5
“Infinitely the Most Difficult
Metre to Manage”
Characteristics of Wordsworth’s Blank Verse
“PROOFS OF SKILL ACQUIRED BY PRACTICE”
Wordsworth considered his blank verse a consummate artistic accomplishment. In letters written in his middle and late years, he is quick to admonish correspondents who tend (like many twentieth-century commentators) to confound the painstaking fashioning of a powerfully original and various voice in blank verse with artless or “natural” expression. In a letter of 1831, Wordsworth warns William Rowan Hamilton not to be tempted by the seeming naturalness of blank verse into supposing that the effect of effortlessness takes no effort. Although there is no “cant” in Milton’s claim to be “pouring easy his unpremeditated verse,” Wordsworth tells Hamilton, it is “not true to the letter, and tends to mislead. … I could point out to you 500 passages in Milton upon which labour has been bestowed, and twice 500 more to which additional labour would have been serviceable: not that I regret the absence of such labour, because no Poem contains more proofs of skill acquired by practice [than does Paradise Lost]” (LY 2:45). Blank verse, Wordsworth writes to Catharine Grace Godwin, is “infinitely the most difficult metre to manage, as is clear from so few having succeeded in it” (LY 2:58).
Wordsworth certainly bound himself to a long apprenticeship in the craft of blank verse. Before the publication of the 1800 Lyrical Ballads, which contained thirteen new blank-verse poems, Wordsworth had published only some 230 lines in the form in three poems, all in the 1798 Lyrical Ballads: “Lines left upon a Seat in a Yew-Tree,” “Old Man Travelling,” and “Tintern Abbey.” Between mid-1796, when he probably composed the fragment that Stephen Gill calls his “first significant use of blank verse” (“The road extended o’er a heath,” in DC MS 2),1 and early 1800, after which the bulk of the thirteen new poems in Lyrical Ballads (1800) were begun, however, Wordsworth had amassed in manuscript a body of blank verse more than twenty times the size of his public output. These five-thousand-plus unpublished verses encompass dramatic, narrative, philosophical, autobiographical, descriptive, and lyric genres. They include work on The Borderers, early work on The Prelude, the “Prospectus” to The Recluse, “The Ruined Cottage,” “Description of a Beggar,” “A Night-Piece,” and much more that would eventually find its way into print. By the time he published a substantial body of blank-verse poems in 1800, Wordsworth had been attending for some time and with impressive results to what he calls the “innumerable minutiae” on which “absolute success” in the art of poetry “depends” (LY 2:459).2
The few and “very simple” rules governing Wordsworth’s practice in pentameters are set forth in the 1804 letter to Thelwall. After making explicit his claim that the passion of meter makes it “Physically impossible,” even in blank verse, “to pronounce the last words or syllables of the lines with the same indifference, as the others, i.e. not to give them an intonation of one kind or an other, or to follow them with a pause, not called out for by the passion of the subject” (EY, 434), Wordsworth sets forth a “general rule” for the disposition of stresses: “1st and 2nd syllables long or short indifferently except where the Passion of the sense cries out for one in preference 3d 5th 7th 9th short etc according to the regular laws of the Iambic.”3 Finally, he offers this statement defining what he considers to be allowable variation within these rules: “I can scarcely say that I admit any limits to the dislocation of the verse, that is I know none that may not be justified by some passion or other” (EY, 434).
An additional set of remarks by Wordsworth, concerning the important issue of placement and variety of midline pauses, helps in constructing a more developed picture of Wordsworth’s practical rules with regard specifically to blank verse. In a letter of 1816 to Robert Pearce Gillies, Wordsworth provides a rule of thumb while describing his own practice: “If you write more blank verse, pray pay particular attention to your versification, especially as to the pauses on the first, second, third, eighth, and ninth syllables. These pauses should never be introduced for convenience, and not often for the sake of variety merely, but for some especial effect of harmony or emphasis” (MY 2:343). Earlier in the same letter, Wordsworth had objected to Gillies’s placement of pause in “The Visionary.” He faults in particular a passage in which the line breaks after the sixth syllable in three consecutive verses and offers the general criticism that Gillies “frequently introduce[s] pauses at the second syllable, which are always harsh, unless the sense justify them and require an especial emphasis” (MY 2:343).
The Wordsworth of 1816 might as well have been addressing the Wordsworth of 1793. It may be recalled that in the pentameter verse of An Evening Walk—and especially of Descriptive Sketches—placement of pause after the second syllable is a kind of stylistic mannerism and contributes to the sense of “harshness” that contemporary reviewers had sensed in the versification of Wordsworth’s debut poems. Wordsworth’s comments of 1816 show the poet had in his maturity come into broad agreement with the theory and practice of mainstream English tradition (most importantly with the practice of Milton) in which the pause in a five-beat line is in general restricted to the midline positions. (Wordsworth, however, extends the range of allowable normal pauses to include the seventh syllable.) As is common in Wordsworth’s comments about meter and rhythm, he stresses variety of placement within these relatively strict confines, while again suggesting that he would allow almost any departure from the general rule as long as it were justified by the need for “especial emphasis” or by some “especial effect of harmony.” As is the case with his discussion of “dislocation” in the letter to Thelwall, Wordsworth will exclude in theory no effect that may be justified in terms of the poet’s chief duties: to express passion and to give pleasure. The only practices he will exclude prescriptively are those that might give the impression of caprice or inattention, because such impressions undermine the chief function of versification—to provide a normative “set” against which expressive impulses play. In terms of the discussion of the passion of meter pursued in the first chapter, Wordsworth’s practical rules concerning the placement of pause reflect his concern that meter be manifested in the poem as a restricting presence or counterpassion, so that the passion of the sense may be made palpable through the dynamics of the relationship between the fixed form and infinitely variable realizations of that form.
According to Wordsworth’s “rules,” then, the blank-verse line is theoretically a ten-syllable unit with regularly alternating stress, a tendency toward internal structural balance, and a marked ending. This theoretical pattern (the passion of meter) exists, however, only in and through tense opposition with actual speech sounds and the passions that motivate them (the passion of the subject). This tension, the precise bounds of which Wordsworth consistently declines to define (“I can scarcely say that I admit any limits”), manifests itself chiefly in the interplay between an ideal and a real stress pattern (potentially causing “dislocation”) and in ever-shifting relationships between metrical lines and variable phrases, achieved through enjambment (over marked terminations) and placement of pause. A third source of tension also may be deduced from Wordsworth’s comments and from his practices, the tension (and sense of optionality) produced by the fact that real speech sounds seldom fulfill unambiguously the numerical requirements of the ten-syllable line. Is “power” disyllabic or monosyllabic? Is it “heaven” or “heav’n”? Wordsworth’s practice with regard to ambiguous syllables is less strict in his mature pentameters than in his juvenilia and in the couplets of An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches. As his definition of his “rules” suggests (and as his practice shows), however, he never abandoned his theoretical definition of the line as decasyllabic, nor did he adopt, as did many of his contemporaries and nineteenth-century successors, frequent “trisyllabic substitution” or variable offbeats as part of his metrical set. Wordsworth’s numerical definition of the line implies that apparently extrametrical syllables ought to be recognized as potentially significant occurrences, not merely as grace notes or (in Thelwall’s terms) “appogiaturae” to be resolved without tension in the normal course of the meter. Wordsworth’s lifelong practice of using the tension between the numerical idea of the line and its actual sound is an important source of the liveliness and power of his blank verse.
The blank verse of the 1800 Lyrical Ballads shows that Wordsworth had by the late 1790s already begun to work within and through the general rules that he lays out in 1804 and 1816. Departures from the rules of syllable number and stress placement are, appropriately, rare. Only in “The Brothers” does Wordsworth employ a significant number of genuinely hypermetrical verses (verses containing more than ten syllables that do not also contain ambiguous or elidable syllables). And there the effect is clearly intended, as it marks a generic distinction between passages of direct dramatic speech (set off by the speaker prefixes “Leonard” and “Priest”) and the narrative links between these speeches. Frequent use of unstressed “extra” final syllables (what Wordsworth calls a “trochaic ending”)4 is, of course, characteristic of dramatic blank verse and is a chief means through which such verse may be made to seem more conversational, less formal, than other kinds:
LEONARD.
These Boys—I hope
They lov’d this good old Man—
PRIEST.
But that was what we almost overlook’d,
They were such darlings of each other. For
The only kinsman near them …
(“The Brothers,” ll. 287–42)
(Note in the example also the informal effect of the ninth-syllable pause in line 240, a placement that would be avoided in Wordsworth’s nondramatic blank verse.) This kind of relatively loose blank verse is, for Wordsworth, appropriate only for passages of direct speech and occurs in his corpus regularly only in the dramatic passages of “The Brothers,” in his tragedy, The Borderers, and in some passages of quoted speech in The Excursion. When true eleven-syllable verses with unstressed endings appear elsewhere, they may be considered to serve some extraordinary expressive or emblematic end.
Dislocations of stress pattern, except for “initial inversion,” occur infrequently in the Lyrical Ballads of 1800 and are clearly related either to expressive motives or to aesthetic ends such as variety of pattern or pace. Among the most common kinds of dislocations other than initial inversion are the following (roughly in the order of their frequency of occurrence):
Stress-ûnal implied-offbeat pattern at the opening of a line (midline stress-ûnal patterns are much less frequent)
(“To Joanna,” ll. 48–50)
Stress-initial implied-offbeat pattern at the seventh position (or “fourth-foot inversion”—usually occurring after a strong sixth-syllable pause)
(“Lines left upon a Seat in a Yew-Tree,” ll. 37-39)
(“To Joanna,” ll. 32-33)
Stress-initial implied-offbeat pattern at the ûfth position (or “third-foot inversion”)
(“Michael,” ll. 413–15)
Because stress-initial implied-offbeat formations are rather disruptive of the metrical set, they tend not to occur earlier than the fifth position or, as Attridge puts it, “before the rhythm has had a chance to establish itself (174). Implied offbeats in the third position (or “second-foot inversion”) are indeed rare in Wordsworth’s verse (and in English verse as a whole). Marina Tarlinskaja calculates that such effects account for only 4 percent of all “inversions” in Wordsworth (English Verse, 283, table 43). More will be said about Wordsworth’s use of this source of tension below, in the discussion of “A Night-Piece.” At present, it may be sufficient to note that where it occurs, this rare kind of dislocation may be expected, like the use of eleven-syllable lines with “trochaic endings,” to mark some especially significant expressive or emblematic purpose.
A much more common and pervasive source of metrical variety and interest is Wordsworth’s use of the less-disruptive effects of promotion or demotion of syllables. As these effects will be discussed in detail below in the course of analyses of individual passages and poems, I will limit myself here to a simple mention of one especially characteristic kind of demotion and one of promotion. Wordsworth is fond of using a relatively strongly stressed monosyllabic adjective in the third, offbeat, position. Placed in this position the syllable is felt to be in tense opposition to the meter and frequently produces a slowing effect. This probably results in large part from the strong pull in the metrical set against a third-syllable stress (for reasons mentioned immediately above):
(“Lines Written with a Slate pencil … Rydal,” l. 17)
(“There is an Eminence,—of these our hills,” ll. 7–8)
(“Tintern Abbey,” l. 92)
Wordsworth’s most characteristic kind of stress promotion involves the use of a normally unstressed preposition, article, or conjunction in a “beat” position. Very frequently, this promoted syllable, which has an effect opposite to the slowing effect of the demoted third syllable, falls in the sixth position. As the examples quoted above show, the effect very frequently occurs in those lines that contain a third-syllable demotion, where it seems to function as a kind of rhythmic compensation:
Such verses, in which an initial sense of slow weightiness is balanced by the diminution of stress and relative speediness of the line ending, are a Wordsworthian blank-verse trademark.
Wordsworth’s placement of pause and use of enjambment in the blank verse of Lyrical Ballads also show him to be working in accordance both with his practical rules (as these would later be set forth in the letter to Gillies) and with his ideas about the function of meter in the accomplishment of the aesthetic ends of similitude in dissimilitude. Table 2 analyzes the distribution of pause in a sample of one thousand lines from Lyrical Ballads. It allows comparison of Wordsworth’s mature practice both with his own early work in pentameters (in An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches) and with two very different earlier uses of the form, each of which surely influenced Wordsworth’s development—Paradise Lost and Cowper’s The Task.
TABLE 2
Distribution of Pauses after Syllables and Percentage of
Occurrence in Various Texts
| Pause | PL | ||||
| After | EW | DS | LB1 | (Book I)2 | Task3 |
| Syllable | (%) | (%) | (%) | (%) | (%) |
| 1 | 7.6 | 6.6 | 2.6 | 0.2 | 1.6 |
| 2 | 15.3 | 17.9 | 4.8 | 4.9 | 4.3 |
| 3 | 2.9 | 7.0 | 5.9 | 4.5 | 7.6 |
| 4 | 18.8 | 17.5 | 13.2 | 24.2 | 23.7 |
| 5 | 8.2 | 7.4 | 13.5 | 16.6 | 11.3 |
| 6 | 15.9 | 9.5 | 16.8 | 27.0 | 21.0 |
| 7 | 2.4 | 1.4 | 12.1 | 10.7 | 12.7 |
| 8 | 1.8 | 2.8 | 3.8 | 4.9 | 4.1 |
| 9 | 0.5 | 3.2 | 0.3 | 0.5 | 0.4 |
| Double | 25.9 | 24.6 | 21.0 | 6.0 | 10.9 |
| Triple | 0.5 | 2.1 | 2.6 | 0.2 | 2.3 |
| Unbroken | 62.0 | 64.5 | 35.7 | 31.3 | 36.8 |
Note: Percentages are based upon the number of lines that employ pause; the percentage of unbroken lines relative to the total number of lines is given at the end of the table. |
|||||
Midline pause (after fourth, fifth, or sixth syllable): EW, 42.9%; DS, 34.3%; LB 43.5%; PL, 67.8%; Task, 56%; Pause after fourth, fifth, sixth, or seventh: EW, 48 3%;DS, 35.7%;LB, 55.6%; PL, 78.5%; Task, 68.7% |
|||||
1. The thousand lines analyzed were selected at random from LB (1800). They include “Lines Left upon a Seat in a Yew Tree” (66 lines); “The Brothers,” ll. 1–164; “A Narrow Girdle of Rough Stones and Crags” (86 lines); “There Was A Boy” (32 lines); “Tintern Abbey” (160 lines); “The Old Cumberland Beggar,” ll. 1–154; “Nutting” (55 lines); “Written with a Slate Pencil upon a Stone … upon One of the Islands at Rydal” (35 lines); “There is an Eminence,—or these our hills” (17 lines); “To Joanna” (85 lines); “Michael,” 11.1–146. |
|||||
2. Paradise Lost sample (book 1) consists of 798 lines. The raw numbers for each position are as follows: after 1st = 1; 2d = 27; 3d = 25; 4th = 133; 5th = 91; 6th = 148; 7th = 59; 8th = 27; 9th = 3; double = 33; triple = 1; unbroken = 250. |
|||||
3. The Task sample (book 1) consists of 770 lines. The raw numbers for each position are as follows: after 1st = 8; 2d = 21; 3d = 37; 4th = 115; 5th = 55; 6th = 102; 7th = 62; 8th = 20; 9th = 2; double = 53; triple = 11; unbroken = 284. |
|||||
Pentameter couplets and blank verse, of course, have their own structures of organization, and it may be misleading to compare them here. But the table will help to show the extent to which Wordsworth’s five-beat line becomes a different kind of rhythmic structure in the years between 1793 and 1797–1800. Whereas in 1793 Wordsworth seems to have been striving through idiosyncratic placement of pause to distinguish the movement of his verse from that of predecessors and contemporaries, by the later 1790s he has accepted midline pause as an internal structural requirement of the five-beat form. Whatever will be distinctive about his verse will emerge within the context of certain enduring rhythmic patterns, inherent in the physical form of the verse itself (its tendency to break into a balanced 4/6, 5/5, or 6/4 structure), and sanctioned by earlier use.
Similarities in the placement of pause in Wordsworth, Cowper, and Milton suggest one of the reasons why the form is “infinitely the most difficult metre to manage.” Blank verse may free the poet from the bondage of rhyming, but it imposes its own, more subtle, kinds of restraint at other levels of organization. There simply are not very many options for breaking a five-beat line without threatening its integrity as a line. At the same time, table 2 reveals some of the ways in which Wordsworth’s verse in Lyrical Ballads does in fact distinguish itself rhythmically from the other samples: multiple pauses occur more frequently than is common in the nondramatic blank-verse tradition (this accounts for the relatively low percentages in each position under Lyrical Ballads compared with both Milton and Cowper); pauses are distributed fairly equally among the midline positions (that is, Wordsworth shows no clear preference, as do Milton and Cowper, for pauses after stressed syllables over pauses after unstressed syllables); and pauses fall almost as frequently after the seventh syllable as they do in the more conventionally acceptable positions, the fourth, fifth, and sixth syllables. Milton, although showing a similar tendency to eschew pauses after the second, third, eighth, and ninth syllables, definitely favors the fourth-and especially the sixth-syllable pause (he uses these two almost twice as frequently as he does the fifth- and seventh-syllable pause), and he uses the seventh-syllable pause less frequently than does Wordsworth. Cowper, whose blank verse is commonly cited as a forerunner of Wordsworth’s because of its less Miltonically magisterial and more conversational movement, also shows a decided preference for pauses after even-numbered syllables. Cowper’s preference for the fourth-syllable pause is perhaps a residual effect of his extensive early work in couplets (fourth-syllable pause being a trademark of eighteenth-century couplet verse). It also helps to account for the relative (and appropriate) lightness and rapidity of Cowper’s line when compared with Milton’s.
Another chief source of formal tension and variety in any blank verse is, of course, enjambment, which creates potentially meaningful kinds of interplay between syntactic structures and the metrical frame. Wordsworth’s letter to Thelwall calls particular attention to line endings, as it asserts that the passion of meter is felt especially at line boundaries. At line ends, Wordsworth says, a minute sense of physical restraint must be felt, whether or not it is consonant with the rhythmic and syntactic manifestation of the passion of the subject. That is, a run-on line in good poetry does not invalidate the force of line endings; rather, it uses that inescapable force to effect.
Wordsworth uses run-on lines considerably less frequently than Milton but considerably more frequently than Cowper: 51.1 percent of the lines in the sample from Lyrical Ballads are enjambed, compared with 66.8 percent in Paradise Lost (book 1) and 36.6 percent in The Task (book 1).5 Related to the issue of frequency of enjambment is Wordsworth’s practice in the use of medial full stops (defined here as a midline pause, normally at the end of an independent clause and usually marked by punctuation stronger than a comma). Here, too, the three samples show important similarities and dissimilarities. In Lyrical Ballads, 14.1 percent (141/1000) of the lines surveyed contain a medial full stop, compared with 18 percent in the Paradise Lost sample (145/798) and 12 percent in the first book of The Task (93/770).
More revealing still is the ratio of medial full stops to all full stops. In Wordsworth’s blank verse, 15.5 percent of the lines have full stops at line endings. Milton uses line-ending full stops in only 12 percent of his verses. In Cowper—again perhaps because of habits instilled through his writing of couplets—full stops correspond with line endings in 27.1 percent of the lines. The percentages of medial full stops relative to all full stops in the three samples, then, are 47.6 percent in Lyrical Ballads, 55 percent in Paradise Lost, and only 30.7 percent in The Task. Once again, Wordsworth’s practice places him between the extremes of Milton’s heavily enjambed style—in which the paragraph, not the line or the sentence, is the chief structural unit—and Cowper’s more restrained style, in which the integrity of the line itself tends more often than not to be preserved.
These figures might easily be taken to suggest that the basic structure of Wordsworth’s blank verse is a kind of compromise between the Miltonic and Cowperian, favoring the Miltonic. And such a conclusion would not be entirely wrong by way of a general description of Wordsworth’s practice. Wordsworth does achieve greater interplay between metrical frame and syntax, line and phrase, than does Cowper. At the same time, he allows the counterpassion of the frame to manifest itself (through greater end-stopping and conformity of phrase and line) more frequently than does Milton. And Wordsworth does distribute the pause more equably among the midline positions than does either Milton or Cowper. A closer look at the Lyrical Ballads sample, however, reveals an important way in which Wordsworth’s practice is not adequately described as a compromise between seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century habits. In both Milton and Cowper, the tendencies of the larger sample provide, by and large, an accurate reflection of individual passages within the sample: that is, Milton’s clear preference for late pause and frequent enjambment and Cowper’s clear preference for early pause and infrequent enjambment tend to be in evidence throughout the samples. In the selection from the Lyrical Ballads, however, the tendency toward moderation suggested by the figures turns out to be a statistical fiction, an average of a very wide variety that does not accurately describe any one part of the sample. Any given passage of Wordsworth’s blank verse may be as frequently end-stopped and line-conscious as Cowper, as frequently enjambed and paragraphed as Milton, or virtually anywhere in between. It all depends on the expressive and aesthetic ends of the poet, on who is represented as speaking, about what, in what genre, to whom, and under what circumstances.
Distribution of Pauses after Syllables and Percentage of
Occurrence in Various Texts
| Pause After Syllable |
Tintern (%) |
Abbey | Michael (%) |
(ll. 1-146) | LB (%) |
Total |
| 1 | - | - | 2.3 | (2) | 2.7 | (17) |
| 2 | 0.4 | (5) | 2.3 | (2) | 5.0 | (32) |
| 3 | 0.5 | (6) | 4.5 | (4) | 6.0 | (38) |
| 4 | 15.9 | (18) | 7.9 | (7) | 13.9 | (88) |
| 5 | 19.5 | (22) | 12.5 | (11) | 13.7 | (87) |
| 6 | 9.7 | (11) | 23.8 | (21) | 17.3 | (110) |
| 7 | 16.8 | (19) | 6.8 | (6) | 12.4 | (79) |
| 8 | 0.4 | (5) | 5.7 | (5) | 3.8 | (24) |
| 9 | - | - | - | - | 0.4 | (2) |
| Double | 21.2 | (24) | 32.9 | (29) | 22.1 | (140) |
| Triple | 0.3 | (3) | 1.1 | (1) | 2.7 | (17) |
| Unbroken | 29.4 | (47) | 39.7 | (58) | 36.6 | (366) |
| Enjambed | 55.6 | (89) | 44.9 | (67) | 51.1 | (511) |
Note: Numbers in parentheses give the total number of occurrences of pause in each position. |
||||||
Table 3 allows comparison of Wordsworth’s enjambment and placement of pause in two parts of the one-thousand-line sample—“Michael” and “Tintern Abbey”—with the total for the entire sample.
Different kinds of poems apparently require very different kinds of verse. In the narrative poem “Michael,” Wordsworth’s blank verse is characterized by unbroken lines (39.7 percent is an extremely high percentage),6 by a clear preference for pauses after stressed syllables (especially after the sixth), and by relatively infrequent enjambment. The very high frequency of unbroken and syntactically self-contained lines contributes substantially to the effect of simplicity in “Michael”:
He had not pass’d his days in singleness.
He had a Wife, a comely Matron, old
Though younger than himself full twenty years.
She was a woman of a stirring life
Whose heart was in her house …
(ll. 80-84)
Here and throughout the poem, syntactical and metrical structures tend to be commensurate much more frequently than in Wordsworth’s blank verse as a whole. As a result, there is relatively little complexity in the interplay of the passion of the meter and the passion of the sense.
In “Michael,” the clear preference for one placement of pause (and that one late in the line) also helps to create, through the appearance of a relatively easy fit between passion and metrical scheme, a simplicity of expression appropriate to the story of a man who does not “wear fine clothes” (letter to Charles James Fox; EY, 315). The sixth-syllable pause tends to make a five-beat line appear to move slowly. And the frequent use of a single pause tends to make the pause itself seem an element of structure, as opposed to an element of expression:
Nor should I have made mention of this Dell
But for one object which you might pass by,
Might see and notice not. Beside the brook
There is a straggling Heap of unhewn stones;
And to that place a Story appertains,
Which, though it be ungarnish’d with events,
Is not unfit, I deem, for the fire-side
Or for the summer shade. It was the first,
The earliest of these Tales …
(ll. 14–22)
Note in particular how both of the midline full stops in the passage occur in the sixth position (nine of the fourteen midline full stops in the sample passage fall in this position also). In such verse, the favored midline position comes to be felt as only slightly less an element of structure than is the length of line. The placement of pause, that is, is properly an element of the “general rule” governing the verse, rather than a disruptive exception. It produces not expressive tension but a sense of pleasing variety appropriate to a narrative founded on deep, not volatile, feeling and presented for the delight of a “few natural hearts” and for the sake of those “youthful Poets” who will be the narrator’s “second self” when he is gone. The rhetorical gesture here, as in “Hart-Leap Well,” suggests a kind of preexisting bond among poet, tale, and reader. The rhythmic characteristics of the verse may be regarded as a chief means for incorporating this bond into the tale. Wordsworth offers few surprises in “Michael,” few twists and turns of passion or expression. The rhythm of his verse functions not so much as an overt challenge to preexisting habits of association but as a gentle reinforcement of salutary combinations of thought and feeling that the speaker assumes are at his disposal. This is the voice of the village storyteller, telling to effect a tale that instantiates commonly acknowledged kinds of power; it is not the voice of the bard creating new combinations of thought and feeling.
“Tintern Abbey” departs from the averages of the sample almost as sharply as does “Michael,” but in very different, even idiosyncratic, ways. Whereas “Michael” restricts the distribution of pause, “Tintern Abbey” disperses it evenly and widely in positions four to seven. Whereas the line is broken in “Michael” much less frequently than in the sample as a whole, in “Tintern Abbey” it is broken much more frequently. “Tintern Abbey” employs enjambment in 4.5 percent more of its lines than does the sample; “Michael” in 6.2 percent fewer. Such devices in “Tintern Abbey” are as appropriate to the expressive ends of a poem, the versification of which Wordsworth called “impassioned music” (PW 2:517), as is the verse of “Michael” to a “history / Homely and rude” (ll. 34–35). Pause is not, in the following passage, chiefly a structural source of pleasant variety. It is an expressive index of the tension inherent in the act of a mind engaged in complex processes of thought and feeling:
We see into the life of things.
If this
Be but a vain belief, yet, oh! how oft,
In darkness, and amid the many shapes
Of joyless day-light; when the fretful stir
Unprofitable, and the fever of the world,
Have hung upon the beatings of my heart,
How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee
O sylvan Wye! Thou wanderer through the woods,
How often has my spirit turned to thee!
(ll. 50-58)
The paragraph break falling after the eighth syllable, the triple pause in the second full verse, and the double pause (including a second-syllable pause) in the seventh line quoted all help to create the impression of a mind engaged in a process of discovering and making—the meanings it articulates, rather than of a speaker reciting a tale the general course of which is known in advance. Phrases are allowed to take their own shape, expressing and emblematizing through tension between metrical and syntactic structures the fluxes and refluxes of the speaker’s mind.
Such features of the verse call attention to the minutiae of expression to a greater degree than is usual, or welcome, in narrative verse. Note, for example, the parallel repetition, with significant syntactic and rhythmic variation, in the seventh and ninth lines of the quoted passage:
The rhythmic effectiveness of the minute change in phrase may easily be felt merely by repeating the lines, in either form, without the variation:
How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee
O sylvan Wye! Thou wanderer through the woods,
How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee!
How often has my spirit turned to thee
O sylvan Wye! Thou wanderer through the woods,
How often has my spirit turned to thee!
Even more revelatory of the power of Wordsworth’s repetition is the unsatisfactory effect resulting from a reversal of the repeated lines:
How often has my spirit turned to thee
O sylvan Wye! Thou wanderer through the woods,
How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee!
The unsettling nature of this rewritten version probably results from the expectation that endings, even verse paragraph endings, will resolve tensions, not introduce them. In Wordsworth’s original version, the final line is indeed a more neatly satisfying, less complex realization of the scheme than is the first. Even the reduction of stress on the auxiliary verb (“has”) contributes. Whereas the pause in the first line allows “have” to take a full stress, in the final line the absence of a pause gives the line four primary stresses. The result is a faster paced verse that also takes advantage of the deep-seated physical pull of the four-beat, binary rhythm around which all five-beat verse plays. Its approximation of the feel of a four-beat verse contributes to its ability to function as a grounding, stabilizing influence on the paragraph as a whole.7 Such effects help to underscore and embody the speaker’s assertions, to give physical proof that the progressive regeneration of power he professes to feel is in fact under way. Rhythmic strength expresses and emblematizes the poet’s sense of regeneration upon his return to the sources of his power.
Of interest, also, is the way in which the lines call attention, through their similarity, to the very subtle but philosophically central difference between the content of the two phrases; namely, the question of the extent to which the reinvigoration of the speaker’s power, celebrated in the poem, is a result of the self-motivated “turning” (and returning) of the “I” and the extent to which it is a result of an influence other than and perhaps superior to the “I.” In short, has the speaker himself turned, or has he been turned? By repeating the phrase in rhythmically similar and dissimilar forms—one that expresses, in a broken line, the speaker’s assertion of power (I have turned), the other that acknowledges, in a single unbroken line, the primacy of the “spirit” in the act of restoration (my spirit has turned)—Wordsworth embodies in an essentially lyric mode what might be called the motivating (and paradoxical) tension underlying the entire poem. An assertion of a free and spirited, self-motivated turn out of the course that necessity seems to have dictated and an assertion of the speaker’s belief that finally it was not in fact a free and self-motivated turn are matched, rhetorically and rhythmically, not as antithetical statements but as two variations on the same theme. In such places, the passion of the sense and the passion of meter overlap and interpenetrate in complex ways. Such interpenetration tends to focus attention on the medium itself, justifying Wordsworth’s assertion that the poem might have been called an ode chiefly on the strength of its “impassioned music.”8
Another telling—and effective—difference between the blank verse of “Michael” and that of “Tintern Abbey” is evident in the use of midline full stops. In the “Michael” sample, only fourteen full stops fall in midline positions, compared with thirty-three at line ends (14/47;or 29.8 percent); “Tintern Abbey” contains twenty-seven medial full stops, and only fourteen full stops at line ends (27/41; or 65.8 percent). The difference in Wordsworth’s practice in the two poems—and especially the differences between each poem individually and the Lyrical Ballads sample totals—are a fair index of just how various Wordsworth’s rhythmic practice can be. In the total one-thousand-line sample, the percentage of medial full stops relative to total full stops is 47.2 percent (143/303). Wordsworth’s preference for end-line full stops in “Michael” is nearly as marked a deviation from this average as is the opposite preference for midline full stops in “Tintern Abbey.”
In “Michael,” the frequent coincidence of full stops with line endings is another of the many ways through which Wordsworth creates that sense of easy recitation of event that is the proper form of communication between his storyteller and the sympathetic audience. Where metrical and expressive structures are commensurate—where line endings mark units of thought—the poet foregoes one of the chief means at his disposal for creating complexity and tension:
UPON the Forest-side in Grasmere Vale
There dwelt a Shepherd, Michael was his name,
An old man, stout of heart, and strong of limb.
His bodily frame had been from youth to age
Of an unusual strength: his mind was keen,
Intense, and frugal, apt for all affairs,
And in his Shepherd’s calling he was prompt
And watchful more than ordinary men.
(ll. 40-47)
The effectiveness (and distinctiveness) of Wordsworth’s quite deliberate reduction of rhythmic complexity and tension may be appreciated by comparing it with the very different effects that issue from Southey’s attempts in the 1790s to create a blank-verse style appropriate to “homely and rude” tales. In Hannah, for example, a work frequently grouped on the basis of style with Wordsworth’s plainer blank-verse poems of the late 1790s,9 midline full stops account for fully 70 percent (21/30) of total full stops, and twenty-seven of the fifty-one lines in the poem are enjambed (52.9 percent). The rhythmic effect of such verse is the very opposite of the effect achieved in “Michael”:
[I]t was one,
A village girl; they told us she had borne
An eighteen months strange illness; pined away
With such slow wasting as had made the hour
Of Death most welcome—To the house of mirth
We held our way, and, with that idle talk
That passes o’er the mind and is forgot,
We wore away the hour.
(Hannah, ll. 5–12)
Southey avoids commensurability of phrase and metrical unit as surely as Wordsworth favors it. Whereas Wordsworth achieves simplicity of expression through devices that reduce tension between the metrical frame and the expression of the speaker (allowing in the process a certain latitude in diction, phrasing, and figures without violating the decorum of his tale), Southey seems intent on compensating for unremitting homeliness of diction and syntax through the use of rhythmic means that create such tension. This is not the place to debate the relative merits of Southey’s and Wordsworth’s versification. It may be worthwhile to note here, however, that from Wordsworth’s point of view Southey’s passage of circumstantial narrative (like his own in the passage quoted from “Michael”) lacks the kind of passion that would justify all of this overflowing of physical boundaries and challenging of the integrity of the line.
Wordsworth’s practice in “Michael,” in Lyrical Ballads as a whole, and indeed throughout the Poetical Works shows that he tended to reserve such verse—heavily enjambed and with frequent midline full stops—for poems or passages of poems in which the play of the speaker’s emotions is of the essence. Such verse is not used merely to give a kind of counterbalancing rhythmic license or formal status to poems on homely subjects. In Lyrical Ballads, the only poem approaching Southey’s in the frequency of enjambment and use of midline full stops both is “Tintern Abbey,” in which the practices clearly are employed in the service of expressive and emblematic ends.10 The passage in the poem in which these devices appear most frequently is, predictably, the conclusion, in which the voice of the speaker expresses his hope and faith that the fleeting glimpse he has had of the permanent integrity of his experience will not wholly pass away:
Nor, perchance,
If I should be, where I no more can hear
Thy voice, nor catch from thy wild eyes these gleams
Of past existence, wilt thou then forget
That on the banks of this delightful stream
We stood together; and that I, so long
A worshipper of Nature, hither came,
Unwearied in that service: rather say
With warmer love, oh! with far deeper zeal
Of holier love. Nor wilt thou then forget,
That after many wanderings, many years
Of absence, these steep woods and lofty cliffs,
And this green pastoral landscape, were to me
More dear, both for themselves, and for thy sake.
(ll. 147–60)
Upon the assertion that this deeply personal experience is in fact communicable to his companion (and, by implication, to posterity) rests to a significant degree Wordsworth’s entire poetic project. Appropriately, the stylistic resources used in the service of the assertion are extraordinary, even within the context of this most prosodically complex of the Lyrical Ballads. Of the fourteen lines that make up this passage, ten are enjambed (64.3 percent; the ratio in the poem as a whole is 160/89, or 55.6 percent); six full stops occur in midline positions, compared with only one (the final stop) at the end of a line (compared with 27/14 in the poem as a whole). The effect of the ending, rhetorically, is that of a single powerful assertion of the power of remembrance, continually augmented and revised: “Nor, perchance,” “rather say,” “Nor wilt thou then forget.” The effect of its prosodic character is to embody in the physical experience of reading (and hearing) the tension between assertion and revision—or the sense of confident summation tending toward closure—and the countertendency toward an open-ended avowal of the inability to fix the meaning of the occasion. The extraordinary degree of complexity in the interplay of metrical frame and syntax serves extraordinarily complex ends. Such passages, expressive of a complex interpenetration of thought and feeling, demand to be internalized more than simpler passages do, to be felt and remembered in all of their physical details. Such a demand is appropriate, because to a considerable degree the meaning of the passage is dependent on the reader’s participation (along with the interlocutor) in the experience of just this kind of interpenetration and on his or her remembrance of the complexity of thought and feeling that is the motivating tension in the poem.
The only other passage in “Tintern Abbey” that approaches the ending in the degree to which metrical and syntactic units are in opposition is the beginning. In lines 1–23, fourteen lines are enjambed (60.9 percent) and five of six full stops are medial (83.3 percent; compare 65.8 percent for “Tintern Abbey” as a whole; 47.2 percent [143/303] in the Lyrical Ballads sample). This coincidence in tendency in the first twenty-three and the final fourteen lines may in fact help to account for the full sense of closure produced by the final lines, even though their rhythmic character is unconventional for an ending; that is, although the final fourteen lines do not fulfill the usual expectations of closure—that at endings tension between meter and rhythm, scheme and realization will be reduced—they suggest a kind of completion by means of a return to the rhythmic characteristics of the beginning. More important for present purposes, however, are the different ends to which similar metrical means are employed in the two passages. In the conclusion, the tension between line and sentence as competing forms of organization is primarily an expressive indicator; in the opening, such tensions are more directly emblematic and are especially related to generic considerations.
As the length of the introductory verse paragraph itself makes a statement concerning its speaker’s ambitions and powers, it needs to be considered whole:
Five years have passed; five summers, with the length
Of five long winters! and again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
With a sweet inland murmur.—Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,
Which on a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect
The landscape with the quiet of the sky.
The day is come when I again repose
Here, under this dark sycamore, and view
These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard-tufts,
Which, at this season, with their unripe fruits,
Among the woods and copses lose themselves,
Nor, with their green and simple hue, disturb
The wild green landscape. Once again I see
These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines
Of sportive wood run wild; these pastoral farms
Green to the very door; and wreathes of smoke
Sent up, in silence, from among the trees,
With some uncertain notice, as might seem,
Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods,
Or of some hermit’s cave, where by his fire
The hermit sits alone.
(ll. 1–23)
This paragraph accomplishes a type of fusion of subject and style of versification that is pointedly unlike anything else in the Lyrical Ballads, either in blank verse or rhyme. The speaker, in his graceful synthesis into a harmonious whole of disparate elements of the scene, attempts and accomplishes more than any other speaker in the collection. His imaginative fusion of past and present, landscape and sky, motion and stillness, natural wildness and circumscribed domesticity into a complexly unified picture of the landscape demonstrates exactly the type of mental activity that Coleridge implicitly singles out in Biographia Literaria as the force behind Wordsworth’s most impressive manner: “He [the poet, described in ideal perfection] diffuses a tone, and a spirit of unity, that blends, and (as it were) fuses, each into each, by that synthetic and magical power, to which we have exclusively appropriated the name of imagination” (BL 2:15–16). The verse paragraph—and the poem as a whole—depicts a man possessed of a “prospectiveness of mind” or a “surview” through which he is able to “foresee the whole of what he is to convey.” This foresight allows him “to subordinate and arrange the different parts [of his speech] according to their relative importance, as to convey it at once, and as an organized whole” (BL 2:58).
Wordsworth’s marshaling of the resources of rhythm and sound in the passage is, appropriately, designed to assert the speaker’s comprehensive powers. The paragraph consists of four sentences, each describing in its main clause a distinct aspect of the speaker’s perception: “I hear,” “I behold,” “I … repose / … and view,” “I see.” These sentences become progressively longer and more complex. The first is a compound sentence of thirty-seven syllables; the second employs a compound subordinate clause and is forty-three syllables long; the third sentence contains sixty-five syllables and uses three verbs, a subordinate clause, and three prepositional phrases; the fourth has eighty-one syllables and is a series of three dependent clauses each completing the main clause “I see.” Within these sentences, the placement of the pause is extremely varied but tends to fall late more often than early in the line. Nearly a third of the lines contain more than one pause (seven of twenty-three), and in the remaining lines the pause falls variously after the third (once), fourth (once), fifth (twice), sixth (five times), and seventh (three times) syllables. The multiple pauses tend to create the effect of a spontaneous, conversational tone while the tendency toward late placement tends to produce a slow pace.
As the speaker makes more and more connections among details, progressively building up to a unified whole, his method of describing becomes progressively more capacious. The careful, slow, and patient composition of a landscape complete unto itself finds its appropriate expression in the speaker’s amassing of his words in slowly paced, progressively longer and more complex formal structures. The whole is unified in large part through the repetition of key sounds (particularly by the repetition, four times, of the word “again”) that function (to expand on Wordsworth’s metaphor of metrical writing as “fitting”) as threads running through the paragraph, helping to make of the separate phrases a unified whole. The repetition of the consonant h— to take just one of many instances that might be used to illustrate this pervasive management of sounds—is a particularly important means through which Wordsworth underpins and patterns his speaker’s expression. The sound is used sparingly in early and middle portions of the paragraph: “I hear” (l. 2), “behold” (l. 5), Here” (1.10), “hue” (1.14). It is nevertheless sounded frequently enough to call attention to its presence as an important element in the structure of the paragraph. When, in lines 15–23, the sound becomes (along with s and w) a dominant consonant sound, it functions, as does the repetition of “again,” to unify the paragraph. The amassing in the end of the paragraph of key sounds used sparingly in previous verses parallels the steady increase in the length of sentences and works to reinforce the paragraph’s creation of a voice that seems to gain power as it progresses. Wordsworth thus underpins his speaker’s ability to build great things from least suggestions, ensuring that his reader will have aural, as well as cognitive, evidence of that power.
In a poem that attempts to create a monument to the power of time to create as well as to destroy, this subtle building up of discrete phrases into a unified verse paragraph produces an effect more important than mere harmony of sounds for the sake of harmony. The stitching together of these sentences, effected in large part through the tendency of repeated sounds to work against the onward temporal succession of the sounds of words, is an instance of, as well as a vehicle for, the speaker’s imaginative fusion of past and present into a single scene. Just as the speaker creates through images and figures of speech a representation of the ability of imagination to hold intellectually separable elements in harmonious suspension, so the repeated sounds (particularly those of the insistently repeated word “again”), by eddying back upon themselves, give structure to the temporal succession of the words. The thread of repeated sounds and syllables helps Wordsworth, in Ezra Pound’s terms, to cut a form in time,11 making the paragraph a union of temporal and spatial organization analogous to those described elsewhere by Wordsworth through such figures as the “speaking monument” of The River Duddon (3.3). The paragraph is not merely a description of a result of imaginative perception; it is an active instance of imaginative process.12
The opening paragraph of “Tintern Abbey” is extraordinarily complex not only in comparison with the verse of “Michael” or with the stanzaic poems of Lyrical Ballads and the Poetical Works but even within the context of Wordsworth’s blank verse as a whole. It therefore stands out not merely as a powerfully expressive use of language (though it is that, of course) but as an emblem of (and proof of) the operation of those very powers that the poem is engaged in attempting to define and assert. The heightened formal qualities of the passage function to elevate and foreground the medium itself in such a way that the powers of the poet as poet are made a subject of the poem in a particularly insistent way. These are, after all, “Lines Written … above Tintern Abbey.” The poet’s powers as a writer, as composer of internal and external landscapes in words, are as surely on display as are his capacities to think, feel, and remember. If “Michael” gives us the poet as storyteller, rehearsing a well-known tale, this announces the poet as shaper of hitherto unapprehended experience, giving body to the previously unarticulated through the music and mystery of verse. The blank verse of the poem is appropriately formal, lyrical magisterial. Its elevated style presents it as a masterpiece, in the sense of a work of art undertaken in part to provide “proofs of skill acquired by practice.”
In a poem about the ability of poetry to respond powerfully to loss, such proofs of the speaker’s control over the resources of his art are constitutive of meaning in a precise way: the formal composition of the lines, presented as having issued spontaneously from a state of heightened passions, is a kind of instance of the speaker’s paradoxical claim that his life to date has been (like the “wanderer” Wye) both perfectly free and powerfully determined. Will and necessity, spontaneity and pattern, passionate expression and the poet’s duty to shape expression into pleasurable poems are bodied forth in the very speech impulses and patterned sounds of the verse.
In the first chapter, I suggested that Wordsworth’s is an aesthetic based not so much on unity as on significant diversity, the end of which is the presentation of as wide a variety of poetic speakers as may be pleasurably encompassed by the synthetic and sympathetic mind. Wordsworth’s complex and odic blank verse in “Tintern Abbey” is effective in part because of intrinsic tensions employed to effect and in part because, within the context provided both by rhymed poems and by the less formally complex, less passionate and elevated blank verse in the collection, it is extraordinary. Conversely, the presence of the blank verse of “Tintern Abbey” in Lyrical Ballads helps to bring out more strikingly the different relationship among speaker, subject, and audience that results from the formal simplicity of “Michael.” In “Michael,” the poet who is capable of the heightened verse of “Tintern Abbey” sets aside some of the devices of composition at his disposal in order to single out one among many sources of his power; in “Tintern Abbey,” the poet who is capable of the austerity of the verse of “Michael” provides a stylistically all-encompassing instance of the full power of the mental river into which the tributary represented in “Michael” flows.
“Michael” and “Tintern Abbey,” then, represent two effectively dissimilar adaptations of the same verse form to Wordsworth’s purposes in Lyrical Ballads: the “fitting” of language to metrical arrangement for the purpose of delineating, and encouraging sympathetic participation with, a range of types of minds or of individual minds under various circumstances and influences. And they are only two of many different kinds of blank verse in a collection that includes the dramatic blank verse of “The Brothers” (and of Coleridge’s “The Foster-Mother’s Tale” from Osorio), the Cowperian verse of “Poems on the Naming of Places” (see especially “There is an Eminence, of these our hills,” and “To M.H.”), and the highly rhetorical and sententious verse, anticipatory of the Wanderer’s speeches in The Excursion, of “The Old Cumberland Beggar” (especially its peroration).
Wordsworth’s blank-verse variety is clearly apparent even within individual poems in Lyrical Ballads. The 1800 version of “Animal Tranquillity and Decay, a Sketch,” for example, draws on prosodic means to present a pointed and abrupt change of focus and tone on the part of the speaker. (The poem in this regard anticipates the kind of purposeful dissonance that has been discussed above in connection with “The Sailor’s Mother.”) In “Animal Tranquillity and Decay,” as in “The Sailor’s Mother,” a speaker comments on the appearance of a person he meets on the road, drawing from that appearance a general preliminary impression. The “mein and gait” of the sailor’s mother make her “stately” and dignified; the old man’s “face, his step / His gait” form “one expression”:
… every limb,
His look and bending figure, all bespeak
A man who does not move with pain, but moves
With thought—He is insensibly subdued
To settled quiet.
(ll. 4-8)
The physical expression of the man, his demeanor and his movements, have a language of their own that “bespeaks” his character. The speaker, who may be regarded as a kind of translator into words of these outward signs and actions, finds in his subject an embodiment of one who has been “by Nature led” to a “peace” that he describes as “perfect.” The exercise of patience throughout a long life has become so habitual to the old man as to “seem a thing, of which / He hath no need” (ll. 11–12).
The speaker sums up his impression with an implicit contrast between himself (the “young”) and his subject:
… He is by nature led
To peace so perfect, that the young behold
With envy, what the old man hardly feels.
(ll. 12–14)
The artful antithesis of the speaker’s summation—its balance of the concerns of young and old, of the intense interests of “envy” and the supposed disinterestedness of the old man-is typical of the whole of the character sketch. Throughout the sketch, the speaker sets up balanced contrasts between free will and necessity, activity and passivity (the practice of patience leading to a state in which it seems that no patience is needed), and gain and loss (tranquility and decay).
These contrasts are couched in the first fourteen lines in highly patterned, prosodically subtle language. The opening “sketch” is in fact structured as a kind of blank-verse sonnet.13 It begins with discrete facts about the man’s appearance (the birds do not “regard” him; he “travels on”; his “face, his step, / His gait” form “one expression”), continues with reflections on patience and the meanings of the old man’s appearance, and ends with a summation neatly contained in the lines quoted above. The turn from description to reflection occurs, as would be expected in a poem in sonnet form, midway through line eight, dividing the first fourteen lines into a neat binary structure, octave and sestet.
Within this larger pattern are many other patterns, all of which tend to present the speaker as adept in the habits of formal composition requisite to the kind of exemplary character sketch he has undertaken. A higher than normal incidence of enjambment (eight of fourteen lines; 57.1 percent) and midline full stops (four of six full stops are medial) help make the sketch as rhythmically impressive as any of the blank verse in the collection. These characteristics also help account for the sense of closure at the end of line 14, where the full stop is prepared for by the slowing effects of the pauses after unstressed syllables in lines 13 and 14 and by the use of the demoted third-syllable adjective in line 13:
Note, too, how the promotion of “that” and “what” in the two lines produces the effect of four strong beats per verse, drawing on the stabilizing effect of native measure and thereby contributing to the sense of binary structure on which sonnet form depends.
The sketch also achieves a kind of unity through frequent repetition of verbal sound—particularly alliteration, internal rhyme, and homoeo-teleuton. The repetition of third-person pronouns (“he,” “his,” and “him”) throughout the first fourteen lines (ten times) gives sonic evidence of the speaker’s insistent and minute focus on his subject. The repetition of initial p, from “peck” (l. 2) to “pain” (l. 6) to “patience” (twice, in ll. 10 an 11) to “peace so perfect” supplies a thread of sound underpinning the key transformation of the old man into an example of perfection. The final two lines achieve their sonnetlike summarizing power in part through the rhyme of “behold” and “old” that links lines 13 and 14.
An instance of line-ending homoeoteleuton is particularly significant:
… He is one by whom
All effort seems forgotten, one to whom
Long patience has such mild composure given,
That patience now doth seem a thing, of which
He hath no need.
(ll. 8–12)
The juxtaposition in the final feet of successive verses of “by whom” and “to whom” and the repetition of “patience” in lines 10 and 11 call attention through prosodic minutiae to an overarching thematic concern: the relationship between the old man as one who acts and as one who is acted upon. He is both an agent “by whom” effort has been forgotten through long exercise of patience and a creature of necessity “to whom” nature has “given” peace by leading him to his present state. Taken together, these various kinds of formal pattern help give the first fourteen lines an intense feeling of formal coherence. The sketch is as perfect a reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities as ever Coleridge could want to see and hear.
Then comes the abrupt downfall.14 Lines 15–21 (end) of the poem suggest prosodically and otherwise that here, as in “The Sailor’s Mother,” the perfect “sketch” can only achieve its internal perfection and harmony through the exclusion of the subject himself. When the speaker asks the old man “whither he was bound” on his “journey” (note again, in the pun on “bound,” the speaker’s confidence in his ideal of the perfect relationship between self-determination and necessity), he receives an answer that speaks only of disharmonies and disruptions of peace and contentment, of war and an old father’s loss of a son:
he replied
That he was going many miles to take
A last leave of his son, a mariner
Who from a sea-fight had been brought to Falmouth,
And there was lying in an hospital.
(ll. 16–20)
Line 18 provides the first metrical dislocation in the poem (there is in ll. 1-17 not even an initial inversion), and it comes in a particularly disruptive position:
Such second-foot inversions, as has been mentioned above, are extremely rare because they are so dangerous to the metrical character of the line. The promoted ending of the line continues the effect of ill-fitting meter and rhythm and prepares for a further departure from the metrical set in line 19, where Wordsworth introduces an eleven-syllable line with a “trochaic” ending (a dramatic pentameter):
In short, Wordsworth could not have made the shift in kinds of blank verse more abrupt. Even the 1798 version, in which these lines are presented as quoted speech instead of paraphrase, is not as disruptive as is this change of pace in the voice of the speaker himself. It is as if the speaker’s very recollection of the effect of the old man’s unanticipated response has produced an emotional deflation affecting his powers of expression. He goes from blank-verse master to stammerer in meter as he recounts the excruciatingly prosaic answer of his erstwhile poetic and perfectly contented subject. The concluding passage is utterly devoid of figures of speech (even “going many miles” makes prosaic the “journey” in the speaker’s question) and uses no word or arrangement of words that would be out of place in the barest matter-of-fact speech. Wordsworth shows through stylistic dissonance that, whatever the speaker has captured of his subject, his conventionally unified sketch (in ll. 1–14) is just that a sketch. The concluding lines effectively break open the sketch, challenging the very aesthetic principles on which it is based and suggesting that the quotidian reality that is the old man’s existence must challenge (as must all human existence) the well-intentioned but ultimately inadequate attempt of art to represent it as “something loftier” and “perfect.”15 The ear cautions speaker and reader alike to see more clearly. The voice of the old man, like other voices of other men and women encountered by chance in Wordsworth’s poetry, admonishes the speaker, bringing him back to the “very world.” Through such means Wordsworth implies that the poetry that can adequately comprehend that “very world” is a poetry in which the desire for earthly perfection and the life lived in time and space struggle for dominance in the very music of the poem.
The range of styles within “Animal Tranquillity and Decay” is admittedly more striking and more productive of prosodic dissonance than is usual in Wordsworth’s blank-verse poems. In fact, the last seven lines were not retained by Wordsworth in reprintings of the poem in collected editions from 1815 through 1850. Whether Wordsworth judged that the juxtaposition of metrical styles was too dissonant (at least for the ears of his readers, if not for his own) or whether he decided that the internal tensions between youth and age, tranquillity and decay couched in the easy rhythms of the fourteen-line sketch were themselves sufficient to give the summation the desired effect of a too-perfect and too-neat closure, it is difficult to say. What is clear, however, is that the principle behind such widely various use of the same or similar metrical forms is in evidence throughout Wordsworth’s corpus. The presence of such diversity and such range in the blank verse of Lyrical Ballads (1800) suggests that a chief attraction of (and source of difficulty in) blank-verse composition is the opportunity it affords for the juxtaposition of diverse (even extreme) realizations of the same metrical pattern. The presence, for example, of the last seven lines of “Animal Tranquillity and Decay,” the first twenty-three lines of “Tintern Abbey,” the dramatic blank verse of “The Brothers,” the homely narrative verse of “Michael,” and the marmorial “Lines left upon a Seat in a Yew-Tree,” all in Wordsworth’s first substantial collection, make complexity of voice itself an issue of primary importance. In the more or less tense reconciliation of the discordant qualities of regularity and departure from pattern, in the easy or difficult fitting of phonetic material to abstract and predetermined forms, and in the fluidity or turgidity of the mind as it is expressed through the physical operation of speech reside a fundamental and infinitely complex kind of meaning in Wordsworth’s corpus.
WORDSWORTH’S “BEST SPECIMENS”:
“A NIGHT-PIECE” AND “YEW-TREES”
According to Henry Crabb Robinson, Wordsworth considered “A Night-Piece” (composed probably January 1798; published 1815) and “Yew-Trees” (composed 1804, 1811–14; published 1815) his “best specimens of blank verse.”16 Given Wordsworth’s characteristic precision of statement, such a description may be considered an invitation to consider this pair of poems, both of which appear in Wordsworth’s collected works as Poems of the Imagination, as together containing in small much of what is vital in and characteristic of Wordsworth’s most intensely lyrical and imaginative blank verse.17 A close focus on these two relatively short poems also will provide an opportunity to delve into some of the more minute levels of prosodic organization in Wordsworth’s blank verse. Whereas the first section of this chapter focused chiefly on Wordsworth’s habits in placement of pause and use of enjambment, this section will be concerned more immediately with significant instances of rhythmic dislocation, the structural integrity of individual verses, and patterns of assonance and alliteration.
In “A Night-Piece,” a speaker describes a “pensive traveller” who experiences an unexpected and intensely pleasurable moment of vision brought about by the breaking forth of the moon and stars from a thick cloud cover.18 The dynamics of the poem give it a clear four-part structure: an emotionally neutral beginning, in which the speaker describes a poetically unpromising overcast night (ll. 1–7); a rising action, as the traveller is “startled” by a rift in the clouds, and his eye, which has been “bent earthwards,” now is directed toward a “Vision” of “The clear Moon, and the glory of the heavens” (ll. 8–13); an emotional peak, in which the vision is described (ll. 14–21); and a falling action, as the traveller’s mind, “not undisturbed” by the “delight” it feels, “slowly settles into peaceful calm” (ll. 28–26).
Wordsworth says that he composed the poem extempore on the road between Nether Stowey and Alfoxden, and in DC MSS 15 and 16 it bears the title “A Fragment,” appropriate to the sense of unpremeditated overflow that the poem attempts to imitate. The versification is in fact as clear an instance as Wordsworth’s corpus affords of powerfully expressive and affective blank verse. The volatile and shifting verse rhythms and patterns of sound function primarily to convey the impression that the speaker of the poem is actually, in the process of composition, under the influence of the intense and delightfully disturbing emotions that the poem recollects. These elements of versification in turn serve to encourage the sympathetic participation of a reader in the dynamics of tension and release appropriate to the emotions expressed in the poem. The finished poem, that is, presents itself not merely as an account of the vision but as an invitation to the reader to participate in a reenactment of its emotional content and structure.
The first part of the poem contains virtually no metrical complexity, and therefore no metrical tension, apart from initial inversion (ll. 2, 3, 7), some promotion and demotion of stresses, and three instances of elidable syllables (underlined):
Even the variant structures—for example, the promotion of the initial syllable in the second line and the formation thereby of a relatively weak initial inversion pattern (the ubiquitous +s -s -s +s)—are appropriate to the nearly emotionless calm of the opening. Indeed, the line seems to be designedly gentle when compared with an earlier version (in DC MSS 15 and 16):
(Butler and Green, 276; 500-501)
Here, the relatively more disruptive stress-final pairing (-s -s +s +s) and the implied offbeat produce a kind of metrical tension, implying complexity of emotion, that Wordsworth evidently came to feel was out of place at this point in the poem. The revised version provides a more neutral metrical unit that will help provide in lines 1–7 the basis for an important contrast between the rhythm of the opening and the considerably more complex rhythmic patterns in the central two sections of the poem. Similarly, the list of nouns in line 7, in which “plant” is placed in an offbeat position between the semantically equivalent “rock” and “tree,” tends toward a leveling of stress values and a concomitant diminution of the rhythmic pulse and pace.
In part 2, increasing metrical complexity in the form of double and implied offbeats corresponds to increased emotional activity, as the plodding traveller is startled by the illumination of the previously dull and darkened landscape:
Line 11, as the scansion clearly shows, contains a particularly disruptive instance of a stress-final double-offbeat pattern interrupted by a strong third-syllable pause. Although the metrical set encourages the four-syllable group to be considered as a whole (with the implied offbeat compensating for a double offbeat), this realization sharply splits that normal pattern asunder. An even more unsettling challenge to the metrical set occurs in line 13, with an instance of an effect that has been labeled the diabolus in prosodia (or the metrical equivalent of music’s diminished fifth, or “devil’s,” interval)—second-foot inversion.19 The expressive and emblematic effects of the prosodic breaks in these lines are sufficiently obvious. The “gleam” breaks forth, jolting the “unobserving” traveler, the speaker, and the reader out of the well-beaten, earthbound, and continuous path. It transforms the familiar and predictable into something extraordinary and celestial. There is no more familiar path for the voice to take than the pentameter, and there are few disruptions more threatening to the form itself than the kind Wordsworth introduces here.
The challenge to the metrical set initiated in this second part of the poem develops in part 3 into a realization as close as Wordsworth comes in his pentameter to a genuine departure from “the regular rules of the iambic” and from his own rules concerning placement of pause. Here Wordsworth takes advantage of a number of devices—chiefly enjambment, multiple midline pauses (including pauses in eccentric positions), and effective placement of polysyllabic words—to continue and develop the effect begun in part 2 of extraordinarily energetic speech rhythms. The use of short phrases in this passage is especially effective, as it reproduces in performance the very motions of the speech organs appropriate to the visionary experience. The scene is literally breathtaking:
The phrase “Drive as she drives” is in the context of Wordsworth’s metrical set an astounding departure. The second-foot inversion is disruptive enough; a sequence of four consecutive atypical syllables occurring at the beginning of a line threatens to break the back of the meter. In this case, the combination of strong enjambment before and a midline full stop after the atypical sequence helps to neutralize its disruptive tendencies. The enjambment and the unconventional pattern do, however, tend to prohibit rapid or rhythmically regular pronunciation and make the full stop after “drives” as emphatic as possible. All of this works to emphasize by way of extreme contrast the rapidity and regularity of the second part of the next full phrase, in which the speaker reaches an emotional peak in the contemplation of a vision of profound permanence vested in eternal motion, of infinity and containment both: “how fast they wheel away / Yet vanish not.”
Part 4, introduced by an echo of the transition that began the movement from lesser toward greater metrical complexity (“At length …”), concludes the poem with a return to the rhythmic regularity and longer phrases of the opening:
Only the phrase “not undisturbed by the delight” disturbs the return of realized stresses to their theoretically proper places. The hint of a very rare triple offbeat caused by the placement of the preposition “by” in a beat position is a ripple in the calm that Wordsworth achieved in revision. In DC MSS 15 and 16, the line appears thus:
Introducing the contrast between “delight” and the “peaceful calm” to which the disturbance gives way, Wordsworth also achieves a rhythmic flurry appropriate to the contrast he obviously wishes to make in the structure of the experience between the heightened emotion of the vision and the deeper calm to which it gives way. Elsewhere in this concluding passage, and especially in the two final rhythmically unbroken lines, the prosodic regularity of the opening section returns, marking the slow subsidence of the speaker’s emotions after the “Vision closes.”
Contributing to the sense of fulfillment and closure, too, is a slow gathering of alliteration, especially on the sounds [z] and [s] and the sonorant consonants m, I, and n:
Also contributing is the repetition at the end of the final two lines of the rhythmic pattern +s -s / +s ( / = word boundary)—”peaceful calm,” “solemn scene”—in which the first two syllables form a disyllabic adjective and the last a monosyllabic noun. The effect, a repetition of identical rhythmic and syntactic forms with different sounds, might be called a “stress-contour rhyme.” More will be said below about this pattern in the discussion of the ending of “Yew-Trees,” including evidence that Wordsworth acknowledged its use and effectiveness in Milton. At present it may be sufficient to note that the identical grammatical and rhythmic structure at the end of successive lines is as close as one can come in blank verse (short of a Shakespearean scene-ending couplet, that is) to the sense of closure supplied by a couplet in rhymed verse.
The four-part poem, brief enough to be apprehended as a single rhythmic, sonic, and syntactic whole, proceeds, then, from rhythmic simplicity to extreme complexity and back, giving at the end a sense of return to the beginning, but with a difference. The rhythmic regularity that in the beginning was appropriate to the experience of the “unob-serving eye” is now the embodiment of feeling appropriate to the eye disturbed and then made quiet and solemn by an intervening vision of a sublimely immeasurable abyss in which action and stasis, sound and silence, are one. The structure helps convey through the very rhythmic impulses of the poem a sense that the state of mind embodied at the end of the poem is not different in kind from—and in fact is inextricably connected with—the common and everyday operations of mind with which the poem began. The delight produced by the vision, in other words, is the effect of the whole movement from and return to the everyday and is intended to produce a sense of the potentially heightened significance of—or the “glory” in—the common. Physically, the poem departs sharply from and returns completely to the common rhythms of the metrical set, creating through the process a new sense of the potential richness of that constraining set of conventional expectations.
“A Night-Piece” is impressive and effective in large part because its clearly individuated voice finds expression by means of an extraordinary degree of strain on the metrical set. The versification of “Yew-Trees,” the other half of Wordsworth’s “specimen,” is founded on a very different relationship between expressive impulses and metrical restraints, the passion of the subject and the passion of the meter. Indeed, the prosodic dissimilarity of the two poems suggests that extreme—variety even contrariety—is precisely what the poems, as “specimens” of blank verse, were intended by Wordsworth to exhibit.
In contrast to the speaker of “A Night-Piece,” the speaker in “Yew-Trees” is, as has frequently been noted in recent criticism of the poem, curiously impersonal and unindividuated. In “Yew-Trees,” differences between the single ancient yew, the “pride of Lorton Vale,” and the “fraternal four” of Borrowdale—which form an “umbrage” “not uninformed by Phantasy”—spark a meditation that tends to deflect attention away from the speaker and toward the relationship itself and its implications.20 The poem seems almost to exist to provoke and sustain consideration of relationships between the one and the many, individual act and communal gathering, historical individuals (“Um-fraville or Percy”) and timeless allegorical figures, war and “united worship,” pride and “fraternal” feeling, substance and shadow. Its pleasures, it might be said, are more purely intellectual than are the more immediate and sense-induced “delights” of “A Night-Piece.” Indeed, Lee Johnson has gone so far as to argue that at its deepest levels of organization, the pleasures of “Yew-Trees” are the pleasures of geometrical contemplation.21
The speaker of “Yew-Trees” recedes, as Theresa M. Kelley puts it, with the effect of foregrounding tensions between the sublime otherness of singularity and the beauty of containment.22 Appropriately, then, the prosody and music of the poem depend relatively little on the most disruptive kinds of variation—dislocations of stress pattern—and more on subtleties of phrasing of a kind that tend to reveal the abstract metrical underpinnings of the language, placement of pauses, and patterning of vowel and consonant sounds. The rhythmic pulse remains relatively constant throughout.
In “A Night-Piece,” five of twenty-six lines employ implied offbeat and pairing formations (-s -s +s +s, or +s +s -s -s). Only three such formations occur in the thirty-three lines of “Yew-Trees.” Their sparing use calls special attention to them, not so much as indications of the speaker’s passion (although they are that) as places of particular conceptual importance pointing emblematically toward thematic concerns. The first two instances occur at the very beginning:
The first of the two stress-final formations is the more disruptive because of the relative weakness of “this.” As an adjective it would normally be expected to be subordinated to the noun it modifies.23 An alternative scansion might merely promote “to” and demote “this”:
This option would make the beginning of the line rhythmically more regular, but it would fail to give expression to the contrast, which becomes clear only in the next line, between “this day” and the phrase “as it stood of yore.” At issue here is not how to fix the line by a prescriptive rule of pronunciation; the point is to notice that the lines have built into them at this (early) point a kind of rhythmic complexity that demands a fairly high level of attention to relationships between semantic and nonsemantic details. A good instance of metrical complexity used for emphasis, the uncertain stress value of “this” and the dependence of the syllable on contrasting syllables in the next verse, assures that the relationship between past and present, which is a chief focus of the poem, is felt in the very physical structure of the line. The voice must register the contrast between the syllables “this day” and “of yore” in order for the lines to have metrical integrity.
The only other instance of dislocation in “Yew-Trees” occurs at a point of similar conceptual importance. This time, the effect is somewhat more complex:
As the alternate scansions show, the line is difficult to account for according to Wordsworth’s own strict requirements. “One” must be emphasized in any meaningful realization of the verse. Juxtaposed with “four,” it is acted on semantically very much as “this” is by the implied contrast in “days of yore.” (Note, here, however, that the double adjective, compared with the demonstrative adjective plus noun formation in the second line, is not affected as strongly by syntactic stress hierarchies.) But how can a reading give “one” its due without either producing a jarring triple offbeat (option 1) or realizing six stresses in a ten-syllable line (option 2)? Both of these options are possible but are unusual given the metrical set (whether that set is defined as “Yew-Trees,” Wordsworth’s blank verse, or English nondramatic blank verse as a whole). And both would leave the initial inversion condition unfulfilled. The third scansion shows a way in which initial inversion conditions could be fulfilled—by regarding “one” as demoted—but this is precisely what any reasonable reading would want to avoid.
Again, the absolute stress value of “one” is not the issue. The point is that a powerful and legitimate set of expectations based on the tradition of accentual-syllabic verse and the local conditions of Wordsworth’s blank verse (that the line will have five stresses; that the initial inversion and double offbeat conditions will be fulfilled) is being challenged. The reason behind the difficulty may be the speaker’s wonderment (an expressive indication) or the poet’s desire to emphasize, as in the earlier example, a conceptual point or both. What is certain is that a metrically sensitive reading of the verse calls attention to the juxtaposition of “four” and “one,” embodying in the physical structure of the verse the thematically important issue of unity and multiplicity.
Aside from these three rhythmically complex lines at two different points in the poem, and aside from several commonplace instances of initial inversion formations, “Yew-Trees” contains virtually no further rhythmic dislocation. Variety of versification is accomplished by the relatively more subtle means of promotion and demotion of stress, length of phrase, placement of pause, and patterning of alliteration and assonance.
Fourteen of the thirty-three lines in “Yew-Trees” (42.4 percent) are unbroken, and none of its lines contains more than one pause. Both of these characteristics are much more pronounced in “Yew-Trees” than is usual in Wordsworth’s blank verse: in the sample of one thousand lines from Lyrical Ballads (1800), fewer than 37 percent of the lines are unbroken, and about one-quarter contain double or triple pauses. Unbroken lines tend, of course, to emphasize the abstract and formal metrical pattern underlying the verse more frequently than do broken, dramatic lines. The occurrence of double and triple pauses in five of twenty-six lines in “A Night-Piece,” for example, is a chief means through which Wordsworth creates the sense of growing emotional complexity:
There // in the black blue vault she sails along,
Followed by multitudes of stars // that // small
And sharp // and bright // along the dark abyss
Drive as she drives // how fast they wheel away,
Yet vanish not! // the wind is in the tree[.]
(ll. 14–18)
By comparison, the impressiveness of a similarly important passage of description in “Yew-Trees” depends less on rhythmic interruption and more on a sense of formal integrity and order manifesting itself through the physical stuff of the speaker’s language. This effect is produced in part by the high frequency of unbroken lines in the passage and in part by the use of words requiring, or at least inviting, elision:24
But worthier still of note
Are those fraternal Four of Borrowdale,
Joined in one solemn and capacious grove;
Huge trunks!—and each particular trunk a growth
Of intertwisted fibres serpentine
Up-coiling, and inveterately convolved[.]
(ll. 13–18)
“Worthier,” “capacious,” and “inveterately” are clearly and easily elidable. One effect of such elisions is, of course, to foreground the line as a unit governed by tight restrictions on numbers of syllables. Here, to put the point in terms relative to the issue of line integrity, the elisions may be regarded as a pleasant coincidence of optional pronunciation and the pressure for conformity that the metrical scheme of the whole line imposes on its individual parts. The elisions seem natural enough in pronunciation, so the hint of elision in conformity to metrical requirements is not obtrusive. The effect created is that of slightly heightened and formalized natural pronunciation—an instance, perhaps, of what Hazlitt calls Wordsworth’s “chaunt.”
“Particular,” on the other hand, would seem to be more difficult to account for in the metrical scheme. The consonant combination c + vowel + l is subject to rules of elision in earlier English verse: Bridges includes “articulate,” for example, in a list of words that he judges are regularly regarded as elided for metrical purposes in Paradise Lost.25 But any attempt to fit “particular” in actual pronunciation into a three-syllable space surely requires a much greater sense of shoe-horning its recalcitrant phonetic stuff into the meter than does the much more natural pronunciation of “inveterately” as a four-syllable word. Without such fitting, however, the line would have a double offbeat without an implied offbeat to offset it:
Such realization of the metrical pattern is, of course, perfectly allowable in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century blank verse. And Wordsworth himself, though a strict syllabist in his early training, later shows a tendency to be slightly less strict in his management of syllables. But the fact remains that such effects are not frequent in Wordsworth, early or late. The problematic “extra” syllable alternately may be regarded as an instance of what Attridge calls delayed compensation. That is, the double offbeat of the seventh position compensates for an implied offbeat elsewhere in the line, perhaps between the first and second syllables:
This option, however, as in the similar example in the immediately preceding line (“Joined in one solemn …”), introduces six beats in the line. And it may be remembered from the discussion above of “this day” that, in general, syntactical stress hierarchies will tend to subordinate the adjective “huge” to the noun “trunks.”
It seems best, then, to think of “particular” as, for metrical purposes, a three-syllable word. This does not mean that the reader must actually pronounce the elision (or that the poet himself would have done so, or even that it is physically possible to do so): it means that a fully informed reading of the line in the context of Wordsworth’s metrical set will involve a sense of the delicate tensions that work to make “particular” an extraordinarily interesting word. As a word that both does and does not fit the rhythmic structure of the line, it stands out to the ear as a recalcitrant bit of phonetic material. Such words seem almost to require two kinds of apprehension simultaneously, one that subsumes the word according to the requirements of harmonious poetic numbers and one that allows it a “natural” pronunciation that does not quite fit.
That the metrically interesting word “particular” appears in the midst of a description of the relationship of parts to wholes, of individual “fibres,” “inveterately convolved,” and the one “huge” trunk they form (which is itself only one of four that make up the single “pillared shade”) is no accident. Similar sonic and rhythmic peculiarities occur in such conceptually important places throughout Wordsworth’s poetry. The use of “powers,” discussed above in connection with “Expostulation and Reply,” is one good example. Another occurs in the midst of what may be Wordsworth’s most resoundingly confident and imaginative assertion of the possibility for perfect community among perfectly distinct individuals—Home at Grasmere, lines 149–51. There, Grasmere Vale is described in grand summation both as an “Abiding-place of many Men” and as a perfect unity:
A Whole without dependence or defect,
Made for itself and happy in itself,
Perfect Contentment, Unity entire.26
Wordsworth’s fondness for phonologically complex or rhythmically ambiguous words at points where, conceptually, the demands for closure are most insistent has been noted above in the discussion of promoted rhymes in stanzaic verse. Here, “entire,” as a word that may be described as hovering between a monosyllabic and disyllabic pronunciation, concludes the four-square statement of assurance of perfection with a lingering ghost of a sound that resists easy inclusion in the metrical scheme. Its tension perfectly embodies the conceptual tension residual in the assertion of the decidedly individual speaker (none other than William Wordsworth, poet) that he is a perfectly assimilated member of the community.
Granted, the leap from such minute elements of poetic composition to such grand and central preoccupations of Wordsworth’s poetry of the imagination is a large one. It is, however, one that Wordsworth invites. In the Preface to Poems (1815), Wordsworth draws attention to the shaping and creative power of imagination, claiming that it is manifested chiefly in relationships between “numbers” and “unity”: “The Imagination also shapes and creates; and how? By innumerable processes; and in none does it more delight than in that of consolidating numbers into unity, and dissolving and separating unity into number—alternations proceeding from, and governed by, a sublime consciousness of the soul in her own mighty and almost divine powers” (Prose 3:33). As Christopher Ricks has remarked, the phrase “consolidating numbers” “cannot but bring to mind the other sense of numbers, ‘harmonious numbers,’ that poetic imagination which consolidates numbers into unity by creating poetic numbers within poetic unity.”27 Ricks’s argument focuses on Wordsworth’s use of complexly ambiguous line endings and enjambment—what Paul Sheats calls Wordsworth’s skill in maintaining a “delicate equilibrium between process and stasis”—in order to claim in part that Wordsworth’s blank verse gains much of its power from its ability to embody in its movement just this kind of tension between parts and wholes, between numerous single verses and the one poem of which they are integral parts.28 Wordsworth’s blank-verse line endings, he suggests, frequently function as a “type or symbol or emblem” of the poet’s “commitment to those ample relationships which yet do not swamp or warp the multiplicities which they accommodate. No fragmentation into separateness; but also no dissolution within a greedily engrossing unity” (3). This concern on Wordsworth’s part commits him to a kind of verse in which the “separate line of verse must not be too simply separate, and yet it must have its individuality respected” (3). In the following passage from The Prelude, says Ricks, the lines both “are about—and supremely evoke—the impossibility of stopping short”:
and oftentimes,
When we had given our bodies to the wind,
And all the shadowy banks, on either side,
Came sweeping through the darkness, spinning still
The rapid line of motion; then at once
Have I, reclining back upon my heels,
Stopp’d short, yet still the solitary Cliffs
Wheel’d by me, even as if the earth had roll’d
With visible motion her diurnal round.
(13-Bk Prelude 1.479–87)
Such verse suggests that “there can be no cutting off the sequential, and the verbal sequences themselves tell their tale” (5).
The contribution of unbroken lines and elisions to the sense of the distinctness and integrity of the individual verses in “Yew-Trees” already has been suggested. The complexity of “particular,” on the other hand, may be seen as a part of the artistic impulse in the opposite direction that is, as a challenge to the line as the determining unit of organization. The most prevalent and obvious means through which the blank-verse line is both defined and challenged is, of course, enjambment, which occurs more frequently in “Yew-Trees” than in the average passage of Wordsworth’s blank verse: nineteen of thirty-three (or 57.6 percent) of the lines in “Yew-Trees” are enjambed, compared with 51.1 percent in the Lyrical Ballads sample, and only 38 percent in “A Night-Piece” (ten of twenty-six). The ending of the poem—one of the most elaborately sonorous passages in all of Wordsworth’s verse—is a good example of the interconnection (or serpentine intertwisting) of the numerous verses into a single unified whole:
ghostly Shapes
May meet at noontide—Fear and trembling Hope,
Silence and Foresight—Death the Skeleton
And Time the Shadow,—there to celebrate,
As in a natural temple scattered o’er
With altars undisturbed of mossy stone,
United worship; or in mute repose
To lie, and listen to the mountain flood
Murmuring from Glaramara’s inmost caves.
(ll. 25–33)
I am chiefly interested here in the prevalence of those sonic and rhythmic characteristics of individual verses that depend for their full effect on juxtaposition with other verses. Enjambment in five of the nine lines is obviously one of these, as is the wide variety in the placement of pauses in lines following enjambments. A less-obvious but no less effective device is similarity and dissimilarity in the stress contour and sound of line endings—the effect that has been called stress-contour rhyme in the discussion of the final “couplet” of “A Night-Piece.”29
Wordsworth’s consciousness of and interest in such effects is shown by his mention of a particularly interesting example of stress contour similitude in dissimilitude in Milton. Pointing out “some of the artifices of versification by which Milton produces so great an effect,” Wordsworth cites the following from Paradise Lost (ll.486–88):
… pining atrophy,
Marasmus, and wide-wasting pestilence,
Dropsies and asthmas, and joint-racking rheums.
Wordsworth reportedly commented that “the power of the final ‘rheums’ is heightened by the ‘atrophy’ and ‘pestilence’” occurring at the end of the two preceding verses.30 Certainly there is a kind of semantic rhyme in the example: the three kinds of disease, different and similar, placed in a formally important position, help to give the final word added force by virtue of accretion. But Wordsworth also was likely to be remarking on a specifically rhythmic source of emphasis here. The phrases “pining Atrophy” and “wasting pestilence” have identical grammatical forms and stress contours (/+s -s/ +s -s -s/), and both require promotion of the third syllable of the noun to the status of a secondary stress for full metrical realization of the line. They produce therefore relatively weak endings, bordering on falling rhythm, and thereby help to emphasize by contrast the rhythmically strong and rising “Joint-racking rheums.” In addition, the placement of “rheums” after a two syllable adjective—“racking rheums”—makes the ending even stronger. (The use of “racking” as the second element in a compound also contributes to the contrast.) Milton’s passage uses the “passion of meter” to effect. “Rheums” is felt to be powerful in part because the minute physical tensions that exist at line boundaries even in blank verse allow it to be placed in rhythmic contrast to the semantically similar nouns that precede it.
The conclusion of “Yew-Trees” draws on this opportunity, though admittedly in a less-obvious way, in the placement of “Skeleton” and “celebrate.” These offer rhythmic contrast to the final four lines, three of which have the now familiar grammatical and rhythmic form: “mossy stone,” “mountain flood,” and “inmost caves.” The relatively weak realization of the metrical scheme in those lines ending with the pattern +s -s -s (or +s -s s)—“Skeleton,” “celebrate”—and the use of the semantically weak (and enjambed) “o’er” in the following line tend to deemphasize the singleness of individual lines and to set up and reinforce the very strong conclusion, in which the unbroken and rhythmically regular final line grounds the whole. The coupletlike effect of “mountain flood” and “inmost caves” also assists in creating the profound sense of closure in this passage, as does the similar rhythmic effect marking the ending of “A Night-Piece.”
Perhaps the most important element of versification contributing to the sense of interconnection among the concluding verses is the management of assonance and alliteration. The texture is closely woven, giving the passage an almost Spenserian luxuriance of sound. Among the most obvious examples of sound patterning is the remarkably persistent repetition of long o. It resonates from “o’er” to “stone” to “repose” (all in the important final positions of verses) and is finally picked up—as are many of the sounds in this final passage—in the last line with “inmost.” This long o contributes in the final verse to an extraordinary example of vowel music in which the restriction and repetition of the vowels, in conjunction with the heavy use of sonorant consonants in “Murmuring” and “Glaramara” contribute substantially, through a kind of sonic undertone, to the poem’s sense of the power that rolls through all things.
This effect is not, as might be supposed, dependent on onomatopoeic effects. “To lie and listen to the mountain flood / Murmuring from Glaramara’s inmost caves” sounds no more like a mountain flood than does any other combination of vowels and consonants. Its power is felt because of the minute, physical sense that a reader will have when he or she participates sympathetically in the reenactment of the patterned tension and release of the speech apparatus necessary to an impassioned pronunciation of these words. The reader will feel, consciously or unconsciously, whether reading aloud or silently (but metrically and with animation, of course), that vowels—the free-flowing column of air that provides the breath out of which articulate speech is shaped—here predominate over and are facilitated by the relatively weak resistance of the consonants (many of which are in fact semivowels—[y], [w], and [r]). The effect thus produced by the relatively unimpeded vowels may be regarded as a means for giving embodiment in language to the feeling that the powerfully inarticulate murmuring stream produces in a sympathetic listener. The ending in two “long” vowels (actually one long vowel and a diphthong)—”inmost caves”—would also seem to contribute to this sense of the passage as a stream of words organized as much by powerful nonsemantic forces too deep for words as by specifically semantic requirements of intelligibility and referentiality.
Alliteration, too, functions in these final lines primarily as a means for preparing the way for the sonic and rhythmic fulfillment of the final line, or line and a half. As in “A Night-Piece,” Wordsworth here favors the consonant sounds s, I, m, n, and r. Of all of the consonant sounds from “to celebrate” to “inmost caves,” only five are not repeated at least once (and many are repeated at least twice). Significantly, all five of these unrepeated sounds—the ng of “murmuring,” the f of “from,” the g of “Glaramara,” and the [k] and υ of “caves”—all occur for the first time in the final verse, while at the same time repetition of a few consonants increases toward the end: “lie and listen” “mountain / Murmuring … Glaramara’s … inmost.” The lines exhibit a growing concentration of vowel sounds and consonant sounds alike (brackets above the line mark occurrences of alliteration; those below mark instances of assonance):
But this concentration is only one of two movements; repetition of a few sounds is simultaneously countered by the introduction of new consonant sounds (none of the marked sounds are anticipated in the densely woven lines that precede these lines):
or in mute repose
To lie, and listen to the mountain flood
Murmuring from Glaramara’s inmost caves.
The result is an extraordinary effect of concentrated power with a residual hint of single and individuated sounds that remain unencompassed by the overall pattern of the passage. The consonants of the final syllable in particular—“caves”—detach it emphatically from the sonic pattern of the whole. Thus the poem, which is so powerfully focused on issues of the relationship of the many and the one, ends with a syllable that admits of varying interpretations: is it the appropriate sound of closure and coherence, or a sonic hint of an opening, of something that resists inclusion into the scheme? Again, as with the example of “entire” in Home at Grasmere, the prevalence of sonic or rhythmic ambiguity at key points such as this allows Wordsworth to embody in the very viscera of the verse artistic and intellectual tensions fundamental to his poetry, particularly to the poetry of imagination. If the imagination may be defined as the faculty that makes one out of many without violence to the many or that makes wholes in which the parts are both distinctly individuated and fully incorporated—then such minute effects of the versification are best regarded as instances of the operation of that power, as well as means for describing it.
“Rarely is any Wordsworth text innocent of other Wordsworth texts.” Eric Walker’s apt phrasing of what is by now a critical commonplace applies as surely to issues of metrical similitude in dissimilitude as it does to better-trodden topics in Wordsworth studies.31 “Yew-Trees” provides a specimen of Wordsworth at his most sonorously impressive. Its rhythmic regularities and deep sonic structures give the work a feel of almost sculpted wholeness and indivisibility. Its conclusion comes as close as does any passage of Wordsworth’s verse to a Tennysonian abandonment of the individualized speaking voice to the abstract harmonies and relationships of pure vowel music. “A Night-Piece,” which immediately precedes “Yew-Trees” in the Poems of the Imagination (in Poems [1815]), is a specimen of Wordsworth’s blank verse at its most expressively dislocated. Nowhere in Wordsworth’s blank verse do more and more kinds of rhythmic disruptions occur in so short a space. No passage of blank verse more successfully conveys a sense of spontaneous overflow of emotion through skillful suggestions of an individual escape from superimposed structures of metrical form.
Wordsworth’s grouping of the poems together in his Poems and in his comments to Henry Crabb Robinson suggests that in the end the marmoreal verse of “Yew-Trees” and the volatile and elastic verse of “A Night-Piece” are to be recognized as representative of complementary impulses. By juxtaposing them, Wordsworth suggests that in his blank verse every escape implies a return, every point of tension implies release from tension, every concession to the passion of the meter implies a departure motivated by the passion of the subject. Every fixed realization of a line, in short, implies all of the possibilities that must be excluded in the realization of the line. Taken to its logical conclusion, the aesthetics on which Wordsworth’s metrical art is founded implies that every line of blank verse potentially resonates with every other one, producing endless and endlessly dissimilar echoes of the same immutably fixed form. The prosodic power of Wordsworth’s blank verse depends on the reader’s sensuous apprehension (and abstract conception) of this infinite diversification of the same and coalescence of the infinitely diverse.
ASSOCIATIVE FUNCTIONS OF BLANK VERSE.’
WORDSWORTH, MILTON, AND THE MILTONIC
Thus far, I have been concerned for the most part with characteristic expressive and emblematic functions of Wordsworth’s blank-verse rhythms and structures. An adequate understanding of the issues involved, however, also requires some consideration of the historical associations of blank verse, associations that make the form particularly well suited to explorations of relationships between the personal voice and echoes of the past, the voice of one poet and the voice of that “nature that exists in [all] mighty poets.” As the most malleable of regular accentual-syllabic verse forms, blank verse offered Wordsworth the most flexible means for developing and presenting his own voice in all of its complexity. At the same time, iambic pentameter verse carries the heaviest weight of associative power (as “exponent or symbol”) of any form in English. Its very malleability, its adaptability to idiosyncrasies of use, has also made it historically impressionable.
One significant and somewhat paradoxical result of this impressionability is that particularly powerful and idiosyncratic uses of blank verse tend to become so closely connected with the form itself as to seem the self-evidently natural way for it to be used. Thus, when Samuel Johnson warns that blank verse tempts the poet to greater extravagance in the use of syntactic distortion and more frequent departure from simple expression than does rhymed verse, he is equating Milton’s particular use of the form with the form itself. A comment made by Cowper in 1784 nicely summarizes this tendency in the blank-verse tradition. Writing to John Newton, Cowper objects to criticism of his blank verse on the grounds that it is insufficiently like Milton’s and Thomson’s. “Milton’s manner was peculiar,” says Cowper, “so is Thomson’s”:
He that should write like either of them, would in my judgment, deserve the name of a Copyist, but not of a Poet. Blank verse is susceptible of a much greater diversification of manner, than verse in rhime. And why the modern writers of it have all thought proper to cast their numbers alike, I know not. Certainly it was not necessity that compelled them to it. I flatter myself however that I have avoided that sameness with others which would entitle me to nothing but a share in one common oblivion with them all.32
The most formally variable form is in practice the most rigidly undiversified. In The Task, of course, Cowper did to some extent achieve his goal of diversifying the tradition and thereby influenced not only Wordsworth (who acknowledged his debt to Cowper in a MS note to “Thoughts, Suggested on the Day Following, on the Banks of the Nith” [published 1842]) but also Coleridge, Lamb, and a whole generation of writers.33 Wordsworth’s own task in 1797–1820 or so (that is, until his own verse in its turn began to seem to younger writers the self-evidently natural way to write blank verse) would also require him to work directly against, and with, the conventionalized sonic and rhythmic “sameness” that R. D. Havens attributes to “idolatry” of the Miltonic.34
Wordsworth’s well-known description of Milton’s “voice” in “London 1802” puts in significant figurative terms the kind of power that Milton’s verse seemed to embody:
Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea.
(l. 10)
Wordsworth here is of course not referring solely to Milton’s specifically prosodic qualities. His identification of the Miltonic voice with elemental natural power, however, does suggest the degree to which he regarded Milton’s verse as having accomplished in its own way what he wished to accomplish. Milton’s artful management of fixities and fluidity, unity and multiplicity, restraint and freedom makes the very physical stuff of his verse nearly as self-evidently powerful as is nature itself. Wordsworth’s figure also suggests that the Miltonic could be, in a practical sense, as overwhelming as the sea.
As I argued in chapter 1, Wordsworth took very seriously the power of verse forms to become associated with a particular usage or set of stylistic characteristics. Wordsworth, like Cowper before him, may have regretted this fact of the history of taste, but he could neither deny it nor ignore its consequences. What this means is that Wordsworth’s own blank-verse style had to be developed and, ultimately, presented within the context of Milton’s achievement and example.
The Miltonic is a constant presence in Wordsworth’s blank verse not only because of conventional associations but for more immediate and practical reasons. We know from various sources—and especially from the evidence of Wordsworth’s own rhythms—that he had hundreds of lines of Milton by heart. Milton was for Wordsworth not merely an external and intellectualized standard of style—a certain percentage per paragraph of syntactic inversions, enjambed lines, latinate and polysyllabic words—to be alluded to or not, by choice, as the occasion warranted. Miltonic rhythm and phrasing had to be for the boy and young man who could recite long passages of Paradise Lost a fully internalized presence informing his own patterns of speech and recitation. Milton’s measures were for him felt in the blood and along the heart—and in the lungs and speech organs as well.
Metrical and rhythmic imitation of or allusion to Milton, then, is always an extremely complex matter in Wordsworth. What precisely is the difference, after all, between the internalized Miltonic voice that echoes “like the sea” and all of the figuratively analogous natural “voices” through which Wordsworth seeks to represent the specifically extraliterary (even extralinguistic) sources of his intellectual and emotional strength? Milton’s verse is for Wordsworth the proper embodiment of the “mighty nature” that exists in some few poets. Its complex and diverse music bestows on mere words characteristics analogous to those the poet habitually associates with the workings of nature. Milton’s music is perfectly distinct and individuated. In Cowper’s terms, it is “peculiar.”35 At the same time—and this is what distinguishes it from the “glittering verse” to which Wordsworth was so attracted in his early youth (and which he wrote in his early work)—such verse strikes the ear as never merely personal and singular.36 Great verse, like a powerful natural phenomenon, presents itself as a distinctly individuated manifestation of uncontainably extraindividual power. As book 5 of The Prelude sets out to attest, such verse had power to act on the young Wordsworth with a force comparable to that which he elsewhere attributes to the influence of the Derwent, the “sound like thunder,” the sea itself, and all other phenomena through which one may feel “whate’er there is of power in sound.”37
One important aspect of this complex relationship between Wordsworth and Milton has been convincingly set forth by Judith W. Page, who singles out for discussion several specifically “metrical allusions” to Milton in The Prelude.38 These metrical allusions function, according to Page, in a way similar to a particular kind of verbal allusiveness described by James K. Chandler—by creating “intentional representation[s] of unconscious influence.”39 In other words, the Miltonic rhythmic strain functions as evidence in the midst of “spontaneous” utterance of the internalization of previous poetic influence and therefore is able to represent deep “workings of the unconscious mind” (292). Milton’s rhythms, Page argues, are as much a source of enduring power in Wordsworth’s imagination as are the memories that make up the “spots of time” passages in The Prelude. The surfacing of these rhythms in Wordsworth’s work are “tributes to the power of meter which Wordsworth acknowledges in his prose writings” (293).
Page shows how Milton’s metrical style haunts Wordsworth’s imagination in book 1 of The Prelude, where Wordsworth’s speaker struggles with doubts about his capacity to write a poem rivaling Milton’s own. Frequent syntactic inversion (“With meditations passionate from deep / Recesses in man’s heart”) is, of course, the chief signal of Miltonic influence. Another more subtle means is the use of a fairly rare and peculiarly Miltonic kind of enjambment; that is, enjambment that falls within a phrase. This occurs three times in fewer than one hundred lines in The Prelude, book 1:
The Poet, gentle creature as he is,
Hath, like the Lover, his unruly times;
His fits when he is neither sick nor well,
Though no distress be near him but his own
Unmanageable thoughts.
[13-Bk Prelude 1.146–50)
I settle on some British theme, some old
Romantic tale, by Milton left unsung[.]
(ll. 180–81)
With meditations passionate from deep
Recesses in man’s heart, immortal verse
Thoughtfully fitted to the Orphean lyre[.]
(ll. 233–35)
These effects, argues Page, show that Wordsworth “habitually and customarily associates Miltonic rhythms with grand achievement” (293). Miltonic rhythms, then, are the proper embodiment of Wordsworth’s spontaneous expression of anxiety concerning his own achievement and aims.
Because her focus is specifically the psychology of Wordsworth’s metrical allusions, however, Page finally wishes to argue that these Miltonic rhythms are always, or primarily, evidence of Wordsworth’s anxiety of influence, a kind of rhythmic burden that he must cast off (or a demon to be “exorcised”) in the search for his own more natural and genuinely Wordsworthian rhythms (293–94). My own view is that Wordsworth’s original use of internalized and naturalized Miltonic rhythm includes this dimension but is in fact much more various and more pervasive than Page’s thesis suggests.40 Considered with regard to specifically metrical issues, the Miltonic voice is not best regarded as always, or even usually, antagonistic. Its rhythms are in many cases not opposed to Wordsworthian spontaneity or expressive naturalness but are actively complementary to it. Thus, in certain situations (Prelude book 1, for example) the particular activity of mind being instanced (Wordsworth’s creation of a distinct autobiographical self) may find proper expression through antagonism to the Miltonic. In other situations, however, Wordsworth’s complex purposes will involve incorporations of, contrasts with, undercuttings of, or even a kind of appropriate passivity before the Miltonic. Another way to put this is that as long as Wordsworth retains his own memory of and physical response to Milton’s power and continues to write in blank verse, the Miltonic may be channeled, but it cannot be ignored (or “exorcised” or cast off). Its undersong is as persistent as the undersong of the Derwent.41
The versification of “Yew-Trees,” for example, has appropriately been called “Miltonic” in large part because of lines such as the following:
Huge trunks!—and each particular trunk a growth
Of intertwisted fibres serpentine
Up-coiling, and inveterately convolved,—
(ll. 16–18)
The polysyllabic adjectives and adverb, the enjambment, and the syntactically impressive delayed placement of the Miltonic “serpentine” all serve to call attention to the verse as being as baroquely “convolved” as the subject of the description. Such verse would be perfectly at home in Milton’s description of Eden—that locus of unity in multiplicity—in book 4 of Paradise Lost. In Wordsworth’s corpus, however, these rhythms and syntactic peculiarities make the passage stand out as one kind of verse among many. The lines therefore present themselves as a kind of allusive purple passage, distinctly more musically impressive than usual.
I use “musical” here in the sense in which O. B. Hardison, Jr., uses it in Prosody and Purpose in the Renaissance to describe Milton’s peculiar ability to seem to incorporate in the very texture of his verse powerful extrasemantic forces (an ability that Wordsworth strives to develop on his own terms). Such effects pervade Paradise Lost, providing sustained aesthetic evidence of the poet’s Orphic or prophetic function:
Like Homer, [Milton] begins by commanding the epic Muse to sing; and the infinitely varied music of the song continues until the departure of Adam and Eve from Paradise at the end of book 12 of Paradise Lost. Since the Muse sings of “things invisible to mortal sight,” the poem is, among other things, a powerful reassertion of the ancient theory that poetry is constitutive and that its power comes to it through music.42
Distortions of speech order are signs of the informing power of Urania’s celestial harmonies, which bend the lowly English language to forms outside and beyond those appropriate to merely communicative, imitative, or psychologically expressive purposes.
In Wordsworth’s corpus, such effects frequently occur within contexts in which the process of imaginative reformulation, through which the prosaic and everyday is elevated into a song of supersensual significance, is precisely the point of the verse. For all of the musical grandeur of the “intertwisted fibres serpentine,” the subject is—pointedly—not the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. It is a stand of yew trees in an actual place with the homely and decidedly English name of Borrowdale. Such interpenetrations of Miltonic celestial music and native English subjects function in the service of a familiar Wordsworthian task. They help to substantiate the claim that the commonplace, imaginatively apprehended, can be as impressive to the mind as any of the more conventionally grand subjects of earlier poetry. Chanting of Borrowdale yews in Miltonic strains while remaining decidedly within the realm of things visible to mortal sight, Wordsworth juxtaposes through the music of his verse the “groves elysian and fortunate fields” and an actual spot that in the clear light of the noontime sun has power to lift the speaker to a vision of more than earthly power.
The complexity of Wordsworth’s use of the associational power of his blank verse to create Miltonic contexts for his own different aims is a subject worthy of a book of its own. For present purposes, it may be sufficient to suggest some of the more important of Wordsworth’s tendencies in this regard through a metrical analysis of his most direct statement of his aims relative to Milton’s, the “Prospectus” to the Excursion. As is appropriate to so important and comprehensive a manifesto, the versification of the passage is itself an attempt to instantiate the powers that it describes and celebrates.
From a conventional point of view, the “Prospectus” is among the most stylistically uneven passages in all of Wordsworth’s blank verse. It has lines of extreme grandeur in which Wordsworth draws on Miltonic music as evidence of his own status as a transcriber of celestial harmonies or as bardic singer of things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme:
For I must tread on shadowy ground, must sink
Deep—and, aloft ascending, breathe in worlds
To which the heaven of heavens is but a veil.
All strength—all terror, single or in bands,
That ever was put forth in personal form;
Jehovah—with his thunder, and the choir
Of shouting Angels, and the empyreal thrones,
I pass them, unalarmed.
(ll. 28–35)43
The passage is both extremely passionate and, prosodically, extremely regular and taut. Promotion and demotion of syllables, variation of polysyllabic and monosyllabic words, and varied placement of pause create all of its rhythmic interest. Enjambment (note the Miltonic midphrase enjambment of the first line), syntactic displacement (especially suspension of the subject and verb “I pass” in the second sentence), the high percentage of easily elidable words (shadowy, heaven, heavens, personal, th’empyr ea l), and of course the diction itself all help to create the effect of steadily mounting power, flowing in response to the speaker’s invocation, in the immediately preceding lines, of Milton’s Urania, “or a greater Muse, if such / Descend to earth or dwell in highest heaven!”
At the other end of the scale are passages such as the following, in which elements of Miltonic rhythm persist in enjambments and some syntactic traits, for example but are in uneasy combination or at cross purposes with other elements especially the repetitious and philosophically abstract diction and the disruptive parenthetical phrases:44
… while my voice proclaims
How exquisitely the individual Mind
(And the progressive powers perhaps no less
Of the whole species) to the external World
Is fitted:—and how exquisitely, too,
Theme this but little heard of among Men—
The external World is fitted to the Mind;
And the creation (by no lower name
Can it be called) which they with blended might
Accomplish:—this is our high argument.
(ll. 62–71)
“Exquisitely,” “progressive powers,” “external World,” “individual mind,” “species”—such diction gives evidence of a mind under the influence of a different motive force than that which informed the passage of high inspiration and aspiration quoted above. The parentheses, asides, and qualifications (“perhaps no less”; “by no lower name”) express a mind concerned with a kind of philosophical explicitness that is difficult to accommodate in the context of chanted “spousal verse.” The physical evidence of the tension is easy enough to document in the rhythmic complexity of several key lines:
The word “exquisitely” stands out rhythmically in both of its occurrences, and of course its repetition calls particular attention to it. The pronunciation required by the meter—+s -s [s] -s–in both cases realizes a beat with a very weakly stressed syllable, almost producing the effect of a triple offbeat. In the first occurrence of the word, the added complexity of the elision of “th’individual” creates a shadow of even a fourth consecutive weak syllable. These elements, taken together with the second elision in “individual” make the verse an extraordinarily complex—one might be tempted to say “exquisite”—realization of the metrical scheme. The use of a stress-final pairing formation in line 65, and arguably in line 66, is, as has been noted, characteristic of more conversational verse than this. It helps here to give the parenthetical structure the rhythm appropriate to a sotto voce insertion.
The most disruptive rhythmic structure in the cited passage occurs in the next line, which is itself a syntactically disruptive parentheses:
The final four syllables constitute a rhythmic structure but little heard among readers of English verse. The pattern -s / -s +s/ +s, in which the middle two syllables are contained within a word boundary, is singled out by prosodists as a rare—or even, according to some systems, a disallowed—feature of five-beat verse. Whether it is called a “juncture inversion” caused by “autonomous polysyllables” (as it is by Tarlinskaja) or a “stress-final pairing with linkage” (as it is by Attridge), it has been avoided throughout the history of English pentameter with remarkable consistency. Only twenty-four clear examples of the pattern are recorded in Tarlinskja’s sample of thirteen thousand lines of pentameter verse from Spenser to Swinburne.45 So disruptive is the formation that it has been common among prosodists to explain it away by means of a theory of “recession of accent,” or shifting the accent forward for metrical purposes to the first syllable of the disyllabic penultimate word. The editors of the Norton edition of The Prelude provide a good example of the usual way of accounting for this anomaly in a footnote to another instance of linkage, in book 1, line 336:
(ll. 334–37)
The footnote directs the reader to shift the accent to the first syllable of “obscure” and notes that “Milton too sometimes stresses the first syllable” (J. Wordsworth et al. 82 n. 2). Theories of recession of accent, however, only beg the question. The most compelling evidence that Milton (or Wordsworth in imitation of him) intended recession of accent on “obscure” (or “among”) is the offense that the ear (or, more accurately, the speech apparatus) takes when confronted with such a metrically dislocating rhythmic structure:
Encamp their Legions; or with obscure wing.
(Paradise Lost 2.132)
Whether the word is pronounced “ob-scure” or “ob-scure,” the reader is left with evidence of tension between speech and meter. Robert Bridges leaves the issue open with regard to Milton’s practice, describing the rhythmic character of such phrases as “doubtful” and venturing the opinion that Milton tended to exclude such effects from later verse because of its tendency to unsettle the rhythm (Milton’s Prosody, 28–35). Attridge’s conclusion on this point is probably the best; that is, that these metrical anomalies are instances of a “balance of tensions created by deliberate (and unavoidable) mismatching of metrical form and linguistic structure” (268). They are, in other words, irreducibly and inherently troublesome features that call a great deal of attention to the fact of the poet’s craft in fitting language to aesthetically dictated formal structures.
For all of these reasons, a reader attentive to rhythm cannot but register a sense that this latter passage is considerably less conventionally harmonious than is the verse surrounding it. Here, the signs of fitting recalcitrant language to metrical form are so clearly audible—and are especially so because of the juxtaposition of the passage with the more conventionally harmonious verse of lines 28-35—that it seems justified to inquire whether or not such various use of metrical form may have some expressive or emblematic value. The question is especially of interest because the relatively inharmonious passage is placed in a position of extreme importance, culminating as it does in the announcement that “This is our high argument.”
The “Prospectus” is, of course, as much about the ways in which Wordsworth wishes to distinguish himself from Milton as it is a claim of poetic fraternity with him. (Indeed, as Cowper’s comment above suggests, the fraternity of effective blank verse writers must be a fraternity of strongly distinct individuals.) A phrase represented by Wordsworth as direct quotation from Milton subtly sums up an important difference relevant to a discussion of the two poets’ verse harmonies. In Paradise Lost, book 7, Milton prays to Urania (as the muse of astronomy, the source of the poem’s invisible and celestial harmonies) to find her audience by singing through him. Milton’s music is figuratively not his own:
Still govern thou my song,
Urania, and fit audience find, though few.
(Paradise Lost 7.30–31)
Wordsworth invokes Milton by misquoting him even before he makes any mention of the Muse. Wordsworth’s act boldly appropriates for himself the power to “give utterance in numerous Verse” to his “fair trains of imagery,” “feelings of delight,” “affecting thoughts,” and “dear remembrances”:
Of Truth, of Grandeur, Beauty, Love, and Hope—
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
I sing; “fit audience let me find though few!”
(ll. 14, 23)
The inserted phrase “let me” in a line that claims a close similarity between Wordsworth’s and Milton’s aims nicely expresses the ambivalence of Wordsworth toward the Miltonic. For one thing, it shows that the Miltonic is not for Wordsworth (as the Authorized Version is for Milton in Paradise Lost, for example) a sacred text inviolable to creative appropriation and revision. Furthermore, if The Recluse is to be a poem asserting the creativity, as well as the receptivity, of the individual “Mind of Man,” then its music must result from a fitting of the kind of power represented in Milton’s poem by Urania to diction that is expressive of the fluxes and refluxes of the individual human mind. Wordsworthian power of song, in short, will work not only by fitting the language of common humanity to “number”; it will also fit those numbers to the variety, idiosyncrasy, and volatility of human speech. This is not to suggest of course that Milton did not do something of the same in his verse. All good poets struggle in the accommodation of language to number. The point is that Wordsworth is announcing himself in the “Prospectus”—and is giving examples in the verse of the “Prospectus”—to be in the act of drawing the boundaries differently than they were drawn by Milton. Milton’s English under the influence of heavenly order—what Johnson called, appropriately for the present discussion, his “Babylonish dialect”—will not be Wordsworth’s English. Wordsworth reserves the right to draw when appropriate on Miltonic sources of power, but he will not limit himself to them.
From this point of view, then, the conventionally inharmonious passage about fitting and being fit may be regarded as a point at which the verse itself makes such fitting an issue. The overtly philosophical language here, needed by the poet to attempt to introduce his theme “but little heard of among men,” resists incorporation into the “song” in such a way that one cannot but be attentive to two contrary impulses at work. One impulse foregrounds the language as different from that usually heard in such contexts; the other informs the ear that this language, after all, does fit; that is, it can indeed be sung, though doing so may stretch the reader’s conventional sense of what is appropriate to be sung. Or the tension might be regarded as an element of expressive use, depicting a speaker who holds passionately the abstract ideas that the diction expresses. In submitting such diction to the organizing patterns of the song, especially in the context of other passages that are more conventionally harmonious, Wordsworth’s verse seeks to humanize ideas, to give physical realization to notions. The poet of The Recluse, he claims, can sing philosophically.
These metrical poles finally may be regarded as instances of the large claims of the “Prospectus” itself. Wordsworth is claiming through example that the work to which these lines form an overview and introduction will have—must have, in order to be the poem therein described—a music of its own, one appropriate to its extreme ambition. Just as the Miltonic landscape marks boundaries beyond which Wordsworth’s muse must fly or sink, so Miltonic blank-verse rhythm marks one great example of the possible fitting of the English language to metrical arrangement. Wordsworth’s own versification, to be appropriate to his song of the unfathomable human mind, must be free to accommodate language that may strain its conventional arrangements almost to the breaking point. The harmonies of Wordsworth’s verse, in other words, will issue from the poet’s juxtaposition of a considerably more various range of stylistic elements than is usual in the English grand style.
As is the case in the arguments mounted by Wordsworth in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, or in his claim that he can accept almost unlimited “dislocation” in his blank-verse line, the “Prospectus” effectively asserts (and like “A Night-Piece” and “Yew-Trees” provides an instance proving the assertion) that the poet will accept no limitations beyond those which are necessarily entailed in his choice of a conventional verse form. According to this view and to this aesthetic principle, stylistic unevenness or inconstancy to a single ideal of metrical realization becomes a chief means for embodying Wordsworth’s extraordinary ambition: to accomplish on his own terms a poetic task comparable to Milton’s own. And those passages or transitions in which Wordsworth’s verse seems to be least Miltonic may be seen finally as instances of Wordsworth at his most truly Miltonic. Insofar as these passages express stylistically his independence from Milton within a context that directly invites comparison, they embody Wordsworth’s understanding that the recovery of ancient liberty from various kinds of “modern bondage” is the task of every great poet. It is what Cowper means when he says that he believes that he has escaped the “common obscurity” of all of the imitators of Milton. It is part of what we mean when we say that Wordsworth’s blank verse introduces a distinctive voice into English poetry.