IV.iv.Sympathetic Life in Things, Silence and the ...
This erasure of female literary labor in “poetic mediality[108]”is not specifically that of Wordsworth, nor merely of this poem.Adela Pinch points out that “Sonnet on Seeing Miss Helen Maria Williams Weep at a Tale of Distress”is similar to other contemporary poems addressed to women poetesses—Anna Seward, Charlotte Smith, Hannah More, Ann Yearsley and Williams—that populated the poetry sections of the magazines in the 1780s [109].This general textual media strategy is deployed for control and anxiety upon the possibly hysterical woman body at a time decades after “the female body came to be understood no longer as a lesser version of the male’s(a one-sex model) but as its incommensurable opposite(a two-sex model)”(Laqueur viii)[110].The female body and passion are so potentially contaminating that in another poem of Wordsworth’s—written in 1799 or 1800—there has to be a literary death:
A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal
A slumber did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears.
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.
No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.
The poem’s sources in the ballad tradition have long been recognized[111].The literary death of the female figure reminds of a similar female informant mentioned in Thomas Percy’s headnote to his “Edom O’Gordon, a Scottish ballad”(1765):“We are indebted for its publication(with many other valuable things in these volumes) to Sir David Dalrymple, Bart., who gave it as it was preserved in the memory of a lady that is now dead[112].”The figure of a dead lady informant becomes part of what Edinburgh moral philosopher Dugald Stewart calls “the culture of memory”and “the principles on which the culture of memory depends[113]”—a mnemonics constituted by the coming of the modern print[114].
In an important essay, Geoffrey Hartman argues that many of the spectral qualities that we associate with marginal figures in Wordsworth’s poetry derive from their genealogical link to the world of ballads and romance.“The archaic or literary forms subsumed by Wordsworth,”he writes, “are the literal spooks of Gothic ballad or tale, and the etiolated personifications endemic to poetic diction[115].”This Gothic tincture of female figures in Wordsworth’s poetry is more explicitly stated in a primal scene of terror that happens in “The Thorn”—“one of the strangest poems in Lyrical Ballads”(Hartman 146), according to Geoffrey Hartman[116]—before the narrator has a language to poeticize it.While climbing among the hills, when the old sailor first comes to this seaside village and has not yet “heard of Martha’s name”(173), he is caught in a terrible storm:
’Twas mist and rain, and storm and rain:
No screen, no fence could I discover;
And then the wind! in sooth, it was
A wind full ten times over.
I looked around, I thought I saw
A jutting crag, —and off I ran,
Head-foremost, through the driving rain,
The shelter of the crag to gain;
And, as I am a man,
Instead of jutting crag, I found
A woman seated on the ground.
I did not speak—I saw her face;
Her face!—It was enough for me;
I turned about and heard her cry,(https://www.daowen.com)
“Oh misery! oh misery!”[177-191]
Seeking a rock, the poetic voice comes upon what seems an isolated woman, her body figuring so close to the earth that she becomes part of it, suffering, like mad Lear, the brunt of the storm[117].S.M.Parrish contends that the narrator does not actually see Martha Ray, only “a gnarled old tree hung with moss”(Parrish 101).The encounter establishes itself as a literary artifact, reminiscent of Wordsworth’s writing of “Sonnet on Seeing Miss Helen Maria Williams Weep at a Tale of Distress”before he actually met Miss Williams[118].In this Lucy poem of Wordsworth’s, the object-like spectral “she”“neither hears nor sees.”“She”becomes part of the inanimate “earthly years,”“rolled,”“earth’s diurnal course”with rocks, and stones, and trees, which, in turn, strikes of interest because of being provided by consciousness of the human presence—the eyesight of the narrator, the sympathetic erotic “touch,”and their implied visual and aural sensorial abilities.Literature is presented as work and nature as that work.The entire absence of the readerly experience of the “audiovisual hallucinations”presents another experience of the “blanking”from the auditory screen of the blank verse(Langan 53).Readers are thus presented at a crucial moment in an almost primitive encounter when standing before the other, as a figure of inarticulate feeling, seeking sympathetic understanding that underlies and makes possible the mediation from writing.Only after an evocation from the sensuality of the touch could the narrator claim knowledge and the right to speak the truth and reconstruct the primeval world, which is pre-human and pre-linguistic:she dies, as Geoffrey Hartman has observed, “at the threshold of humanization”(Hartman 1964:60).
Condillac, in his Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge(1746), situates his account of the origin of language in a postdiluvian period, when “that some time after the deluge two children, one male, and the other female, wandered about in the deserts, before they understood any sign.”“Who knows?”he asks, “but some nation or other owes its original to an event of this kind?[119]”Wordsworth, as almost certain to have been familiar with this Essay[120], seems to invest an origin of a poetic language through the erotic “touch of earthly years”communicated to the female figure.It accomplishes a transition from natural to instituted signs in a gesture of what Charles Taylor calls “the affirmation of ordinary life[121]”—“earth’s diurnal course,”that is[122].It agrees with the way in which “Enlightenment theories of the origin of languages regarded poetry as the most archaic form of discourse, and meter and rhyme chiefly as mnemonic devices for the preservation of cultural history in the absence of writing”(Langan 50)[123].Celeste Langan argues that
the problematic archaism of a written poetry culminates with the development in the eighteenth century of print capitalism as a truly massive medium ....The most widespread solution to this evident dilemma is to identify poetry as the language of the passions; poetry represents that excited utterance which, according to grammarians of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, is registered in prose only by the unmeaning interjection(oh! ah! alas!).(Langan 50)
“A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal”presents an exemplary illustration of this solution through an entire absence of the oral communication of passions, since the touch is tactile.
This insinuated fertility of the feminine suggested in the poem is not strange in Wordsworth’s poetics:“For the Vale profound / Is overflowing with the sound”suggesting a voice and womb from the Solitary Reaper, who, “o’er the sickle bending,”sings “a melancholy strain”of “natural sorrow, loss, or pain,”or of “old, unhappy, far-off things,”a primordial song whose power over the listener / narrative voice is pre-linguistic, connecting the ancient past with the present[124].The south-to-north “progress of poetry”—as well as its east-to-west / downward-to-upward movement, is an ascent contrary to the descent in “Sonnet on Seeing Miss Helen Maria Williams Weep at a Tale of Distress.”This movement accords well with a progress from exteriority to interiority—“The music in my heart I bore, / Long after it was heard no more[125],”visuality to aurality, and more significantly, the female poetic object to the male poetic subject that realizes the ethnographic poetic project, with a strong sense of landscaping ownership obtained [126].This characterizes the transformation of the temporality of speech into the spatiality of writing.Susan Stewart argues that:“The movement of time into space is often a device for the legitimation of territory and property, both private and national, by means of narrative or textual evidence”(23).The acoustically conscious singing culminates in a silencing move of the ascending male poetic consciousness:“I listen’d till I had my fill./ And, as I mounted up the hill, / The music in my heart I bore, / Long after it was heard no more.”Work of writing aspires to achieve an Enlightenment ideal of transparent communication of a silent medium, where “print is the medium of a virtual community of speakers”(Langan 50)[127].The silent reader of the blank verse, “no longer subjected to the immediate sensory input of verbal melody,”“gain access to the mediated(i.e., narratively evoked) musical sense of the poem”(Langan 53).The construction of the poetic is rather interiorized sound and vision in the poem.
Between the medium itself and this “community”always already exists a process of mediation—a constant inter-textual activity.Wordsworth remarks of “The Solitary Reaper”:“This Poem was suggested by a beautiful sentence in a MS.Tour in Scotland written by a Friend, the last line being taken from it verbatim[128].”In an entirely inverse gesture, the death of sentimentality and dearth of the magical repository of “audiovisual hallucinations”in “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal”gives the birth of the writer, assuming a common cause with the ethnologist and the archaeologist, who, as Michel de Certeau puts it, “arrive at the moment a culture has lost its means of self-defense”(de Certeau 1986:123).By the 1780s, indeed, as Paula McDowell points out, “one detects the crystallization of a new confrontational model of balladry, whereby an earlier, more ‘authentic’ tradition of ‘minstrel song’ is seen as having been displaced by commercial print”(McDowell 2010:242).It is a confrontation stated very explicitly in John Pinkerton’s preface “Dissertation on the Oral Tradition of Poetry”to his Scottish Tragic Ballads:“In proportion as Literature advanced in the world Oral Tradition disappeared”(qtd.in McDowell 2010:243).The erotic and tactile touch is revealed as time, a gesture of classifying and ordering of objects.It produces a structure of rationalization, a legitimation of an end that only the present can bring to consciousness.The acoustic and visual faculties of the poetic figure are surrogated by a silent reader.It is the historical emergence of mass literacy identified by Friedrich A.Kittler as “around 1800,”which teaches “a silent and private way of reading.”“[A]s a ‘sad surrogate of speech’ could easily consume letters bypassing the vocal organs”(Kittler 1997:38), so that “one believes one hears what one merely reads”(39)[129].It reminds of Wordsworth’s attempts to sink “deep into the mind of Man,”into “the darkest Pit / Of the profoundest Hell, chaos, night”(Home at Grasmere, MS.B, lines 984-989) bred by superstition and fear, to reconstruct imaginatively the “vulgar metaphysics”of the world’s first humans through a poetic media[130].Lucy here is so objectified that she shares in the “rolling,”after being rolled by “obscurely animate, motion and force of that earth[131]”into periods of darkness, measure of early days and years that occupies the threshold between nature and man linking the two states.A spiritualizing progress is very rudimentary:“[W]hat has been immortalized is not a spirit, but the body, which rolls interminably, as a ‘thing’ hardly different from ‘rocks, and stones, and trees,’ in an elemental material nature”(Bewell 203).It is “transformed into a genius loci, an expression of the ‘law and impulse’ of nature[132]”—“Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course,”that is.What Herbert Lindenberger observes as the “rhetoric of interaction”throughout The Prelude and elsewhere in Wordsworth’s poetry[133], charges the poetic incident through mirroring “my spirit,”“she,”and “early”rocks, stones, and trees.Before this, she is claimed as a “thing,”a literary as well as sentimental dearth.The human figure is fused into her sympathetic relationship with natural objects[134]:“in all shapes … a secret & mysterious soul, / A fragrance & a spirit of strange meaning.”“[M]oral life”is given to “every natural form, rock, fruit, & flower / Even the losse stones that cover the highway[135].”This remains similar to what Geoffrey Hartman has perceptively noted in the old man of the leech gatherer:“a relict of the spiritual flood ...a ‘sea-beast’ stranded by the ebbed side”(Hartman 1966:33).The feminine body, through affective dearth, is reduced to a state of nature and can now epitomize, having regained the spirit through the erotic touch of writing, the transition from nature to culture.It is here one sees the poet that Hazlitt describes as scanning
the human race as the naturalist measures with earth’s zone, without attending to the picturesque points of view, the inequalities of surface.He contemplates the passions and the habits of men, not in their extremes, but in their first elements.(Hazlitt 11)
As the poet of the Lake District, Wordsworth wanders through a primeval landscape, engaged in the hazardous task of gathering a poetic language capable of withstanding the historical flow of time—a leech-gatherer of words, that is.He writes that he feels a “wide ...vacancy”separating himself from his past, yet nevertheless he feels that “those days”have
such self-presence in my mind
That sometimes when I think of them I seem
Two consciousnesses—conscious of myself,
And of some other being.[Wordsworth, 1979b:28-33]
This double self, an identity split into two parts—“the means by which he recovered that ‘other being’ within himself”(Bewell 35)—constitutes a condition as well as a product of his “poetic mediality.”Poetry-writing works to create means of mediation between them to interiorize the outward glance—the objects of which are either nature, “uncouth vagrants,”female sentiments, or females reading and creeping—into a way of looking inward.Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe argue that “since [Walter Scott], since a certain break or rupture that took place with [Scott], [poetry] is no longer what was understood by this word, but rather the agency(or insistence) of the letter in the unconscious.[Poetry] is the letter and hence what passes in and through the unconscious[136].”In Wordsworth we have one of the beginnings regarding this technology of writing in relation to an emergent form of the unconscious through media and mediation[137].
Wordsworth, loving a nature felt “all in all”and setting a larger interactive history embodied in the site of Tintern Abbey, learns
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity.(Wordsworth 1952—1959, 2:260)
The shift from “looking on”nature as a “thoughtless youth”to “hearing ...music”is mediated by the coming of a poetic consciousness, which is realized in the work of writing.A landscape made significant to a savage eye is poeticized into an acoustic literacy of the social ear to domesticate the sublime topographical landscape into an individualized listening experience[138].This is probably why Wordsworth places the site of the poem “a few miles above Tintern Abbey”to manufacture “the landscape of the opening passage”to be “prehistoric rather than unhistorical, prefiguring the abbey that is not so much absent entirely as not yet there, but waiting downriver in the flow of time[139].”The facility for objectification and for distancing compels a poetic mediation from the work of writing to mean historically.The failure of the landscape is to meet the actual motivation for the composition of the poem, which is suggestive of what Andrew Franta identifies of “Romantic poetry’s aspiration to achieve the kind of durability that will allow it to reach its readers”(Franta 15).It is an illustration of “the self-regarding quality of Romantic poetry—and of the poet ‘who sits in darkness, and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds,’”which is “a formal acknowledgement of the necessity of transmission”(15).This media transmission is interwoven with a new and distinctly modern historical consciousness, which print culture historian Elizabeth Eisenstein attributes to “the printing press as an agent of change[140].”With the introduction of printing, Eisenstein suggests,
less effort was required to preserve and pass on what was known ....Successive generations began to pride themselves on knowing more than had their forebears ...Human history itself acquired the character of an indefinitely extended unfolding sequence.(Eisenstein 1986:6)
In this sense, the rise of a poetic consciousness in Wordsworth, as materialized through a saturating print technology, creates a historical sense.And this involves an engagement with his contemporary situation, as Coleridge comments upon The Recluse:after surveying “the pastoral and other states of society,”it was to have presented “a melancholy picture of the present state of degeneracy and vice,”which would serve as proof of the “necessity for, the whole state of man and society being subject to, and illustrative of, a redemptive process[141].”
This redemptive historical sense cannot dispense with the sublime nature, the anthropological figures of which Wordsworth resituates into a domestic circumstance:idiots, children, villagers, and women, the blind, the deaf, and the mute.What we call their sublimity is actually our “dim and undetermined sense”that they represent “unknown modes of being”(Wordsworth 1979b:51), like the leech-gatherer, who seems a figure “met with in a dream”(110).No wonder John Keats writes to Richard Woodhouse of “the Wordsworthian or egotistical sublime[142].”In the fragmentary essay “The Sublime and the Beautiful,”Wordsworth claims that
as we advance in life, we can escape upon the invitation of our more placid & gentle nature from those obtrusive qualities in an object sublime in its general character; which qualities, at an earlier age, precluded imperiously the perception of beauty which that object if contemplated under another relation would have been capable of imparting.(Wordsworth 1974, 2:349)
The sublime and the beautiful, simultaneously existing in nature, works differently to a maturing poetic mind, which is affected first by the “obtrusive qualities in an object sublime”and later by a more “placid and gentle nature[143].”James Averill argues that Wordsworth “finds such power in the traditional sources of literary energy inherited from previous generations of poets, the complex of images and responses collectively known as the ‘sublime’.”The four such sources of “sublimity”include “the cosmic space vision, the ‘mountain glory,’ the ‘graveyard’ and the ‘psychological sublime’”(Averill 1980:91).A sense of tranquility and catharsis achieved in “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal”is through a convergence of these four sources:earth, rocks, death and slumber [144]—nature as the “agent invisible”(Hobbes’ phrase [145]) materialized through the touch.The performative function of narrative is well maintained through these two stanzas:“she”literarily has to become a “thing,”to which the narrator can claim an epistemological truth, and she does.The exploitative theatricality becomes even ghoulish.If “words”are “not only as symbols of the passion, but as things, active and efficient, which are of themselves part of the passion,”as Wordsworth conceives in his Note to “The Thorn,”in making “words”into a poem “she”has to become a “thing”and thereby part of the “words.”The silence—“slumber”—of the poetic voice represents not tragic catharsis but a form of sublimity, and comes through with vacuity, darkness, solitude and a general privation of humanity rendered into earthly things and a printed image[146].The doctrine of Love of Nature and Love of Mankind are merged by an economy of sympathy not in scarcity, but almost in excess.Wordsworth, not proposing a Burkean emotionalism, has a more self-conscious “moral discipline”towards feelings, some of which he considers to be “coarse sympathies[147]”.Too much excitement from poetry should be tranquilized rather than celebrated, and excessive emotionalism could only be attributed to the marginal characters of his poems.The textual media, indeed, serves as the Freudian “superego”in the work process of writing and transmission.For instance, Wordsworth writes:
The end of Poetry is to produce excitement in coexistence with an overbalance of pleasure.Now, by the supposition, excitement is an unusual and irregular state of the mind; ideas and feelings do not in that state succeed each other in accustomed order.But if the words by which this excitement is produced are in themselves powerful, or the images and feelings have an undueproportion of pain connected with them, there is some danger that the excitement may be carried beyond its proper bounds.(Wordsworth 1974, 1:146)
He finds “the great social principle of life, / Coercing all things into sympathy”(Wordsworth 1979b:87).It reminds of some abiding sense of calm that Coleridge finds in sympathy with the real or imagined life of objects:“The rocks and Stones put on a vital semblance; and Life itself thereby seemed to forego its restlessness, to anticipate in its own nature an infinite repose, and to become, as it were, compatible with Immovability[148].”Albert O.Wlecke argues that for Wordsworth, as for Coleridge, “the true source of the sublimity of anything, physical object or idea, is always the subject,”and “sublime consciousness”becomes “a structure of awareness in which all conceptions tend to recede from shapeliness, and the mind is left groping in the darkness of its own subjectivity[149].”A sublimating self-consciousness incarnates the poetic subjectivity in the object-like things like “she,”trees and stones, and words, or a companionship of Dorothy Wordsworth, who “enters the poem [The Prelude] not in her own right but in answer to the poet’s and the poem’s needs[150].”The sublimity of subjectivity is made possible through a necessary aesthetic distance between the observer and the object associated with sentimentality.If in the previous poem, the readers could still afford to have an access to Miss Helen Maria Williams’s poems published in the magazines of the 1780s, along with those by Anna Seward and Charlotte Smith, Wordsworth bases his poetic vision and possibility in the literary death of the female body when more into his career of being a poet[151].Thus, the movement of Wordsworth from sentimental to topographical verse could be observed:the poetic energies that originally focus on sentimental human objects shift to “the infinite variety of natural appearances[152],”in both of which sources of “sublimity”are located and achieved in mediation, whether what Meyer Howard Abrams terms as “visual peripety[153]”is devised.It is in this way that female figures and sentiments are forged, collected, annotated, surveyed, transcribed, and edited into the conditions of existence in an emergent textual media culture.