We may begin with a poem standing near this boundary, the famous verses To the Cuckoo, ‘O blithe new-comer.’ It stands near the boundary because, like the poem on the Daffodils, it is entirely happy. But it stands unmistakably on the further side of the boundary, and is, in truth, more nearly allied to the Ode on Immortality than to the poem on the Daffodils. The sense of sight is baffled, and its tyranny broken. Only a cry is heard, which makes the listener look a thousand ways, so shifting is the direction from which it reaches him. It seems to come from a mere ‘voice,’ ‘an invisible thing,’ ‘a mystery.’ It brings him ‘a tale of visionary hours,’ – hours of childhood, when he sought this invisible thing in vain, and the earth appeared to his bewildered but liberated fancy ‘an unsubstantial fairy place.’ And still, when he hears it, the great globe itself, we may say, fades like an unsubstantial pageant; or, to quote from the Immortality Ode, the ‘shades of the prison house’ melt into air. These words are much more solemn than the Cuckoo poem; but the experience is of the same type, and ‘the visionary gleam’ of the ode, like the ‘wandering voice’ of the poem, is the expression through sense of something beyond sense.
Take another passage referring to childhood. It is from the Prelude, ii. Here there is something more than perplexity. There is apprehension, and we are approaching the sublime:
One summer evening (led by her54) I found
A little boat tied to a willow tree
Within a rocky cave, its usual home.
Straight I unloosed her chain, and stepping in
Pushed from the shore. It was an act of stealth
And troubled pleasure, nor without the voice
Of mountain-echoes did my boat move on;
Leaving behind her still, on either side,
Small circles glittering idly in the moon,
Until they melted all into one track
Of sparkling light. But now, like one who rows,
Proud of his skill, to reach a chosen point
With an unswerving line, I fixed my view
Upon the summit of a craggy ridge,
The horizon’s utmost boundary; far above
Was nothing but the stars and the grey sky.
She was an elfin pinnace; lustily
I dipped my oars into the silent lake,
And, as I rose upon the stroke, my boat
Went heaving through the water like a swan;
When, from behind that craggy steep till then
The horizon’s bound, a huge peak, black and huge,
As if with voluntary power instinct,
Upreared its head. I struck and struck again,
And growing still in stature the grim shape
Towered up between me and the stars, and still,
For so it seemed, with purpose of its own
And measured motion like a living thing,
Strode after me. With trembling oars I turned,
And through the silent water stole my way
Back to the covert of the willow tree;
There in her mooring-place I left my bark, —
And through the meadows homeward went, in grave
And serious mood; but after I had seen
That spectacle, for many days, my brain
Worked with a dim and undetermined sense
Of unknown modes of being; o’er my thoughts
There hung a darkness, call it solitude
Or blank desertion. No familiar shapes
Remained, no pleasant images of trees,
Of sea or sky, no colours of green fields;
But huge and mighty forms, that do not live
Like living men, moved slowly through the mind
By day, and were a trouble to my dreams.
The best commentary on a poem is generally to be found in the poet’s other works. And those last dozen lines furnish the best commentary on that famous passage in the Ode, where the poet, looking back to his childhood, gives thanks for it, – not however for its careless delight and liberty,
But for those obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things,
Fallings from us, vanishings;
Blank misgivings of a Creature
Moving about in worlds not realised,
High instincts before which our mortal Nature
Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised.
Whether, or how, these experiences afford ‘intimations of immortality’ is not in question here; but it will never do to dismiss them so airily as Arnold did. Without them Wordsworth is not Wordsworth.
The most striking recollections of his childhood have not in all cases this manifest affinity to the Ode, but wherever the visionary feeling appears in them (and it appears in many), this affinity is still traceable. There is, for instance, in Prelude, xii., the description of the crag, from which, on a wild dark day, the boy watched eagerly the two highways below for the ponies that were coming to take him home for the holidays. It is too long to quote, but every reader of it will remember
the wind and sleety rain,
And all the business of the elements,
The single sheep, and the one blasted tree,
And the bleak music from that old stone wall,
The noise of wood and water, and the mist
That on the line of each of those two roads
Advanced in such indisputable shapes.
Everything here is natural, but everything is apocalyptic. And we happen to know why. Wordsworth is describing the scene in the light of memory. In that eagerly expected holiday his father died; and the scene, as he recalled it, was charged with the sense of contrast between the narrow world of common pleasures and blind and easy hopes, and the vast unseen world which encloses it in beneficent yet dark and inexorable arms. The visionary feeling has here a peculiar tone; but always, openly or covertly, it is the intimation of something illimitable, over-arching or breaking into the customary ‘reality.’ Its character varies; and so sometimes at its touch the soul, suddenly conscious of its own infinity, melts in rapture into that infinite being; while at other times the ‘mortal nature’ stands dumb, incapable of thought, or shrinking from some presence
Not un-informed with Phantasy, and looks
That threaten the profane.
This feeling is so essential to many of Wordsworth’s most characteristic poems that it may almost be called their soul; and failure to understand them frequently arises from obtuseness to it. It appears in a mild and tender form, but quite openly, in the lines To a Highland Girl, where the child, and the rocks and trees and lake and road by her home, seem to the poet
Like something fashioned in a dream.
It gives to The Solitary Reaper its note of remoteness and wonder; and even the slight shock of bewilderment due to it is felt in the opening line of the most famous stanza:
Will no one tell me what she sings?
Its etherial music accompanies every vision of the White Doe, and sounds faintly to us from far away through all the tale of failure and anguish. Without it such shorter narratives as Hartleap Well and Resolution and Independence would lose the imaginative atmosphere which adds mystery and grandeur to the apparently simple ‘moral.’
In Hartleap Well it is conveyed at first by slight touches of contrast. Sir Walter, in his long pursuit of the Hart, has mounted his third horse.
Joy sparkled in the prancing courser’s eyes;
The horse and horseman are a happy pair;
But, though Sir Walter like a falcon flies,
There is a doleful silence in the air.
A rout this morning left Sir Walter’s hall,
That as they galloped made the echoes roar;
But horse and man are vanished, one and all;
Such race, I think, was never seen before.
At last even the dogs are left behind, stretched one by one among the mountain fern.
Where is the throng, the tumult of the race?
The bugles that so joyfully were blown?
– This chase it looks not like an earthly chase;
Sir Walter and the Hart are left alone.
Thus the poem begins. At the end we have the old shepherd’s description of the utter desolation of the spot where the waters of the little spring had trembled with the last deep groan of the dying stag, and where the Knight, to commemorate his exploit, had built a basin for the spring, three pillars to mark the last three leaps of his victim, and a pleasure-house, surrounded by trees and trailing plants, for the summer joy of himself and his paramour. But now ‘the pleasure-house is dust,’ and the trees are grey, ‘with neither arms nor head’:
Now, here is neither grass nor pleasant shade;
The sun on drearier hollow never shone;
So will it be, as I have often said,
Till trees, and stones, and fountain all are gone.
It is only this feeling of the presence of mysterious inviolable Powers, behind the momentary powers of hard pleasure and empty pride, that justifies the solemnity of the stanza:
The Being, that is in the clouds and air,
That is in the green leaves among the groves,
Maintains a deep and reverential care
For the unoffending creatures whom he loves.
Hartleap Well is a beautiful poem, but whether it is entirely successful is, perhaps, doubtful. There can be no sort of doubt as to Resolution and Independence, probably, if we must choose, the most Wordsworthian of Wordsworth’s poems, and the best test of ability to understand him. The story, if given in a brief argument, would sound far from promising. We should expect for it, too, a ballad form somewhat like that of Simon Lee. When we read it, we find instead lines of extraordinary grandeur, but, mingled with them, lines more pedestrian than could be found in an impressive poem from any other hand, – for instance,
And, drawing to his side, to him did say,
‘This morning gives us promise of a glorious day.’
or,
‘How is it that you live, and what is it you do?’
We meet also with that perplexed persistence, and that helpless reiteration of a question (in this case one already clearly answered), which in other poems threatens to become ludicrous, and on which a writer with a keener sense of the ludicrous would hardly have ventured. Yet with all this, and by dint of all this, we read with bated breath, almost as if we were in the presence of that ‘majestical’ Spirit in Hamlet, come to ‘admonish’ from another world, though not this time by terror. And one source of this effect is the confusion, the almost hypnotic obliteration of the habitual reasoning mind, that falls on the poet as he gazes at the leech-gatherer, and hears, without understanding, his plain reply to the enquiry about himself and the prosaic ‘occupation’ he ‘pursues’:
The old man still stood talking by my side;
But now his voice to me was like a stream
Scarce heard; nor word from word could I divide;
And the whole body of the man did seem
Like one whom I had met with in a dream;
Or like a man from some far region sent,
To give me human strength, by apt admonishment.
The same question was asked again, and the answer was repeated. But
While he was talking thus, the lonely place,
The old man’s shape, and speech, all troubled me.
‘Trouble’ is a word not seldom employed by the poet to denote the confusion caused by some visionary experience. Here are, again, the fallings from us, vanishings, blank misgivings, dim fore-feelings of the soul’s infinity.
Out of many illustrations I will choose three more. There is in the Prelude, iv., the passage (so strongly resembling Resolution and Independence that I merely refer to it) where Wordsworth describes an old soldier suddenly seen, leaning against a milestone on the moon-lit road, all alone:
No living thing appeared in earth or air;
And, save the flowing water’s peaceful voice,
Sound there was none …
… still his form
Kept the same awful steadiness – at his feet
His shadow lay, and moved not.
His shadow proves he was no ghost; but a ghost was never ghostlier than he. And by him we may place the London beggar of Prelude, vii.:
How oft, amid those overflowing streets,
Have I gone forward with the crowd, and said
Unto myself, ‘The face of every one
That passes by me is a mystery!’
Thus have I looked, nor ceased to look, oppressed
By thoughts of what and whither, when and how,
Until the shapes before my eyes became
A second-sight procession, such as glides
Over still mountains, or appears in dreams;
And once, far-travelled in such mood, beyond
The reach of common indication, lost
Amid the moving pageant, I was smitten
Abruptly, with the view (a sight not rare)
Of a blind Beggar, who, with upright face,
Stood, propped against a wall, upon his chest
Wearing a written paper, to explain
His story, whence he came, and who he was.
Caught by the spectacle my mind turned round
As with the might of waters; an apt type
This label seemed of the utmost we can know,
Both of ourselves and of the universe;
And, on the shape of that unmoving man,
His steadfast face and sightless eyes, I gazed,
As if admonished from another world.
Still more curious psychologically is the passage, in the preceding book of the Prelude, which tells us of a similar shock and leads to the description of its effects. The more prosaically I introduce the passage, the better. Wordsworth and Jones (‘Jones, as from Calais southward you and I’) set out to walk over the Simplon, then traversed only by a rough mule-track. They wandered out of the way, and, meeting a peasant, discovered from his answers to their questions that, without knowing it, they ‘had crossed the Alps.’ This may not sound important, and the italics are Wordsworth’s, not mine. But the next words are these:
Imagination – here the Power so called
Through sad incompetence of human speech,
That awful Power rose from the mind’s abyss
Like an unfathered vapour that enwraps,
At once, some lonely traveller. I was lost;
Halted without an effort to break through;
But to my conscious soul I now can say —
‘I recognise thy glory’: in such strength
Of usurpation, when the light of sense
Goes out, but with a flash that has revealed
The invisible world, doth greatness make abode,
There harbours; whether we be young or old,
Our destiny, our being’s heart and home,
Is with infinitude, and only there;
With hope it is, hope that can never die,
Effort, and expectation, and desire,
And something evermore about to be.
And what was the result of this shock? The poet may answer for himself in some of the greatest lines in English poetry. The travellers proceeded on their way down the Defile of Gondo.
Downwards we hurried fast,
And, with the half-shaped road which we had missed,
Entered a narrow chasm. The brook and road
Were fellow-travellers in this gloomy strait,
And with them did we journey several hours
At a slow pace. The immeasurable height
Of woods decaying, never to be decayed,
The stationary blasts of waterfalls,
And in the narrow rent at every turn
Winds thwarting winds, bewildered and forlorn,
The torrents shooting from the clear blue sky,
The rocks that muttered close upon our ears,
Black drizzling crags that spake by the way-side
As if a voice were in them, the sick sight
And giddy prospect of the raving stream,
The unfettered clouds and region of the Heavens,
Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light —
Were all like workings of one mind, the features
Of the same face, blossoms upon one tree;
Characters of the great Apocalypse,
The types and symbols of Eternity,
Of first, and last, and midst, and without end.55
I hardly think that ‘the poet of Surrey, say, and the prophet of its life’ could have written thus. And of all the poems to which I have lately referred, and all the passages I have quoted, there are but two or three which do not cry aloud that their birth-place was the moor or the mountain, and that severed from their birth-place they would perish. The more sublime they are, or the nearer they approach sublimity, the more is this true. The cry of the cuckoo in O blithe new-comer, though visionary, is not sublime; but, echoed by the mountain, it is
Like – but oh, how different!56
It was among the mountains that Wordsworth, as he says of his Wanderer, felt his faith. It was there that all things
Breathed immortality, revolving life,
And greatness still revolving; infinite.
There littleness was not; the least of things
Seemed infinite; and there his spirit shaped
Her prospects, nor did he believe, – he saw.
And even if we count his vision a mere dream, still he put into words, as no other poet has, the spirit of the mountains.
Two voices are there; one is of the sea,
One of the mountains; each a mighty voice.
And of the second of these we may say that ‘few or none hears it right’ now he is gone.
Partly because he is the poet of mountains he is, even more pre-eminently, the poet of solitude. For there are tones in the mountain voice scarcely audible except in solitude, and the reader whom Wordsworth’s greatest poetry baffles could have no better advice offered him than to do what he has probably never done in his life – to be on a mountain alone. But for Wordsworth not this solitude only, but all solitude and all things solitary had an extraordinary fascination.
The outward shows of sky and earth,
Of hill and valley, he has viewed;
And impulses of deeper birth
Have come to him in solitude.
The sense of solitude, it will readily be found, is essential to nearly all the poems and passages we have been considering, and to some of quite a different character, such as the Daffodil stanzas. And it is not merely that the poet is alone; what he sees is so too. If the leech-gatherer and the soldier on the moon-lit road had not been solitary figures, they would not have awaked ‘the visionary power’; and it is scarcely fanciful to add that if the boy who was watching for his father’s ponies had had beside him any more than
The single sheep and the one blasted tree,
the mist would not have advanced along the roads ‘in such indisputable shapes.’ With Wordsworth that power seems to have sprung into life at once on the perception of loneliness. What is lonely is a spirit. To call a thing lonely or solitary is, with him, to say that it opens a bright or solemn vista into infinity. He himself ‘wanders lonely as a cloud’: he seeks the ‘souls of lonely places’: he listens in awe to
One voice, the solitary raven …
An iron knell, with echoes from afar:
against the distant sky he descries the shepherd,
A solitary object and sublime,
Above all height! like an aerial cross
Stationed alone upon a spiry rock
Of the Chartreuse, for worship.
But this theme might be pursued for hours, and I will refer only to two poems more. The editor of the Golden Treasury, a book never to be thought of without gratitude, changed the title The Solitary Reaper into The Highland Reaper. He may have had his reasons. Perhaps he had met some one who thought that the Reaper belonged to Surrey. Still the change was a mistake: the ‘solitary’ in Wordsworth’s title gave the keynote. The other poem is Lucy Gray. ‘When I was little,’ a lover of Wordsworth once said, ‘I could hardly bear to read Lucy Gray, it made me feel so lonely.’ Wordsworth called it Lucy Gray, or Solitude, and this young reader understood him. But there is too much, reason to fear that for half his readers his ‘solitary child’ is generalised into a mere ‘little girl,’ and that they never receive the main impression he wished to produce. Yet his intention is announced in the opening lines, and as clearly shown in the lovely final stanzas, which give even to this ballad the visionary touch which distinguishes it from Alice Fell:
Yet some maintain that to this day
She is a living child;
That you may see sweet Lucy Gray
Upon the lonesome wild.
O’er rough and smooth she trips along,
And never looks behind;
And sings a solitary song
That whistles in the wind.
The solitariness which exerted so potent a spell on Wordsworth had in it nothing ‘Byronic.’ He preached in the Excursion against the solitude of ‘self-indulging spleen.’ He was even aware that he himself, though free from that weakness, had felt
perhaps too much
The self-sufficing power of Solitude.57
No poet is more emphatically the poet of community. A great part of his verse – a part as characteristic and as precious as the part on which I have been dwelling – is dedicated to the affections of home and neighbourhood and country, and to that soul of joy and love which links together all Nature’s children, and ‘steals from earth to man, from man to earth.’ And this soul is for him as truly the presence of ‘the Being that is in the clouds and air’ and in the mind of man as are the power, the darkness, the silence, the strange gleams and mysterious visitations which startle and confuse with intimations of infinity. But solitude and solitariness were to him, in the main, one of these intimations. They had not for him merely the ‘eeriness’ which they have at times for everyone, though that was essential to some of the poems we have reviewed. They were the symbol of power to stand alone, to be ‘self-sufficing,’ to dispense with custom and surroundings and aid and sympathy – a self-dependence at once the image and the communication of ‘the soul of all the worlds.’ Even when they were full of ‘sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not,’ the solitude of the Reaper or of Lucy, they so appealed to him. But they appealed also to that austerer strain which led him to love ‘bare trees and mountains bare,’ and lonely places, and the bleak music of the old stone wall, and to dwell with awe, and yet with exultation, on the majesty of that ‘unconquerable mind’ which through long years holds its solitary purpose, sustains its solitary passion, feeds upon its solitary anguish. For this mind, as for the blind beggar or the leech-gatherer, the ‘light of sense’ and the sweetness of life have faded or ‘gone out’; but in it ‘greatness makes abode,’ and it ‘retains its station proud,’ ‘by form or image unprofaned.’ Thus, in whatever guise it might present itself, solitariness ‘carried far into his heart’ the haunting sense of an ‘invisible world’; of some Life beyond this ‘transitory being’ and ‘unapproachable by death’;
Of Life continuous, Being unimpaired;
That hath been, is, and where it was and is
There shall endure, – existence unexposed
To the blind walk of mortal accident;
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.
For me, I confess, all this is far from being ‘mere poetry’ – partly because I do not believe that any such thing as ‘mere poetry’ exists. But whatever kind or degree of truth we may find in all this, everything in Wordsworth that is sublime or approaches sublimity has, directly or more remotely, to do with it. And without this part of his poetry Wordsworth would be ‘shorn of his strength,’ and would no longer stand, as he does stand, nearer than any other poet of the Nineteenth Century to Milton.
NOTE
I take this opportunity of airing a heresy about We are Seven. Wordsworth’s friend, James Tobin, who saw the Lyrical Ballads while they were going through the press, told him that this poem would make him everlastingly ridiculous, and entreated him in vain to cancel it. I have forgotten how it was received in 1798, but it has long been one of the most popular of the ballad poems, and I do not think I have ever heard it ridiculed. I wonder, however, what its readers take to be the ‘moral’ of it, for I have never been able to convince myself that the ‘moral’ given in the poem itself truly represents the imaginative impression from which the poem arose.
The ‘moral’ is in this instance put at the beginning, in the mutilated opening stanza:
– A simple child,
That lightly draws its breath,
And feels its life in every limb,
What should it know of death?
Wordsworth, in composing, began his poem with the end; and when it was all but finished he recited it to Dorothy and Coleridge, and observed that a prefatory stanza was wanted, and that he should enjoy his tea better if he could add it first. Coleridge at once threw off the stanza as we have it, except that the first line ran, ‘A simple child, dear brother Jim,’ – this Jim, who rhymes with ‘limb,’ being the James Tobin who protested afterwards against the poem. The stanza was printed in the Lyrical Ballads as Coleridge made it, Wordsworth objecting to the words ‘dear brother Jim’ as ludicrous, but (apparently) giving way for the sake of the joke of introducing Tobin.
Now the poem gains in one way by this stanza, which has a felicity of style such as Wordsworth perhaps would not have achieved in expressing the idea. And the idea was not only accepted by Wordsworth, but, according to his own account, he had mentioned in substance what he wished to be expressed. It must seem, therefore, outrageous to hint a doubt whether the stanza truly represents the imaginative experience from which the poem arose; and I can only say, in excuse, that this doubt does not spring from reflection, or from knowledge of Coleridge’s authorship of the stanza, for I do not remember ever having read We are Seven without feeling it or without saying to myself at the end, ‘This means more than the first stanza says.’ And, however improbable, it cannot be called impossible that even so introspective a poet as Wordsworth might misconstrue the impression that stirred him to write. I will take courage, therefore, to confess the belief that what stirred him was the coincidence of the child’s feelings with some of those feelings of his own childhood which he described in the Immortality Ode, and once or twice in conversation, and which, in a less individual and peculiar form, he attributes, in the Essay on Epitaphs, to children in general. But, rather than argue the point, I will refer to one or two passages. ‘At that time I could not believe that I should lie down quietly in the grave, and that my body would moulder into dust’ (remark recorded by Bishop Wordsworth, Prose Works, ed. Grosart, iii. 464). Is not this the condition of the child in We are Seven? ‘Nothing,’ he says to Miss Fenwick, ‘was more difficult for me in childhood than to admit the notion of death as a state applicable to my own being’ (ib. iii. 194). He then quotes the first stanza of We are Seven. It is true that thereupon he expressly distinguishes his own case from the child’s, attributing the difficulty in her case to ‘animal vivacity.’ But I have already fully admitted that Wordsworth’s direct testimony goes against me; and I have now only to call attention to a passage in the Essay on Epitaphs. In that essay Wordsworth begins by saying that the custom of raising monuments to the dead ‘proceeded obviously from a two-fold desire; first, to guard the remains of the deceased from irreverent approach or from savage violation, and, secondly, to preserve their memory.’ But these desires, in his opinion, resolve themselves into one, and both proceed from the consciousness or fore-feeling of immortality, also described as ‘an intimation or assurance within us, that some part of our nature is imperishable.’ And he goes on thus: ‘If we look back upon the days of childhood, we shall find that the time is not in remembrance when, with respect to our own individual Being, the mind was without this assurance… Forlorn, and cut off from communication with the best part of his nature, must that man be, who should derive the sense of immortality, as it exists in the mind of a child, from the same unthinking gaiety or liveliness of animal spirits with which the lamb in the meadow or any other irrational creature is endowed; to an inability arising from the imperfect state of his faculties to come, in any point of his being, into contact with a notion of death; or to an unreflecting acquiescence in what had been instilled into him!’ Now Coleridge’s stanza, and Wordsworth’s own distinction between the child and himself, do come at least very near to attributing the child’s inability to realise the fact of death to that very liveliness of animal spirits which, as a sufficient cause of it, is here indignantly repudiated. According to the present passage, this inability ought to have been traced to that ‘sense’ or ‘consciousness’ of immortality which is inherent in human nature. And (whether or no Wordsworth rightly describes this sense) it was this, I suggest, that, unknown to himself, arrested him in the child’s persistent ignoring of the fact of death. The poem is thus allied to the Immortality Ode. The child is in possession of one of those ‘truths that wake to perish never,’ though the tyranny of the senses and the deadening influence of custom obscure them as childhood passes away. When the conversation took place (in 1793), and even when the poem was written (1798), Wordsworth had not yet come to regard the experiences of his own childhood as he saw them later (Tintern Abbey, 1798, shows this), and so he gave to the poem a moral which is not adequate to it. Or perhaps he accepted from Coleridge a formulation of his moral which was not quite true even to his own thoughts at that time. It is just worth observing as possibly significant that the child in We are Seven is not described as showing any particular ‘animal vivacity’: she strikes one as rather a quiet, though determined, little person.
These remarks, of course, can have no interest for those readers who feel no misgivings, such as I have always felt, in reading the poem. But many, I think, must feel them.