Wordsworth was known to his contemporaries as the author of a major long poem. But this poem was not The Prelude, first published only in 1850 after his death that year. Instead, it was The Excursion, one of the ‘three things to rejoice at in this Age’, according to Keats in a letter.1 It seemed to many contemporary readers such as Hazlitt and Byron to involve a retreat from sympathy with radicalism into conservatism. Later commentators have found it to be lacking the poetic intensity and flair of the greatest writing in The Prelude. More recently, however, there has been renewed interest in and admiration for a poem that can be thought of as powerfully dramatic.2 Involving a narrator and an encounter with a disillusioned Solitary, whose ‘despondency’ is the object of attempted ‘correction’ through the advice and often sympathetic admonitions of two other characters, the Wanderer and the Pastor, the poem engages the reader in and through its depiction of different moods and perspectives.
Formally, Wordsworth takes over the nine‐book form favoured by eighteenth‐century meditative poems such as Edward Young’s Night Thoughts, a form also used by Blake in The Four Zoas and by Shelley in Queen Mab. The Excursion begins after an important manifesto‐like Prospectus, intended for the philosophical poem The Recluse, which Wordsworth never completed, but of which The Excursion was intended as a part. In this Prospectus Wordsworth, in a majestic and resonant blank verse, claims ‘the Mind of Man’ as ‘My haunt, and the main region of my Song’ (40, 41).3 He claims, as already noted in the Introduction, that this subject creates more ‘fear and awe’ (37) than Miltonic subjects such as ‘Chaos’ (35) and ‘The darkest pit of lowest Erebus’ (36), or than the ‘blinder vacancy – scooped out / By help of dreams’ (37–8). The language, there, is responsive to the ‘vacancy’ it affects to despise, partly an effect of the vigorous phrase, ‘scooped out’, and alerts us to the tensions that give dynamic energy to the long poem that follows.
Those tensions come into view towards the close of Book I, in which Wordsworth first published material relating to the sufferings of a woman called Margaret, whose husband is driven by economic need to desert her and join the army. At the end of Book I the reader is presented with the problem of how to respond to the tale, which ends with the death of Margaret and attempted solace offered to the narrator and the reader. It was first conceived as a poem called ‘The Ruined Cottage’.4 In The Excursion it is told to a narrator by the Wanderer (the Pedlar in the earlier version) whose formation is described in language and rhythms that are alert to the influences exercised by nature upon his developing imagination. Wordsworth mingles inner and outer in wording that blends ‘deep feelings’ (152) and ‘Great objects’ (153); the physical and the mental form a composite form and force that ‘on his mind’ (154), a phrase repeated from the previous line, ‘lay like substances, and almost seemed / To haunt the bodily sense’ (155–6). The passage captures the forming power of experience, as it impresses itself upon the young boy’s mind and imagination, through enjambments, lineation, and images that are all imbued with a vital responsiveness.
Wordsworth conveys the story of Margaret with restraint, economy, and tragic simplicity, but also with attention to the involvement of teller and listener. The poem deploys a blank verse of an unusual bareness and capacity; it serves, quite unsentimentally, to evoke strong emotion. This capacity is evident in the Wanderer’s outcry, picked up by Shelley at the end of his Preface to Alastor (possibly turning Wordsworth’s words against him): ‘the good die first, / And they whose hearts are dry as summer dust / Burn to the socket’ (531–3). Internal rhyme (‘die’ and ‘dry’) combines with a blank verse of expressive strength (apparent in the stress on ‘Burns’) to communicate the speaker’s half‐embittered state of distress. Elsewhere, Wordsworth implies a parallel between the increasingly ramshackle cottage and Margaret’s inability to care for herself or her child. Or he charges words such as ‘changed’ with heart‐stopping power: ‘Her face was pale and thin, her figure too / Was changed’ (786–7).5 As often in Wordsworth’s poetry, forms of the verb ‘to be’ – here the word ‘was’ – insist on a condition that is what it is, ungainsayably itself.
And yet, though much is unignorable, much remains to be revealed. On two occasions Margaret speaks as though fulfilling the Wanderer’s apprehensions on her behalf, as in the chiastic, ‘I have slept / Weeping, and weeping I have waked’ (804–5). However, his preoccupation with her sadness, his sense that he is seeming ‘to muse on One / By sorrow laid asleep’ (820–1), must contend with the rather stranger implication of her words later on, when she says of a tree, ‘I fear it will be dead and gone / Ere Robert come again’ (880–1), with its affecting hint, supported by the fact that she keeps his clothes and staff ‘undisturbed’ (889), that what torments Margaret is not despair but the desperate hope, communicated through the last four words, that Robert will ‘come again’.6 Indeed, returns, real and imagined, are vital to the poem’s success. Margaret endures ‘A sore heart‐wasting’ (910) before her death, seen by the Wanderer in a further image of sleep as a merciful release into the care of nature: ‘She sleeps in the calm earth, and peace is here’ (971), he tells the narrator, offering the solace of a pantheistic intuition and gently rebuking his auditor for giving way to grief. Nature absorbs Margaret back into itself, putting a stop to her ‘sore heart‐wasting’ by arresting her status as a living person. This absorption may seem faintly ominous, but the Wanderer seeks to reassure the narrator through an exquisitely meditative account of grasses ‘By mist and silent rain‐drops silvered o’er’ (974) that conveyed to him ‘So still an image of tranquillity’ (976) that it seemed momentarily to nullify ‘all the grief / That passing shews of Being leave behind’ (980–1). The passage comforts and discomforts in equal measure. The writing carries us along on an eloquent tide of rhythmic and figurative conviction, yet we may protest at the suddenly long‐angled view that includes the experiential data of Margaret’s endurance among ‘the passing shews of Being’. Wordsworth is at pains to suggest that the Wanderer’s feelings of contentment and solace are just that, feelings that do not exclude what the tale as a whole has made clear, that human suffering has about it an irreducible reality.
The story of Margaret is probably the finest passage in The Excursion. But the poem contains much else that is worth close attention, especially when it seeks both to provide solace and to recognize the human need for consolation. An example occurs in a passage from Book IV, a book much admired by Keats, in which the Wanderer explains the source of mythological imaginings as deriving from the need to foster and cherish ‘A thought / Of Life continuous, Being unimpaired’ (IV.750–1). Expertly using the resources of blank verse, especially its ability to accommodate qualifications extending across a long sentence, Wordsworth goes on to describe what such a thought surmounts. In doing so he brings into play a powerful sense of the human condition, one that left its mark upon Keats’s ‘Ode to the Nightingale’ and his ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’:
From diminution safe and weakening age;
While Man grows old, and dwindles, and decays;
And countless generations of Mankind
Depart, and leave no vestige where they trod. (756–9)
The writing dwells here on all that the ‘thought’ of ‘Life continuous, being unimpaired’ holds at bay. It finds an idiom that achieves a grave authority as it articulates the sorrowful truths of mutability, transience, and oblivion. It serves as a small instance of an impulse at work in The Excursion. At war with the merely or tediously prescriptive and didactic, this impulse is in tune with the realities of ordinary human suffering and able to endow those realities with a persuasive grandeur. Wordsworth’s writing here and elsewhere in the poem has about it a subdued visionary power. This power can flare into sublime vision, as in the account of the sky and cloudscape towards the close of Book II as a New Jerusalem. The passage has something of the sudden revelation typical of a spot of time in The Prelude, but its vision in the sky of ‘a mighty City’ (870) has, if anything, a bolder, more transcendental, more architecturally shaped grandeur. Wordsworth captures, his fluid syntax flowing, it would seem, in all directions, ‘an unimaginable sight’ (886), a sight imagined as composed of ‘Clouds of all tincture, rocks and sapphire sky, / Confused, commingled, mutually inflamed, / Molten together’ (889–91). Effects of confusion, commingling, and molten fusion happen at once in a poetry of rare visionary richness. The language suggests that political confusions have been displaced onto a vista of the heavens, and the sense throughout the passage that, despite the elaborated metaphors of structure and building, the vision is about to dissolve gives it, in the context of the poem as a whole, an almost unnerving tonal blend, one made up of wonder, resilience, imaginative comfort, and a quiet, self‐aware quality of resignation.
Again, the poetry compels when it gives full scope to the Solitary’s story of personal happiness and sadness (the loss of a child and wife), exaltation at the sense of liberation when France embarked on its Revolution, and subsequent disillusion at the behaviour of both France and its enemies, especially Britain. All existence heads towards nothingness in the powerful close of his speech in this book, the third, in which he expresses ‘a hope / That my particular current soon will reach / The unfathomable gulph, where all is still!’ (996–8). There, much work is performed by the interplay of indeterminate adjective and homeless noun.
More of the poem’s finest moments, however, derive from a complex doubleness of perspective that challenges the Solitary’s near‐nihilistic pessimism as expressed at the end of Book III. In Book IV, for example, the image of the sea heard in a shell communicates the Wanderer’s conviction that it is possible to hear ‘Authentic tidings of invisible things; / Of ebb and flow, and ever‐during power; / And central peace, subsisting at the heart / Of endless agitation’ (1138–41). Here, one is in touch with the poem’s ability to intuit the possibility of ‘central peace’ while allowing for the pervasive experience of ‘endless agitation’. Yet, cunningly and truthfully, the syntax gives such ‘agitation’ the last word; peace shines out from a structure that is endlessly folded over on itself and responsive to ‘agitation’. At such moments, one is aware that the poem contains some of Wordsworth’s finest achievements as a writer of blank verse, that it embodies his mature response to the problems posed by ordinary human suffering, those presented by ageing, loneliness, disease, and poverty, and that it seeks, often with much success, to dramatize inner debates and conflicts.