Wordsworth’s craft
Composition and craft
If you consult ‘craft’ in a Wordsworth concordance or a database, the report is not often cheering. There is much to do with contrivance, debased art, suspect artfulness: the ‘dangerous craft of picking phrases out / From languages that want the living voice / To make of them a nature to the heart’ (Prel.1805 vi 130–2), the ‘craft’ of ‘gilded sympathies’ in affected ‘dreams and fictions’ (vi 481–3), ‘the marvellous craft / Of modern Merlins’ (vii 686–7), ‘the Wizard’s craft’ (‘The Egyptian Maid’ 44), modern ‘Life’ decked out by ‘the mean handywork of craftsman’ (‘London 1802’ 4), assassins led by those ‘whose craft holds no consent / With aught that breathes the ethereal element’ (Dion 54–5), the ‘craft of age, seducing reason’ (Borderers 363) or ‘the craft / Of a shrewd Counsellor’ (‘Wars of York and Lancaster’ 1–2). About as good as it gets is a rare reverence for ‘the painter’s true Promethean craft’ (‘Lines suggested’ 24) or the poet’s hope that his own ‘Imagination’ has ‘learn’d to ply her craft / By judgement steadied’ (Prel.1805 xiii 290–4). Making rigorous inquisition into Wordsworth and poetic craft might even seem perversity, for he is, legendarily, the antithesis. What care for craft can there be in his praise for ‘Poets . . . sown / By Nature; Men endowed with highest gifts, / The vision and the faculty divine, / Yet wanting the accomplishment of Verse’ (The Excursion i 81–4) – ‘wanting’ signifying no urgent desire but an unimportant, accidental lack?
It was Wordsworth, after all, who prompted Hazlitt’s wry lecture on the ‘new school’ of poetry (1818), a few years after The Excursion (1814) and twenty years after the debut of Lyrical Ballads. With a principle of ‘pure nature void of art’, this school (said Hazlitt) had expelled traditions of craft as surely as the French Revolution had expelled the monarchy:
According to the prevailing notions, all was to be natural and new. Nothing that was established was to be tolerated. [. . .] rhyme was looked upon as a relic of the feudal system, and regular metre was abolished along with regular government.1
This is burlesque, but Hazlitt is taking his cue from such manifestos as the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, in which Wordsworth rejected neoclassical tenets to declare that ‘all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’ LB 744). So convinced was the poet of this sweeping equation that he called it back, some pages on, to elaborate:
I have said that Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till by a species of reaction the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, similar to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind. In this mood successful composition generally begins, and in a mood similar to this it is carried on.
(LB 756)
No utterance in Wordsworth’s critical writing, remarks Stephen Parrish, ‘has taken on the historical significance of [this] one’ (The Art of the ‘Lyrical Ballads’ (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973), p. 4). If the ‘Poet’ (as Wordsworth knew) is a crafter by etymology (Greek for maker), what sort of poetic ‘making’ is a ‘spontaneous overflow’?
Out of the phase of recollection at least, William Wimsatt (writing at the high tide of New Criticism’s concern with poetic structure and form) hoped to tease craftwork: Reading the Wordsworthian formula ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’, he proposed ‘that “emotion” refers to a kind of poetic content, and tranquil “recollection” to the control or shaping of this content – the formal poetic principle’ (Literary Criticism: A Short History (New York, 1957), p. 408). Wimsatt hoped thereby to extricate Wordsworth from any theorizing (in some Coleridgean formulas) of emotion ‘as the organizing principle’. ‘The difference is crucial’, he insists; ‘As organization is a form of intelligibility, it is a basic question of poetic theory whether in fact emotion as such can become the formal or organizing principle of a poem without the disappearance of the principle’ (408–9). But as Wimsatt’s prompting to defence may suggest, Wordsworth’s Preface flagrantly courts this question, not the least because of a crucial absence in its account: namely, any scene of the poet at his craft, in control of, or shaping emotion. This is Wimsatt’s supplement. Even the interval of ‘contemplation’, when such craftwork might be expected to have entertainment, offers no such project. ‘Obeying blindly and mechanically’ feeling-informed habits of mind (LB 745), contemplation works chiefly to reanimate those powerful feelings that are the mood and muse of poetry.
About half way between the moment of Wordsworth’s Preface and that of Wimsatt’s follow-up question, Matthew Arnold conjured Wimsatt’s worry. In his own preface to a carefully sifted anthology of Wordsworth’s poetry (1879), he proposed that
Wordsworth’s poetry, when he is at his best, is inevitable, as inevitable as Nature herself. It might seem that Nature not only gave him the matter for his poem, but wrote his poem for him. He has no style.
(Poems of Wordsworth xxii)
Matching Wordsworth’s twice-told definition of good poetry, Arnold repeats: ‘Nature herself seems, I say, to take the pen out of his hand, to write for him with her own bare, sheer, penetrating power’ (xxiv). Sharpening the convention whereby Nature and Muse are gendered as female, Arnold pointedly uncrafts the agency of Wordsworth himself: the poet claiming to be ‘a man [. . .] possessed of more than usual organic sensibility’ (LB 744) turns out to be a man unpossessed of poetic craft. His feelings may be ‘powerful’, but Nature is the ‘power’. More than a muse, she takes ‘the pen out of his hand’ to take over the work of the poet unmanned in default, writing ‘for him with her own [. . .] penetrating power’. Whatever the hyperbole, Arnold succeeded (remarks Christopher Ricks) ‘in limning the poet with intense recognisability’. The scandal played well into the twentieth century. ‘The Preface unfolds a dangerously simplistic concept of language’, reported another critic in 1969 (although he saw the instabilities): ‘By inflating the role of natural response in the exercise of imaginative power’, such theory ‘forces the poet to give up virtually all of the conscious control over his poem’; ‘consciousness plays no part in the creative act itself’; ‘the poet abdicates his responsibility to shape and mold the materials of his poem’.2
The illusion of poetic passivity under the force of natural inevitability has prompted a critique in recent decades of what might be termed a ‘craft of spontaneity’, analogous to the insinuation of ideology under the guise of ‘organic’ origination and value. Anthony Easthope, for one, indicts the Wordsworthian formula with leaving ‘unproblematized as aesthetic, formal and natural’ the constructedness of ‘poetic discourse’.3 Well before him, Coleridge (collaborator on the first edition of Lyrical Ballads) thought the Wordsworthian conception at least contradictory, and so begged to differ. Poetic imagination, he proposes in Biographia Literaria (1817), is a balancing act of ‘a more than usual state of emotion, with more than usual order; judgement ever awake and steady self-possession, with enthusiasm and feeling profound or vehement’(BL ii 17). Yet Wordsworth’s own practice (if not always theorizing) has a way of making Coleridge’s case (and unmaking Easthope’s). Even poems seemingly staged to show how ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’ may turn into a ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’ give deliberate craft an important role in the drama.
Take, for example, the paradigmatic lyric of after-reflection in Poems, in Two Volumes (1807) that concludes:
For oft when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the Daffodils.
(13–18)
Walter Pater admired the way this poetic ‘dance’ uses craft to produce pleasure: ‘prompted by a sort of half-playful mysticism’, the poem indulges ‘a certain quaint gaiety of metre’ (1874; Appreciations (1879) 57–8). Indeed, it’s an old form, an octosyllabic sestet, here so metrically regular as to suggest an incantation of verse. This effect is neither a symptom of ambivalence nor a sign of contradiction, but an intelligent collation of craft and poetic power.
It is with semantically rich craft that Wordsworth shapes the end of the first stanza of another poem in these volumes, ‘The Solitary Reaper’:
Alone she cuts, and binds the grain,
And sings a melancholy strain;
O listen! for the Vale profound
Is overflowing with the sound.
(5–8)
The theme is the Wordsworthian myth of poetry, doubled in poet and Maid. To her emotive overflowing (her sound pure song, the import evocatively mysterious), he matches a deftly crafted song. Note how the enjambment (overflowing) of lines 7–8 performs what it describes: 7 halts in a pause of deep silence, then the syntax flows over to 8, where the sound runs softly through the stresses and slips of ‘overflowing with the’ toward the rhyme. Listen, too, to how beautifully this rhyme has ‘sound’ echo, as if returning from, ‘Vale profound’ (how much duller would be ‘the sound / Is overflowing the Vale profound’). To the power of this sound, Dorothy Wordsworth could attest: ‘There is something inexpressibly soothing to me in the sound of those two Lines’, she wrote, listening to and then renewing them with her own echo: ‘I often catch myself repeating them’ (WL i 649–50).
The prototype of this catching is the poem itself. At its conclusion, Wordsworth crafts his lines not only to recall but also to catch its inspiration:
Whate’er the theme, the Maiden sang
As if her song could have no ending;
I saw her singing at her work,
And o’er the sickle bending;
I listen’d till I had my fill:
And, as I mounted up the hill,
The music in my heart I bore,
Long after it was heard no more.
(25–32)
Theme shapes poetry, not only in the lilting measures linking Maiden’s song to poet’s but also in the semantics of rhyme and non-rhyme. In this craft and subtle art, the poet’s rhymes are not of her actions (work and sang are unrhymed) but his. Murmuring through sang, song, ending, singing, the stanza’s first rhyme chimes at the falling feminine-measured bending, the word literally resounding ending, as if to signify how the impression of a song with ‘no ending’ were to be (and now is) realized in the rhyme of recollection. The 1815 version of the daffodil poem added a stanza that capitalizes on this sense of an ending:
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of the bay.
The first line pauses at the verbal margin of ‘line’, where, without terminal punctuation, it seems to stretch its claims emblematically into the page’s open space – an effect that superimposes on the illusion of the flowers’ neverending line their continuation into the poet’s open-ended line.4 Wordsworth’s craft at once evokes this suggestion and gives it a poetic correlative.
Ending and bending play in the stanza from ‘The Solitary Reaper’ as similar tropes of poetic craft: ending ends the verse line, and bending coincides with the bending of the verse line into the poet’s listening. Wordsworth intensifies this experiential shift from seeing to pre-poetic listening with the rhyme that rings through till / fill / hill (‘I listen’d till I had my fill’ is a wonderful little self-listening couplet). He lost this chord when (in 1820) he revised ‘till I had my fill’ to ‘motionless and still’, but it was to gain a rich mine in the multiple and interrelated senses of ‘still’: arrested motion and hushed sound; the counter-pulse (even so) and duration (even yet) in which successful composition begins. In the wake of these vibrations, even as the final lines describe a parting of poet and Maid, the craft of couplets keeps them coupled, and show the shadow of no parting from her. The music ‘heard no more’ is borne in the ‘heart’ (‘heard’ shifted only by a letter) and then, as after-effect and in imagination, reborn in poetic craft.
This textual transformation may be what licensed Wordsworth to place this poem, in 1807, in the subgroup Poems Written During a Tour in Scotland and, simultaneously, to append a potentially contradictory note: ‘This Poem was suggested by a beautiful sentence in a MS. Tour in Scotland written by a Friend, the last line being taken from it verbatim.’5 He retained this note of influence in 1815, even as he assigned the lyric to his own Poems of the Imagination. This is the sentence (to which he alludes but stops short of quoting) from his friend’s 1789 journal:
Passed a female who was reaping alone: she sung in Erse as she bended over her sickle; the sweetest human voice I ever heard: her strains were tenderly melancholy, and felt delicious, long after they were heard no more.6
Until 1824, when Thomas Wilkinson’s Tours to the British Mountains was finally published, a general reader had to take Wordsworth’s word for his debts and their limit to the last phrase (its perfect iambic tetrameter predicting the poem’s measure). When in November 1806 he told Wilkinson, ‘your Journal [. . .] is locked up with my manuscripts’ (WL iii 104), he meant its whereabouts while on loan to him, but the verb ‘locked up’ uncannily intimates a textual association.
The linked and imported material does not belie Wordsworth’s mythology of recollection so much as collate poetic craft with an already textualized memory. Wordsworth has not simply fabricated history (a fiction of ‘written during’ denying pre-reading and after-writing), nor has he simply lifted and shifted Wilkinson’s prose into his rhymes and metres, nor, in a similar textual influence, blithely plucked his sister’s journal-prose about the golden daffodils (15 April 1802) for transplant into his own garden of verses. Recollecting these texts in imagination-as-text is the forge of a poetic craft that keeps visible the workmanship exercised to shape ‘emotion recollected’ into ‘successful composition’.
Crafted measures
The slipperiest issue in this success is metre, the radical distinction of verse from conversation or prose. Is poetic metre spontaneous and organic? Or is it supplementary, super-added, even wrought in opposition to, the pulse of spontaneity? As M. H. Abrams remarked (at about the time Wimsatt was worrying the question of emotion as the muse of poetic craft), ‘the justification of poetic meter’ was ‘particularly troublesome’ to Wordsworth, for ‘although the natural language of feeling may be broadly rhythmical, the use in poetry of highly regular stress and stanza patterns would seem a matter not of nature, but of artifice and convention’ (The Mirror and the Lamp (1953; 1958), p. 116). ‘I write in metre’, Coleridge says with no apology, ‘because I am about to use a language different from that of prose’ (BL ii 69). His critique in Biographia (ch. 18) of the Wordsworthian mythology of composition is particularly tuned to the advent of metre, which he ascribes to a ‘balance in the mind effected by that spontaneous effort which strives to hold in check the workings of passion’. Revising Wordsworth’s equation of poetry to a spontaneous overflow of passion, Coleridge theorizes a spontaneous countercheck, a ‘balance of antagonists [. . .] organized into metre’ (ii 64). Yet, as we shall see, Wordsworth sometimes agrees, and over the course of his theory (even in the Preface[s] to Lyrical Ballads) and his practice, metre plays as a sliding signifier. It shuttles and shifts between nature and culture, passion and restraint, text and intertexture – oppositions which themselves may reverse polarity, depending on the pressure of the moment. Caught in the labyrinth of metre, Wordsworth maps a deeper, more self-conscious commitment to poetic craft than some readers recognize.
The most radical metre is blank verse, ‘blank’ of rhyme – and thus to some, blank as versecraft. For Wordsworth as for everyone, the romance was the trope of blank-verse ‘liberty’, and its primer was Milton’s note on ‘The Verse’ of Paradise Lost, which announced ‘an example set, the first in English, of ancient liberty recovered’ from ‘the modern bondage of rhyming’. Dr. Johnson worried that such verse was nearly self-cancelling, ‘verse only to the eye’ (Life of Milton (1783)). Coleridge echoed him: when metre – ‘the sole acknowledged difference’ between prose and verse – becomes ‘metre to the eye only’, the craft of verse, ‘even to the most delicate ear’, may be ‘unrecognisable’. For proof, he prosed part of Wordsworth’s ‘The Brothers’ (Lyrical Ballads 1800) to show that (save a few phrases) no ‘ear could suspect, that these sentences were ever printed as metre’ (BL i 79–80). To interrogators such as Easthope, this effect is culpably crafty: ‘pentameter would disavow its own metricality’ (74), ‘would render poetic discourse transparent’ (75), would suppress ‘recognition of the work of metric production – and so of the poem as constructed artifice’ in order to foist the illusion of a ‘spontaneously generated product’ (67).
Yet this critique elides an effect not lost on Wordsworth’s contemporary, Charles James Fox, then Whig leader in Parliament: the democratizing of blank verse in Lyrical Ballads. If we expect Whig politics to pattern Whig poetics, it is a sign of how ingrained conventions of craft were that Fox felt able to complain to Wordsworth about seeing the measure of lofty contemplation in ‘Tintern Abbey’ deployed for the humble tales ‘Michael’ and ‘The Brothers’: ‘I am no great friend to blank verse for subjects which are to be treated of with simplicity’ (Christopher Wordsworth, Memoirs of William Wordsworth (2 vols.; 1851) i 172). Wordsworth’s challenge was calculated: he had begun ‘Michael’ as a pastoral ballad (LB 319–20), a ‘low’ form, then decided to give the shepherd’s story a claim to blank verse. This is a move that reverses Easthope’s claims: far from disavowing poetic craft, Wordsworth visibly motivates it to confront what his 1798 ‘Advertisement’ called ‘that most dreadful enemy to our pleasures, our own pre-established codes of decision’ (LB 739).
In these codes, the craft of the measure was not in dispute: ‘no man in ordinary conversation [. . .] speak[s] in blank verse’, remarks a conversant in Dryden’s essay on Dramatick Poesie (1668). Many agreed well into the eighteenth century. Wordsworth makes the case in reverse at the outset of The Prelude in a patently extraordinary moment of happily ‘pour[ing] out’ his ‘soul in measur’d strains’ (Prel.1805 i 57): the measure is metre as well as the Miltonic ideal of unstrained, easy inspiration into ‘unpremeditated verse’ (Paradise Lost ix 23–4). When he said ‘poetic numbers [metre] came / Spontaneously’ (i 60–1), he understood the extravagance. Years later, in 1829, he remarked that the technical demands made blank verse ‘infinitely the most difficult metre to manage (WL v 58), and in 1831 he would conflate his language and Milton’s to critique the illusion of any poet’s ‘pouring easy his unpremeditated verse’, contending ‘that the composition of verse is infinitely more of an art than Men are prepared to believe’ (WL v 454). Contra Easthope (and Dr Johnson), Wordsworth insisted even on the verbal marking of metric production, of measured strain: ‘as long as blank verse shall be printed in lines’, he wrote in 1804, ‘it will be Physically impossible to pronounce the last word or syllable of the lines’ without ‘an intonation of one kind or an other, or to follow them with a pause, not called out for by the passion of the subject, but by the passion of the metre merely’ (WL i 434).7
The attachment of passion to versification involves central questions of poetic origin and agency, ones not easily reduced to critical measures that discern only mystificatory device. At times, metre seems to matter as an art that is the antithesis of artifice. A note Wordsworth added in the 1800 Lyrical Ballads to one of his most famous poems in blank verse points this way as it speaks of the ‘impassioned [. . .] versification’ (LB 357). Years later he told this story of its crafting:
I began it upon leaving Tintern, after crossing the Wye, and concluded it just as I was entering Bristol in the evening. [. . .] Not a line of it was altered, and not any part of written down till I reached Bristol. It was published almost immediately after.
(LB 357)
A recollection of poetic passion is synonymous with a passion for poetry. ‘I have not ventured to call this Poem an Ode’, he said in his note of 1800 to ‘Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13, 1798’; but venture he does: ‘it was written with a hope that in the transitions, and the impassioned music of the versification would be found the principal requisites of that species of composition’ (LB 357). The transitions and the versification are the workings of passion through craft, the verse not just conveying but turning (Latin versus: turning) the feelings – in a form informed almost instinctively (Geoffrey Hartman suggests) by the generic structuring of the ode through turn and counterturn (Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1787–1814, 27). It’s a Latin pun Wordsworth liked; see, for example, ‘the turnings intricate of Verse’ (Prel.1805 v 627).
Yet for all this passion of versification, metre persists as a critical problem, and does so less for the incidental reason Hazlitt suggests, the poetical reforms associated with Wordsworth and the ‘Lake School’, than for its durable mark of distinction from other modes of language. For liberal poetics, this effect was an embarrassment both to myths of spontaneous origination and to any insistence on the common language of poetry, prose, and conversation – the other big claim of the Preface of 1800, also in the teeth of neoclassical consensus. In Elements of Elocution (1781), for example, John Walker described prose as ‘common, familiar and practical [in] nature’, and verse as ‘beautiful, elevated, and ideal [. . .] the latter as different from the former as the elegant step of a minuet is from the common motions of walking’ (239). Metrical feet are art, not nature, ideal not familiar, elegant and elevated, not common and pedestrian, practised and courtly, not just practical: class difference is the elementary code in this description. So when Wordsworth, theorizing a common language of common values, raised the question in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads – ‘Is there then, it will be asked, no essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition?’ – and stayed to answer, ‘there neither is nor can be any essential difference’ (LB 749), he knew he was putting his feet in his mouth. In the opening paragraph he referred to his ‘experiment’ in ‘fitting to metrical arrangement a selection of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation’ (LB 741) without pausing over the work of ‘fitting’, as though there were no ultimate contradiction between fit and feel, arranged and real. But a few paragraphs on, the poet (parenthetically) concedes a bit of craft: ‘the real language’ he has been advertising has actually been ‘purified’ from ‘its real defects, from all lasting and rational causes of dislike or disgust’; a poetic ‘real’ has replaced the socially ‘real’ (744).
Subtracting defects, the poet also adds elements of craft. Can he distinguish these from the artifices he is at pains to reject, but which traditionally accompany ‘the act of writing in verse’ (LB 742)? Having just married the languages of prose and poetic composition, Wordsworth admits impediments, hoping to rein them in: ‘If it be affirmed that rhyme and metrical arrangement of themselves constitute a distinction which overturns what I have been saying on the strict affinity of metrical language with that of prose, and paves the way for other distinctions’, he is armed with a rejoinder: the crucial distinction is between a language of the ‘passions’ and the artifice of ‘poetic diction’ (LB 750, 754). Still refusing to view metre as a ‘foreign splendour’ incongruous with what ‘passion naturally suggests’ (he adds in 1802; LB 750), he treats with it as a natural ally. Poetic diction is ‘arbitrary, and subject to infinite caprices’, but metre ‘is regular and uniform’ and ‘obeys certain laws’ – ones to which, moreover, ‘Poet and Reader both willingly submit’, because far from ‘interference’, metre has long been ‘shewn to heighten and improve [poetic] pleasure’. This is a custom sufficiently naturalized as to seem natural: ‘I have endeavoured to superadd the charm which by the consent of all nations is acknowledged to exist in metrical language’ (754). Even so, Wordsworth knows that what he calls a ‘charm’ may be a forgery, and that metre may be as much a fetter as Milton ever thought rhyme was. Thus he writes to John Scott in 1816: ‘if you have not practised metre in youth, I should apprehend that your thoughts would not easily accommodate themselves to those chains, so as to give you a consciousness that you were moving under them and with them, gracefully and with spirit’ (WL iii 284).
This shift from ‘charms’ to ‘chains’, from practice to ‘accommodation’ (literally, a fitting), and then to the illusion of spirit and grace, sets the stage for what seems (but ultimately is not) a new defence: ‘I might point out various causes why, when the style is manly, and the subject of some importance, words metrically arranged will long continue to impart such a pleasure’ (LB 755). In ‘an unusual and irregular state of the mind’, in which ‘ideas and feelings do not [. . .] succeed each other in accustomed order’, and words involve images and feelings ‘connected’ with an ‘undue proportion of pain’, Wordsworth says, there is a ‘danger that the excitement may be carried beyond its proper bounds’. This is why metre matters, as a welcome chain: ‘the co-presence of something regular, something to which the mind has been accustomed when in an unexcited or a less excited state, cannot but have great efficacy in tempering and restraining the passion by an intertexture of ordinary feeling’ (755). Redeemed from alienated craft, metre returns on behalf of ‘accustomed order as a bearer of ordinary feeling’. ‘So feeling comes in aid / Of feeling, and diversity of strength / Attends us, if but once we have been strong’, Wordsworth writes of a recovery from trauma in The Prelude (1805 xi 326–8).
Pater discerned this intertexture at exactly those moments of ‘highest poetical expression,’ when Wordsworthian craft seems most invisible: when, in a ‘fusion of matter and form’, ‘his words are themselves thought and feeling’ (57) – or, in Wordsworth’s terms, those phases of composition when ‘the words by which [. . .] excitement is produced are in themselves powerful’ (LB 755). In this ‘fusion’, Pater suggests, ‘the music of metre performs but a limited, yet a very peculiar and subtly ascertained function’:
It is a sedative to that excitement, an excitement sometimes almost painful, under which the language, alike of poetry and prose, attains a rhythmical power, independent of metrical combination, and dependent rather on some subtle adjustment of the elementary sounds of words themselves to the image or feeling they convey. (57)
As Pater recognizes, Wordsworth’s question about the origin of metre – craft or natural impulse? – also involves a question of effect: is metre the charming enhancement of poetic passion, or its desired regulator? A reconciliation might be tendered: as a craft cultivated by and identified with the culture of ‘poetry’, metre assists passion into capable expression, and a sense of this dynamic infuses the ‘natural’ pleasure of reading. But this effect is strained by the way, even in the theorizing of the Preface, the force of metre as a regulator becomes increasingly entrammelled in what it is supposed to be regulating. We sense this convergence in Wordsworth’s comment on reciting blank verse (in the letter quoted above): the terminal pause is ‘not called out for by the passion of the subject, but by the passion of the metre merely’ (WL i 434). Here, metre is passion, possessed by and possessing it.
Fits of passion
In more than a few lyrical ballads, the efficacy of metre ‘in tempering and restraining the passion’ that produces poetry (Preface LB 755) is under stress. The untitled ballad that opens with the spondee ‘Strange fits of passion’ is just such a meta-metrical crisis. It recounts what Wordsworth (with another referent) calls a ‘fit of imagination’ (LB 398): a poet is on a nocturnal trek to his beloved’s cottage, towards which the moon appeared to descend; as it ‘dropp’d’ below the roof, he had a vivid sensation that she might be dead. He would convey this fit, as the Preface says, ‘fitting [it] to metrical arrangement’ (LB 741) – a fitting that presumably contrasts ‘fits of passion’. But the archaic sense of fits as poetic craft (OED, ‘Fit, fytte’: ‘A part or section of a poem or song, a canto’), observes Hartman, leaves its sense ‘unsettled’ (Wordsworth’s Poetry xix).
From its start, the ballad is haunted by an uncertain relation between psychic and poetic fits. For all its speaker’s irony about the shaping fantasies of which the lunatic, the lover, and the poet are compact (‘What fond and wayward thoughts will slide / Into a Lover’s head – ’ (25–6)), his ballad cannot defuse a sense that this too-knowing ‘will slide’ is not just diagnostic, but helplessly predictive. In its present-progressive inception, the poet’s confession seems compelled as well as rehearsed:
Strange fits of passion I have known,
And I will dare to tell,
But in the lover’s ear alone,
What once to me befel.
(1–4)
Is the event at hand extraordinary (‘once’) or habitual (‘fits’)?
As metre enters this question, the ballad shimmers into a counter-Preface. Metre may promise to fit passion to ‘continual and regular impulses’ (LB 756) but in this poem its pulsation seems less to restrain than to revive the original compulsion, giving a sensation of a fated sequence, of a consciousness continually possessed:
Upon the moon I fix’d my eye,
All over the wide lea;
My horse trudg’d on, and we drew nigh
Those paths so dear to me.
And now we reach’d the orchard-plot,
And, as we climb’d the hill,
Towards the roof of Lucy’s cot
The moon descended still.
(9–16)
A present progressive tense in a draft, ‘And now I’ve reached the orchard-plot’ (LB 294), predicts the first line’s strange-familiar ‘I have known’, while the punctuated acceleration from and to and spells a hypnotic (re)possession. Telling his wayward thoughts in an ambiguously situated ‘now,’ this balladeer is more than recollecting them: he is reliving them. His lines, tightly (almost over-) rhymed, reined into prescribed iambic tetrameter and trimeter, seem as fixed as his moonstruck eye:
And, all the while, my eyes I kept
On the descending moon.
My horse mov’d on; hoof after hoof
He rais’d and never stopp’d:
(19–22)
Telling seems to have become another fit of passion, induced by a metrical repetition of the paces that first led helplessly wayward; mania as metre. But are we sure of this pathology, or might there be a metrical plot? Might the metre have been crafted to induce our sympathy with a strange case? To lead us to expect disaster, and thus to endorse the lunatic surmise?
‘If Lucy should be dead!’
(27–28)
By this point, we probably think so, too (this climax is an anti-climax).8
In this strange fit, metre produces passion even as it fits it out. Sometimes Wordsworth strips his verse to an almost radical metrical punctuation of passion:
‘O misery! oh misery!
O woe is me! oh misery!’
(‘The Thorn’ 252–3)
Oh! what’s the matter? what’s the matter?
What is’t that ails young Harry Gill?
That evermore his teeth they chatter,
Chatter, chatter, chatter still.
(‘Goody Blake, and Harry Gill’ 1–4)
The owlets hoot, the owlets curr,
And Johnny’s lips they burr, burr, burr.
. . .
‘The cocks did crow to-whoo, to-whoo.’
(‘The Idiot Boy’ 114–15, 460)
‘The Idiot Boy’ is the lightest case, uttering a little ode to joy in rhyme with nature’s sounds. But the others, fraught with that ‘undue proportion of pain’ for which metre is the recommended antidote (LB 755), convey more ambiguous effects. The metrics of ‘Goody Blake’, ‘rather than converting pain into pleasure by reducing excitement to a regular level’, Adela Pinch argues, convey anarchy, ‘a painful disintegration of a man into a chattering old woman’.9 As in ‘Strange fits’, metre is not just mimetic of passion but symptomatic of diseased poetic craft. And more: a betrayal of Wordsworth’s hint in the Preface of maintaining a ‘manly’ style with ‘words metrically arranged’ (LB 755) – no small concern to Coleridge when he described ‘Tintern Abbey’, a poem by virtue of metre only, as a ‘manly reflection’ on ‘passion and appetite’ (BL i 79).
Passion intensified by feminine incursion (whether from female suffering or a passion-prone literary culture) saturates the controversial metres of ‘The Thorn’. The poem ends with a male balladeer’s repetition of, and seeming possession by, a woman’s repeated cry, in metrically punctuated sounds: ‘O misery! oh misery! / O woe is me! oh misery!’ In his ground-breaking reading of this ballad as a manic monologue, Stephen Parrish proposes that the force of Wordsworth’s craft is to make us wonder whether the balladeer has heard any woman at all – or whether, in a moment of panic and its aftermath, he has (mis)taken the sound of the wind for her cry (100–1; 105). In all these ballads of passion, Wordsworth crafts the mimetic metres to signal literary as well as natural inspirations. ‘O woe is me! oh misery!’ has legible textual lineage, as if from a handbook of pathetic expressions. The metrics of chatter in ‘Goody Blake, and Harry Gill’ not only employ onomatopoeia but draw attention to the device itself.
Commenting on both these ballads in his Preface, Wordsworth argues for a pleasure principle in the alliance of ‘elementary’ passion and a craft that solicits interest. The effect of metre, he says, depends both on ‘the pleasure [. . .] derive[d] from the perception of similitude in dissimilitude’ and on ‘the blind association of pleasure [. . .] previously received from works of rhyme or metre of the same or similar construction’ (LB 756, 757). He is willing to guess that even if a poet’s words fail to grab a reader – that is, seem ‘incommensurate with the passion’ – metre may supply the needed measure:
in the feelings of pleasure which the Reader has been accustomed to connect with metre in general, and in the feeling, whether chearful or melancholy, which he has been accustomed to connect with that particular movement of metre, there will be found something which will greatly contribute to impart passion to the words, and to effect the complex end which the poet proposes to himself.
(LB 756)
In line with this value-added custom, the long note he appended to ‘The Thorn’ in 1800 explains metre as an antidote to his other risky poetic experiment, ‘the repetition of words’ in the poem ‘not only as symbols of the passion, but as things, active and efficient, which are of themselves part of the passion’. For those not ‘accustomed to sympathize with men feeling in that manner or using such language’, Wordsworth hopes for ‘the assistance of Lyrical and rapid Metre’. To the potentially alien (ating) spectacle of how ‘superstition acts upon the mind’, he ‘superadd[s] the charm’ of metre (LB 351, 754); one super-meets another. Likewise, ‘Goody Blake, and Harry Gill’, he says in the Preface, is ‘related in metre’ in hopes of ‘draw[ing] attention to the truth’ of its tale of hysteric possession, aiding its communication to ‘many hundreds of people who would never have heard of it’ had it not been versed as ‘a Ballad, and in a more impressive metre than is usual in Ballads’ (LB 757).
Yet metre crafted to facilitate a reader’s sympathy might be fabricating it, as an immediately preceding remark concedes: ‘We see that Pope by the power of verse alone, has contrived to render the plainest common sense interesting, and even frequently to invest it with the appearance of passion’ (LB 757). Pope’s metres seem to manufacture interest, as a mnemonic aid or artifice of investment yielding a dubious return, a contrived appearance. This yoking of contradictory interests – whether metre evokes natural expression or just shams a passion; whether it aids common sympathy or serves a contrived common sense – is sufficiently strained to prompt Wordsworth to revise the Preface in 1802. Reassigning metre to a poetics of estrangement and defamiliarization, he now argues that the ‘complex feeling of delight’ in poetic pleasure (so described in 1800) involves ‘an indistinct perception perpetually renewed of language closely resembling that of real life, and yet, in the circumstance of metre, differing from it so widely’ (757). In this difference, metre is effective not because it doesn’t interfere with passion, but because it does. Correspondingly, he revises the paragraph about the effect of ‘tempering and restraining’ passion to say that ‘the tendency of metre to divest language in a certain degree of its reality, and thus to throw a sort of half consciousness of unsubstantial existence over the whole composition’, makes it easier to endure ‘pathetic situations and sentiments’ which ‘have a greater proportion of pain connected with them’ (755). The conscious craft and its derealizing effect are now essential.
The crafted Poet
Even with this revision, Wordsworth does not ultimately unravel the issue of circular and reciprocal causes and consequences. Its very irresolution keeps the matter active in the meta-poetry of poetic craft. The metrical poetry that became his greatest devotion was his perpetually revised autobiography (later called The Prelude), a work whose craft does not just organize recollection but also produces it. In writing as a poet about becoming a poet, Wordsworth stages the autobiographical subject as both constituted and made legible by its affinity for poetic craft. An early draft displays just this self-reading, as the autobiographer ponders the import of several immediately previous recollections of boyhood thefts. Each event had recoiled in an arrest of the self by what seems to be external craftwork, a formative intention:
The mind of man is fashioned & built up
Even as a strain of music: I believe
That there are spirits, which, when they would form
A favored being, from his very dawn
Of infancy do open out the clouds
As at the touch of lightning, seeking him
With gentle visitation[.] quiet Powers!
Retired and seldom recognized, yet kind,
And to the very meanest not unknown;
With me, though rarely,
They communed: others too there are who use,
Yet haply aiming at the selfsame end,
Severer interventions, ministry
More palpable, and of their school was I.
(Prel.1799 232)
Ministry, intervention, design toward an end – all this is but another name for craft. The hero ‘I’ comes into the verse as fashioned, built up, shaped, even as the poetic ‘I’ (‘I believe’) shapes a verse that crafts memory into argument. Such reflexivity informs many sophisticated autobiographies; what distinguishes Wordsworth’s is the way his verse becomes a trope for craft: the lines above appear in MS v as a sonnet-stanza, its summary couplet sight-rhyming ‘I’ with ‘ministry’.
Wordsworth liked discovering such forms in Paradise Lost, marvelling at some ‘fine fourteen lines’ as ‘a perfect sonnet without rhyme’ (so reports his friend Henry Crabb Robinson). To craft this form in the flow of autobiographical verse is to acknowledge that he is reading the history of ‘the Poet’ into a poetic craft with a history. Indeed, no poetic craft is more selfreflexive about its history than the sonnet, as the performative meta-genre of ‘sonnets on the sonnet’ makes clear. Wordsworth himself contributed with a ‘Prefatory Sonnet’ to the section of ‘Sonnets’ in the 1807 Poems (that is, ‘Nuns fret not at their Convent’s narrow room’), and ‘Scorn not the Sonnet’ (1827). While his revisions of his autobiography do not preserve its evocative sonnet stanza, the textual archaeology is telling, for it shows how deeply embedded is Wordsworth’s poetic self-composition with intuitive commitments to poetic craft.
Wordsworth’s perpetual revisions of this and other poems have had debatable effects on theme and argument, but he was always motivated by a craftsman’s attention.10 Advising an aspiring poet in 1824, he stressed the importance of ‘the logical faculty’: ‘the materials upon which that faculty is exercised in poetry are so subtle, so plastic, so complex, the application of it requires an adroitness which can proceed from nothing but practice’. In this practised craftwork, ‘emotion is so far from bestowing’ any help (he went on to add) that ‘at first it is ever in the way of it’ (WL iv 546).
This was no late-developing news. Arguing in 1814 with a correspondent about whether ‘such thoughts as arise in the progress of composition should be expressed in the first words that offer themselves, as being likely to be most energetic and natural’, Wordsworth countered, ‘My first expressions I often find detestable; and it is frequently true of second words as of second thoughts, that they are the best’ (WL iii 179). The poet who became famous for equating the best poetry with a spontaneous overflow of feeling turns out to have had second thoughts about this expression as well.
1 ‘On the Living Poets’, The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe (21 vols.; 1930–4), v, pp. 161–2.
2 James Heffernan, Wordsworth’s Theory of Poetry: The Transforming Imagination (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969), pp. 37, 43, 48; Christopher Ricks, The Force of Poetry (1984; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 117.
3 Anthony Easthope, Poetry as Discourse (London: Methuen, 1983), p. 23.
4 ‘The use of line-endings can be a type or symbol or emblem of what the poet values, as well as the instrument by which his values are expressed’, proposes Christopher Ricks (91). For his brilliant discussion of Wordsworth’s performance with terms of poetic form, including this instance, see ‘A Pure Organic Pleasure from the Lines’, in The Force of Poetry, pp. 91–116.
5 P2V 415. Peter Manning comments that Wordsworth’s placement of the poem in 1807 in the subgroup advertised as ‘Written During’ belies the craft of recollection by ‘presenting as a spontaneous record a subsequent, carefully ordered collection’ (‘ “Will No One Tell Me What She Sings?”: “The Solitary Reaper” and the Contexts of Criticism’, in Reading Romantics: Text and Context (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990) p. 258.
6 P2V 415. Observing that Wordsworth wrote his poem in 1805, two years after the tour on which he took Wilkinson’s Tours as a guide, Manning reads the note as an originary rather than an intermediary text – less significant, however, as a verbal source than as a reflection of Wordsworth’s composition of the poem within ‘a specific historic matrix’ (the domestic situations and international events of 1805–7) even as the poem itself, in a mode of polemically conservative nostalgia, invests the reaper ‘with the aura of mythic timelessness’ (ibid. 254–5, 267–8).
7 For related discussion, see David Perkins’s capacious investigation, ‘How the Romantics Recited Poetry’, Studies in English Literature, 31 (1991), 655–71; and for the complex involvement of Wordsworth and others with the question of metre, my own ‘Romanticism and the Measures of Meter’, Eighteenth Century Life (1992), 162–80.
8 In the key phrase ‘Strange fits of passion’ Barbara Johnson sees ‘Wordsworth’s poetic project’ summarized: ‘poetry is a fit, an outburst, an overflow, of feeling; and poetry is an attempt to fit, to arrange, feeling into form’ (‘Strange Fits: Poe and Wordsworth on the Nature of Poetic Language,’ in A World of Difference (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989) p. 95).
9 Strange Fits of Passion: Etymologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen (Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 90–1.
10 See my discussion and relevant bibliography in Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997).