The Sway of Language

Summary

In his essay ‘The Makings of a Music: Reflections on Wordsworth and Yeats’, Seamus Heaney considers Hazlitt's account of a visit to Alfoxden in June 1798, when Wordsworth gave a spirited reading of ‘Peter Bell’. It was ‘the quality and sway of the poet's speaking voice’ (P 64), as Heaney puts it, that moved Hazlitt to record his impressions of the event. The implications of the word ‘sway’ in this formulation are not entirely clear: does Heaney have in mind only the imposing authority of the poet's performance or does he also mean to suggest that the delivery captured the sweeping rhythmic motions of the verse? The word itself sways a little, fluctuating between possibilities. Heaney develops its ambiguities a few lines later in the essay by positing a connection between the nature of Wordsworth's hold over an audience and his habit of composing aloud to himself on the hoof: ‘And I imagine that the swing of the poet's body contributed as well to the sway of the voice’ (65). This correlation between bodily movement and authority of utterance appears also in Heaney's ‘Elegy’ for Robert Lowell in Field Work (1979), when he recalls how his American friend would rock on his feet while controlling the flow of conversation: ‘you swayed the talk / and rode on the swaying tiller / of yourself’ (FW 31).