thro’ the gloom and shake the rattling spear.
(Salisbury Plain 181–9)
This hellish vision provides the obverse to the situation enjoyed by the Swiss peasant of Descriptive Sketches; here, the aspirations of the earlier poem are answered with a report from the front line. The burning of ‘living men’ is an apt metaphor for the wastefulness of modern warfare; worse still, the victims of this sacrifice have been condemned against their will, in the same way that soldiers were conscripted into service, often by press-gangs. Those who preside over these rites shadow the influence of such bishops as Richard Watson, Bishop of Llandaff, who supported the war with Revolutionary France; as Stephen Gill puts it: ‘What are the Druids themselves but early practitioners of the priestly mysteries which in every age have shrouded tyranny with the mantle of religion?’5
The other central element of Salisbury Plain was the Female Vagrant, whose story, somewhat revised, would form one of the Lyrical Ballads. Although her narrative is geared toward the anti-war moral of the poem as a whole, it shows Wordsworth to be extending his preoccupation with human psychology. Having lost her husband, children, and father to the ravages of conflict and famine, she says that her experience has done more than condemn her to the charity of passers-by:
I lived upon the mercy of the fields,
And oft of cruelty the sky accused;
On hazard, or what general bounty yields,
Now coldly given, now utterly refused.
The fields I for my bed have often used:
But, what afflicts my peace with keenest ruth
Is, that I have my inner self abused,
Foregone the home delight of constant truth,
And clear and open soul, so prized in fearless youth.
(Salisbury Plain 541–9)
The female vagrant is the natural counterpart of the Swiss peasant. He is redeemed from suffering and alienation by the heroism of his ancestors in their victorious battles against tyranny. She and the other characters in Salisbury Plain are prisoners of a situation over which they lack influence; they are powerless, compelled to fight for a regime that discards them when they have served their purpose. Were this the full extent of Wordsworth’s comment, Salisbury Plain would be of interest for its politics but little else. What distinguishes it as poetry is the vagrant’s intuition that oppression has damaged her soul: ‘what afflicts my peace with keenest ruth / Is, that I have my inner self abused’. Far from dignifying her, her experiences have led her away from ‘constant truth’, while the ‘clear and open soul’ she once had is calloused over. If liberty empowered the Swiss peasant, its denial has stunted the female vagrant. The belief that political injustice hurts the spirit is original – even, one is tempted to suggest, eccentric. It places Wordsworth at a slight remove from contemporary political comment, and reveals where his attention is focused. He is compelled by the forces that shape the mind, whether they be political, social, or religious.
The months following completion of Salisbury Plain represented a period of consolidation. In the spring of 1794 Wordsworth set up house with Dorothy at Windy Brow in Keswick, where he revised An Evening Walk (for text see Cornell Wordsworth edition, 129–56). His interest in politics did not abate; Robespierre was executed on 28 July, an event to which Wordsworth reacted with understandable pleasure, as he recalled in The Prelude (1805 x 530–657). By this time he had read Godwin’s Political Justice – a powerful influence on radicals of the day. And it’s easy to see why that work would have appealed to him. Like Wordsworth, Godwin was preoccupied by the problem of why man, in his fallen state, behaved as he did, and how he might improve. Godwin’s vision of a better society was based on a belief in the perfectibility of mankind, which he thought attainable through the full exercise of the reason. When all were governed exclusively by rationality, he suggested, all human institutions, including that of marriage, would wither away. Godwin regarded human beings as largely the product of the social and political forces that bore upon them. These ideas comprised the theory that, as Wordsworth recalled in The Prelude, ‘Was flattering to the young ingenuous mind / Pleased with extremes’ (1805 xiii 815–16). Such was the perspective of an older and wiser man; in November 1795, by which time he was living with Dorothy at Racedown Lodge in Dorset, rewriting Salisbury Plain as Adventures on Salisbury Plain, Wordsworth was enough of a rationalist to illustrate Godwin’s ideas in his new work. Its central character, a Sailor, becomes a murderer largely as a result of the injustices that impinge on him, and this is in line with Godwin’s critique. However, Wordsworth’s triumph is to transcend philosophy in his portrayal of the Sailor’s inner world. Crossing Salisbury Plain, the Sailor sees a corpse hanging from a gibbet:
It was a spectacle which none might view
In spot so savage but with shuddering pain
Nor only did for him at once renew
All he had feared from man, but rouzed a train
Of the mind’s phantoms, horrible as vain.
The stones, as if to sweep him from the day,
Roll’d at his back along the living plain;
He fell and without sense or motion lay,
And when the trance was gone, feebly pursued his way.
(Adventures on Salisbury Plain 118–26)
On a literary level, the obvious precursor is Macbeth, iii iv 121–2: ‘It will have blood, they say, blood will have blood. / Stones have been known to move and trees to speak . . . ’ But Wordsworth is not exploiting the situation for spookiness alone. The phantoms that pursue the Sailor, turning even the roadside stones into enemies, are creations of his own brain: but paradoxically, they are beyond his control. Of course, the intuition is there in Shakespeare too, but no one since had dealt so persuasively with the involuntary reflexes of the guilt-ridden conscience. Wordsworth is fascinated by the tendency of the subconscious to make manifest our innermost anxieties, even to the point of precipitating physical collapse. His own experience had taught him that our deepest emotions cannot be suppressed – a lesson that informs some of his greatest poems, including ‘Goody Blake and Harry Gill’, ‘The Thorn’, Peter Bell, and the spots of time in The Prelude.
Wordsworth’s days as a Godwinian were numbered. The vision of man as a kind of automaton whose highest virtue was reason entailed a corresponding denial of passion. Godwin’s perspective was a grimly materialist one that looked forward to Marxism. It was fundamentally antithetical to Wordsworth – who knew that emotional truth was the key to those questions about man and society for which he sought an answer. As dissatisfaction turned to hostility, Wordsworth must have seen that a poetic rooted in real life demanded psychological veracity. No wonder guilt crops up so frequently in his early poetry; it was something of which he had extensive first-hand experience. Besides that related to his parents’ deaths, there were the feelings arising out of his enforced abandonment of Annette Vallon and their daughter. And, in the wake of Robespierre’s execution, he was beginning to question his fervent support for the execution of Louis XVI (as articulated in his unpublished pamphlet, A Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff ; Prose i 19–66); he may even have felt that he was in some way implicated in it.
These concerns fuel his next major work – a play, The Borderers, composed largely at Racedown during 1796–7. Again, the plot concerns a murder – the abandonment of an old man, Herbert, on a heath, by a young man called Mortimer, egged on by the villainous Rivers. Rivers expounds the Godwinian denial of emotion, telling Mortimer, ‘Compassion! pity! pride can do without them, / And what if you should never know them more!’ (iii v 74–5), but he is also aware of the nature of regret and self-blame:
Action is transitory, a step, a blow –
The motion of a muscle – this way or that –
’Tis done – and in the after vacancy
We wonder at ourselves like men betray’d.
Suffering is permanent, obscure and dark,
And has the nature of infinity.
(III v 60–5; 1797–9 text)
Wordsworth read these lines to William Hazlitt in 1803, and Hazlitt spent the rest of his life repeating and quoting them in his essays (The Borderers was not published by Wordsworth until 1842). They are indeed memorable, and are the first traces of the great poet who was to compose The Ruined Cottage shortly after. Their impact derives partly from the fact that Rivers is describing remorse from the inside. The point of Godwinism in Adventures on Salisbury Plain was that it had justified the argument that the Sailor’s crime was not solely his responsibility. Although Wordsworth had rejected Godwinism, he remained intrigued by the point that people commit crimes in spite of their better natures, almost out of carelessness – that their better selves are forgotten, and, ‘in the after vacancy’, lamented for the rest of their lives. It was the last two lines of the quotation that left their indelible mark on Hazlitt’s memory, and they comprise the most distinctive and haunting element of Rivers’ speech. They affirm the enduring, formative effect of the moral choices we make: such choices are not merely an index of what we have become, but of what we are in the process of becoming. And that can’t be faked. Each of us is the product of the moral decisions we have made in the past, which in turn determine our future.
In short, The Borderers subjects Godwin to comprehensive and drastic revision. Adventures on Salisbury Plain, an ostensibly Godwinite work, was designed to show how an individual could be driven to murder by political and social oppression; by contrast, The Borderers offers a line of thought that anticipates modern existentialism. Individuals are not compelled to murder each other, it argues; compassion and pity can detain us from bad moral choices. Guilt may exist, but is understood to have causes. By the end of the play, Mortimer perceives the errors of his ways, and vows to ‘go forth a wanderer on the earth, / A shadowy thing’ (v iii 265–6), in penance. It seems tragic, and to some extent it is. But the important point is that through his rejection of rationalism Wordsworth has moved towards an understanding of the human heart that is utterly original, and in its implications deeply un-tragic.
Coleridge first met Wordsworth in September 1795, but they did not become close friends until June 1797 when Coleridge visited Racedown. The first thing Wordsworth read him was The Borderers. His second reading was of a poem he had composed during the preceding weeks: The Ruined Cottage.6 When he first wrote it, Wordsworth cannot have fully comprehended its significance in his career as a writer. It was to be his first indisputably great poem. His long apprenticeship was at an end.
The Ruined Cottage concerns the story of Margaret, a war-widow, whose neglect of her children in her distress leads to their deaths, her subsequent madness, and ultimate demise. This sad tale is related by her friend, the anonymous Pedlar, to the listening Poet, at the spot where she lived and died: the site of her cottage. It is simple enough, and looks back to Cowper’s The Task, which describes a madwoman called ‘Crazy Kate’.7 The political context that provided a rationale for Salisbury Plain, Adventures on Salisbury Plain, and The Borderers persists in The Ruined Cottage, in that the story of failed harvests and high prices that entails the enlisting of Margaret’s husband in the army accurately reflects conditions during the mid 1790s. But where Salisbury Plain was essentially an anti-war poem, Adventures exposed the iniquities of the world from a rationalist perspective, and The Borderers was geared to revising Godwinism, the new work transcends the concerns of politics and philosophy, and settles on the thing that had always fascinated Wordsworth,8 and which would provide his central subject for the rest of his career: emotional and psychological truth. As a consequence, the narrative, though it documents Margaret’s decline against a recognizably contemporary milieu, is actually driven by Wordsworth’s preoccupation with her interior world. The important philosophical breakthrough of The Borderers – that our actions, though momentary, are of enduring significance – is integrated here into the story of a woman whose misfortune, and consequent ‘abuse’ of her ‘inner self’, leads to tragedy. Among many brilliant touches, Wordsworth’s sensitive handling of the workings of the mind is illustrated by his account of her watchfulness, in the wake of her husband’s desertion:
On this old Bench
For hours she sate, and evermore her eye
Was busy in the distance, shaping things
Which made her heart beat quick.
(Ruined Cottage MS b 490–3)
These lines were among the first to be written for the poem: Wordsworth actually began it as an examination of the distraction and apathy arising from the pain of abandonment. There is a literary source,9 but the psychological minutiae here are intricate, precise, and original. In an almost surreal figure of speech, Margaret’s eye journeys beyond her body toward the horizon, whence her husband Robert is expected, generating shapes out of existing ‘things’, that give her the momentary excitement of believing that he is there. But he is not, and the hours she spends imagining his form in the distance are a self-inflicted mental torture. No wonder she goes mad. The poetry has admitted us into the deranged mind of someone powerless to save either her children or herself. As in the case of the guilty Sailor of Adventures, Margaret’s imaginings are involuntary and beyond conscious manipulation; they compel her along the path of self-destruction.
That, at least, is the approximate shape of the poem as presented to Coleridge in June 1797: a tragic narrative alive to the social and political context of its time but driven largely by its author’s interest in psychological truth. We glimpse something of it in MS b (although MS b actually dates from January–March 1798; see Butler, 42–72). Under Coleridge’s influence, Wordsworth overhauled the poem in the spring of 1798, lengthening it, giving it a more formal structure, adding to the opening section, and, most importantly, composing a final exchange in which the Pedlar tells the poet not to be depressed by Margaret’s story:
Be wise and chearful, and no longer read
The forms of things with an unworthy eye.
She sleeps in the calm earth, and peace is here.
I well remember that those very plumes,
Those weeds, and the high spear-grass on that wall,
By mist and silent rain-drops silver’d o’er,
As once I passed did to my heart convey
So still an image of tranquillity,
So calm and still, and looked so beautiful
Amid the uneasy thoughts which filled my mind,
That what we feel of sorrow and despair
From ruin and from change, and all the grief
The passing shews of being leave behind,
Appeared an ideal dream that could not live
Where meditation was.
(Ruined Cottage MS d 510–24)
In June 1797 Wordsworth had presented Coleridge with his finest work to date – a poem which told of Margaret’s appalling decline precipitated by the enlistment of her husband in the army: the following spring he adds a conclusion which portrays her suffering as ‘an idle dream’. What’s more, the witness to her tragedy is instructed to ‘Be wise and chearful’, rather than empathize with her pain. It is an astonishing volte-face, and on the surface might be taken to indicate indecisiveness or, worse, incoherence. Nothing of the kind. Wordsworth has taken the final step towards realizing his genius, one he could not have made without Coleridge.
Coleridge visited Racedown in June 1797 as an aspirant writer of philosophical poetry, a mantle he quickly transferred to Wordsworth. His highest ambition had been to compose a revelatory poem that would exceed the quality of Religious Musings, composed 1794–6:
Believe thou, O my soul,
Life is a vision shadowy of Truth,
And vice, and anguish, and the wormy grave,
Shapes of a dream! The veiling clouds retire,
And lo! the Throne of the redeeming God
Forth flashing unimaginable day
Wraps in one blaze earth, heaven, and deepest hell.
(Religious Musings 421–8)10
As poetry these lines may not be very good, but their contention that the material world around us, that of ‘vice, and anguish, and the wormy grave’, is a mere shadow of the divine reality over which the enthroned deity presides, ‘flashing unimaginable day’, explains the 1798 conclusion to The Ruined Cottage. There, too, Wordsworth argues that the material world favoured by the likes of Godwin is ‘a dream’, an illusion. The meditation on the spear-grass in what was once Margaret’s garden tells the Pedlar, and the reader of Wordsworth’s poem, of tranquillity. The calmness and stillness of that moment is no mirage. It is the shadow of that higher world in which Margaret endures, relieved of the physical and mental suffering of her last months. In symbolic terms, the ‘image of tranquillity’ symbolizes her passage beyond the physical, into ‘unimaginable day’.
In the context of Wordsworth’s overall development, it is easy to understand the appeal to him of Coleridge’s rather unusual ideas – heavily influenced by the philosophy of Bishop Berkeley – for they are anticipated in Wordsworth’s early writing. In one way or another, the dead, from The Vale of Esthwaite onwards, return from the ‘wormy grave’ in order to affirm their continuing life. Whether Orpheus, or the Swiss soldiers who won liberty for the peasant in Descriptive Sketches, or even Wordsworth’s father, they are forever returning. And not as ghosts, but, curiously enough, as teachers. So it is that, ultimately, Margaret’s suffering is not in vain. Her death comes as a release, but also as a necessary transition in her continuing existence. With the new conclusion, Wordsworth transforms The Ruined Cottage from just another pathetic tale salted with an unusually acute understanding of human nature to one in which Margaret’s torment acquires purpose. Her continued influence on the Pedlar and the listening poet turns her, unexpectedly, into a spiritual guide. It is a surprising conclusion, and perhaps no one could have been more surprised by it than Wordsworth, but it possesses a logic that is the culmination of everything he had composed to date. The Ruined Cottage is inscribed in the twists and turns his career as a writer had taken since completing The Vale of Esthwaite in the summer of 1787. It is arguably the first and greatest philosophical poem Wordsworth ever wrote.11
NOTES
1 See T. W. Thompson, Wordsworth’s Hawkshead, ed. Robert Woof (Oxford, 1970), p. 344; my Wordsworth’s Reading 1770–1799 (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 23, 38, 127; and Wordsworth’s Reading 1800–1815 (Cambridge, 1995), p. 254.
2 I have compared the two versions at greater length in ‘Tautology and Imaginative Vision in Wordsworth’, The Charles Lamb Bulletin, ns 96 (October 1996), 174–84. I am indebted in general terms to the analysis offered by Jonathan Wordsworth, William Wordsworth: The Borders of Vision (Oxford, 1982), pp. 61–3. I have explored the work of this period in more detail than is possible here in a number of articles: ‘Wordsworth’s Poetry of Grief’, The Wordsworth Circle, 21 (1990), 114–17; ‘Wordsworth and Helvellyn’s Womb’, Essays in Criticism, 44 (January 1994), 6–25; and ‘Navigated by Magic: Wordsworth’s Cambridge Sonnets’, Review of English Studies, 46 (August 1995), 352–65.
3 For further details see my ‘Three Translations of Virgil Read by Wordsworth in 1788’, Notes and Queries, ns 37 (December 1990), 407–9. Texts appear in Landon and Curtis, pp. 614–47.
4 For a useful account of the tour, and the resulting poem, see Stephen Gill, William Wordsworth: A Life (Oxford, 1989), pp. 44–9.
5 Stephen Gill, ‘The Original Salisbury Plain’, Bicentenary Wordsworth Studies, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth (Ithaca, ny: Cornell University Press, 1970), p. 149.
6 This early version (MS a) comprised lines 152–243 of the MS b text, and in his Cornell Wordsworth edition James A. Butler dates it to March–early June 1797. Butler reproduces the MS in facsimile, pp. 78–87.
7 Cowper, The Task i 534–56. The passage is extracted in my Romanticism: An Anthology (Second Edition) (Oxford, 1998), p. 9. Connections between Cowper and Wordsworth are discussed by Jonathan Wordsworth, The Music of Humanity (London, 1969), pp. 61–2 – still the best introduction to The Ruined Cottage.
8 Butler observes that The Ruined Cottage is ‘the culmination of elements present in Wordsworth’s poetry from the beginning. In An Evening Walk, for example, a female beggar – her husband killed in the American war – wanders along the road with her two babes . . . The woman in Salisbury Plain was once living happily with her husband and children, as was Margaret in The Ruined Cottage’ (p. 6).
9 Wordsworth goes one better than Southey’s description of a war-widow in Joan of Arc (1796):
The wretched one shall sit, and with dim eye
Gaze o’er the plain, where on his parting steps
Her last look hung. (vii 325–8)
Wordsworth had probably seen these lines in proof or manuscript before they were published as early as September 1795, and he certainly knew the published poem. Southey and Coleridge, during their close association in the mid-1790s, had written many political works; psychological sophistication was not, however, one of Southey’s stronger suits.
10 Quoted from the text in Coleridge’s Poems (1796).
11 It is widely discussed. Besides those already noted, analyses include Kenneth R. Johnston, Wordsworth and The Recluse (1984); Stephen Gill, William Wordsworth: A Life (1989), pp. 133–7; James H. Averill, Wordsworth and the Poetry of Human Suffering (1980); F. R. Leavis, The Critic as Anti-Philosopher, ed. G. Singh (1982), pp. 24–40; Jerome J. McGann, The Romantic Ideology (1983), pp. 82–6; Peter J. Manning, Reading Romantics: Text and Context (1990), pp. 9–34.