Conclusion
On the Power of Sound

When Wordsworth first included “On the Power of Sound” in a collective edition of his poetry, he gave it pride of place as the last of the Poems of the Imagination. “On the Power of Sound” (composed 1828–29; published 1835) is, among other things, a poet’s apologia—a defense, in mythic terms, of a life dedicated to “fitting” the English language to the requirements of “numerous verse.” It suggests in grandly comprehensive terms how pervasively important metrical art is in the corpus as a whole.¹

Wordsworth’s apology is magisterial both in statement and design. A formal “Argument” (rare in Wordsworth’s Poetical Works) stands at the head of the poem, mapping out with matter-of-fact bluntness an outrageously broad thematic sweep. The poem is to range from consideration of “The Ear” itself (imagined “as occupied by a spiritual functionary”) to “the destruction of the earth and the planetary system,” the “survival of audible harmony, and its support in the Divine Nature, as revealed in Holy Writ.” In the course of the poem, Wordsworth’s treatment ranges from natural sounds “acting casually or severally” (“The little sprinkling of cold earth that fell / Echoed from the coffin-lid”), to the “power” and “Origin” of music (“Orphean Insight!”), to the “Pythagorean theory of numbers and music, with their supposed power over the motions of the universe” (“By one pervading spirit / Of tones and numbers all things are controlled”), and finally to the Voice of voices, the originating creative Power that “to Light gave Being” and that “shall finish doubt and dim foreseeing, / And sweep away life’s visionary stir.” Sound is imaged in scores of forms in the poem. Encompassing “whispers” and “shrieks,” lion’s roar and lamb’s bleat, Wordsworth’s catalogue of sound images reads like a recapitulation of the basic vocabulary of his lifelong concern for “whatever there is of power in sound.” Cuckoos, nightingales, the “hungry barkings” of the eagle, “headlong streams and fountains,” the “lowing mead,” and “forest hum of noon,” sounds and echoes of the hunt, bells and knells of all kinds, Hosannas and requiems, the “blackening clouds” that “in thunder speak of God,” milkmaids’ song, lullabies, patriotic hymn, “babe’s first cry,” and “voice of regal city / rolling a solemn sea-like bass” all find place in the fourteen-stanza poem.

The task that Wordsworth’s speaker sets for himself is an enormously large and daunting one: to discover a “scheme,” a “scale of moral music” whereby this vastly varied world of natural sound—figuratively “wandering Utterances”—might be comprehended as an organized whole. Wordsworth strives to imagine something like a harmonic system or a grammar of natural sound, some system of correspondence and difference through which this “vast … compass” and “swell of notes” might be saved, translated into articulate signs. With such a scheme or scale at his disposal, the Orpheus-like poet would be able to sound a chord sufficient to release from the oblivion of dim and fading memory all that he has most dearly loved in the mighty living world of eye and ear.² Is there any possibility, the poet asks in stanza 11, that these “Powers” that “survive but in the faintest dream / Of memory” might be given a more permanent form?:

O that ye might stoop to bear

Chains, such precious chains of sight

As laboured minstrelsies through ages wear!

O for a balance fit the truth to tell

Of the Unsubstantial, pondered well!

(ll.172–76)

The answer to this wishful question comes, significantly, in the form of a rhetorical fiat. In stanza 13 Wordsworth finds the scale and the “chains of sight” he needs through an act of “representation” (Wordsworth’s word, in the “Argument”) of all sounds “under the form of thanksgiving to the Creator.” Through a leap of imagination, “wandering Utterances” and dying echoes of voice become melody, harmony, and text in a vast “hymn / Of joy” that articulates nothing less than the full significance of being in time and space:

Break forth into thanksgiving,

Ye banded instruments of wind and chords;

Unite, to magnify the Ever-living,

Your inarticulate notes with the voice of words!

The key transition (or transition in key) from the tone of longing wishfulness in stanza 11 (“O for a balance fit the truth to tell / Of the Unsubstantial”) to the resoundingly affirmative hymn of thanksgiving of stanzas 13 and 14 (“Break forth into thanksgiving … !”) comes in the stanza that was, in fact, the earliest composed part of the poem. “Wandering Utterances” are transformed into purposeful notes through an act of representation of all sounds as agents of harmony, a representation made possible by the introduction in stanza 12 of the Pythagorean “mystery.” The speaker asserts in the bluntest possible terms—and with as imperious a manner as that of a conductor raising his baton before an unruly orchestra (or of Prospero conjuring the actors in his masque)—that “all things” are intermeasurable (or, poetically speaking, “controlled”) according to a single system of correspondence. Vastly different and individuated concrete “things” turn out, mysteriously, to be modalities of a single substance and as such are intermeasurable through an abstract language of “tones and numbers”:

By one pervading spirit

Of tones and numbers all things are controlled

As sages taught, where faith was found to merit

Initiation in that mystery old.

(ll. 177–80)

Alfred North Whitehead has discussed the Pythagorean insight—in terms incidentally useful for grasping the central issues and tensions of Wordsworth’s argument—as either the “luckiest of lucky guesses” in the history of Western thought or as “a flash of divine genius penetrating to the inmost nature of things.”³ Pythagorean understanding of the numerical underpinning of reality provides for Whitehead the basis of a powerful critique of the mind/matter split and its resultant “fallacy of misplaced concreteness.” In defining reality as essentially vibratory and periodic, the Pythagorean tradition allows for an understanding of “things” of material “reality” itself—as having no existence except as a “streaming” of activity unfolding in space and time. What appear to be steadily existing, permanent phenomena are, properly comprehended (without the “film of familiarity”?), just as surely vibratory manifestations of underlying power as are sounds, which we know to be explainable as “the outcome of vibrations in the air”:

A steadily sounding note is explained as the outcome of vibrations in the air: a steady colour is explained as the outcome of vibrations in ether. If we explain the steady endurance of matter on the same principle, we shall conceive each primordial element as a vibratory ebb and flow of an underlying energy, or activity. (35)

According to such a view, each “primordial element will be an organized system of vibratory streaming of energy.” The notion of a universe of steadily enduring things definable in terms of simple location gives way to a universe of musiclike waves, in which each “thing” may be perceived as an activity among other activities: “Accordingly there will be a definite period associated with each element; and within that period the stream-system will sway from one stationary maximum to another stationary maximum—or, taking a metaphor from the ocean tides, the system will sway from one high tide to another high tide.” “This system,” Whitehead continues, “is nothing at any instant.” In a way directly analogous to the sounding of a note of music, the system “requires its whole period in which to manifest itself (35).

To translate this into the figures of “On the Power of Sound,” Wordsworth, in appealing to Pythagorean “tones and numbers,” leaps to a vision of the entire created world as infinitely diversified modulations of the central activity of creation. That activity is represented as a voice:

          As Deep to Deep

Shouting through one valley calls,

All worlds, all natures, mood and measure keep

For praise and ceaseless gratulation, poured

Into the ear of God, their Lord!

(ll. 204-8)

“All” ultimately manifests itself as sound to the ear of God and, by implication, to the ear of godlike imagination. This is because sound is of all things in the created universe the most directly communicative of the essentially periodic nature of the “primordial element.” The sound of the cuckoo frozen at any one instant simply is not the cuckoo’s song. To be what it is, it requires its “whole period in which to manifest itself.” It becomes a “thing” identifiable as such to sense only through its full unfolding in space and time, from initial attack to final decay. Whereas the eye has a disconcerting (and tyrannous) tendency to assert the independence from the whole of its objects of perception, giving the world of sight an appearance of permanence that misrepresents its essentially vibratory and periodic existence, the ear knows the world to be continually resonant of the time in which it was created and pregnant with the time that will undo it. The insistent transitoriness of the experience of sound opposes the tyranny of the eye, moving the mind eventually out of the merely “visionary” (and its tendency toward static misrepresentation) into an experience of something more directly communicative of the fundamental activity of creation:

A Voice to Light gave Being

To Time, and Man his earth-born chronicler;

A Voice shall finish doubt and dim foreseeing,

And sweep away life’s visionary stir[.]

(ll. 209–12)

The Pythagorean “lucky guess” (or is it “divine insight”?), then, is in Wordsworth’s poem the poet’s enabling fiction. It allows him to represent the entire created world as a manifestation of an essentially poetic activity: the continual articulation of the silent one into the vocal many and the reconsolidation of the many into the one. This key Poem of the Imagination thematizes on a grand scale what Wordsworth defines in the Preface to Poems (1815) as the primary operation of the imagination (and one that has been discussed above as a key to understanding his metrical art). The imagination “shapes and creates,” says Wordsworth, “delight[ing]” especially in a process of “consolidating numbers into unity, and dissolving and separating unity into number.” These alternations proceed from, “and are governed by, a sublime consciousness of the soul in her own mighty and almost divine powers” (Prose 3:33).⁴ The power of sound is the best emblem for the power of imagination because imagination perceives “all things” as the ear perceives the world of sound: as a vastly diversified articulation in time of an essential unity.

The implications of Wordsworth’s representation of sound in “On the Power of Sound” and the connections between its argument and the treatment of sound elsewhere in the corpus are numerous and complex enough to have warranted extended study in their own right.⁵ Mary Jacobus reads the poem as Wordsworth’s attempt to redeem the “personal lyric” of The Prelude from time and death through recourse to the “WORD ,” defined here as “voice transcendentalized as Logos.”⁶ “On the Power of Sound” is for Jacobus the “optimistic, orthodox Christian sequel to the Arab dream [in Prelude, book 5], revised not to foretell ‘Destruction to the children of the earth’ but rather to prophesy salvation of and through the Word” (157). Jacobus’s reading suggests that Wordsworth’s poem, though perhaps psychologically necessary, involves a degree of anxious revision of earlier (more courageous or more authentic) positions. The same kind of suspicion is certainly present in John Hollander’s historical reading, according to which “On the Power of Sound” is an “imaginatively dangerous remythologizing of natural music.”⁷ The poem is “dangerous” according to Hollander because its rhetorical movement into the Pythagorean “mystery” threatens the very source of Wordsworth’s strength—his insistence on the primacy of the “very world” of sounds over the music of the spheres. Insofar as Wordsworth’s mythologized overview tends to diminish the importance of the haunting presence in sound, it threatens what is strongest in Wordsworth’s earlier resistance to myth and to the tendency of myth to mute the actual sound of the lived human life. In “On the Power of Sound,” says Hollander, Wordsworth remythologizes the music of the spheres “via, but not terminating in, the fabulous power of what is … mundane.” Through this process, Hollander claims, “even ‘the still, sad music of humanity,’ become[s], for the sound that lies as far behind language as it does beyond music, but phonetic shadows” (79).

Reading “On the Power of Sound” in the way that I have set forth above—as an insistently mythologized, quasi-autobiographical defense, an apologia for his metrical art—however, allows for a different, more integral and less sinister, view of its relation to the rest of Wordsworth’s work. To put the issue simply, the audacity of Wordsworth’s rhetoric in “On the Power of Sound” is matched by (and conveyed through) the obvious singularity of the poem’s formal means. The poem announces itself in all sorts of ways not so much as the last word on the subject but as a particularly strong word of advice to listen attentively to impulses that pervade the music of the corpus as a whole.

A metrical reading notes first of all that the stanza form and sonic patterns make the poem unlike anything else in Wordsworth’s corpus. As I noted in the discussion of “The Thorn” in chapter 4, Wordsworth’s longer stanzas (ten lines or more) are with one exception “centos,” or amalgamations of recognizable smaller forms, usually quatrains, couplets, and tail-rhyme sections.⁸ The exception is the stanza used in “On the Power of Sound,” which seems to be designedly resistant to being broken down into components. The sixteen-line stanza is the most complexly patterned, structurally integrated stanza in Wordsworth’s poetical works. The rhyme pattern a_₃ba_bc₅dcdef_e5gf₄gh₅h₄ both suggests and frustrates attempts by the ear and eye to discern clear divisions of quatrains or couplets. Stanzas contain very few variations from the pattern. There are no variations in rhyme and only eight departures (in 224 lines) from the standard metrical pattern.⁹ Within stanzas, patterns are present that are more minute than are able to be shown in schematic form; for example, line 13 of each stanza (with two exceptions) is a catalectic tetrameter, a seven-syllable verse suggesting a falling or trochaic rhythm in the midst of an otherwise iambic poem. Yet for all of this complexity of rhyme and meter (and perhaps, paradoxically, because of it), the verse pattern tends to give the initial impression of spontaneous irregularity. Any verse pattern longer than sonnet length, especially when it employs varied line lengths and provides no clear subdivisions in rhyme pattern, will appear irregular at first sight. Wordsworth seems to heighten this appearance through enjambment and midline pauses (note the emphatic exclamation point in line 3) in the opening lines of the poem:

Thy functions are ethereal,

As if within thee dwelt a glancing mind,

Organ of vision! And a Spirit aërial

Informs the cell of Hearing, dark and blind;

Intricate labyrinth, more dread for thought

To enter than oracular cave[.]

(ll. 1–6)

In fact, the compositional history suggests that the stanza originally was a creature of spontaneous overflow. Judging from De Selincourt’s apparatus criticus, the germ of “On the Power of Sound” is a set of lines composed for and rejected from “The Triad,” an irregularly rhymed poem (composed 1828). The lines—beginning “The Heavens, whose aspect makes our minds as still”—correspond to lines 181–92 of “On the Power of Sound,” the fifth to sixteenth lines of stanza 12 in the published poem. Later, Wordsworth added another set of verses rejected from “The Triad” to the head of this group. These lines correspond to lines 177–80, or the first four lines of stanza 12:

By one pervading spirit

Of tones and numbers all things are controlled

As sages taught, where faith was found to merit

Initiation in that mystery old.¹⁰

The stanza thus created stood as the introduction to a five-stanza version of “On the Power of Sound” (De Selincourt’s MS A), with subsequent stanzas presumably written in conformity with the sixteen-line form created through revision. A form arrived at through accidents of revision, then, becomes the most rigorously formal stanza in Wordsworth’s corpus. More to the point that I wish to pursue here, a stanza that gives an appearance of being organized primarily in accordance with the exigencies of the moment turns out to manifest a rather elaborate underlying pattern. A free impulse issues in a fixed scheme, an overflow manifests order, the passion of the sense expresses itself in a system of “tones and numbers.”

Wordsworth’s theme and versification both make the emblematic significance of the poems’ physical pattern more obvious than is common in Wordsworth’s corpus. In stanza 13, for example, Wordsworth’s representation of the infinite variety of natural sound “under the form of” a single hymn of thanksgiving is marked by a number of metrical minutiae that together make the activity of unifying the linguistic many into an integral whole an important part of the experience of reading. For example, Wordsworth employs strong enjambment at the midpoint of the stanza (end of line 8), a place where the rhyme scheme suggests a natural division and where most of the stanzas employ full stops:

Nor mute the forest hum of noon:	6
Thou too be heard, lone eagle! freed	7
From snowy peak and cloud, attune	8
Thy hungry barkings to the hymn	9
Of joy	10

(ll. 198–202)

Another, more subtle, example is the use of apparently extrametrical syllables in the thematically central line 196:

Unite, to magnify the Ever-living,

Your inarticulate notes with the voice of words!

(ll. 195–96)

Here, as in a similar example from “Yew-Trees,” the placement of “inarticulate” and “with the voice” is, for the ear practiced in hearing Wordsworth’s verse, a challenge to fit the language to the metrical scheme, to unite this verse with the system of stress and number that governs all of Wordsworth’s verse. The syllables admit of elision but (like “particular” in “Yew-Trees” [l.16]) do not go gentle into a metrically induced oblivion:¹¹

In a poem that thematizes the relationship between naturally unique and individuated occurrences of sound and a system of “tones and numbers” comprehending all such occurrences, such minutiae offer concrete instances of sound that may be heard not as exclusively one or the other but as both. Twelve syllables of natural speech pronunciation are metrically ten. The activity of fitting the individual instance to the controlling pattern exercises powers of articulation and consolidation both.

Wordsworth’s stanza in “On the Power of Sound” expresses and emblematizes the activity of unification through and in diversification in yet another way. As has been noted, the stanza is without precedent either in Wordsworth’s corpus or in English poetry in general. At the same time, however, it is suggestive enough of sonnet form to invite comparison with what may be the single most readily recognizable rhymed form both in the corpus and in the tradition. The rhyme scheme suggests, but does not quite conform to, sonnet quatrain and couplet divisions. Moreover, the total metrical length of the sixteen lines in the stanza is exactly equivalent to the metrical length of the sonnet: each has, typically, seventy metrical beats. The relationship seems especially apparent and significant when “On the Power of Sound” is considered within the contexts of Wordsworth’s corpus and his career. The Poetical Works contains more than five hundred sonnets; therefore, to know Wordsworth’s verse is to be fully attuned to the structure and movement of the sonnet. During the years when “On the Power of Sound” was drafted and revised, Wordsworth’s preferred form, especially for longer and more important themes, was increasingly the sonnet sequence, in which numbered sonnets function as stanzas (or almost so) in a longer work (note here, too, the numbering of stanzas in “On the Power of Sound”).

Wordsworth’s stanza in “On the Power of Sound,” then, may be regarded as an attempt to fashion out of the sonnet tradition a form “more interwoven and complete / To fit the naked foot of Poesy.”¹² Considered as such, the experiment is interestingly of a piece with his thinking about the sonnet in the 1820s and 1830s. During this period, Wordsworth is writing sonnets on the sonnet, including “Scorn not the sonnet, critic” and “There is a pleasure in poetic pains” (both composed in 1827). These deal overtly (as does the much earlier written “Nuns Fret Not”) with issues that I am suggesting are more covertiy present in “On the Power of Sound”: the poet’s commitment to work in strictly controlled verse forms and the pleasures and rewards of doing so. This is the period, too, during which Wordsworth makes his well-known comments to Alexander Dyce about the sonnet, comments that reveal a great deal about the attractions that sonnet form so obviously held for him.¹³ Praising Milton for his refusal to submit to the divisions—either merely “arbitrary” or, at best, binary—encouraged by the Italian form, Wordsworth defines the “excellence of the Sonnet” as consisting mainly in a “pervading sense of intense Unity.” He goes on to say, a “little fanciful[ly],” that he is “much in the habit” of looking on the sonnet not “as a piece of architecture, making a whole out of three parts,” but as “an orbicular body, –a sphere—or a dew-drop” (LY 2:604–5).

A “pervading sense of intense Unity” would seem to have been on Wordsworth’s mind, and such unity seems to be the goal of the stanza used in “On the Power of Sound.” Although most of the stanzas divide syntactically in half at line 8, the differences between the patterns of lines 1–8 (a_₃ba_bc₅dcd₄) and lines 9–16 (ef₄e₅gf₄gh₅h₄) are sufficient to frustrate any easy sense of a binary structure. In fact, the appearance of asymmetricality creates a sense that the eighth-line division does not divide the poem into equal parts. Short of actually counting syllables and metrical units, it is difficult to register the fact that lines 1-8 and lines 1–16 each contain precisely the same number of metrical beats (thirty-five).¹⁴ Again, the appearance of no particular order manifests in its “full period” an underlying order. Contrarily, numerical regularity finds expression in and through the appearance of unique occurrences.

Many such incitements to emblematic reading occur in the minutiae of the verse in “On the Power of Sound.” Their prevalence, taken along with the overt themes of the work, constitutes an open invitation to a reading of the poem as emblematic of an important function of Wordsworth’s metrical art as a whole. As a late poem, placed prominently in a centrally important category of the Poetical Works, the poem’s image of a world of diffuse and varied sound unified by the ear of imagination cannot but bring to mind Wordsworth’s hopes and fears for his own “wandering Utterances,” the poems that make up the Poetical Works. Dora Wordsworth’s response to the poem speaks volumes about the context in which the formidable task of this poem’s composition was undertaken and pursued: “We all think there is a grandeur in this Poem,” she writes to Edward Quillinan in November 1829, “but it ought to have been in the ‘Recluse’ and Mother on that account but half enjoys it” (see LY 2:309–10 n. 4).

In 1814, Wordsworth could be satisfied with a figurative description of his “minor poems” as forming the “little cells, oratories, and sepulchral recesses” of an (as yet) unfinished concrete expression of thanksgiving—the metaphoric “gothic church” of the Preface to The Excursion (Prose 3:5-6). As long as The Recluse remained the great work that was to be done, each of the parts had a place within that work, and The Recluse itself would take its place in a larger whole among the works of Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton. Hundreds of shorter efforts were guaranteed continued life by virtue of their inclusion within the greater work. In 1828–29, when the plan of the all-inclusive Recluse was a rapidly fading dream (at least as originally conceived), Wordsworth begins to emphasize a different kind of figure.

Asserting the claims of the musical over, or in tense opposition to, the architectural as an adequate figure under which to represent the unity of his work, Wordsworth redirects attention away from the visual image of what might have been (an image in which the unsheltered cells and oratories are doomed to ruin) and encourages aural apprehension of the work on its own terms, as nothing more (or less) than what it is—a body of work to which a prelude is the appropriate form of introduction. In Wordsworth’s metrical art, each sound, syllable, word, verse, stanza, or verse paragraph is represented as simultaneously an expression of spontaneous impulse and a fulfillment of a single controlling system of organization. Each is neither one nor the other but both. Wordsworth’s poetic voice is neither wholly bound to common speech nor wholly free to revel in its own harmonic relationships, aspiring to a celestial music beyond the mire of human complexity. It is a third thing—sung speech or spoken song, able to accommodate a “vast … compass” of “fittings” of the two systems of organization to each other. The creative “voice” of Wordsworth’s verse exists in the active tension between the syntax of passion and the passion of meter, “True to the kindred points of Heaven and Home.”¹⁵

“On the Power of Sound” suggests that this aesthetic principle at the heart of Wordsworth’s metrical art may be extended imaginatively to the corpus as a whole. The “wandering Utterances” that constitute the corpus itself—the odes, elegies, meditations, narratives, didactic poems, political sonnets, hymns, songs, and the vast compass of diverse voices that find expression in common measure and blank verse, sonnets, cento stanzas, four- and five-beat couplets, and the rest—stand on their own, each reflective of the particular impulses and accidents of its composition. At the same time, the ear of imagination may hear all of these as infinitely varied modulations of a single activity. Heard within the full period of their unfolding, they may be understood as magnificently and diversely articulated expressions of a single system of “tones and numbers.”

One song they sang, and it was audible,

Most audible, then, when the fleshly ear,

O’ercome by humblest prelude of that strain,

Forgot her functions and slept undisturbed.

(14-Bk Prelude 2.416–19)