Romantic Marks and Measures: Wordsworth’s Poetry in Fields of Print

In The Prelude of 1798–99, Wordsworth registers his sense of his subject’s resistance to orderly and definitive exposition by making an implicit, and dismissive, analogy to cartography:

In this complex critique of cartography, first, as a misguided analytic that imposes arbitrary order on the land and, second, as a specious fixing of spatial relations, mapping represents a mode of life writing motivated by the rational determination and systematic display of behavioral origins and mental causes. The analogy might seem to obviate comparisons between autobiography and cartography, and yet, having discredited the visual analytic, Wordsworth went on to develop the motif of spatial deixis when he extended, reorganized, and revised the poem. “And here, O Friend! have I retrac’d my life / Up to an eminence” (1805, III: 168–69), he comments in Book III, as if pointing to a spot on the map. Qualifying this, he then employs an array of semiotic terms to indicate what his subject is not and, then, to gesture toward the difficulties of representing human interiority:

Speaking not of “things done visibly for other minds” but of that “genuine prowess” that “lies far hidden from the reach of words,” Wordsworth constructs a semiotic opposition between a “field” of “outward things” (“words, signs, / Symbols, or actions”) and the “Points” of an interior topography. The mathematical condition of the point indexes the limits of Wordsworth’s medium: those places where, despite having “retrac’d his life / Up to an eminence,” he cannot “stand” together with Coleridge. Thus Wordsworth figures the soul’s “might” and emphasizes its resistance to communication by invoking the logic and codes of the survey, map, and plotted landscape. In an authenticating inversion of a life-writer’s “point[ing] as with a wand”—or projection of experience upon a plane of visibility—Wordsworth claims that his “hand” cannot “touch” such “Points” of internal depth. His subject “beyond / The reach of common indications,” to borrow a phrase from Book VII (1805, VII: 608–9), Wordsworth claims to make “Breathings for incommunicable powers” that do not materialize as words upon the page.

As with trace, point and its variants are part of the poem’s self-reflexive repertoire: a cluster of terms with which Wordsworth evaluates the progress of his tale and probes the limits and possibilities of his subject’s verbal communication—and the verbal communication of subjectivity. As with trace, again, point summons a print domain and field of practice of personal interest to Wordsworth and of more conceptual and historical relevance to his poetry than the caricature of cartography as organization by “geometric rules” would suggest. Even as he emphasizes the oral nature of his efforts in the opening of Book III—that he has “been speaking” of (1805, III: 173, 177) but merely “mak[ing] / Breathings for incommunicable powers” (187–88)—the first two books of the poem disclose a graphic line of argumentation, based on the figure of the line in the landscape, that sets the autobiographical project in complex relation to nineteenth-century British cartography: an endeavor far less seamless than Wordsworth’s allusion suggests and resistant to the order of “round and square” with which it too easily gets identified by cultural historians.

In fact, the very question of how to assess and by what methods to inscribe the land occurred within British cartography and took on increasing cultural importance during Wordsworth’s poetic career. This chapter considers the inscription of mental growth and power in the poem that spans that career in relation to the Ordnance Survey’s reorganization of British space and to controversies over its modes of national representation. The signal event in modern British cartography, the Ordnance Survey involved both the making of a precise trigonometrical survey of the nation and the production of complete series of standardized topographical maps from that survey. Like the blankverse autobiography, the survey and its first series of national maps were produced in stages, extensively revised, and involved the hands and eyes of multiple makers. Both projects were dynamically evolving, conceptually totalizing, and procedurally ambitious. Both tested the limits of knowledge and strained the established conventions of their media as they strove to show, on two dimensional sheets and pages and at enlarged scales, an extent of the earth’s physical surface and of the mind’s development over time.

The Prelude’s representational self-reflexivity and experimentation is matched by experimentation and debate in the cartographic representation of the nation. In the case of the Ordnance Survey, controversy arose not over the triangulation survey of the horizontal plane—the mathematical plotting of the island and the redrawing of the nation’s outline—but rather over the rendering of Britain’s hills and mountains, where anxiety about national figuration and reception became most keenly focused. The marks on the national maps increasingly mattered to mapmakers and the public because they not only put forth an idea of but also legislated a mode of relating to the nation by inscribing a way of knowing what had become, by the middle of the nineteenth century, a deeply sentimentalized terrain. At the climax of the controversy, following the exhibition of a contour map of Lancashire at the Great Exhibition in 1851, a parliamentary Select Committee debated the matter, pitting mathematical against representational truth, mechanism against imagination, and precision against the characteristic expression of a personified nation.

That their searches for suitable grammars led both autobiographical poet and national mapmakers to look over their shoulders to the other domain—for Wordsworth, to the marking of the “province,” for mapmakers, to the marking of “character”—suggests both the power of the cartographic turn at the time of Wordsworth’s writing and the influence of ways of imagining landscape that Wordsworth promoted and popularized during the course of his career.¹ Reading the projects of poetic autobiography and national cartography side-by-side, over the course of their production, not only illuminates shared epistemological and representational concerns but also exposes cross-fertilization between them. In this chapter I examine the ways in which the geometrical features of the point and the line were pivotal to, and focused anxieties about, the depiction not only of nation but also of mind, revealing the historical conjuncture of semiotic instability, contention, and reference across the print domains.

To begin, I detail the new national grammar of lines and points that the Ordnance Survey put into cultural play: a graphic and conceptual context for and counterpoint to Wordsworth’s delineations of landscape in The Prelude. In a reading of the two-part poem of 1798–99, I show how the figure of an unmeasured “line” functions in Wordsworth’s telling of his childhood “intercourse” (1799, I: 149) with nature to accent his imaginative vision and signal his mind’s growth over time. Across the extending poem, Wordsworth selfconsciously aligns these decidedly noncartographic delineations of nature with his poetic lines, which materialize on the page as (typo)graphical and metrical registers of his “Poet’s History” and of the history of his poem. A turning point in its composition, I argue, occurs with the Black Comb poems of 1811–14 (published 1815), whose own lexical and graphical play with the figure of the extending line patently contends with the Ordnance Survey’s fixed and finite delineations of “British ground.”²

In the final section, I consider The Prelude’s delineations of nature and imagination in the era of its print publication. Here I broaden received understandings of the Ordnance Survey as a “geographic panopticon”³ by shifting critical attention from the abstract survey of the nation to the widely embraced pictorialism of the Board of Ordnance’s topographical maps. During their production, the first series of topographical maps of England and Wales accrued increasing cultural importance and visibility, and, in response to threats to their pictorialism, were defended as a vernacular visual form: an expressive “portrait” of a living nation to be seen, felt, and imaginatively experienced by its citizens amidst the overarching mathematical drift of the period. This form of map, its defenders argued, depended on a mode of unmeasured line, the hachure, derived from unmediated perception of natural forms that engaged the imagination of cartographer and user alike. Merely four years after the publication of The Prelude, the “common face of Nature” that “spake … Rememberable things” (1850, I: 587–58) to Wordsworth as a boy was made to communicate strikingly to “ordinary” Britons through the medium of the national map. As industrialization was altering the landscape, British governors chose to preserve a familiar but outmoded system of representation that emphasized the undulations of the terrain over and against other cartographic information—names, numbers, and triangulation stations—memorializing a mode of feeling and interacting with the nation that Matthew Arnold, in his elegies and commentary on mapping, implicated with Wordsworth’s poetry.

A conceptual shift in the ordering of British space occurred at the end of the eighteenth century with the inauguration of the Trigonometrical Survey of Britain. Since the second half of the eighteenth century, private English mapmakers had worked to re-demarcate the counties according to scientific principles, spurred in part by the Society of Arts’ 1759 announcement of a series of prizes for the best county maps. Their criteria for cartographic superiority included accurate coastal outlining, a one-inch-to-one-mile scale (a scale larger than then conventional), the determining of positions on land by means of visual, angular measurement (triangulation), and the employment of the most modern instruments.⁴ Thus accurate, scientific surveys were experiencing a rise in cultural prestige, and private, regional surveying and mapping were being pursued with a new rigor when English engineers responded to a French challenge to recalculate the relative positions of the Greenwich and Paris observatories by triangulation in 1783.⁵ César François Cassini de Thury (1714–84), who helped produce Europe’s first nationwide triangulation-based topographical map, the internationally influential Carte Géometrique de La France (1744–93), urged the cross-channel triangulation as a means of resolving France and Britain’s longstanding dispute about the Greenwich coordinates while underscoring the scientific merits of international trigonometrical alignment.⁶ Although military engineer of the Board of Ordnance and Fellow of the Royal Society William Roy (1726–90) had campaigned during the 1760s “to make a general survey of the whole island at public cost” (after trigonometrically surveying part of Scotland to reestablish political dominance in the Highlands),⁷ it was Cassini’s direct challenge to England’s scientific reputation that convinced the Royal Society and the quasi-military Board of Ordnance to launch a triangulation of the whole of the island of Great Britain in 1791, intending the positional data to abet military interests, commercial cartography, and other civilian and scientific efforts. In 1795, the Board began to produce topographical maps from these trigonometrical bases, recognizing the need for distinct coastal maps in the event of a French military invasion.⁸ Once the threat passed, however, the Board continued the triangulation of England, Wales, and Scotland (commencing the survey of Ireland in 1825) and the production of official topographical maps at the enlarged scale of one inch to one mile. Historians interpret the decision as an embrace of Roy’s earlier assertion that the “‘honour of the nation is concerned in having at least as good a map of this as there is of any other country.’”⁹ Scientific and political conditions, as well as a sense that British “honour” depended upon the production of an accurate cartographic self-image, turned cartographical attention at the end of the eighteenth century to the nation as a whole.

Before the widespread introduction of triangulation, topographical features were positioned with respect to each other by dead reckoning (measurement by ground traversal or chains) and by a handful of astronomical determinations: a mode of surveying and data compilation that introduces significant error and incorporates no strategies of self-correction. When a map is drawn from a previously determined trigonometrical survey, topographical features are positioned with respect to a framework of ground positions arrived at by techniques of instrumental observation and trigonometrical calculation. As Matthew Edney explains,

The surveyor first imagines a series of straight lines joining the tops of hills or tall buildings. The hilltops are selected so that the lines form either a long chain of triangles or a network of interlocking triangles spread out across the landscape. The surveyor determines the geometry of the triangles by measuring their interior angles. The actual size of the triangles is determined by the very careful measurement on the ground of the length of one side of a triangle; the lengths of all other triangle sides are calculated from this one “baseline” by means of trigonometry.¹⁰

The theodolite (which measures the interior angles of triangles) in conjunction with a “minimum of actual measurement on the ground” and “the application of sound mathematical theory” resulted in “a highly accurate framework for map making.”¹¹ Mapmakers working from the basis of a triangulation survey, it is said, “hang” topographical features from the dependable frame of the encompassing triangle,¹² a method that promises “the potential perfection of the map’s relationship with the territory mapped.”¹³ In the words of General Roy, advocating for a general triangulation of England toward his larger goal of the whole of Britain, “the Situation of all the material points would be truely fixed with regard to one another, and thence the Great Outlines of the Country would be truely determined.”¹⁴ Roy’s confidence that a network of points plotted across the island’s interior would permit true delineation of the island registers the cultural prestige of visual technology, systematic method, and mathematical precision, an Enlightenment ethos referred to as the esprit géometrique.¹⁵ Indeed, the production of those “Great Outlines” put into cultural play a form of nonnaturalistic line abstracted from the land’s physical structure that rearticulated the nation according to a new philosophical and material logic.

With the publication of the trigonometrical data as it became available over the next thirty years in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, the national survey became a circulating scientific and representational form in its own right. By sending into the public domain this geographic data for civilian mapmaking, the Board of Ordnance put forward a cartographic underface—a new image and logic of nation based on the pointed intersections of quantified lines. Further, after publishing its first topographical maps, of the counties of Kent (1801) and Essex (1805), the Board “started to map the country according to the straight lines of rectangular sheets” rather than the highly irregular, unquantified outlines of counties, Britain’s traditional administrative, political, and geographic divisions.¹⁶ Ordnance Survey mapmakers did not cease engraving a copperplate at the boundary of a county but engraved as much of the country as could fit within the rectangular borders of the sheets on which the maps were printed—a practice called “squaring the map.”¹⁷ And just as the dimensions of the sheet took organizational precedence over the traditional cartographic division, so too did the geometrical network of the triangles, which observed neither county borders nor the divisions between England, Scotland, and Wales. Great Britain’s evolving scientific spatialism was thus signaled by the straight lines of rectangular sheets and triangulation, and was underscored by the use of the rigorously positioned Greenwich meridian as the basis for map projections.¹⁸

The initial data was published also in William Mudge and Isaac Dalby’s Account of the Trigonometrical Survey of England and Wales (1799–1811). The quantified lines and fixed points of their Plan of the Principal Triangles covers the interior of England, Wales and southeastern Scotland with interlocking triangles. The 228 points on the primary survey (there were larger-scale secondary and tertiary surveys) corresponded in actual space to stones approximately two-feet square topped by a small stake.¹⁹ There is stillness at these stations, the “material points” Roy had envisioned, and in the intersection of lines that do not represent courses, ways, or routes-lines that, when followed by the eye, allude to physical motion across the featured territory, such as the Thames that winds just north of the Greenwich Observatory on the Plan of the Triangles Connecting the Meridians of the Royal Observatories of Greenwich and Paris (Figure 13). Nor do the lines imply forces that have produced over time such features as coastlines. The triangles rather signal perfect proportions determined by the laws of geometry. As such they organize and interpret the landscape, but they do not mimic or represent it.

Of a different visual order are the hachures that function to produce the illusion of hills and upland on Part of Kent and Sussex Laid Down from a Trigonometrical Survey in 1795–1796 (Figure 14). As discussed in Chapter 2, hachures are a line technique borrowed from French maps in the second half of the century when British mapmakers began to experiment with naturalistic representations of hills. They suggest shadow (the fall of light is as from above) and mark the orientation and steepness of slope; they trace out actual ridges and terrestrial form, asking us to see the landscape.²⁰ While the geometric notation of the survey orders the plane topologically by fixing horizontal locations and relations, a pictorial mode of indicating relief simultaneously uplifts and dimensionalizes that plane. And thus two concurrently valued but contrasting modes of articulating the nation—both new to cartographers in the second half of the eighteenth century—occupy the same geographical frame in the survey of part of Kent and Sussex, prefiguring a conflict between pictorial and abstract rendering that intensifies as the new century progresses.

Figure 13. Plan of the Triangles Connecting the Meridians of the Royal Observatories of Greenwich and Paris, detail. William Mudge and Isaac Dalby, An Account of the Operations Carried on for Accomplishing a Trigonometrical Survey of England and Wales; from the commencement, in the year 1784, to the end of the year 1796. Begun under the direction of the Royal Society, and continued by order of the honourable Board of Ordnance. First published in, and now revised from, the Philosophical Transactions, by Captain William Mudge, F.R.S., and Mr. Isaac Dalby, vol. II (London, 1799–1811). Reproduced by permission of the Map Library, University of Michigan.

The use of point symbols, “any non-linear sign which by its position on a map shows the location of some geographical phenomenon,”²¹ exemplifies the abstracting tendencies of Ordnance maps and surveys. By the end of the fifteenth century, a small circle enclosing a dot or cross to symbolize town and city centers were conventional on European maps.²² Sixteenth- through eighteenthcentury county maps of England and Wales used the symbol for settlements, augmenting or substituting them with pictographs—conventional signs depicting recognizable objects, such as a church tower, building, or cluster of buildings in profile view—to mark larger towns and important cities.²³ On Mudge and Dalby’s Ordnance Survey plans, however, the dotted circles mark not human settlements but particular points in space whose significance derives not from their social, cultural, or political function but from their function in supporting the mathematical national organization. As histories note, many triangulation stations were church steeples and hills, since elevation is good for sightings, but a scanning of the names beside the point symbols on the various plans shows that many other types of geographical phenomena were recruited to produce the framework; triangulation thus appears a great leveler. On the Triangles for the Survey of Part of South Wales (Figure 15), Cilgerran Castle, Cardigan Steeple, Flat Barrow, Rock near Trecoon Farm, Mr. Jones’s Summer House, Quarry Pile, and Direction Post achieve parallel significance as all function equivalently to support the new mathematical, and predominantly Anglophone, frame. In effect, the triangulation of the island re-points the island: it subjects the territory to an alternative system of emphasis—or logic of showing—such that a rock and a castle and a post can be classed together as trigonometrical stations and marked by the same abstract sign.²⁴

Figure 14. Part of Kent and Sussex Laid Down from a Trigonometrical Survey in 1795–1796, detail. William Mudge and Isaac Dalby, An Account of the Operations Carried on for Accomplishing a Trigonometrical Survey of England and Wales; from the commencement, in the year 1784, to the end of the year 1796. Begun under the direction of the Royal Society, and continued by order of the honourable Board of Ordnance. First published in, and now revised from, the Philosophical Transactions, by Captain William Mudge, F.R.S., and Mr. Isaac Reproduced by permission of the Map Library, University of Michigan. Reproduced by permission of the Map Library, University of Michigan.

In its first topographical map, the Board of Ordnance dispensed with pictorial marking of human settlements. Towns and cities are indicated ichnographically as abstract grids of streets as seen from above.²⁵ The plan view of an actual horizontal arrangement, schematically rendered in straight lines, thus replaced the pictographic building profile so as to achieve a rational organization of human and physical geography consistent with the map’s abstract, trigonometrical foundations.

Wordsworth’s Prelude question “Who that shall point, as with a wand, and say, / ‘This portion of the river of my mind / Came from yon fountain’?” (1805, II: 213–15) would seem to find an answer in the person of William Roy, who had conveyed his Enlightenment aspiration for accurate positioning and his confidence in total visibility in no uncertain terms. While the Ordnance Survey engineers were taking sightings between trig points which they marked with stones and stakes across the nation, Wordsworth posited points of unrepresentability—“Points have we all of us within our souls, / Where all stand single; this I feel, and make / Breathings for incommunicable powers” (1805, III: 186–88)—employing the elementary Euclidean figure, and the sign of national triangulation, to organize a profound and potent human interior. The implication is that “What pass’d within” him (1805, III: 174) cannot be projected upon a plane surface or unfolded sequentially in verbal narrative, an idea that helps to interpret his characterization of “The face of every neighbour” from his childhood village as “a volume to [him]” (1805, IV: 58, 59). Nonetheless, as Wordsworth strives in the opening books on his boyhood education to “trace the history” and “seek / The origin of what [he] then [has] felt” (1805, II: 365–66), he invokes the figure of the line in the landscape as a signal of those “incommunicable powers”—“Genius, Power, / Creation, and Divinity itself” (1805, III: 188, 171–72)—that are fostered, according to his myth, by his “intercourse” with nature (1805, I: 450). With the figure of the unmeasured line Wordsworth neither surveys the landscape of his childhood nor chronicles his mental development, but traces a non-sequential history of the formation of his imagination in the landscape, and of the formation of a poetic line that carries the force and feeling of this primary experience.

Figure 15. Triangles for the Survey of Part of South Wales, detail. William Mudge and Isaac Dalby, An Account of the Operations Carried on for Accomplishing a Trigonometrical Survey of England and Wales; from the commencement, in the year 1784, to the end of the year 1796. Begun under the direction of the Royal Society, and continued by order of the honourable Board of Ordnance. First published in, and now revised from, the Philosophical Transactions, by Captain William Mudge, F.R.S., and Mr. Isaac Dalby, vol. III (London, 1799–1811). Reproduced by permission of the Map Library, University of Michigan.

As I showed in Chapter 2, despite his alignment of the map with simple mimesis in “Cambridge and the Alps,” Wordsworth employs a cartographic terminology in his revisions, using terms such as point, pointed, and marked to accent his poetic and spiritual progress. In the opening books of The Prelude, he introduces the perception of the line in the landscape as a signal of his burgeoning imaginative vision—a signal by no means confined to The Prelude but given an origin story in that tale of mental growth and poetical education. One need only think of the “never-ending line” of daffodils added to “I wander’d lonely as a cloud” for its 1815 republication,²⁶ and of the Pedlar’s “active power to fasten images / Upon his brain” and intense brooding upon “their pictur’d lines” until “they acquir’d / The liveliness of dreams” to recognize the importance of the trope in Wordsworth’s corpus and its association with imaginative activity.²⁷ While critics such as Christopher Ricks and Susan Wolfson²⁸ have remarked the selfreferring function of the terms line and lines in Wordsworth’s poetry, none that I know of have registered their historical, intermedial resonance. As I suggest here, the figure of the line as it emerges in the two-part Prelude is suggestive of a visual epistemology, formal organization, and dynamic force that is noncartographic: it signals and prioritizes the loco-descriptive blank-verse line as it differentiates it from the totalizing Enlightenment grammars of the survey and history.

Wordsworth’s penchant for the line relates to what Hartman has called a “spot syndrome.” In his reading of Book III’s “Points have we all of us within our souls, / Where all stand single,” Hartman identifies “imagination” as the referent of “Points,” interpreting it as a “force that isolates man, and from which he draws the consciousness of individual being.”²⁹ Accordingly, he reads Wordsworth’s attention to spots in nature, both in The Prelude and throughout the poetry, as a subliminal recognition of imaginative power, as the mind’s tentative movement from consciousness of nature toward consciousness of self. It is the “idea of a spot that haunts Wordsworth: the idea of a point of powerful stasis, a concentration and fixation of power” (85). Hartman elucidates “the spot syndrome” with reference to the Simplon Pass and Snowdon episodes, explaining that “the imagination in its withdrawal from nature first withdraws to a single point. Its show-place is still nature but reduced to one center as dangerous as any holy site. This site is an omphalos: the navel-point at which powers meet, the ‘one’ place leading to a vision of the One. To describe it, the poet later resorts to the figure of an abyss which is a kind of verticalized point and a variant of the ‘narrow chasm’ and ‘gloomy strait’ he has actually crossed; while in another encounter he suddenly glimpses imagination in a ‘breach’ or ‘dark deep thoroughfare’” (122). Hartman’s reading of the point in nature as a meeting between the powers of nature and mind sheds light on the figure of the line and its tensions. In the two-part poem of 1798–99, before the Simplon, Gondo Gorge, and Snowdon episodes had been written and the figure of the abyss (“a kind of verticalized point”) integrated into the poem, the line in the landscape emerges as the nexus of mind, nature, and the eternal or spiritual world, a signal, amidst the accounts of nature’s impressive agency, of the boy’s imaginative and visionary faculties and also of his inscriptional disposition.³⁰ Rather than a mark of man’s isolation by imagination, or “a point of powerful stasis,” the line in the landscape marks the boy’s dynamic and poetically generative experience: his physical movements in space and imaginative transfigurations over time that “elevate the feelings” and anticipate an expressivist poetics. Emerging across the episodes of Part One as a mark of the edge between perception and vision, and culminating, in Part Two, with Wordsworth’s offering of “these lines, this page” (1799, II: 384) to an adult reader, the figure of the line both encodes a history of nature-based imaginative process and accrues material associations with the blank-verse lines that it anticipates. In adding the reflexive accent to successive books of the extending poem, markedly in Book VIII, Wordsworth traces his own discontinuous history of seeing and models an active perception and moving reception of his own poetic lines.

Rather than employ a willful narrative analytic that would split the intellect into “round and square” and link “portion[s] of the river of [his] mind” to particular tributaries, in Part One of the two-part Prelude, Wordsworth relates episodes of his education by the “spirits” and “Powers” of nature (1799, I: 69, 73), both the “gentle visitation[s]” and “Severer interventions” that work to fashion the poet’s mind from infancy and “form / A favored being” (1799, I: 73, 79, 69–70). Experiences of the “ministry / More palpable” leave the boy with “an undetermined sense / Of unknown modes of being” (1799, I: 79–80, 121–22)—with “Low breathings,” “sounds of undistinguished motion,” and “strange utterance” and with mental perceptions of “huge and mighty forms, that do not live / Like living men” (1799, I: 47–48, 64, 127–28): intimations of an order “beyond nature,” to use Hartman’s phrase, unfamiliar to the boy experiencing a nature of time and change.³¹ In the boat-stealing episode (the third of the opening episodes), Wordsworth begins to signal the special effects of the boy’s “intercourse” (1799, I: 149) with nature with the coalescence of circular impressions into a linear path, recalling that

The awakening of visionary power, as critics have noted, is strongly suggested in the multiple images of “liquid light”;³² but the resolution of “idly glittering” circles—produced by the boy’s rowing—into “one track” is significant, too. The implications deepen in the next episode’s depiction of ice-skating at twilight, where reflections on water (now frozen) appear to the boy whose motions again trace a line. The poet recalls “leaving the tumultuous throng / To cut across the shadow of a star / That gleamed upon the ice” (1799, I: 172–74), casting himself as incising, with deliberation, a natural medium and image. If the “Powers” of nature, “Impressed upon all forms the characters / Of danger or desire, and thus did make / The surface of the universal earth / With meanings of delight, of hope and fear, / Work like a sea” (1799, I: 194–98), the boy’s movements across the earth’s surfaces are reciprocally impressive.

Hartman has stated, in a reading of the “spots of time,” that the boy has not yet recognized his imaginative power.³³ I suggest that Wordsworth’s emphasis on the boy’s proto-symbolic and proto-inscriptive interactions with nature foreground the material constituents of imaginative activity and suggest the foundation of Wordsworth’s future poetic lines upon these experiences of marking natural forms: of making, perceiving, and inscribing them by his own motion. Thus when the boy, having given with his friends his body “to the wind,” notes that “the shadowy banks on either side / Came sweeping through the darkness, spinning still / The rapid line of motion” (1799, I: 175–78), the perception of the “line of motion” marks a threshold in his experience of nature and in his poetic formation. Halting then his spinning, the boy gains a grander vision, as the “rapid line of motion” expands to an image of global revolution:

The perception of the “line” marks the boy’s cutting across the sensuous to a vision of nature’s enduring forms, physics, and geometries, its grand circulations and extensions (“behind me did they stretch in solemn train / Feebler and feebler”).³⁴ As both perception and narrative signal, the “line” highlights the intertwining of the boy’s “passions … with high objects, with eternal things, / With life and nature” and his learning to recognize, with the coming of tranquility, “A grandeur in the beating of [his] heart” (1799, I: 134, 136–37,141). Without directly implying the future remediation of this visionary experience as poetry—lines organized by the beats of passion—the “track,” “the cut,” and “the line” intimate the fashioning of the mind for poetic inscription through unplotted, active “intercourse” with nature.

Unlike the national survey, with its systematic inscription of points and lines to build up the “Great Outlines of the country” (Roy), the two-part poem eschews compositional regulation. Like the boy who is “led” on by the “enchantment” of his “rod and line” (1799, I: 238, 236) to explore the pleasures of autumn woods and bowers, Wordsworth the writer proceeds unsystematically, enchanted by his own memories briefly to relate a series of autumnal impressions, “such effects as cannot here / Be regularly classed, yet tend[ing] no less / To the same point, the growth of mental power / And love of Nature’s works” (1799, I: 255–58). Linking the boy in nature with the adult writer, the fishing “line” forecasts the poet to come,³⁵ motivated by fears and pleasures had and renewed in their telling, not by adherence to any abstract compositional order or compulsion to “class the cabinet / Of … sensations” and “Run through the history and birth of each” (1799, II: 258–60). While “point” signals the tendency of the boy’s experiences and of the writer’s inscription of those experiences (movement toward “the growth of mental power / And love of Nature’s works” [1799, I: 257–58]), the fishing “line” flags their nonschematic nature and sequence as well as the poet’s episodic dipping into the pool of memory, such as to those early childhood “spots of time / Which with distinct pre-eminence retain / A fructifying virtue” (1799, I: 288–90), working to nourish and repair the mind, “Especially the imaginative power” (1799, I: 293).

One of these “spots of time” associates the figure of the line with the imagination—with its emotional transfiguration of images “impressed” by powerful experience and with its spatial and temporal reorganization of those images into poetic lines (1799, I: 283). Introduced as leaving a power “Implanted” in Wordsworth’s mind (1799, I: 330), the episode recounts the boy’s impatient waiting on a “Stormy, and rough, and wild” (1799, I: 342) day for the arrival of horses to carry him and his brothers from school at the Christmas holiday. Rationally positioned, “half-sheltered by a naked wall; / Upon [his] right hand … a single sheep, / A whistling hawthorn on [his] left,” (1799, I: 343–45), the boy had a purchase on the scene below. Not knowing which way the horsemen would come, he watched from

After his father’s unexpected death during the holiday, and in the wake of feelings of guilt—“chastisement” for the “anxiety of hope” in which he had scanned those two highways (1799, I: 355, 357)—Wordsworth would “repair” to his imaginative revision of the scene and its feelings, to “drink / As at a fountain,” deriving sustenance from seeing and hearing

The abstraction of the “line” underscores the abstracting powers of imagination, the faculty which here removes the boy from the scene and distinguishes its features, articulating even the spread of mist, which had given intermittent views of the plane below, into “indisputable shapes.” Rhythmical emphasis and coordinative syntax (“The single sheep, and the one blasted tree, / And the bleak music of that old stone wall”) add eerie intensity to the images while also counterpointing the eventual emergence of the “line” in a steady pentameter sequence (“Which on the line of each of those two roads / Advanced”). This metrical and grammatical recuperation both evokes the advance of portentous shapes along the roads and anticipates the mind’s unifying conversion of images and feelings into poetic lines.³⁶ The “line” is again associated with motion, linking the skater’s vision of nature’s grand turnings to the mind’s transfiguration of images and feelings over time and to its reorganization of them into the spatiotemporal turnings of verse.

Significantly, the poetic rendering of the landscape, and of the past, is here distinguished from surveying. At first the boy casts himself as surveyor, or splitter, who scans from an eminence above their “meeting point … / At least a long half-mile of those two roads”; but in imagination he repairs to the unmeasured extension, the “line of each of those two roads,” relinquishing the quantifying eye and control of the “meeting point”—a fatal crossroads, perhaps—for the indefinite stroke and its muted suggestion of eternity. In the 1805 and 1850 versions of the poem, which reposition the Waiting for the Horses episode to the end of Book XI, Wordsworth makes blatant the association of lines and the eternal, claiming to love, in the beginning of Book XII, a “public road,” an “object” that “hath had power / O’er my imagination since the dawn / Of childhood, when its disappearing line, / … / Was like a guide into eternity” (1805, XII: 145–51, 148, 151).³⁷ “Waiting for the Horses” explores the circumstances and yields of these early visions and revisions—emotional, imaginative, and material; it offers the metrical line as a dynamic psychic structure linked to the relinquishing of visual command, the remission of powers of reasoning, and the unfixing of spatial and temporal limits.

Thus when Wordsworth first likens his history, in the next verse paragraph, to an act of tracing, the metaphor has literal resonance:

Rather than ordering the landscape of his mind “by geometric rules” (1799, II: 243), Wordsworth has been illuminating his mind’s formation in the landscape, accenting the edges of perception and vision and signaling the processes of imaginative transfiguration with the figure of the line. If these episodes anticipate their own remediation as poetic lines, the sequence that follows these remarks on method suggests the process whereby nature’s forms rematerialize in moving poetry. The passage traces the course of “lines / Of curling mist”:

Wordsworth’s “intercourse” with “the eternal Beauty” is appropriately signaled by the sinuous line, reminiscent of Hogarth’s “line of beauty” and Burke’s “varied line”—unmeasured, in motion, and insinuating itself into Wordsworth’s affections via the “brain.”³⁹ Such “scenes” of pleasure, he explains, “Remained, in their substantial lineaments / Depicted on the brain” (1799, I: 429–31); they “did at length / Become habitually dear” and “were by invisible links / Allied to the affections” (1799, I: 439–42), moving him to “love” nature and sense in it “a never-failing principle of joy / And purest passion” (1799, II: 495–96). Lines, lineaments,⁴⁰ at length, links, Allied: the associationist sequence of terms and sounds emphasizes the material and temporal process of impassioning. But the sequence does not stop here. After several episodes in which he “retrace[s]” his “round[s]” (1799, II: 1, 7) of childhood play, Wordsworth pauses to consider the emotional effect “these lines, this page” will have on a “passionately loved” but now distant childhood friend (1799, II: 384, 383). Lines materialize, in their “substantial lineaments,” on the pages between poet and reader as the medium of their “intercourse.” As Wordsworth traces his history, then, he traces a discontinuous genealogy of “lines” from domain to domain—from sky and sea to brain and ultimately to page, deriving his lines from passionate communion with nature and his own revisionary perceptions even as he queries their capacity to renew passions felt between friends in that landscape.

In an essay examining the “fluidity” and “suppleness” of line endings in The Prelude, Christopher Ricks observes the frequency of the words line and lines in Wordsworth’s poems, including “the rapid line of motion” and “the lines / Of curling mist” from Book I, and asserts their occasional “covert metaphorical application to the verse-lines themselves.”⁴¹ Especially when poised in the final syntactic position, such terms as line, hung, and end evoke the line and the “white space at the end of the line,” sensitizing readers both to the subtle plays of meaning effected by the visual boundary and to the individual line’s easy accommodation within the aural structure of the blank-verse paragraph (7). “It is natural that the word line or lines should figure so often in Wordsworth’s lines,” Ricks argues, because the verse as an aesthetic form “is to epitomise” the poet’s broader values of distinction without separation (5), transition without violence (9–10), and nontyrannical balance of the senses, particularly of sight and hearing. I have been suggesting that line and lines are not a “natural” self-reference in the blank verse of The Prelude. Inscribed from the earliest stages of the poem and incorporated in its latest phases of revision, they reflect shifting autobiographical concerns and representational strategies as well as a formal consciousness sharpened by contemporary projects of marking and measuring the landscape that had unprecedented cultural visibility and authority.

Ongoing invocations of the figure of the line reveal the historical nature of their reflexivity. In extensions and revisions of the “Poet’s History” (1805, IV: 71), Wordsworth marked with the figure his growing awareness of the powers of the “Soul” and his spiritualizing visions of “Man” and nature, subtly differentiating his poetic lines from instrumental delineations of nature by drawing out, paradoxically, their typo-metrical materiality. Consider his account of “priz’d and lov’d” walks taken during his first summer vacation from Cambridge. Wordsworth singles out his first “Circuit of our little Lake” (1805, IV: 121, 128) for the feeling of “restoration” it brings, for “swellings of the spirits,” and for

This “musing” on immortality touches down in a corresponding image of the landscape: “meanwhile,” Wordsworth recalls, “The mountain heights were slowly overspread / With darkness; and before a rippling breeze / The long Lake lengthen’d out its hoary line” (1805, IV: 167–71). The young man’s “Circuit” of the “little Lake” opens into the lake’s own lengthening of its “glimmering” line—a visual intimation of immortality that metrically materializes in the slowing sequence of stresses (“The long Lake lengthen’d out”). Wordsworth again used the poetic line in this way—to formalize, or mark, his moving perception of the unbound—as he moved a passage from the two-part poem to Book VIII of the 1805 text and subsequently extended it. Telling of nature’s guiding him to an early “unconscious love and reverence / Of human nature” (1805, VIII: 413–14), he added an image of a grove whose boughs overhang Coniston Water

With the sinuous, material tracing of the “line” across three lines of /l/ sounds—length, glides, Along, line, low, cloister—Wordsworth inscribes an active perception of nature’s spatial and spiritual volume. The pentameter comes momentarily into view as part of a longer rhythmical continuum, suggesting also the joint agency involved in imaginative and poetic progress: nature’s guiding as he “glides / Along.”

The poetic line materializes again in a revision of Book VIII when Wordsworth uses the figure of the “boundary line” to heighten his ennobling perception of the shepherd among the hills. In the 1805 text, their volumetric fullness stages a spiritual turn: “When round some shady promontory turning, / His Form hath flash’d upon me, glorified / By the deep radiance of the setting sun” (1805, VIII: 403–5). The 1850 text delineates this transformation more decisively—

—by formalizing his surpassing of merely empirical perception in the striding enjambement and hypermetrical poetic line (“Beyond the boundary line of some hill-shadow”) that doubly signals hill representation. Fully dimensional “Man” emerges, an “index of delight,” “spiritual almost” (1850, VIII: 275, 280, 282), as if from the two-dimensional poem or relief map. If Wordsworth’s “present Theme / Is to retrace the way that led [him] on / Through Nature to the love of human Kind” (1805, VIII: 586–88), the figure of the line in the landscape not only marks that “way” but also leaves typo-metrical traces of it on the page—blank verses that reflexively remark his “having track’d the main essential Power, / Imagination, up her way sublime” (1805, XIII: 289–90). In revision, the poem’s spiritual cartographism is materially pronounced.

Each of these additions conjures a line that appears to Wordsworth’s eye, and to the readers’, by virtue of movement. Biographically, they indicate the boy’s unwilled apprehension of dynamic power (Nature, Imagination, the eternal); compositionally, they mark the poet’s inscription of a providential “way.” And while the figure recalls Dorothy’s tracing of Wordsworth’s continental route upon her maps, Wordsworth’s “line” elides point of origin and terminus (“the principal places he stopped at”)⁴² so as to inscribe an eternal fit or cooperation, only occasionally glimpsed, between mind and nature. Finally, as a foil for the never-ending line and for the retrospective poet of 1850 who tracks the “way” of Imagination toward the “point marked out by heaven” (1850, VI: 754), Wordsworth introduces a terminal line into a revision of the boyhood boat-stealing scene. In the 1805 text, the image of the “one track” comes in a passage rich with naturalistic detail:

With the inscription of “line” and “point,” Wordsworth visibly figures the boy’s willful ambition, his effort to master nature by pursuing a straight and finite course toward a “chosen” goal; yet the “summit” that the boy had rationally “fixed” in view, not unlike an Ordnance surveyor, is powerfully revealed to be false.⁴³ This graphic plotting of a deviation from nature’s lead and from his own imagination, symbolized by the dynamic counter-image of “Small circles” melting into “one track / Of sparkling light,” supports the 1850 poem’s more explicit providentialism and its intensification of geometric accenting to trace the boy’s developing perception of earth’s heavenly, immeasurable volumes: “whoso glides / Along the line of low-roofed water moves / As in a cloister” (1850, VIII: 460–62).

The Ordnance Survey and the poetic autobiography developed in parallel. The relevance of the Survey to the counter-cartographic imaginative accenting and formal fashioning of The Prelude is indicated by a pair of short blank-verse poems Wordsworth began on an 1811 visit to the western edge of Cumberland, a tour that brought him into contact with the surveyors who were currently working on the mountain of Black Comb. Cartographic historians and literary critics have discussed the poems’ ideological ambivalence toward the Survey.⁴⁴ My goal here is to show how the blank-verse poems foreground the competing epistemologies of topographical media and how their particular graphicallexical expressivity emerges in reflexive relation to national cartographic pressures on the terrain.

“Written with a Slate-pencil, on a Stone, on the side of the Mountain of Black Comb” shows Wordsworth’s awareness not only of what he is writing on—the poetic page—but also, coyly, of what he is not: the map surface. Nominally an inscription “on a Stone” that in actuality takes the material form of a printed text in a book, the poem evokes a diversity of graphic surfaces and technologies of writing. In the mode of an eighteenth-century nature inscription—a brief poem inscribed upon an object in a garden—the poem invokes and halts a passerby. But instead of pointing out a sight to a gentleman or woman, the spirit of the place interrupts a pedestrian on his climb to a hoped-for “terraqueous spectacle”:⁴⁵

Like one of Wordsworth’s first published blank-verse poems, “Lines Left upon a Seat in a Yew-tree” (Lyrical Ballads, 1798), the poem admonishes the passing tourist to appreciate nature’s essential flux—here by identifying the view-seeker with a topographical surveyor. The first half honors the peak’s powerful storms; the second relates the account of a “geographic Labourer” who “Week after week pursued” his “lonely task” of measuring “height and distance” until a “glimpse” of “Nature’s processes” intervened (14–19). The inscription relays the surveyor’s report,

If Wordsworth’s nature poems offer an “enlarged understanding”⁴⁷ of a scene, this one dramatizes the dynamic strength of nature, capable of thwarting in an instant the measuring of heights and fixing of spatial relations—an event, Wordsworth explains in the Fenwick note, that occurred to “one of the engineers, who was employed in making trigonometrical surveys of that region.”⁴⁸ The flux of weather exceeds the powers of perception, bringing the work of knowledge to an unexpected end. By obscuring the surface of the map, “Nature’s processes” (18–19) stay the surveyor’s labor but drive his telling of the tale and the inscribing of the lines on stone. The inscription thus structurally embodies its enlarged understanding: whereas maps depend on visual clarity and offer specious images of an earth without weather (from “centre to circumference, unveiled!” [11]), the inscription accommodates oral report of “total gloom.” Further, in a final image of the surveyor seated with “unclosed eyes / Upon the blinded mountain’s silent top!” it opens the possibility of deeper, spiritual insight for tourist and surveyor alike.

A fragmentary coda introduced in manuscript enforces the inscription’s aesthetic-epistemological statement—“I am not a map”—by referencing the inscription’s material features:

While allying the inscription and the map by their labor of production (“geographic Labourer,” “these slight labours”) and by their susceptibility to time and weather, the unfinished coda suggests the power of effaced stone to remain a silent monument to nature’s compromising of cultural projects. My interest, though, is in Wordsworth’s use of the word “lines” to carry forward this critique. At publication in 1815, the self-reflexive coda with its “feeble lines” is rejected, a cancellation that dissociates the inscription from the mark of the line. This logic is repeated in the addition, also at publication, of the lengthy but nonetheless elliptical title, “Written with a Slate-pencil, on a Stone, on the Side of the Mountain of Black Comb,” when “Lines,” the volume tells us, are the stuff of poems. The index to the 1815 Poems lists “Lines Left upon a Seat,” “Lines Written upon a Stone,” “Lines Written on a Blank Leaf in a Copy of the Author’s Poem ‘The Excursion,’” “Lines Written in Early Spring,” “Lines Written at a Small Distance from my House,” and “Lines Addressed to a Noble Lord.” A synecdoche that refers not merely to those poems Wordsworth classes in 1815 as “Inscriptions,” “Lines” make up the poet’s volumes.

The poem’s sensitivity to graphic media is augmented over time. Canceled with the coda and elided in the title, the term “lines” returns to the poem in Edward Moxon’s 1836 edition of The Poetical Works—but now in an elaborated description of the map and as a mark of cartography’s aspiration to accuracy of distinction. In the 1815 clause, the map is a creature of colors: “The manycoloured map before his eyes / Became invisible.”⁵⁰ In the 1836 clause, “colours, lines, / And the whole surface of the out-spread map / Became invisible.”⁵¹ The term “lines” migrates to the map, then, as the “eyes” of the surveyor vanish—two changes that emphasize the ideality of cartographic rendering and its fiction of objective, vantage-free perception. By presenting “the whole surface of the out-spread map” to the reader of “Written with a Slate-pencil, on a Stone, on the Side of the Mountain of Black Comb,” Wordsworth elaborates the contrast between stone and map, pencil writing and cartographic delineation, and the attitudes toward nature that they imply. The very form of the title, a slow climb of prepositional phrases intimating the magnitude of that “huge Eminence,” contrasts with the “whole surface,” synchronic presentation of the survey’s instrumentally measured space.

Even while elevating, philosophically, the nature inscription over the survey, the poem resists a simple valorization of one medium—and mode of inscribing space—over others. By appending a topographical note to the poem at publication in 1815, Wordsworth evokes yet another discursive context: that of tourist publications and county maps, which, as we saw in Chapter 1, commonly included informative topographical annotations.⁵² The horizontal block of text at the foot of the verse reads: “Black Comb stands at the southern extremity of Cumberland: its base covers a much greater extent of ground than any other Mountain in these parts; and, from its situation, the summit commands a more extensive view than any other point in Britain. See page 305, Vol. I.”⁵³ The impersonal objectivity assumed in the prose vies with the intimacy of the verse inscription to which it is a gloss, recalling the reader from the stony scene of inscription to the fact of the printed “page” and book. Although part of the note paraphrases Colonel William Mudge, Superintendent of the Ordnance Survey (1798–1820), and implies knowledge gained by surveying from summits, the note refers us not to the sheets of the Ordnance Survey but to an illustrative companion poem, “View from the Top of Black Comb,” which is classified in the same volume of 1815 as a “Poem of the Imagination.”⁵⁴ The archaic wisdom of the genius loci is thus not compromised by contemporary scientific authority but linked with the poet himself and his imaginative apprehension and inscription of landscape.

“View from the Top of Black Comb” shows Wordsworth’s developing sensitivity to the linguistic and graphic capacities of blank verse—to its capacities, particularly, as a medium for articulating national and imperial space. While “Written with a Slate-pencil” withholds the promise of expansive view, its companion “View from the Top of Black Comb” traces, as if in real time, “the amplest range / Of unobstructed prospect” that “British ground commands”:

While, as I showed in Chapter 1, Crosthwaite had encouraged “British Youths” to “explore” their “native Isle” with the aid of his patriotic plans, Wordsworth renders the scene from the perspective of viewers imagined already within it. From the summit of Black Comb, eyes of a viewer-speaker range over points to the south and the southwest, linking these in a diagonal “line of eye-sight” with Scottish peaks to the northwest. After a break-inscribing dash, enhancing the effect of vocal immediacy, the poem scans a westerly line of view from a point of “British ground” in the east (“whence the sun comes forth”) to Black Comb’s “western base,” out across the ocean, and “Far into silent regions blue and pale” (11, 13, 15).

In Romantic Geography, Michael Wiley asserts that Wordsworth’s “poetic survey of the land” simulates “the procedures” of trigonometrical “measurement.”⁵⁶ He reads the Black Comb poems as Wordsworth’s ideological reconciliation with institutional modes of delineating Britain, of which the Ordnance Survey was one official expression.⁵⁷ But this oversimplifies both the cartographic context in which the poems function and the way they take the measure of the landscape. Wiley overlooks the formal and material dimension of the poems as well as the print context of tourist publications, which trained Britons to encounter the landscape through a range of signs that flexibly interacted on the page. In fact, lexical and notational revisions made to the Black Comb poems heighten the interactions of graphic and verbal codes. These revisions intensify the critique of the Ordnance Survey’s institutionalization of the landscape and, as I will show, endorse the fluidity of the blank-verse measure as a medium for formulating national space. The status of the “line” as a unit of spatial fixity, or of spatial and temporal play, is a crucial aspect of this critique.

While Wiley is right to say the poem “delineates Britain from [the surveyor’s] vantage point,”⁵⁸ it is also true that the narrator’s roving eye attributes dynamism to the land: the “line of eye-sight” extending to “The hoary Peaks of Scotland” senses movement in those peaks “that give birth to Tiviot’s Stream” and the rivers “Annan, Tweed, and Clyde.”⁵⁹ The “Gigantic Mountains rough with crags” are where “the sun comes forth”; and the ocean at the “imperial Station’s western base” is an acoustic field “breaking audibly” and “stretched / Far into silent regions”—beyond the reach of ear and then eye. Across the poems and their enactive enjambments, the word “line” draws attention to contrary epistemological and graphic modes: whereas the “geographic Labourer” of “Written with a Slate-pencil” “measures height and distance” and sets finite, quantified “lines” on the “out-spread map,” “View from the Top” traces sight lines across interrelated fields of land, sea, and sky—producing the simultaneous effects of an animated nature and imaginative perceiver.

A late lexical revision underscores this epistemological and representational difference:

Longman’s 1832 text of the poem substitutes “the frame” with “the line of Erin’s coast,” a refining of the image that might seem to ally the poem with cartography.⁶⁰ But the change abstracts the coast while emphasizing the activity, and partiality, of vision. “Do we behold the line of Erin’s coast?” echoes “a line of eye-sight,” uniting wavering geographical aspect with mobile perception. The lexical change narrows the gap between object (“the line of … coast”) and eye (“line of eye-sight”) to a fine line—a gestural and expressive line that inscribes within the poem a viewer-speaker of searching uncertainty and feeling. By contrast, the “lines” of the Ordnance Survey map derive from “instruments” to “measure height and distance,” implying the practical separation of object and eye.

If the term “line” suggests the tracing of the topography with the eye and into language, so too does the typographic mark of the line. Interestingly, the poem gradually develops a graphic logic of punctuation that supports its epistemic and ideological critique of the new national cartography. While punctuation across the lengthening manuscripts is unstable, placement of the dashes is particularly fitful.⁶¹ Promoted during the era as a signal of long pause, break in speech, and sudden shift in thought, as I discuss further in Chapter 5, the many instances of the dash in the manuscripts clearly function rhetorically. In the text of the 1815 Poems, however, the spatial effects of the mark come into focus. Now the dashes iconically represent horizontal vision, from south to north (5–10) and from east to west, “far into silent regions blue and pale;—” (11–15). Dashes “visibly [engird] Mona’s Isle” on the page (15–23), even as the “Spectator’s” view of the shore’s streaked uplands is foreclosed by the island’s apparent flatness from the summit of Black Comb. Dashes also now foreground discontinuities and equivocal visions “—… Do we behold the line of Erin’s coast? …—” (23–28) so as to intimate gaps in the poem’s “circuit” (29) of the landscape, its interruptive but humanizing shifts between lines of visual and verbal attention. Thus while suggesting the speech patterns and pauses of a viewing subject, the dashes in the 1815 text also index the motions of a nonquantifying eye and mind as it focuses, and fails to focus, a United Kingdom (Scotland, England, Wales, and Ireland) that exceeds its reach. The dashes trace, that is, a qualitatively perceived space and a progressive mode of topographic cognizance that the Ordnance Survey would not record—one that engages and strains both eye and ear. The dashes thus signal the simultaneity of visual and vocal experience as well as their fundamental fragmentariness; the poem marks the “breaking audibly” of waves and voice as it gestures toward but does not fully delineate Britain’s extension “Far into silent regions” of the “globe” (19).

The rhetorical and spatial work of punctuation marks in “View from the Top of Black Comb” becomes more complex over time. After 1820, a reader encounters several sets of parentheses (round brackets), segmenting marks that were only gradually introduced to the poem. The earliest draft of the poem employs only a single set of parentheses to mark an atmospheric, etymological reference: “Black Comb (dread name, / From clouds and Storms derived).”⁶² Upon publication in 1815, an additional set of brackets marks a vision of Mona’s Isle

Here the parentheses aid in the reader’s recognition of an inessential phrase—but they also make a point about cartography. Graphically set aside from two views of the island taken from separate vantage points at separate times (“as we left the Plain”; “but now appears / A dwindled object”), the parentheses offer a vision of global convexity. Thus Wordsworth marks both visually, in the convex shape of the brackets, and linguistically, by the words held within the brackets, the eye’s mobility—its ability to shift between local and global perceptions of space. This blank-verse encoding of a quasi-empirical and imaginative perception exceeds the interests and scope of the “out-spread” surface of an Ordnance Survey map.

Introduced into the text of the 1820 Poetical Works, yet another set of parentheses mark a grammatical and geographical aside—an untethering of vision from this world, a flight of fancy:

Over time, then, the poem adopts a visual and visionary logic of punctuation: the dashes come to manifest the poem’s several lines of geographic vision as well as the gaps between them; the parentheses come to mark the awe-inspired, imaginative turns that round and enrich here-and-now perceptions. They are more tropographic than topographic or cartographic. The poem concludes,

Wordsworth lodges nationalist revelation not in the “lines” of the surveyor but in the speaker-viewer’s shifting lines of sight that register the features, motions, and obscurities of the land, its local lore (the etymology of Black Comb), and subjective visual impressions.⁶⁴ It is not the Ordnance surveyor but the blankverse nature poet, Wordsworth discovers, who takes the more nuanced measure of the British landscape by more flexibly deploying the lines of his medium (line terms, line marks, line units). By these formal, linguistic, and graphical interactions, the poems enlarge the visual and aural imagination of the nation and bring blank verse into view as a mode of national portraiture that hovers between speech and print.

Significantly, when Wordsworth coupled these poems in the volume of 1815, effectively differentiating both from the Ordnance Survey, he also organized the volume’s poems into a new system of poetic classification. I want to suggest that the cartographic consciousness underlying “View from the Top of Black Comb” suffuses, as well, the class Wordsworth devises to contain that poem: the “Poems of the Imagination,” designating the verse produced when the imaginative power of the “Author’s” mind predominates.⁶⁵ It is in contrast to the surveyor’s use of instruments to “measure height and distance” (“Written with a Slate-pencil”) that Wordsworth introduces the “Poem of the Imagination”; defines the conferring, abstracting, modifying, creative, and shaping powers of the “Imagination”; and illustrates her “recoil from every thing but the plastic, the pliant, and the indefinite.”⁶⁶ He writes: “Having to speak of stature, she does not tell you that her gigantic Angel was as tall as Pompey’s Pillar; much less that he was twelve cubits, or twelve hundred cubits high; or that his dimensions equalled those of Teneriffe or Atlas;—because these, and if they were a million times as high it would be the same, are bounded: The expression is, ‘His stature reached the sky!’ the illimitable firmament!” An angel of imagination also appears in “View from the Top of Black Comb”:

The angel is the exalted other of the “geographic Labourer” who was “employed in making trigonometrical surveys of that region.”⁶⁷ And, as the manuscript and print revisions of the poems suggest, she is an effect, as well, of the poet’s labor and the labor of copyists, editors, and compositors. It is by honing diction and punctuation that Wordsworth traces a verbal and visual view in blank-verse time and space, graphically evoking nation and empire, as well as a speaking subject in the process of feeling and imagining.

When his poetic autobiography was published in April 1850, the Ordnance Survey had completed the trigonometrical survey of England and Wales and was in the midst of surveys of Ireland and Scotland. The network of triangles upon the island outlines graphically displayed what the presence of stakes and stones materialized in real space: the new mathematical formalization of the British landscape. In this cartographic culture, The Prelude’s indefinitely extensive lines of landscape and imagination and its joint pointing of the “Soul” and ground over which the poet traveled would have been charged by their difference from trigonometrical points and delineations: the product of instrumentaided vision, the angle-measuring theodolite, and the geometrical rules by which distances were derived from those angles. But they also would have been read in the context of a controversy about the topographical representation of the nation—and particularly of hill country—by the Ordnance Survey. This controversy was significant enough to generate a Parliamentary inquiry into the respective merits of different modes of rendering relief, numerical or pictorial, and for Matthew Arnold to advocate publicly, as the Lake District was being topographically mapped, the preservation of fine pictorial representation of hills. Arnold’s elegies on Wordsworth, and his polemic on mapping, took Wordsworthian modes of feeling and perceiving nature to the heart of debates about delineating the nation.

When the Ordnance Survey undertook the task of producing topographical maps based upon the new trigonometrical data, it faced the problem of representing relief accurately and at large scale. Whereas small-scale eighteenthcentury maps such as Emmanuel Bowen’s of Cumberland and Westmorland (1777) had used conventional sugarloaf signs to indicate upland, at a larger scale (such as the one-inch OS maps) these schematic profiles would not only occlude information behind the hills but also be conspicuously out of character with the otherwise detailed depiction of the ground. To show hills from above, in plan view, would resolve the problem of occlusion, but British mapmakers had to adopt these techniques from continental cartographers and hone them.⁶⁸ Further, as I discussed in Chapter 2, they had little practice in visualizing geomorphology and inadequate technology for gauging slope.⁶⁹

In confronting the challenge of producing standardized, accurate visual renderings of the landscape, the Board of Ordnance pursued and developed a French mode of assessing and representing relief that countered the mathematical principles of accuracy emblematized by triangulation (and which were used in some of the Alpine maps discussed in Chapter 2). While many foreign cartographers in the early decades of the nineteenth century had adopted measurement-based techniques, the Ordnance Survey fostered the pictorial, field-sketching mode used for the Carte Géometrique de La France (1756–1816). While continental cartographers now privileged the determination, with instruments, of altitudes and angles of slope, British cartographers continued to privilege the unaided impression of slope to the eye. Each mode of rendering relief differently disposed lines across the two-dimensional surface of the published map, and each elicited different modes of interpretation.

As on the Cassini map, the Ordnance Survey maps employed hachures: short, parallel shade-lines that trace the direction water would take down a slope, the darkness or thickness of which can indicate either height or gradient. As historian Yolande Jones has shown, the Ordnance Survey championed the “natural history principle” of relief representation developed by English artist, surveyor, and draftsman Robert Dawson, a method founded upon the draftsman’s thorough visual understanding of the “physical substance and geological structure and formation of the land.”⁷⁰ From 1803, landscape artists employing Dawson’s methods used statues of the human figure and natural objects, such as stones and the knots of trees, to train surveyors to recognize variations in form, undulation, and gradient. Using watercolor and charcoal, surveyors interspersed color washes with fields of hachures to suggest the fall of vertical or oblique light on slopes (Figure 16).⁷¹ Hill engravers transferred finished drawings to copper plates, cutting hachures in the metal to image what the draftsmen could show with color, ink, texture, and brush stroke.

By contrast, the contour lines coming into favor on European maps bore no relation to naturalistic effects of light and shade, and their production obviated visual interpretation of the surface of the ground. In contouring, surveyors methodically canvass the terrain, determining heights with leveling instruments, marking the points they have leveled on the ground, and plotting those points on paper. Contours—concentrically linked points of equivalent altitude—imply the overall form of a given terrain. Whereas hachures communicate form by tracing slope for the eye, in contouring, slopes must be inferred from the relative widths of blank intervals: the closer the horizontal lines, the steeper the slope. In areas of subtle gradation where contour lines are by definition widely spaced, the lines themselves do not even imply incline: a user must reference and compare the numerical information appended to lines to determine or clarify the direction of slopes.⁷² Numbers encoding altitude differentials permit the translation of lines into landforms. Its supporters hailed contouring as less subjective, less costly, more accurate, more able to show forms in their entirety, and more conducive to the total legibility of maps. Unlike closely inscribed hachures, rationally spaced and numerically encoded contours left room for the clear inscription of place-names and other signs. In Britain, Major General Sir James Carmichael-Smyth fueled an interest in legibility in an 1828 treatise claiming that the nation needed a system of “expressing the features of ground, in a clear and decided manner, by rules, and upon principle, so as to leave little to the taste, the imagination, or the fancy of the draftsman.”⁷³ Although Carmichael-Smyth criticized the system of contouring, he believed that hachures were so inconsistently applied as to prevent the “inspector” of a map from forming “a decided idea as to the nature of the country.” Ordnance Survey maps, he complained, “are like the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, conveying vague and undefined notions, instead of that positive and distinct information we require.”⁷⁴ Whereas Carmichael-Smyth construed hachures as indecipherable foreign language, or cryptic code, their supporters in the 1850s construed them as expressive marks that need not be read at all: as direct representation of the country’s variegated face.

Figure 16. Robert Dawson, fair-drawing of northern Wales, depicting part of Caernarvonshire (1816–21); detail showing Snowdon. © British Library Board. Reproduced by permission of the British Library.

After Carmichael-Smyth’s treatise, matters began to change. The Survey experimented with the instrumental technique of contouring in Ireland, beginning 1839 or 1840, in England, in 1841, and in Scotland at the start of the survey in 1843. In 1851, at the Great Exhibition, it displayed a contour map of Lancashire on which numbers and strings of dotted lines denoting equivalent altitudes appeared where the public expected hill shading (Figure 17). What visitors to the exhibition saw challenged the protocols of British map viewing. Rather than see the form of the ground in hachures impressionistically patterned after actual slopes, they encountered rationally proportioned degrees of altitude; and between these lines of concentrically fixed points, they saw blank intervals.⁷⁵ Where the public expected a continuous surface of hachures showing the undulations of the ground—as in this map of northern England (Figure 18)—they got metric framework, as in the same portion of northern England marked by contours (Figure 19).⁷⁶

The exhibition of Map 91 SE galvanized debate. Although the Ordnance Survey had completed the triangulation survey of England and Wales, it had not issued all of its topographical maps. How the land would be rendered on the completed series of maps, and whether Great Britain more largely would appear in stylistic uniformity, was thrown into question. The contour map shown at the Crystal Palace aroused enough concern for a Parliamentary Select Committee to enquire into “the respective merits of contours and hachures,” superseding the issue of scale that it had initially intended to address.⁷⁷ In 1853, the Committee considered evidence from advocates of each method. When its proceedings stimulated further debate in the press, what might have been a technical issue became the subject of considerable controversy, as surveyors, journalists, and the public recognized that the way in which Britain represented itself to itself was at stake.

If, as General Roy of the Board of Ordnance believed, Britain’s international standing depended upon a rigorous scientific triangulation resulting in the precise determination of longitude and latitude points and the accurate delineation of coasts, the portrayal of landscape and its undulations stirred other interests and brought competing criteria of value into the open. At the simplest level, the debate concerned the way in which public money would be spent; the defenders of hachuring, however, put liberal subjectivity and the coherence of Great Britain on the line. These, they asserted, could come only from “expressive” depiction of the country—from a mode of topographical “portraiture” that would bring British citizens into communion with the “face” of nature, as either the makers or viewers of unmeasured lines that were “faithful” to the particular forms of the country. Hachuring, its supporters reasoned, offered more “faithful representation” of the terrain than contouring. In a letter to Parliament, Lt. Colonel Dawson (the son of surveyor and draftsman Robert Dawson) attacked attributions of accuracy to contouring by contrasting its basis in mathematical truth to hachuring’s higher form of representational truth. Although the “principles” of the system of contouring are “theoretically and mathematically true,” contouring only at widely spaced intervals of altitude, as it is practiced, misrepresents the land because its form between the lines is concealed.⁷⁸ Furthermore, contour lines give only a weak impression of form: although mathematically “accurate,” they are not “expressive.”⁷⁹ In an assemblage of contour lines on a two-dimensional surface—and even in hachures sketched in the engraving office from base grids of contour lines⁸⁰—the map viewer will perceive merely “a flat shade,” not “‘literally and strikingly a correct representation of the physical relief,’” as its advocates claimed.⁸¹

Figure 18. Ordnance Survey hachured map depicting area around Black Fell. Sheet 108 SW, hill version (1868), detail.

Advocates of pictorialism pressed the claims of ordinary map users. Against claims that contour lines “‘[afford] the rigid accuracy the engineer desires,’” Lt. Colonel Dawson asserted that “the forms” of the country “would be better represented and more intelligibly to ordinary observers by the principles and practices of art.”⁸² Similarly, Robert Dawson asserted that hill-shading gives “defined and accurate expression … expressively and immediately to the eye.”⁸³ Hachures were construed as lines that communicate form to the “‘common eye’”—a value that Robert Dawson adopted from John Ruskin, who had himself paid tribute to Wordsworth as “the keenest-eyed of all modern poets for what is deep and essential in nature” while quoting lines from The Excursion. The citation instances the revelation of nature’s vital essence in the perception of a stem’s shadow:

Figure 19. Ordnance Survey contour map depicting area around Black Fell. Sheet 108 SW, outline version (1866), detail.

The “eye demands natural drawing for natural subjects,” Dawson asserted, and for this reason, “neat and accurate delineation” should be combined with “pictural expression.” By retracing nature’s strikingly expressive lines, alive with inner force, the topographer gratifies the eye and is able to “address the mind.”⁸⁵

To give cultural weight to their arguments against numerical modes of rendering relief, advocates of pictorialism aligned field sketching with the intertwined concepts of character and portraiture. Robert Dawson called the enterprise of hill delineation “full-face pictural representation” and “portraiture”; Lt. Colonel Dawson termed it “hill portraiture.”⁸⁶ Essential to the rendering of topographical face was the scrutiny of surface particularities, which, Lt. Colonel Dawson insisted, “give distinctive character to different portions of the earth’s surface.”⁸⁷ If, in contrast, relief were depicted with contours, character-giving details would never appear. In a mountainous region contoured at 500-foot intervals, Lt. Colonel Dawson observes, “an abrupt slope of nearly 1,000 feet might pass altogether without notice in the map.” The effect would rather be of a continuous, dull rise. To the hill sketcher, by contrast, “every separate feature, however small, is an object of special study, and the shading used to express it has reference to the inclination of its slopes, in comparison with those of other features in the limited field of the sketch sheet on which [the hill sketcher] works.”⁸⁸ In stark contrast to the trigonometrical survey, what makes a map “faithful” is not its foundation in abstract truths but its commitment to the formal variations of particular locales.

Hachures based on hill sketching are thus expressive on two counts: insofar as they produce illusions of volume in the eyes of “ordinary observers” and insofar as they render the “characteristic expression” of terrain by fine attention to the details of the ground.⁸⁹ “‘Physiognomy,’” Robert Dawson claimed, “‘is no idle or doubtful science’ ” when it comes to terrain apprehension, and so he advocated close scrutiny of the bumps, ridges, and crevices of the land surface, the skillful representation of which requires practice and follows from “a power of figure-drawing (the human figure) with that truth and form of character which may mark, at least, the physical distinction of the natural races.”⁹⁰ Where Dawson racialized the corporeality of the country in his defense of “natural figuration”⁹¹ over and against numerical representation, one British officer gendered it in his vehement rejection of an early-century proposal to adopt continental methods of distributing hachures mathematically and varying their thickness according to a precise and rational schema (called the “scale of shade”): “It is a hopeless endeavour to restrict the graceful irregularities of nature to the absolute formalities of right lines and circles…. Even the colder scrutiny of the military draftsman will recognize the impossibility of cramping the variety of her swelling contours within the rigid scale of rectilinear features.”⁹² To the pictorialists, geometric and quantitative measure was not only misrepresentative but futile.

Figure 20. Fair-drawing by Robert Dawson from circa 1810–1820, which shows the area around Ashburton, Devon, detail. © British Library Board. Reproduced by permission of the British Library.

In the call for the reinstatement of hachuring on the public maps, pictorialists thus relied on tropes of body and face, implying that Britain could distinguish itself from its European neighbors and vitalize itself as a nation through topographical portraiture. Quoting Dr. Thomas Arnold’s writings on geography, Robert Dawson called for the depiction of the “‘organic structure’” of a “‘country … the form of its skeleton, that is, its hills;—the magnitude and course of its veins and arteries, that is its streams and rivers,’”⁹³ words that aptly gloss a fair drawing of Dawson’s from 1810–20, which shows the area around Ashburton as translucent skin variably shaded and patterned by deeper threads of organic tissue; rivers and roads that trace the edge of the downs are like the veins of hands or leaves (Figure 20). The pictorial inscription of hills, Robert Dawson insisted, gives “life and meaning, and harmony” to cartographic information that would appear “lifeless and confused” on a mere plan outline of a country. To a “foundation” in trigonometrical technique, hachures added a “finishing efficacy or grace,” completing and fulfilling the meaning of the national map.⁹⁴ Only pictorial treatment of the third dimension organized an already mathematically plotted space into a nation; not the outline built up from sets of trigonometrically fixed interior points but those base points overlaid with pictorial accents made a national map throbbingly, distinctively whole. Chiaroscuric effects, which alternately suggest on finished maps a fine tissue of fingerprints and folds of skin (see also Figure 16), were necessary “ornament.” Again quoting Ruskin, Robert Dawson claimed that “‘no form whatever can be known to the eye without its chiaroscuro,—that perfect and harmonious unity of outline with light and shade by which the parts and projections of the body are explained to the eye.’”⁹⁵

The rhetoric of pictorial relief insistently transferred attributes between persons and land, subject and object, reflexively rooting “lively and intelligent” representation of nation in the powers of the human mind to combine detailed sketches of terrain into wholes.⁹⁶ Lt. Colonel Dawson stressed that hill drafting was a two-stage process involving looking with the physical eye and then with a disciplined imaginative eye. While a contoured topographic map involves piecing together individual sheets of plotted elevations, a hachured map involves what the pictorialists claimed is a higher mental activity of imaginary visual synthesis. In the two-stage process, first hill sketchers render the visible details of local area (“characteristic expression”), then their collaborator the draftsman “has to compass in his imagination the larger masses and assemblages of forms, assigning to individual features only their subordinate and relative importance as parts of the general whole, and the tone only which properly belongs to them in the scale of aerial perspective.”⁹⁷ The hachured map thus puts on display not only the “whole expression of forms,” as Dawson claimed, but also, by implication, “the mental apprehension” of the draftsman, “his artistic judgment and skill,” and his capacity for “the one whole imaginative view” that is required to produce the “pictural effect in maps.”⁹⁸ By projecting himself above, he placed “‘the whole character of a country before our eyes.’”⁹⁹

Thus the modern cartographic embrace of quantitative method was a threat to portraiture and all it represented. Robert Dawson argued that imposition of “rules and method” would restrict the “artistic judgment” of both draftsman and engraver.¹⁰⁰ Further, Lt. Colonel Dawson asserted that an enlightened government would never adopt a purely mechanical process of topographic mapping. Only a textual look that is textural could faithfully represent the country to its people, and a compelling textural look could come only from human acts of looking at, not measuring, the ground. “‘There is an expression about all hill lines of nature, but it is not to be reduced to line and rule,’” Robert Dawson stated, quoting Ruskin.¹⁰¹

Swayed by defenses of hachuring that invoked such cultural authorities—and Westmorland residents—as Ruskin and Thomas Arnold, in 1854 the Select Committee made the significant decision to give England and Wales a single textual look. They reinstated hachuring at the one-inch-to-one-mile scale—the scale at which south and central England and parts of Wales had been mapped since the 1790s, deciding that all of England and Wales would be represented pictorially, at the same scale, by hachures sketched in the field. What was called the Old Series (the one-inch maps of England and Wales) would be completed in stylistic uniformity, and the rest of Great Britain would likewise receive oneinch hachured maps. Thus the Committee empowered human imagination and judgment, for nonnumerical and noninstrumental hachuring had been made to support a form of unconstrained interpretive subjectivity, while also acknowledging the needs of “the more general and less instructed public.”¹⁰² To convey the variegated slopes of the countryside “‘literally and strikingly’” to the eye would enable “ordinary observers” to feel and know it. With their endorsement of hachures, Parliament construed the hills as a source of national significance and the topographical map as a popular medium of national feeling.

It was on behalf of the people that, in 1862, Matthew Arnold renewed the pressure on the Ordnance Survey to portray nature artistically for the “‘common eye.’”¹⁰³ Developing Dawson’s Ruskinian aesthetic, Arnold wrote to the London Review complaining that although the Survey had in its new maps taken care to correct “obsolete nomenclature,” “it had done nothing” “to amend their effaced shading.” Scanning maps printed from worn-out copperplates, Arnold asked: “where is the Cumnor hill country on the right bank of the Thames, as the original map gave it? Where is Bredon Hill, with all its beautiful staging from the plain to its summit? As they were in the Roman maps of Britain,” he answers, “—absent.”¹⁰⁴ Shading, Arnold continued, was the principal criterion of a good map: “A lover of maps would in general be only too happy if he could obtain the unworn sheet of thirty years ago, with all its imperfections of writing, in exchange for the indistinct catalogue of names which he now buys under the title of an Ordnance sheet. Names he can put in or correct for himself, but he cannot restore shading.”¹⁰⁵ Shading not only gives definition to the nation but also measures cultural sophistication: “modern maps distinguish themselves from the ancient by the completeness and beauty of their shading.”¹⁰⁶ Thus he concluded that the “Government’s first and indispensable duty in the way of map-making is (we cannot repeat it too often), to provide a good map of its country, not to provide a cheap one. The cheapness or dearness is a secondary consideration for it; the first consideration is excellence.”¹⁰⁷ Whereas Roy and Cassini had based the goodness of a map on its trigonometrical frame, Arnold rested it on full, chiaroscuric representation of the surface of the ground—an expensive procedure but in his view both an essential aesthetic and informational element.¹⁰⁸

If for the military-minded Carmichael-Smyth, hachures were “like the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, conveying vague and undefined notions,”¹⁰⁹ for Arnold they vitalized what would otherwise appear as an “indistinct catalogue of names.” It was not orthography that made a map work but fields of lines that could be pursued by the eye: the “general public” of a “civilized European country” should be able to “trace in those finely graduated lines, mountain and valley, slope and plain, open ground and woodland, in all their endless variety.”¹¹⁰ Here Arnold was pressing for the picturing of slope in its subtlety and idiosyncrasy—exactly what contouring omits—and promoting a form of “civilized” visual experience that converted printed lines and names into the swells of a coherent country. (In Figures 18 and 19, notice the ridges circling the southwestern edge of Black Fell, visible on the left side of the hachured map and omitted on the contour map.)

Arnold’s meditation on the viewer’s engagement with the two-dimensional surface of the map suggests that in preserving shading he hoped to extend a sensory and imaginative mode of engagement with a country that exceeds the capacity of the mind to know it. The whole phrase, “trace in those finely graduated lines, mountain and valley, slope and plain … in all their endless variety,” suggests not merely participatory creativity—as the viewer imagines printed lines into topographical fullness—but also unending discovery and wonder. No rational system of lines masters the variegated landscape or governs the movements of the eye,¹¹¹ which takes pleasure in freely pursuing the myriad of marks on the map and visualizing terrain organized, according to Dawson, by no rule other that the draftsman’s “judgment.” Hachures become the signs of an “enlightened Government” that not merely refrains from restricting but materially supports the interpretive and imaginative agency of its people.

Hachuring’s association with empirical observation, imaginative apprehension, and an animate, organic country helps explain Arnold’s anxiety about the “effaced shading” on Ordnance Survey maps. If hill shading fades, because of too-frequent impressing and poor preservation, so fades the “character” of the country and the traces of the visually acute and mentally agile landscape portraitists. Similarly, to replace lines that have “reference to the inclination of … slopes” with lines pictorialists consider “imaginary” for their nonreferentiality—that is, to replace hachures with contours—would alienate “ordinary observers” and preclude that felt sense of the nation as a vital whole. Hachures emerge as marks absolutely necessary to the cultural, not merely military and scientific, project of national cartography: they “convey” to the common eye what is “interesting and important in the knowledge of the ground” while also permitting what is “beautiful in a richly varied face of country [to] be beautifully portrayed.”¹¹² The pictorialists thus allied the national map with portraiture and made topographical representation rhetorical by turning national cartography into a British vernacular: a visual language based in the abstract grammar of trigonometry but made fluently meaningful in its “natural” marks of inflection.

Arnold’s obvious pleasure in tracing nature in the “finely graduated lines” on the map also speaks to the interests of personal and cultural memory—a desire for the map to revive and preserve past feelings. Wordsworth had linked the fine lines of nature’s face with the revival of past joy in a scene of “unconscious intercourse / With the eternal Beauty.” In the 1799 Prelude, by “Cumbria’s rocky limits,” the boy’s

The 1805 revision graduates that surface: the boy’s “eye” now gathers pleasure as it moves “Through every hair-breadth of that field of light” (1805, I: 608), a refinement that works with the same passage’s “lines / Of curling mist” to lineate the “common face of Nature” that “spake to [the boy] / Rememberable things” (1805, I: 592–93, 616–17). In “maturer seasons,” Wordsworth would enjoy the fruit of that ranging gaze, when the “lineaments / Depicted on the brain” were called forth “To impregnate and to elevate the mind”—filling it with that original “joy” or with “obscure feelings representative / Of joys that were forgotten” (1805, I: 624, 629–30, 625, 635–36). Arnold’s elegies on Wordsworth point to his memorial interest in the restoration of hill shading and his interest in generating a Wordsworthian feeling for nature on a national scale.

In endorsing hill portraiture, Arnold endorsed as a form of national experience a visual and imaginative engagement with the printed face of nature. His intervention put Wordsworthian aesthetics into the public debate about Ordnance Survey mapping even more strongly than did Dawson’s citation of Ruskin. Arnold, of course, was not just an admirer of Wordsworth’s verse but from a young age had lived in the Lakes as the poet’s neighbor. His position on mapping reflects years of reading and hearing Wordsworth’s poetry and seeing the country through those texts, a double perspective manifest in his elegies on Wordsworth.

In his “Memorial Verses” of April 1850, Arnold celebrated Wordsworth’s “healing power,” his rejuvenation of benumbed Britons by returning them to where they “lay at birth / On the cool flowery lap of earth”:

Wordsworth’s death marks a crisis in “Europe’s latter hour”: the elegy’s echoes of the Intimations Ode notwithstanding, “few or none” hear the voice of nature “right, now he is gone” or feel the maternal comfort of encircling “hills.” In a second elegy, “The Youth of Nature” (1852), Arnold deepens the association of Wordsworth with hill country as he lays him to rest “in the shadow” of the very “mountains” that the poet had lived beside and animated in his verse. Although the “spots which recall him survive, / For he lent a new life to these hills” (13–14), Arnold doubts whether Britons are capable of feeling nature’s “joy” (61) without his mediation. In the voice of “Nature,” Arnold calls for the nation’s attention:

With the “great” Wordsworth gone, Arnold’s Nature challenges Britons to carry forward the work of truthful and vital representation. To know Nature requires that they “scan me, and read me, and tell”—that they rearticulate her forms, sounds, and surfaces in syntax, signs, and meters that embody her dynamic pulses and patterns. These rhythmic exhortations to “tell,” or count, Nature’s “thoughts” and feelings foreground Arnold’s own triplets, his halving of elegiac hexameter into a dactylic trimeter that registers his sense of cultural decline but also prompts, in its forward swing, cultural revival. Not in the least rhetorical, his metrical questions spur the reader to aesthetic response: “Can thy pencil, O artist! restore / The figure, the bloom of thy love, / As she was in her morning of spring?” and “Can you make / With marble, with colour, with word, / What charm’d you in others re-live?” (110–12 and 107–9).

Arnold’s public call for vital expression across media, after the loss of the poet who brought the “hills … round us,” anticipates his call to the government to “restore [the] effaced shading” on the maps of England. If, in 1852, Arnold felt that Wordsworth gave “new life to these hills,” and if the “spots which recall him survive,” then by 1862 he fears that these hills and spots will be imperceptible on the national maps as their shading fades with official inertia—and if draftsmen and engravers fail to take care in their rendering of Cumberland’s relief. Will the government give “new life to these hills,” allowing its citizens to “scan” nature and trace themselves in the “finely graduated lines” of the most Wordsworthian parts of the country?

Arnold’s elegies are steeped in Wordsworth’s language; they echo him even as they debate his legacy. It is not surprising then that his discussion of the Ordnance Survey also derives from Wordsworth’s engagement with the hills. Indeed, in arguing that national maps were vital precisely because, if beautifully delineated and shaded, they virtually connected the people who were not fortunate enough to live encircled by its hills, Arnold followed the agenda of The Prelude. Book VII shows how the impression of the northern hills and mountains upon the boy’s mind had salutary effects after long intervals of time and in radical geographical circumstances (1805, I: 625), particularly amidst the disintegrating social, visual, and typographical mayhem of London. Against the many disorienting “marks” of London, its “meagre lines and colours, and the press / Of self-destroying, transitory things” (1805, VII: 739–40), the “mountain’s outline and its steady form” (1805, VII: 723), impressed by habitual sight on Wordsworth’s brain,

The mountain’s “outline” and “steady form” function in the mind not as inert registers of past communion but as agents of cognitive and affective restoration. Sublime topographical impression fills Wordsworth with the feel of his own mental greatness, and by “shap[ing] / The measure and prospect of the soul / To majesty,” stabilizes the poet. His reference to the patterning of light on the “ancient hills”—his seeing anew of the “changeful language of their countenances”—signals the reorganization of his feelings and reactivation of his personifying imagination: his capacity to perceive, with his mind’s eye, a “face.” Wordsworth thus offers an ideal of the national landscape that is perpetuated in arguments for a hachured map that gives “life and meaning, and harmony” by its imaginative faithfulness to characteristic expressions and total forms. If Wordsworth’s urban memory of a mountainscape reestablishes dynamic order within the scene and self, Arnold, as it were, externalizes those internal impressions and literalizes them in printed maps. And, with the Dawsons, Arnold publicizes and politicizes their effects, extending to the British people a print-mediated communion with the nationalized “face” of nature. Nation would be consolidated not by the trigonometrical fixing of its form, the drawing of Roy’s “Great Outlines,” but by individual acts of scanning, reading, and telling, “Claim[ing] manifest kindred” (1805, II: 242) by the recognition of the country’s “characteristic expressions.”

INTERCHAPTER

Native Accents, British Ground

Changing Landscape in the Visual Display of Speech

In discussing the drive to make the countryside appear “literally and strikingly” to the ordinary eye, I compared hachured Ordnance Survey maps to a visual language. Since the 1980s, it has been common to think of the map as “a document presented in a visual language.” “Like any ordinary verbal language,” Martin J. S. Rudwick explains, the visual language of maps “embodies a complex set of tacit rules and conventions that have to be learned by practice” and that “imply the existence of a social community which tacitly accepts these rules and shares an understanding of these conventions.”¹ Or, as J. B. Harley states, maps are “a class of rhetorical images … bound by rules which govern their codes and modes of social production, exchange, and use just as surely as any other discursive form.”² Accordingly, in the last chapter I explored some of the historical, literary, and ideological determinants of Ordnance Survey topographical conventions and showed how Wordsworth’s resistance to inscribing land and human life by “geometric rules” was memorialized in maps that aimed to portray an animate landscape to a social community of “ordinary observers.” Like Wordsworth’s “line,” the hachure offers the possibility of imaginative engagement with the “face of Nature” and the feeling of social integration (Prelude, 1850, I: 587).

While scholars such as Rudwick and Harley introduced historicist methodology and ideological critique to the study of cartographic representation, they did not elaborate a parallel study of the “ordinary verbal language” that maps were said to resemble. Yet behind the idea of an accurate and expressive map that affiliates observers with the nation and each other lies the eighteenthcentury conception of language as a medium of social communication involving visual and phonetic extralinguistic signals, including looks, gestures, tones, emphasis, and pause. From the 1750s, writers of the new dictionaries, practical grammars, prosodical essays, and books on the arts of reading and pronunciation stretched the capacities of the silent medium to display “intelligibly” their newfound understandings of the elements of written and oral communication.³ Both prosodists and elocutionists established emphasis as the defining rhetorical feature of the English language, one that distinguished it from ancient and other modern European languages and, if well placed in the spoken sentence, promised to elevate British culture and affiliate its users around the globe. In addition to developing printed marks for this key oral mark of meaning and feeling, they created printed visualizations on the page—by means of diagrams, marks, staves, and other devices—to illustrate the relations among emphasis, quantity, pause, and other aspects of speech, and to identify patterns of tonal inflection that characterized the different forms of English spoken across the British Isles. Joshua Steele’s and John Walker’s graphical schemes show that before maps were ever conceived of as language, the English language was conceived of spatially and geographically—and configured in print in ways that reflected the increasingly large-scale mapping of Britain and the idealization of the English landscape. This spatialization of English had implications for poetry, too: in new scientific studies and guides to the speaking of the language—as in tour narratives and guidebooks, on maps and itineraries—lines of verse were conscripted to illustrate “natural,” physical phenomena, shape perception, and direct performance.

In the next four chapters, I consider the implications for Wordsworth’s poetry of the new accentual understandings and graphic displays of English. I begin, in Chapter 4, by historicizing “emphatic language” in the context of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century elocutionary and prosodic discourse and then consider Wordsworth’s engagement of the matter during his turn to blank verse in the late 1790s. Of central concern are the rhetorical depictions of emphasis as animating force and key marker of Englishness and Wordsworth’s developing conception of the “Poetic spirit” (Prelude, 1805, II: 276) within his autobiographical blank verse, which offers his poetic medium as an answer to the problem of spreading what Thomas Sheridan termed the “true natural mode of speech” around the globe in books.⁴ In Chapter 5, I examine the production of the 1800 Lyrical Ballads, including the writing of new poems, the Preface, and notes, in light of Wordsworth’s anxieties about publication and the larger cultural problem of encoding passion in print and communicating it to distant readers. I argue that Wordsworth exploited the spatio-temporal punctuation strategies of the elocutionists in his presentation of the poems and organization of the book, in an attempt to move readers not by “calling in the assistance of a lyrical and rapid Metre,” as he wrote in the Note to “The Thorn” (LB 351), but by visually “mapping” local feeling in the book’s slow measures and significant spaces.

The final chapters address the vexed issue of the inference of voice in Wordsworth’s written and printed blank verse. Chapter 6 considers the role of punctuation in the development of The Prelude, in particular the role of the exclamation point as a mark of affectionate address. Manuscripts sent between the Wordsworth siblings and Coleridge from the start of their friendship reveal that punctuation was constitutive of the developing poem rather than a “superadded” (LB 750) afterthought or irregularly applied convention—despite some editorial claims to the contrary. Elision of the exclamation mark from contemporary editions of the thirteen-book poem produces a more meditative poet while also obscuring the history of troubled distance across which the poem was written and read, and which Coleridge’s responding poem “To William Wordsworth” attempted to close. While the growth of The Prelude depended upon the absence of an intimate interlocutor, Coleridge’s reply tries to overcome and compensate for the separation between the friends not so much by returning the remote reader to a present speaker but by renewing the gesture of exclamatory address.

Another interlocutor who had become a distant reader of Wordsworth’s poetry was John Thelwall, who had discussed prosody and recited poetry with Wordsworth and Coleridge in the summer of 1797. As I discuss in Chapter 7, Thelwall responded to his reading of The Excursion by subjecting it to a strategy for returning voice to printed text through a system of prosodical marking. An extension of the pedagogical projects discussed here—schemes for visualizing the melodies and measures of speech—Thelwall’s elocutionary analysis was also political critique: an act of physical annotation that made blank verse, and the “English rhythmus” it was supremely capable of mediating, available to a broader spectrum of readers and speakers, and thereby exposed the inherent social limitations of Wordsworth’s nationalization and naturalization of the measure in the poem as well as its supporting religious ideologies.⁵

A few words about key contexts informing my arguments in the second half of the book. In the eighteenth century, the discourses of elocution and prosody were closely entwined; analyses and graphical displays of the stressbased nature of English—and the importance of emphasis in poetry and speech—served the instruction of eloquent and spiritually moving articulation as well as critique of neoclassical prosodic doctrine and ideologies of the poetic line. As I show in Chapter 7, Thelwall’s project marks the radical physiologization, secularization, and democratization of these entwined discourses—and a radical extension of their interventions in print by a shifting of graphical agency to readers. Samuel Say, identified by Paul Fussell as one of the earliest “liberal” prosodists,⁶ used simple diacritical marks to make apparent the accentual nature of English and the foundation of its “harmony” in its great “Variety in Numbers.” Sound was integral to sense: it was by rhythmical variation that “all the Various Passions of the Human Soul, and all the Endless Variety of Ideas that pass thro’ it” may be “sufficiently and strongly express’d.”⁷ This fundamental idea spurred Say’s condemnation of the contractions and elisions favored by strict syllabists and practitioners of the rhyming couplet as well as his call for the printing of words in full and their pronunciation in a “Natural Voice”—one which gave “to every Sound it’s [sic] proper Accent and Quantity of Time” (133). Say similarly called for the public representation of God’s words in his “Remarks on the Scripture Sense of Preaching,” which appeared in his 1745 Poems on Several Occasions with his essays “On the Harmony, Variety, and Power of Numbers, whether in Prose or Verse” and “On the Numbers of Paradise Lost.” Here Say advised preachers to read aloud from the “Holy Scriptures” instead of merely sermonizing in order to enable parishioners to “hear God Himself speaking to [them] in his own Words”—just as the prophets of biblical history acted as public messengers of God by writing down “very plainly,” posting up “where All might take Notice,” or proclaiming aloud their visions.⁸ Thus Say’s own task of prosodic illustration, by which he made graphically apparent the “Secret Pow’r / Of Harmony” in Paradise Lost, conformed with his notion of preaching: “Where the Prophet seems to be commanded to hang up his Prophecy in some public Place, and to write it in such fair and legible Characters, that he that runs might yet be able to read it” (139, 172–73). Together the essays aligned accent and emphasis—“the very Sounds that give Life and Motion to the English Iämbic” (142)—with spiritual energy, and they charged printers, publishers, poets, and preachers with the responsibility of its representation.

What Fussell has characterized as a “gradually dawning perception” of the “accentual nature of the language”⁹ across the eighteenth century was achieved by dramatic innovations in the figuration of speech, which the long career of Thomas Sheridan as a lecturer and writer on elocution aptly exemplifies. This Irish actor-manager, who was conscious of the need to erase provincialisms for success on the London stage, urged properly emphatic preaching, speaking, and reading—reading aloud from written text—in lectures across Britain between 1756 and 1761. Sheridan’s treatment of “Pitch and Management of the Voice” demonstrates his early reliance on the verbal imagery to which his oral medium confined him, as he advised aspiring public speakers to estimate, before the event if possible, the “degree of loudness [pitch] … necessary to fill the room” and to “deliver all the more forcible, spirited, and impassioned parts of his discourse” with “this degree, or quantity of voice.”¹⁰ In a vivid visual analogy, he then compared “the undulation of sound” that issues from a wellpitched utterance in a well-constructed room “to the circles made in a smooth water by the gentle dropping in of a pebble, where all gradually increase in their circumference, and are regular in the figures.” In a poorly constructed chamber, by contrast, the “sound is suddenly reverberated by an echo” and “rebounds like a tennis ball,” a discord that Sheridan likened to the “motion of water when a stone is dashed violently into it, where all is irregular and confused.” The speaker then must diminish the quantity of voice, and “energy”—or “emphasis”—he must “wholly give up.”¹¹ In the packed lecture halls of Oxford, Cambridge, London, Edinburgh, Bath, and Belfast, Sheridan’s visual metaphors would have demanded that listeners trace in their imaginations those regular “figures” of sound that they were simultaneously taking in with their ears, and then to picture the violent disruption of those circular undulations by redundant vocal energy.

In the first edition of his Course of Lectures on Elocution (1762), Sheridan had encouraged the modeling of speech on the most polite speakers in society—on living figures of eloquence—because he promoted a naturalness of style that he believed could best be achieved from observation and experience. Yet as phonological analyses and techniques of visual display became more sophisticated, print increasingly became the path to eloquence. In his two-volume Lectures on the Art of Reading (1775), Sheridan now “pointed out” the “verse-pauses, and some of the more remarkable emphases” in his graphic annotations of hundreds of lines of Milton’s blank verse, devoting separate sections of his book to “Lessons of Practice in reciting Poetry”¹² and to “the Art of Reading” prose. When John Walker published his two-volume Elements of Elocution in 1781, he diagramed the “wave-like rising and falling of the voice, which constitutes the variety and harmony of speech,” stating that it was unnecessary to enter the auditory range of polished speakers to achieve effective tonal modulation.¹³ Walker’s practical guides offered a communicative and pleasing voice, properly emphasized and tuned, without any living, oral instruction. In this, they owed much to the advances in the understanding and encoding of speech made by Joshua Steele, whose scientific approach to elocution and prosody resulted in the radical visual display of English speech: crosssectional views of sentences that enabled the imagination of English as pervaded by upward and downward “slides”—and enabled the imagination of the countries of the British Isles as patterned by their prevailing tonal axis, or characteristic inflection.

In 1775 Steele illustrated the melodies and measures that pervade all English utterance—and verse and prose—by graphing parts of the church service, Shakespeare’s and Milton’s blank verse, and his own prosaic exposition on an expanded musical scale (Figure 21). Historians consider Steele’s Essay Towards Establishing the Melody and Measure of Speech To Be Expressed and Perpetuated by Peculiar Symbols the “first attempt at a scientific account of English intonation.”¹⁴ By “expressing on paper” (8) the inherent musicality of English utterance—its “melody of modulation” and “rhythmus of quantity” (2)—Steele hoped to improve both speech and writing and to persuade theater professionals to follow ancient Greek and Roman tradition by adding bass accompaniment to dramatic declamation. The elevation of the language arts would require the clarification of phonological analyses, however, which Steele believed were muddied because of “a want of terms and characters, sufficient to distinguish clearly the several properties or accidents belonging to language” (viii). Although he recruited and invented signs to mark five aspects of speech—accent, emphasis, quantity, pause, and force—the symbols that most excited Steele were those that marked his more accurate sense of “accent”: the “imperceptible slides” (2) of ordinary speech. Attempting to differentiate and clarify the phonological aspects of speech, Steele gave to printed symbols the power of encoding sounds and demanded new, complex forms of interpretive engagement with the printed page.

Figure 21. Joshua Steele, An Essay Towards Establishing the Melody and Measure of Speech (London, 1775), 13.

Descriptively ambitious and radically experimental in its exploitation of print, Steele’s essay principally worked to counter the widespread misunderstanding, reinforced most recently in Lord Monboddo’s essay On the Origin and Progress of Language, that the English speaking voice is “monotonous, or confined like the sound of a drum, to exhibit no other changes than those of loud or soft”:¹⁵ “Whilst almost every one perceives and admits singing to be performed by the ascent and descent of the voice through a variety of notes, as palpably and formally different from each other as the steps of a ladder; it seems, at first sight, somewhat extraordinary, that even men of science should not perceive the rapid slides of the voice, upwards and downwards, in common speech.”¹⁶ To Steele, speech, like song, is melodious. But where the singing voice steps perceptibly from note to note, the speaking voice slides imperceptibly, and rapidly, through them. To help his readers recognize this elusive melody, Steele appealed to the imperceptibility of topographical difference, remarking that in “travelling through a country, apparently level, how few people perceive the ascents and descents that would astonish them, if the man of art were to demonstrate them by his instrument, and to bring the sluggish stream to form a cascade! In like manner, when the modulation of the melody of speech shall be ripened into method by art, even the vulgar may be taught to know what the learned can now scarce comprehend” (5). On the verge of presenting his newly conceived method for notating the “ascents and descents” of speech on a musical staff, Steele thus invoked another “man of art”: the surveyor or canal engineer who demonstrates gradient with his leveling “instrument” and exposes the landscape’s undulations by modulating the flow of water through a lock or ladder of locks. A like feat can be accomplished, he asserts, by a skillful modulation of the vocal tones.

Michael Maittaire’s English grammar of 1712 made no appeal to topography in its description of general discourse as being “uttered” in an “even and levelled voice.”¹⁷ Only at moments of interrogation and exclamation, admiration, or wonder—marked by the “Point of Interrogation” (?) and the “Wondering Point” (!)—did the voice rise and fall: “Here the Passion comes [into the discourse], sharper in the first, graver in the last, but vehement in both. The [interrogative] begins with an Acute accent, and then falls, with a quickness of the words, as being in haste to receive an answer to its Question: The [admirative] begins with a Grave, and raises itself gradually and slowly, as requiring more time to consider; since we are in no haste to be resolved about that, which is so wonderful to be past all answer and solution” (193). By 1775, however, when Steele challenged assumptions of the flatness of English utterance, he conceived of discourse as a “country, apparently level” but shot through with undulation.¹⁸ The intervening years had seen developments in both topographical and phonological analyses. Sheridan’s lectures had promoted the idea that tones mark the “infinite variety of emotions” attending operations of the mind, that they pervade discourse, and that they have a semantic function: “our very ideas can not be communicated, nor consequently our meaning understood, without the right use of tones; as many of our ideas are marked and distinguished from each other by tones, and not words.”¹⁹ William Cockin affirmed, “modulations of the voice, which indicate our passions and affections … more particularly point out the meaning of what we say.”²⁰

Also during this period, of course, natural historians and topographical artists had taken increasing interest in the forms of the countryside. More immediately germane to Steele’s topographical analogy was the new rigor with which topographical mapping was being pursued and the rise in cultural prestige accorded accurate, scientific surveys. In 1759, sixteen years before Steele’s essay, the Society of Arts had announced its series of prizes for the “best county maps,” built upon original triangulations, and further awards for accurate determinations of the levels of navigable rivers, an initiative that fostered the work of canal building in Britain.²¹ Several prize-winning county maps used the new French method of hachuring to illustrate orientation of slopes and steepness of the hills—a method, as discussed in the previous chapters, that did not quantify the heights of hills but traced their forms and faces. To the Society of Arts and to the Royal Society Instituted for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge, Steele co-dedicated his Essay on the Melody and Measure of Speech, demonstrating a like concern with measuring and delineating “Natural” phenomena native to Britain—plotting the formal modulations of the land.²²

Although his analytic treats five properties of English utterance, Steele designed his graphic illustrations to accommodate the subtle workings of “accent,” which he defined as the slide within a syllable from a low note to a high note (as in the acute “Oh”) or from a high note to a low note (as in the grave “and”) (Figure 21). Tonal modulations do not merely occur at moments of heightened passion (“Oh!” or “O!”), but throughout speech. They are “rapid” and occur within single syllables—sometimes in two directions to form a circumflex, as in the turn from acute to grave in “our.” Because modulations of speech proceed not “by pointed degrees coinciding with the division of the traditional musical scale, but by gradations that seem infinitely smaller,” Steele added quarter-tone interlineations to the five-lined scale.²³ By this significant enhancement, Steele plainly demonstrated that “accent” (inflection) is an inherent element of utterance and that it is keyed to sense and feeling.

Steele’s recognition of slide’s ubiquity and significance prompted enlargement of scale. Enhancing the scale turned, as it were, a “sluggish stream” into a “cascade,” allowing “men of science” to see on the page what was aurally elusive.²⁴ While the rigor of Steele’s graphs and their intermixture of quantitative and qualitative codes reflect the esprit géometrique and aesthetic interests of British topographical maps in the era of national cartography, it is the fact that scale focused the matter of slope in both projects that highlights their corresponding drives to demonstrate what was not fully apprehensible by the senses. As cartographers were striving to make visible, in plan view, those formal relations and variations of ground unattainable by the eye, so too was Steele striving to make visible—and virtually audible—the interacting dimensions of voice and the pivotal feature of slope that can “scarce” (5) be apprehended by the ear. In a further correspondence, Steele sought to illustrate not absolute tones on the chromatico-diatonic scale but the relative steepness and tilt of the slides in utterance—just as British cartographers, until the 1830s, were more interested in determining slope and orientation of the uplands than absolute heights.²⁵

Steele’s graphical displays, then, did not level English speech, prose, and verse but rather show them to be equally pervaded by “accent,” or “diversity of tone” (11). Their likeness also hinged upon their organization in “emphatical divisions,” or cadences of equal time (11): “Every sentence in the language has a rhythmus peculiar to itself, whether prose or verse. That is, in the language of modern musicians, it is either in common time or triple time, videlicet, minuet time, or jigg time, or mixed” (28). Steele’s graphical display of the “rhythmus of quantity”—the isochronous units of stress and unstress, or thesis and arsis, that course through speech, prose, poetry, and song—thus further democratized the language arts, and brought them closer to physiological process: “Our breathing, the beating of our pulse, and our movement in walking, make the division of time by pointed and regular cadences, familiar and natural to us” (20). Steele’s graphical displays of the “emphatical” movements of English thus enabled such striking sociolinguistic claims as Wordsworth’s that he writes a poetry in the speech of the common man, and that there is “no essential difference” between poetry and prose: the “same human blood circulates through the veins of them both” (LB 750).

Steele’s diagrams made for particularly demanding reading. His plotting of the “To be or not to be” soliloquy expands the phonological dimensions of blank verse, marking thesis and arsis and tracing the upward and downward slides of syllables, in time, along the five-lined staff above (Figure 22). His iterations of a couplet from John Denham’s “Cooper’s Hill” likewise thicken poetic reading as they demonstrate, by showing emphasis, quantity, and rests, the “proper” measure of heroic lines into at least six temporally equivalent cadences rather than units of five feet: “Tho’ | deep, | yet | clear; | tho’ | gentle, | yet not | dull; || Strong, | without | rage; | with | out o’er | flowing | full”—and, in the voice of the revered actor David Garrick—who makes cameo appearances throughout elocutionary texts—“Strong with | out | rage; | with | out o’er | flowing | full |” (31). First in a long tradition of the topographical genre, “Cooper’s Hill” celebrates temperance in the English monarchy and poetic measures, a value the poem locates in the windings of the River Thames and in the rolling landscape. While it is tempting to read Steele’s newly discovered “ascents and descents” (5) of voice in the poem’s moralistic ranging across English “swells” and “wanton Vallies” and its positing of Windsor Castle on “an easie and unforc’d Ascent” to which “no stupendious Precipice denies / Access,” it is John Walker’s reprinting of the same couplet from “Cooper’s Hill” in his 1781 Elements of Elocution that more closely aligns the ideas of an easily rising and falling English landscape and speech.²⁶

Walker, an actor-turned-elocutionist and lexicographer, was more prescriptive regarding intonation. In his Elements of Elocution, which offered full, print instruction in standard English pronunciation without the aid of a lecture, he seized upon Denham’s moral lines to reinforce the alternating slides characteristic of what he considered the proper English voice. To standardize, Walker simplified: “Whatever other diversity of time, tone, or force, is added to speaking, it must necessarily be conveyed by these two slides” (I: 117), he asserted, or else “the true meaning of a sentence” will not be conveyed (I: 112). As I discuss in Chapter 4, Walker followed Sheridan in spreading the doctrine of emphasis and devised signs for marking in print the force that experts recognized as necessary to comprehension; but inflection, he insisted, was essential. A right “turn of voice”—a qualitative turn upward or downward—“finishes this emphatical word, or that member of a sentence where we pause” (I: 121). Inflection becomes the master phonetic signal without which others fall short of their functions.

Figure 22. Joshua Steele, An Essay Towards Establishing the Melody and Measure of Speech, 40.

Figure 23. John Walker, Elements of Elocution, vol. I (London, 1781), Plate I.

Walker’s resolution of speech into essential “inflexions” takes the graphic form of a continuous line. Dispensing with Steele’s scale, which functioned by degrees, and its detailing of tone, time, and emphasis, Walker figured utterance as sheer contour: upward and downward “turns” running through almost every word of a sentence but most perceptible at emphatic words and long pauses (Figure 23). A set of foldout plates offered aphorisms engraved to show their axial turns—the “great outlines of pronunciation” which “every ear, however unpractised, will naturally adopt in pronouncing them” (117)—including, on Plate I, “Well begun is half done” (No. X) and “Exercise and temperance strengthen the constitution, and sweeten the enjoyments of life” (No. V). No. VI graphed the perfectly alternating inflections of Denham’s “Cooper’s Hill” and thus aligned the court voice that rising professionals were to adopt with the vicissitudes of the Thames and the gentle “swells” and “Vallies” of the countryside. Thus Walker’s graphs of rising and falling inflection strikingly belie the idea of “monotonous” (Monboddo) and “even and level utterance” (Maittaire) as well as the restriction of tonal modulation to moments of interrogation and admiration. As Walker stated, “by the elevation of voice [grammarians] impute” to the notes of interrogation and admiration, “it is not unlikely that they mean the pathos or energy by which we usually express passion or emotion, but which is, by no means, inseparably connected with elevation of voice” (II: 324–35). His “great outlines of pronunciation” (I: 117) represent English as a more broadly prosodic system, in which accentual “slides” enable the semantic and affective function of the emphases and pauses that structure sentences and that serve as a ground for the qualitative, emotional tones that pervade utterance.

But these slides that Steele and Walker regarded as fundamental to communication were also indicative of nationality. Walker used the two “axes”—the “most marking differences in reading and speaking”—to mark the outsiders from the insiders, the rustics from the polite: “the Scotch pronounce the far greater part of their words with the acute accent, or rising inflexion, and the Irish as constantly make use of the grave accent, or falling inflexion, while English observe pretty nearly a due mixture of each.” Thus, he concluded, “the Irish ought to habituate themselves to a more frequent use of the rising inflexion, and the Scotch to the falling, in order to acquire … the English accent” (II: 14). Where Steele’s differentiation of Irish, Scots, English, and Welsh patterns of “accent” attended descriptively to the larger British context, Walker’s diagrams of voice explicitly prescribed an English ideal of eloquence. More readily consumable than Steele’s complex illustrations, Walker’s plates of plotted phrases could be referred to as “a kind of data” or set of “principles” on which to mold all utterance (I: 118). They represent an ideological encoding, and geographical standardization, of sound.²⁷

Wordsworth’s understanding of national and native accents developed in the context of the graphic characterizations of accent and emphasis that elocutionists and prosodists made central to English speech, verse, and prose. But whereas Steele and Walker, charting “Cooper’s Hill,” had implicitly linked “emphatical divisions” and “inflexion” to the English landscape, nationalizing its patterns of sound, Wordsworth explicitly naturalized these patterns.²⁸ This naturalization is evident in an 1818–20 addition to Book X of The Prelude that depicts his 1792 return from revolutionary France to the land of his birth. The addition revises the 1805 text in the direction of a pointed patriotism defined by the grounding of speech in native soil. In the process, it also naturalizes blank verse, in print, as an English melody and measure.

In the 1805 text, Wordsworth returns to his “native Land, / (After a whole year’s absence)” to find the discursive “air yet busy with the stir / Of a contention which had been rais’d up / Against the Traffickers in Negro Blood” (1805, X: 201–2, 203–5). In the later, revised text, the discursive air is neither political nor fractious but rather unified by feeling tones, the signature inflections of “native speech” (1850, X: 240).²⁹ Likewise, the land is represented as a rhythmical unity. The new passage begins by naturalizing the rhythms that inform cadence (from cadere, to fall) as it takes the measure of time spent away from England’s shores, which are marked by the “Beat” of the waves upon them:

Twice had the trees let fall

Their leaves, as often Winter had put on

His hoary crown, since I had seen the surge

Beat against Albion’s shore, since ear of mine

Had caught the accents of my native speech

Upon our native Country’s sacred ground.

A Patriot of the World, how could I glide

Into communion with her sylvan shades,

Erewhile my tuneful haunt? (1850, X: 236–44)

Recalling the temporally and topographically condensing, bird’s-eye cartospection of his Alpine walk (Chapter 2),³⁰ Wordsworth here imagines a linguistic return flight, over the wild anapestic surges of the coast (“surge / Beat against Albion’s shore”), to an aural pattern bodily recognized—the tones of “native speech” “caught” by the ear as if from the air but derived from, and grounded by, “our native Country’s sacred ground.” The regular iambic march of the pentameter (beginning at “Upon”) signals Wordsworth’s return to a stable literary tradition, to the measures of Shakespeare, Milton, and Cowper, which he not only domesticates but naturalizes—grounding their “accents” in a landscape of swells and valleys that unfolds across the rhythm of the line.

However, it is not just by the conceptual conjoining of meter and “ground” that Wordsworth naturalizes “accent”; he also does so by the way he displays the sentence across the lines. The different spatial locations in the circulation of accent between air and ground are allotted to different verse lines, creating a visual cross-section:

Had caught the accents of my native speech

Upon our native Country’s sacred ground.

Whereas Steele graphs “accent”—the upward and downward “slides”—on a scale bar above a line plotting “emphatical divisions” (see Figure 20), Wordsworth uses the visual organization of blank verse on the page to figure the oral/aural relationship of “native speech” and “Country”: tones float above but emerge from, and are heard as one stands upon, or walks across, the ground. He thus takes advantage of blank verse’s horizontal and vertical array as lines upon the page to nationalize and naturalize it. The passage visually emphasizes the patterns of accent that are said to be native and patriotic; these patterns, in turn, naturalize and nationalize the visuality of the medium. Insofar as oral, aural, and visual are mutually reinforcing, Wordsworth’s blank verse is aligned with the native accents and emphases it describes—and contrary to eighteenthcentury critical orthodoxy, still represented as “tuneful,” or poetic.

This prosodic and topographic configuration also implies an incarnation: “native,” transferred from “speech” to “Country,” invokes, via allusion to Milton, the nativity of Christ.³¹ At least, such an implication accounts for the next adjective Wordsworth chooses, “sacred,” which makes English “ground” the material form of the moving spirits that are English “accents.” The young Wordsworth is shown to have been up in the air—ungrounded—in espousing a more universal language of feeling, marked by the strong divergence from the iambic in the next lines: “A Patriot of the World, how could I glide / Into communion with her sylvan shades?” Glide suggests a facile mobility—an all-too-easy way of entering a state that in the Anglican Church must be prefaced by an effortful act of repentance and entreaty. Gliding in, the young Wordsworth is figured as too migratory a bird; moreover, “sylvan shades” is an unspecific cliché, an example of the eighteenth-century poetic diction that Wordsworth denounced in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads. The lines thus criticize the internationalist idealism of the republican Wordsworth of 1792: to be a “Patriot of the World” appears an empty paradox, lacking affiliation to a speech that returns the speaker to a common birthplace. One’s “native” country is a fatherland (from patria/pater); the “World” is not.

The 1818–20 addition crucially channels the narrative of developing poetic identity away from revolutionary engagement and international republicanism into the renewal of “native speech.” Though not on the tip of his tongue, the “accents” of “native speech,” or tones of native feeling, that unify the country are deeply interfused within his being (his English “ear” catches them) and will reassert themselves as he stands upon England’s “ground” (as his strong iambic cadence suggests). “Tuneful haunt” also hints at the means of renewal, for it suggests that “native” “accents” are natural: birdsong, a kind of natural communication in melodic tones, em-placed in local woods, will retune his tongue and resonate in Wordsworth’s future’s verse (the “tuneful haunt” of the poem on the page).

The 1818–20 passage exhibits the reflexivity of a poet comfortable in his art. It offers a fairly seamless relationship between poetry, speech, feeling, nation, and nature—and uses that relationship to revise his youthful political self-portrait. When Wordsworth first began to articulate their relations in the blank verse of 1798, however, the project of self-portraiture had not yet begun—but would emerge, in part, from his explorations of the emphasis said, by Say, Sheridan, Steele, Walker, and also Hugh Blair and Thelwall, to animate English speech, prose, and poetry. It was in the context of their graphical displays and verbal elaborations of the significance of emphasis that Wordsworth negotiated the turn from a blank verse for the stage to a blank verse for the page.