Rest and Recreation
What better way to mark the beginning of the end of the post-Napoleonic depression than to take a holiday? And what better way for Wordsworth to draw his own experience of post-war austerity to a close than by undertaking the long-deferred reunion with the daughter of his former lover? Wordsworth’s visit to Peterloo marked the opening stage of a journey that would interweave memories of personal struggles with the bitter and as yet unresolved history of the wars against revolutionary and Imperial France. Last seen walking on a beach in Calais in 1802, Caroline, now a married woman in her late twenties, met her father in Paris, towards the end of the continental tour that the Wordsworths took in the summer and autumn of 1820. The meeting, at which Caroline’s mother, husband, and two little girls were also present, passed without any apparent awkwardness or bitterness; from the diaries of Mary Wordsworth and Henry Crabb Robinson we learn that time was spent sightseeing, with visits to the Champs Elysee, the Louvre, the Tuileries, and the Jardin des Plantes.1 There is no evidence to suggest that Wordsworth was in any way haunted by memories of his previous visit to Paris when, as a young radical, he surveyed the events of the Revolution with a mixture of ardency and alarm. One other meeting in Paris does, however, give a clue to the complexity of feelings experienced by the poet during this period. As if to make up for the missed encounter of 1792, Wordsworth called on his old friend Helen Maria Williams not once but twice. On one of these occasions, he recited from memory her sonnet ‘To Hope’, the closing lines of which speak of a heart made weary by longing for release from grief and misfortune. A poem of muted acceptance, ‘To Hope’ bids farewell to ‘Fancy’s radiance’ (l. 7) and the ‘dear illusions’ (l. 10) that once charmed the eye.2 And in this manner, Wordsworth’s holiday draws to an end, a holiday that included, among its must-see sights, the fields of Peterloo and Waterloo and that, as we shall now see, provided a means for the older poet to come to terms not only with a conflicted past but also with a conflicted present.
Holidays after war have an air of the ridiculous about them. In Lamb’s account of the 1814 peace celebrations, the parks of London provide the setting for a summer-long period of drunkenness, promiscuity, and misrule.3 In the high-spirited summer of 1815, we learn from Southey that Wordsworth, of all people, caused a commotion when, dressed as a Spanish Don, he accidently kicked over a kettle of boiling water intended for the punch that was to be consumed, in celebration of Waterloo, on the summit of Skiddaw.4 From the same period, the Morning Chronicle reported that in Britain’s seaside resorts ‘[p]astime, in all its diversities, is the order of the day. Droves of donkeys, freighted with youth and Beauty, and clouds of vehicles, as richly filled, scour the rides from morn to eve—while the promenades and libraries teem with all the charms and elegance of fashion’.5 In Sanditon, Jane Austen comments acidly on the growth of the seaside leisure economy that afforded distraction from rising prices, high taxation, and social unrest. A man of grand designs, the entrepreneurial Mr Parker foregoes the house of his forefathers – ‘an honest old place’ – for a new home with a view of the sea:
‘You will not think I have made a bad exchange, when we reach Trafalgar House—which by the bye, I almost wish I had not called Trafalgar—for Waterloo is more the thing now. However, Waterloo is in reserve—& if we have encouragement enough this year for a little Crescent to be ventured on—(as I trust we shall) then, we shall be able to call it Waterloo Crescent—& the name joined to the form of the Building, which always takes, will give us the command of Lodgers.’6
As the language of triumph percolated into the language of tourism – one thinks back to Dorothy’s dismissal of the Bellerophon moment – so the cultured traveller sought to distinguish him or herself from the common herd.7 For those in the know, and the Wordsworths were most certainly of that class, the spoils of victory would be spent not sojourning in a ‘small, fashionable Bathing place’,8 of the kind that, in Austen’s story, had come to be associated with the sickly aftermath of war, but rather in pursuit of those enlivening pleasures that defended individuals and nations alike from the enervating tide of post-war melancholy.
The collection of poems in which Wordsworth sought to capture these pleasures, written mostly in the form of snapshot sonnets, and arranged in sequence like a family album, was developed a year after the holiday came to an end. In this volume, Wordsworth charts a journey across France, Belgium, Switzerland, and Italy, a literary grand tour that reads, at once, as an attempt to appease the ghosts of the tour that the poet undertook in earlier, revolutionary, times and to come to terms with other, more recent, but no less insistent concerns. Written during the phase of intense compositional activity that resulted in The River Duddon and Ecclesiastical Sketches, Memorials of a Tour on the Continent, 1820 follows a similarly riparian course, charting the histories – personal as well as collective – evoked by journeys made along and beside the Rhône and the Rhine. Critical readings of Memorials, which are rare, have pointed to the air of solemnity and, at times, pomposity that can be found in the collection; but such readings miss the surprising variety of tones, as well as the capacity for irony, even prankishness, that these poems exude.9 True, the tendency towards sententiousness, pat expressions of grandeur, and leaden phraseology, qualities that have come to define the ‘later style’, are evident in Memorials, but we must also be alert to the ways in which the poetry seeks to challenge the drive towards the unreflective foolishness of late middle age. Considered as a lyrical travelogue, Memorials is not unaware of its status as a contribution to the burgeoning literature of post-war tourism, at once delighting in the exercise of newfound freedoms – to travel, to revisit, and to reclaim sights associated with the delusions of youth – even as it works to distance itself from a culture given over to the parroting of an outmoded style. That style, which will eventually be recognised as Romantic, is associated in Sanditon with the hyper-cultivated silliness of the leisured classes: in Sir Edward Denham’s deployment of ‘all the usual Phrases’ to evoke the ‘undescribable Emotions’ excited by the sea; in his ill-informed enthusiasm for Scott and Burns; in the ‘fancy, the love of Distinction & the love of the Wonderful’ that impels the hypochondrial Parkers in all their speculative endeavours.10
Wordsworth, no less than Austen, is aware of how the currency of Romanticism has become devalued. The White Doe, as we have seen, gives evidence of an early inclination to have done with the ‘sovereign impulses of illimitable Ardour’ and to cultivate a style more in keeping with the ‘prosaic Decencies of life’.11 Then, the targets had been the epic romances of Scott and Southey; now, the target is the transgressive exoticism of Byron, Shelley, and the Cockney School. Although, in the course of their journey across Europe, the Wordsworths found some traces of the poet’s influence on the reading habits of British tourists – Dorothy notes quotations from ‘Matthew’ and ‘Yarrow Visited’ in the hotel album at Chamonix – for the most part it is Byron whose works ‘inspired by the landscapes of the Continent had now become a part of the public experience of those landscapes’.12 At Chillon Castle, Dorothy discovered, by way of complement to the place’s history of ‘sickening sorrow’, ‘tyranny’, and ‘recent war’, a copy of Byron’s poem in their apartment’s sitting-room.13 But this overt sign of Byron’s hold on the popular imagination is superseded by the uncited but no less commanding influence of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. As is well known, Byron’s description of the Swiss alps in Canto III cemented in the public mind an association between Child Harold and a love for the natural sublime that, for all its indebtedness to Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’ and ‘Immortality’ ode, was regarded as more successful, because more recognisably refined, than the singular productions of the Lake Poet. That, in retracing his earlier, revolutionary, journey Wordsworth was also treading ground ceded to Byron was a source of some considerable rancour, resulting, as we shall see, in forms of thematic and stylistic combativeness that echo the collection’s broader engagement with Europe’s war-torn history.
The predicament of writing ‘After’ the event—after oneself, after Byron, and after war—has been elegantly described by Peter Larkin:
‘After,’ in acknowledging the claim of the other in time, admits also that the present moment may be threateningly unique, that a climax, almost by definition, cannot continue on the same level. A postclimactic sphere must be consolidated, even by inviting meditation on loss, old age, or on death, the pure past.14
To find oneself the subject of the ‘past’s own proleptic expectations, its persistent self-forwardings’, Larkin continues, is to ‘arrive at, not a greater self-coincidence, but a more intense degree of reserve. It is a nostalgia compelled to absorb in its present plight (the plight of ageing) the past’s desire to terminate there as an inheritance’.15 In related vein, Robin Jarvis notes how ‘the layers of self-allusion in the 1820 Memorials’, to past experiences and to past retellings of these experiences, ‘implicitly acknowledge the frailty of the linguistic shrine they aspire to become’.16 At stake in these readings of the late poetry is the sense in which the production of new writing, even as it embraces ‘a deliberately calm, attenuated voice […] so as not to compete with the past’, risks the desecration of previously erected monuments to self-recollection.17 In Memorials, as I argue in this chapter, the tensions exposed by the poetics of unself-rivalry are made more acute by the collection’s belatedness to Childe Harold. To adapt Peter Manning’s account of Wordsworth’s subsequent continental sequence, the ‘Memorials of a Tour in Italy, 1837’, the 1820 Memorials may be read ‘as a deliberate anti-Childe Harold’.18 Informed by the wish to submit ‘to the terms of a private inheritance, to enclose himself in a predefined after-experience, to enact the postsublime’, Wordsworth must strive to confirm that he is the rightful legatee of that inheritance.19
The reading of Memorials that follows attempts, then, to account for the volume’s curious mixture of confidence and uncertainty. Despite the work performed by the collection’s marmoreal title, Wordsworth struggles to allay the taint of superfluity that has come to be associated with the discourse of tourism. Moreover, as an observer of sights linked with a personal history of enmity and disloyalty, the poet aspires towards a self-accord, both unthreatened by and unthreatening towards the return of discordant memories that, to avoid silence, must yet accept and engage with the formative power of linguistic and historical violence. Manifested in the poetry’s descriptions of quiescent cities, haunted battlefields, sanguine rivers, and blasted castles, the poet works also to distinguish his voice from the readymade expressions that, thanks to Scott and Byron, had made of Europe’s past and present a playground for the elicitation of heightened sentiment. To affirm the priority of the poet’s self-positioning while avoiding the reactivation of the early poetry’s visionary power is, of course, not easily achieved, and indeed, for a majority of readers, it is the studied attention to the diminution of such power that accounts for the pallid mediocrity of the later work. The discussion that follows qualifies this view on two counts: first, by drawing attention to the ways in which Memorials works to enact the post-sublime; second, by showing how, in the effort to temper the militant stirrings of the visionary imagination, the poet discovers what remains of the gentle voice of Fancy, not as it appears in the spoiled society of Sanditon but as it used to be heard before the time of speculation. In this voice of quiet resignation, linked with the acceptance of the disappearance of determinate words and things and of all that has come to characterise the fabricated identities of those who, unaffected by social and economic precarity, prosper in the wake of loss, Wordsworth hears the placid but intractable soundings of the melancholy ends of war.
Calais, Again
Memorials of a Tour on the Continent, 1820 begins, however, not with the voice of quiet resignation but with a bad joke in sonnet form. Often cited as one of the worst poems ever written by Wordsworth, and sometimes used as evidence of the aging poet’s indifference to social and artistic decorum, ‘Fish-Women.—On Landing at Calais’ – the title alone reads like a challenge to standard notions of good taste – is perhaps the most unprepossessing opening to a collection of poems by a notable writer ever to appear in print. Certainly, this is how the matter struck Francis Jeffrey who judged the poem to be emblematic of Wordsworth’s ‘emphatic inanity’ and ‘singular […] feebleness of thought’,20 a judgement that chimed with the opinion of the reviewer for the Literary Chronicle for whom the poem was ‘silly’ and ‘absurd’, representative of a collection in which ‘we cannot quote a single stanza worthy of notice’.21 Why, then, would a poet so recently preoccupied with establishing a position of authority in the public imagination descend to such tactics? Could it be, as the collection’s dedicatory sonnet advertised, that ‘Fish-Women’ was intended solely for the amusement of the poet’s ‘Dear Fellow-Travellers’, that devoted coterie in whose ‘enjoyment’ the Muse ‘confides’ (l. 10)?22 Or might the apparent lapse in judgement be taken as a mischievous assault on contemporary reading tastes?
Let us consider the first possibility. Intended as poetic illustrations for Dorothy’s journal account of the tour, the exercise rapidly took on a life of its own, resulting in a fully fledged collection that went to press towards the end of the month.23 ‘Fish-Women’ takes inspiration from the following passage:
Landed on the shores of France at ½ past one. What shall I say of CALAIS? I looked about for what I remembered, and looked for new things, and in both quests was gratified. With one consent we stopped to gaze at a groupe—rather a line of women and girls, seated beside dirty fish-baskets under the old gateway and ramparts—their white nightcaps, brown and puckered faces, bright eyes etc. etc. very striking. The arrangements—how unlike those of a fish-market in the South of England! but the cleanly, tight dress of these females prevents all disgust in looking at them; however you may dislike the smells from their slovenly baskets, and even in the countenance of these fish-women, the very lowest of the people, there is something of liveliness, of mental activity, interesting to me, an Englishwoman, fresh from home. Others however, if they have perceived, hardly remember this—and much of it may have been the gift of my own fancy. Every one is struck by the excessive ugliness (if I may apply the word to any human creatures) of the fish-women of Calais, and that no one can forget.
With its slow, tentative drift from curiosity-piqued admiration of ‘liveliness’ and ‘mental activity’ in ‘the very lowest of the people’ to brusque disavowal of their combined visual effect – ‘Every one is struck by the excessive ugliness […] of the fish-women of Calais’ – Dorothy’s account, though seeming initially to admire and sympathise with these representatives of ‘Low and rustic life’,24 ends by confirming the notion that, in matters of taste, bourgeois disgust trumps jacobinical fellow-feeling. Thus, radical sympathy is exchanged for worldly hauteur and brand Wordsworth is made fit for public consumption.
The sonnet written by way of illustration to these impressions begins and ends with a suave tip of the hat to the educated reader, relying on a shared sense of classical knowledge to advance its satirical intent:
But for Jeffrey, the representative of the educated elite, the joke falls flat as the poet, ‘supposing that Nereids may possibly be like the Calais fish-women’ and ‘judiciously remarking, how terrible it would be to dive and meet such tenants of the submarine caves’, assures himself, ‘without assigning any reason’, that the Nereids excel in beauty ‘Earth’s fairest Daughters’ and ‘therewithal clothes them in every quality of form and voice’. Intended to be of a ‘gay, lively cast’, the poem becomes, for Jeffrey, an indication of Wordsworth’s tonal flat-footedness and, crucially, of his failure to meet the needs of a cultivated readership.25
The above points seem, at first glance, to be uncontroversial. But closer attention, both to the sonnet and its literary relations, might prompt us to reconsider, and perhaps even appreciate, if not the success of the joke then at least the invention that underlies its creation. The opening couplet turns on a fondly mocking allusion to the primordial Titan’s water-encompassing powers and to the tradition of analogical thought, described by Pliny, that maintained a belief in the correspondence between things found in the sea and things found on land. By forcing the contrast between the grotesque fish-women and the beautiful Nereids the poet alludes both to a ‘common opinion’ sustained in classical and early modern thought and to a detail found in Hogarth’s The Gate of Calais, or the Roast Beef of Old England (1749).26 In a note added to the poem in 1836 Wordsworth attempts to excuse himself of the charge of ungallantry to the ‘worthy Poissardes’ – meaning ‘vulgar, low woman’ and, from association with ‘poisson’, more pointedly ‘fishwife’ – by taking ‘shelter under the authority of my lamented friend, the late Sir George Beaumont who, a most accurate observer, used to say of them, that their features and countenances seem to have conformed to those of the creatures they dealt in’.27 Beaumont, who would have been familiar with Hogarth’s painting and its widely circulated engraving (Figure 5), may have pointed out to Wordsworth the detail of ‘an amused fish-woman’ gloating over ‘a large skate with a face resembling her own’.28
Figure 5 William Hogarth, The Gate of Calais, or the Roast Beef of Old England (1749).
By focussing on this arresting correspondence, the poem attempts to provide an amusing critique of the beau ideal, while pushing the extent of analogical thought to its absolute limit. Yet still, even in jest, there is scope for flattering confirmation of the distinction between fishwife’s ‘withered’ condition and the sea-nymph’s ‘unmolested beauty’. Conceived, perhaps, as a witty compliment to the female members of the holiday party, the sonnet speaks also of the distinction between discordant earthly sounds – ‘shrill and fierce in accent!’ – and the ‘liquid music’ of the Nereids. Poetry, the sestet implies, will be found not in nature but in mythological imagining.
There remains, however, something deliberately forced about the sonnet’s display of classical learning, as if the poet were poking fun at a propensity for studied contrivances. In this respect Jeffrey’s incredulity at the poem’s failure to assign a reason for the sudden turn in line 9 comes close to the mark: might the sonnet be working deliberately to undermine the taste for Ovidian exoticism that had briefly interested Wordsworth and that had most recently come to be associated with Keats, Hunt, Shelley, and Byron? The idea that the contrast between fish-women and nereids may have been fashioned as a satirical barb against Keatsian paganism takes shape when one considers how the description of ‘liquid music […] Thrilling each pearly cleft and sparry grot’ mimics the fanciful expressions and overwrought sensuality of Endymion.29 However, as Tim Fulford and Jeffrey Cox note, Keats’s ornate diction and use of classical similes owes much to Wordsworth’s own earlier experiments in the classical mode, most notably the stylised description of ‘pagan Greece’ from Book IV of The Excursion (ll. 847–87; l. 846).30 In addition to stock mentions of naiads, oreads, and zephyrs, together with an allusion to the ‘beaming Goddess’ Diana (l. 865), this passage includes one of only four uses of the word ‘grotesque’ in Wordsworth’s poetry: ‘Withered Boughs grotesque,/Stripped of their leaves and twigs by hoary age’ (ll. 875–6), and it may be that ‘Fish-Women’ recalls this depiction of natural decay so as to sharpen the critique of pagan idolatry that, in The Excursion, ran the risk of waylaying the ascent to Christian truth through overindulgence in the sensual poetics of classical ‘Fancy’ (l. 853).
But while ‘Fish-Women’ presents a challenge to the contemporary vogue for classical fancy and, indeed, to Wordsworth’s role in supporting this vogue, a more immediate, and perhaps stronger, explanation can be found in the sonnet’s personal and political contexts. The port of Calais had long been conceived in the Wordsworthian imagination as an indicator of personal and political friction. In the summer of 1802, the town became a locus for meditations on the fragility of peace, the corruption of liberty, and the potential for hope. Then, the opposition between the sublimity of the ‘senselessness of joy’ that characterised the poet’s experience of France in 1792 and the ‘hollow’, alienated feelings of the present appeared insurmountable;31 in 1820, one might have expected Wordsworth to commemorate his return to France with a poem announcing the fulfilment of his hopes for the return of liberty’s ‘Fair seasons’ (‘To a Friend, Composed near Calais’. l. 14), a verse that would testify to the healing of wounds, the restoration of harmony, and the establishment of peace, a poem that would declare in tones of reserved self-satisfaction not only the end of war but also the end of the striving for visionary distinction that was born out of war. But ‘Fish-Women’ is not that poem. With its cultivated disparities of tone and jarring themes, this late poem is markedly less than sublime, but it is also something more than ridiculous.
This distinction gains force when attention returns to the question of how the poem is situated in relation to the discourse of post-war tourism. In a manner akin to the recently published Doctor Syntax in Paris, or, a Tour in Search of the Grotesque (1820), ‘Fish-Women’ seems to play on the contrast between the categories of the grotesque, the beautiful, and the sublime to substantiate unsubtle points about French impropriety, overfreighting the distinction between the withered victims of sexual disease and their ‘unmolested’ counterparts in Britain. But so wildly conceived is the distinction between these categories and their respective exemplars that one cannot help but entertain the idea that Wordsworth may, after all, be setting out deliberately to parody the expectations of the cross-channel travel genre. If we reject the crude dichotomies of Hogarth for the playful antimonies of Sterne, then the sonnet may be read not simply as a fatuous reiteration of conventional xenophobic misogyny but, rather, as a sophisticated reflection on the ways in which humour is used to discharge, while at the same time reinforcing, anxieties about national identity. More serious than it first appears, ‘Fish-Women’ participates artfully in a long history of Anglo-French antagonism, a history that links Hogarth’s Gates of Calais with anti-French visual satire. For as Wordsworth would have been aware, Hogarth’s depiction of fish-women with faces of ‘leather’ and soldiers ‘ragged and lean’ was an established trope of anti-gallic sentiment, dating back to the Seven Years’ War and deployed most recently and effectively as an aid to recruitment in the war against revolutionary and Napoleonic France.32 Memorials of a Tour on the Continent begins, then, with a deceptively stark refocillation of wartime propaganda, its underlying subtleties revealed only when the poem’s context is attended to and when read in the light of the volume as a whole.
From Bruges to Waterloo
While the opening verse proclaims its strangeness as a challenge to readers seeking confirmation of the ennobling sites to be encountered on a continental tour, the two sonnets that follow seem, at first, to be more conventionally framed. Offering delicately poised reflections on the compensatory beauty of Bruges as seen at dusk, neither comedy nor violence appears to trouble the smooth surface of these poems, yet closer inspection reveals the presence of currents that run against the mood of settled calm. In the first sonnet, the ‘sunless hour/That slowly introduced peaceful night/Best suits with fallen grandeur’ offers to the poet’s ‘sight’ a prospect of ‘magnificence’ to guard against ‘the injuries of time, the spite/Of Fortune, and the desolating storms of future War’ (ll. 3–10; passim). Written in response to Dorothy’s impression of the city, the poem offers a complementary vision of ‘tender melancholy’ and ‘self-sustained’ beauty (JDW II. 17–19). As is typical for Wordsworth, the adaptation of the Petrarchan sonnet, while maintaining the basic rhyme scheme, enjambs the octave and the sestet, allowing the poem to advance in an even, continuous manner, thereby sustaining the thematic emphasis on resistance to time and change at the level of form. At the close of the verse, as the poet seeks to stave off the return of night, peace is figured as ‘gentle’ and ‘silent’, a vision of fleeting ‘grace’ embodied in ‘the forms/Of Nun-like Females’ who ‘with soft motion glide’ (ll. 11–14). Here, then, is an image of concord, informed by notions of idealised feminine beauty, to contrast with the discordant clamour and appearance of the fish-women of Calais. As ‘Fish-Women’ deploys clashes of sight and sound to forward its argument, a set of thematic antitheses mirrored formally in the clear division of octave and sestet, end-stopped lines, and conventionally placed volta, so ‘Bruges’ works by blurring these conventions, presenting an impression of seamless continuity through the sustained use of enjambment and anaphora (four lines begin with the preposition ‘Of’, further underling the importance of maintaining relations between verbal entities) and near-strict adherence to iambic pentameter. An abrupt turn is introduced, however, in the middle of line 10 as, faced with the return of desolation, the poet implores the ‘Power of Darkness’ to ‘Advance not—spare to hide,/[…] these mild hues;/Obscure not yet these silent avenues’ (ll. 10–12). Via the imperative mood Wordsworth reintroduces negation into the poem and with it a premonition of the notion that peace on earth cannot be sustained.33
Serving as counterpoint to the grotesque opening poem, the first Bruges sonnet presents an image of purity briefly havened from the depredations of history and an idea of peace figured as post-discursive silence. The second sonnet endeavours to maintain this vision, dissolving the distinction between the secular and the divine through the portrayal of the city as ‘one vast Temple’ (l. 10). Reminiscent of the Westminster Bridge sonnet, the poem depicts Bruges as a harmonious entwining of the ‘popular’ (l. 3) and the ‘devout’ (l. 4), the ‘vulgar’ (l. 7) and the ‘consecrated’ (l. 9). Within this space ‘jarring passions’ (l. 13) are effaced, the potential for violence quelled by ‘mutual respect’ (l. 11) and ‘forbearances sedate’ (l. 12). The poem again marries content and form by moving with ‘swan-like ease’ (l. 6) between octave and sestet and in this case by erasing all trace of the formulaic volta. Yet, even here, as ‘nobler peace than that in deserts’ is ‘found’ (l. 14), the sonnet cannot avoid falling back on the Longinian rhetoric of conflict as, in line 5, the ‘Spirit of Antiquity’ ‘Strikes at the seat of grace within the mind’ (l. 5), the violent implications enhanced by the placing of three intervening clauses between the subject and the main verb. Thus, as Theresa Kelley has suggested, while the later Wordsworth engages with the category of beauty to smooth over formal divisions within poetry and political divisions within society,34 he does so with the full awareness that beauty, and its cognate peace, may be approached within the contested medium of language but can never fully be realised.
This consideration of Wordsworth’s efforts to reach beyond the economy of discursive violence while acknowledging the necessity of warring antitheses leads me to the central concern of this chapter. In the Autumn and Winter of 1821, when Wordsworth composed the bulk of the Memorials, domestic peace seemed, indeed, to be a distant dream. Although debates about the significance of Waterloo had begun to recede, the aftershocks of Peterloo remained a source of concern, prompting a detailed riposte to the charge of apostacy in a letter to James Losh (LY III. 96–9) and an angry swipe at Charles Lloyd for his role in fuelling Hazlitt’s attack on Wordsworth’s involvement in Westmorland politics in the November issue of ‘Table Talk, No. XII—On Consistency of Opinion’ (LY III. 106–8). As the poet sought to distance himself from former radical friends, he was moved at the same time to offer succour to his fellow apostate Robert Southey, whom Lord Byron had recently accused of slander. Beset by political and reputational assaults, Wordsworth may well have abandoned himself to the process of recollecting gentler, peaceable times to stave off vexation. And there is a sense in which the composition of piecemeal poems, following the course of a journey, may have worked as a form of self-regularisation, providing a way forward at a time of stress.
The fact that Byron should reappear on the horizon during the writing of these poems is not without significance. Relations between Wordsworth and Byron had deteriorated since the evening of Waterloo when, during a dinner at Samuel Rogers’s house, the poets had argued about the desirable outcome of the battle. Wordsworth would go on to voice grave reservations about the ‘bold bad Bard Baron B’ (MY II. 283), stating that the ‘farewell’ poems and verses on Napoleon gave evidence the ‘man is insane’ and that, in the third canto of Childe Harold, he had been ‘poaching on my Manor’ (MY II. 394). In January 1820, piqued no doubt by the dedication to Don Juan, with its attack on Southey, the Tory ‘renegade’, and jibe at Wordsworth’s ‘place in the Excise’,35 Wordsworth intensified his criticism of Byron by claiming that the poem would ‘do more harm to the English character, than anything of our time’ (MY II. 579). A year later, disturbed by the attacks and counterattacks of the Satanic School controversy, Wordsworth may have seen the Memorials as an opportunity to extend the civilising mission of The River Duddon and the Ecclesiastical Sketches, only in this case by using the framing device of the continental tour to counter Byron’s pernicious hold on public taste and to confirm the triumph of the Tory and Anglican establishment against the resurgence, in the wake of Peterloo, of republican and atheist dissent.
That, by the time preparation for Memorials was underway, Byron’s powers of imitation as much as his moral and political beliefs were a source of concern to Wordsworth is evident in Tom Moore’s account of a meeting with the poet in Paris towards the end of the continental tour. At this meeting Wordsworth reanimated his charge against Byron’s ‘antithetical manner’ (MY II. 385), before going on, as Moore recounts, to list
Byron’s plagiarisms from him; the whole third canto of Childe Harold founded on his style & sentiments. The feeling of natural objects, which is there expressed not caught by B.[yron] from Nature herself, but from him [Wordsworth], and spoiled in the transition. ‘Tintern Abbey’ the source of it all […] with this difference, that what is naturally expressed by him, has been worked by Byron into a laboured and antithetical sort of declamation.36
When read in this light, Memorials can be seen as an attempt on Wordsworth’s part to reclaim ground yielded to his more successful contemporary. As we have seen, however, the effort to present Memorials as a work of synthesis, offering unity and harmony in place of antithesis, gets off to a bad start, and despite the efforts of the two Bruges sonnets, Memorials is unable, fully, to revoke its own stake in the poetics and politics of violent opposition.
The impression of a baffled, self-contradicting work is highlighted still further when one considers how closely the collection maps the course of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto III. While such a comparison may, at first, seem aberrant, a brief consideration of these works reveals some compelling similarities. Like Byron’s poem, Memorials follows the tourist route, as set out in popular guides to Northern Europe published after Waterloo, combining evocations of riparian beauty and alpine sublimity with pronouncements on war, religion, and contemporary politics. No less than Byron, Wordsworth uses the device of the poetic journey to explore questions of memory, creativity, and the persistence of self over time. And just as Byron begins and ends his poem with an address to an absent daughter, so Wordsworth comes to frame his collection, albeit belatedly, as a means of reaching out to an estranged child.37 Though there are, of course, obvious points of formal and ideological difference between the two works, Memorials, I propose, is a collection that turns out to be unexpectedly Byronic, and perhaps not least when setting out to distinguish itself from Byron.
The poets’ respective treatments of the field of Waterloo may be taken as cases in point. Scott and Southey, and eventually Byron, would all make trips to Waterloo within a year of the battle having taken place; Wordsworth, however, did not visit the field until 1820. The vision of triumph hymned in the Thanksgiving volume was therefore a work of pure imagination, informed by factual accounts but divorced from personal contact. Byron would wait until the Vision of Judgement and Don Juan to announce his official disdain for Wordsworth’s invocation of divine support for the ‘Carnage’ of Waterloo, but Childe Harold’s unflinching presentation of the indiscriminatory fate of bodies on the field (‘Rider and horse,—friend, foe,—in one red burial blent!’; stanza 28, l. 252), along with the claim that ‘Waterloo with Cannae’s carnage vies’ (stanza 64, l. 608), provided an immediate, albeit oblique, form of attack.38 Initiated by the arresting announcement ‘Stop!—for thy tread is on Empire’s dust!’ (stanza 17, l. 145), the arrival at Waterloo jolts Childe Harold out of the contemplative mode, supplanting ruminations on the nature of poetic creativity and the benefits of the via contemplativa, for a series of rapidly shifting perspectives on the waste and ruin of war. In pronouncing the Juvenalian ‘Stop!’, Byron may well have had been seeking to arrest the seemingly endless flow of celebratory verses that followed in the wake of the battle, with Scott, Southey, and Wordsworth having published some of the more notable and, in Wordsworth’s case, notorious examples, but by setting the grandeur of Marathon against the carnage of Cannae, he was seeking also to ensure that Waterloo would not serve as a mythical point of origin for the Holy Alliance.
Located as the fourth poem in the Memorials sequence, Wordsworth’s arrival at Waterloo is no less jolting than Byron’s, coming as it does after the two poems celebrating the pacific harmonies of Bruges. Sustaining the intention to develop a sequence of poems to complement Dorothy’s prose account of the tour, the resulting sonnet, ‘After Visiting the Field of Waterloo’, takes inspiration from the observation that, aside from ‘a few monuments erected to the memory of the slain’, the field displays ‘no other visible record of slaughter’ (JDW II. 29). Five years have passed since the battle, and the traces of the dead have been covered by ‘luxuriant crops’ (29). Like the dark inverse of ‘Tintern Abbey’, Dorothy’s description affords scant delight from the restoration of natural beauty. Struck by the disparity between the ripening corn and the effacing of the material evidence of battle (‘The ruins of the severely contested chateau of Hougamont [sic.] had been riddled away since the battle, and the injuries done to the farm-house repaired’), Dorothy ventures ‘a charge of ingratitude against the course of things, that was thus hastily removing from the spot all vestiges of so momentous an event’. Still, even as ‘Nature’s universal robe of green, humanity’s appointed shroud’ obliterates the memory of the fallen, there is ‘much to be felt;—sorrow and sadness, and even something like horror breathed out of the ground as we stood upon it!’ (29). It is to this restoration of feeling in the face of scenic paucity that the sonnet responds, recognising in Dorothy’s disappointment with Waterloo the moment when, with an eye made quiet by the power of disharmony, we see into the death of things.
What Wordsworth sees in the field, but more specifically in Dorothy’s account of the field, is an opportunity to repeal Byron’s attack on the apparent callousness of the attribution of ‘Carnage’ to divine providence. The difficulty addressed by this sonnet is to acknowledge the ‘sorrow and sadness’ of Waterloo while maintaining a sense of its grandeur. Accordingly, Wordsworth adapts the argumentative form of the Petrarchan sonnet to accommodate sharp distinctions of perspective and tone while sustaining an impression of unity. Seeking to counter Byron’s rendition of Waterloo as, at once, a mock-heroic version of Marathon and a site of irredeemable loss, Wordsworth begins by forging a blunt contrast between a ‘Winged Goddess’ (l. 1) dispensing ‘glittering crowns and garlands’ (l. 4) on the ‘far-famed Spot’ (l. 5) and the dreary prospect of the present-day field. In the gap between ‘She vanished’ and ‘—All was joyless, blank, and cold’ (l. 6), the sonnet foregrounds the incongruity between the din of bardic triumphalism and the mute intractability of the site on which that vision is raised. In offering a concession to the radical critique of Waterloo, Wordsworth comes close to undoing the imaginative labour of the ‘Thanksgiving Ode’, which had endeavoured to sublimate the horror of mass slaughter by raising it to the status of divine sacrifice. Furthering this process of undoing, the two conditional formulations that comprise the octave accept the field’s resistance to ‘Meanings’ (l. 10), only to transform this acceptance into the self-righteous derivation of an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’:
At the poem’s close, however, the alliterative ‘hoards of hidden carnage near,/And horror breathing from the ground’ intensifies Dorothy’s use of the voiceless glottal fricative (‘something like horror breathed out of the ground as we stood upon it!’), the uncanny suggestion of breath issuing from the dead serving as a grotesque counterpoint to the moralising endorsement of cognitive inadequacy. Intended as a defence of the lines that had so offended Hazlitt, Byron, and Shelley, the reiteration of ‘carnage’ works to check the arrogance associated with inflated visionary perspectives on Waterloo but by doing so forces an encounter with the battle’s excessive human cost. As with the opening sonnet, this is not the first time that the collection has risked offending its audience with a vision of the grotesque. Yet here, once again, Wordsworth appears to be surprisingly in accord with the disruptive aesthetic of Lord Byron. At the same time, it should be noted that Byron is often surprisingly sympathetic towards Wordsworth’s pursuance of unity and calm. To develop this claim, I should like to return, via a reading of the description of the Napoleonic character in Childe Harold Canto III, to the question of Byron’s fascination with antitheses and his attempts, in the Swiss stanzas, to utilise Wordsworth to overcome this fascination.
‘But This Is Not My Theme’: Byron after Wordsworth
Responding to Medwin’s charge that he was indebted to Wordsworth in Childe Harold, Byron had this to say: ‘Very possibly […] Shelley, when I was in Switzerland, used to dose me with Wordsworth physic even to nausea; and I do remember then reading some things of his with pleasure’.39 To this barbed praise, Byron added that the Lyrical Ballads ‘jacobinical and puling with affection of simplicity as they were, had undoubtedly a certain merit’ and that ‘Wordsworth, though occasionally a writer for the nursery masters and misses […] now and then expressed ideas worth imitating’.40 Studies of the Wordsworthian influence on Childe Harold focus, understandably, on the poem’s adaptation of unity with nature tropes derived, in large measure, from ‘Tintern Abbey’ and the ‘Immortality’ ode.41 Again, for good reason, Byron’s imitations of Wordsworth’s declarations of irenic synthesis are read as temporary staging posts in a poem that works unsparingly and relentlessly to cultivate fraught intensities. Like a Wittgensteinian ladder, the release from self-contestation that Byron discovers in Wordsworth’s poetry must be kicked away if the world is to be seen aright.42 Where Childe Harold is most true to itself, then, is in its portrayal of lives that resist the appeal of beatific quiescence, preferring instead to advance the transformative labour of energeia, even to the point of pursuing their being-at-work to a violent end stop.
The life that best represents the paradoxical undoing of the drive to self-completion is, of course, Napoleon: ‘There sunk the greatest, nor the worst of men,/Whose spirit antithetically mixt/One moment of the mightiest, and again/On little objects with like firmness fixt’ (stanza 36, ll. 316–19). Derived from Pope’s Sporus, Dryden’s Achitophel, and Milton’s Satan, the caricature of Napoleon represents the limit point of Byron’s fascination with fiery extremes. By stanza 45, the division between Napoleonic heights and depths, signalled by the unbridgeable distinction between the ‘sun of glory’ ‘above’ and the ‘hate of those below’ (ll. 400–1), reaches its warlike apogee as, alone on the summit of fame, ‘Contending tempests’ excoriate the Emperor’s ‘naked head’ (l. 404). From this inverted nadir the poem turns, in stanza 46, to the lower ground of ‘Maternal Nature’ and the ‘blending’ of ‘beauties’ that may be discovered ‘on the banks’ of the ‘majestic Rhine’ (ll. 409–11). Moving from the death-dealing abstractions of the masculine sublime to the combinatory vigour of the feminine picturesque (‘streams and dells,/Fruit, foliage, crag, wood, cornfield, mountains, vine’; ll. 411–12), Byron follows Ann Radcliffe in ascribing pacific and healing qualities to the Rhineland scenery. The problem, however, is that no sooner has nature been ushered in as a solution to the martial sublime than remnants of that combative history start to return. Thus, at the close of stanza 46, the verse adds to the catalogue of blended beauties the prospect of ‘chiefless castles, breathing stern farewells/From grey but leafy walls, where Ruin greenly dwells’ (ll. 414–15). With its violent yoking of desolation and vitality, the final line recalls the contestable pomp of ambition that the paean to Nature is meant to resolve. As the verse proceeds, recollections of heroic prowess and fierce destruction are shown, ultimately, to result in the sullying of nature, as figured in the image of the ‘discoloured Rhine’ that flows beneath the scenes of ‘ruin’ (stanza 49, l. 441). For Byron, the ability of the ‘abounding river’ (stanza 50, l. 442) to efface the effects of violence with images of enduring beauty is challenged by the human propensity to despoil ‘its fair promise’ with the ‘sharp scythe of conflict’ (ll. 444–7; passim). Violence, no less than nature, persists through time, and although the tide may wash down ‘the blood of yesterday’, leaving the river ‘stainless’ (stanza 51, ll. 455–6), the waves ‘vainly roll’ over the ‘blackened memory’s blighting dream’ (ll. 458–9); history, that is, must have the final say.
In the stanzas that follow, Byron attempts to rebut this gloomy conclusion by addressing his absent half-sister Augusta who serves, like Dorothy in ‘Tintern Abbey’, as a repository for ‘love’ that is ‘pure’ (stanza 55, l. 490) and as an emblem of continuity over time and connection across space. The lyric ‘The castled crag of Drachenfels’ that comes between stanzas 55 and 56 presents an unbaffled, harmonious view of the Rhine that succeeds, for a moment, in erasing the memory of conflict. Associated in German folklore with heroic resistance to political oppression, the ruins of Drachenfels become for Byron a setting for a subtly defiant assertion of the love between brother and half-sister. Here, while casting a slur at establishment prurience, Byron invokes the conclusion of ‘Tintern Abbey’ explicitly: ‘Nor could on earth a spot be found/To nature and to me so dear’ (stanza 4, ll. 532–3). With its affirmation of the purity of sibling love, ‘Tintern Abbey’ provides a fitting touchstone for Byron’s lyric, but the description of innocence is cut short by the poem’s re-entry, via the ensuing references to the history of conflict at Coblentz, Ehrenbreitstein, and Morat, into the realm of history. What these intrusions of conflict confirm, I would suggest, is the impossibility of sustaining socially prohibited forms of love outside the domain of lyric fantasy. Yet just as the pursuit of political freedom is spurred on by recollections of ‘Morat and Marathon […] true Glory’s stainless victories’ (stanza 64, ll. 609–10) and, more recently, by the actions of the ‘brave, and glorious’ General Marceau (stanza 57, l. 545), so the prospect of erotic fulfilment is kept in play by literary exempla.
Unable to sustain the quasi-Wordsworthian mood of stanzas 71–75 (‘I live not in myself, but I become/Portion of that around me’; stanza 72, ll. 680–1; ‘But this is not my theme’; stanza 76, l. 715) the poem turns to address the memory of Rousseau, whose reputation as ‘The apostle of affliction’ (stanza 77, l. 726) presents Byron with a more appropriate model than Wordsworth. In Rousseau’s ‘burning page’ (stanza 78, l. 742) Byron encounters a propensity for antithesis that matches his own. Thus, whereas ‘placid Leman’ raises the prospect of a return to ‘a purer spring’ (stanza 85, ll. 797–800) ‘wild Rousseau’ remains a ‘self-torturing’ figure (stanza 77, l. 725). Thoughts of conflict are never far from Byron’s mind when describing Leman and the Rhône. Through an allusion to his recently dissolved marriage, Byron sees in the ‘swift Rhone’, as it ‘cleaves his way between/Heights’, an image of ‘lovers who have parted/In hate’ (stanza 94, ll. 879–80). The breaches between river and mountains, husband and wife, are here granted expression through the poet’s careful attention to word order, stress patterning, and line breaks while, at the close of the stanza, the double sense of cleave finds issue in the linking of ‘Love’ and ‘rage’ (l. 884) and in the alacrity with which ‘thwarted’ (l. 883) lovers wage ‘war’ both against each other and ‘within themselves’ (l. 887).
Through all these descriptions of social, personal, and mental conflict, Byron cannot quite abandon his reawakened fascination with Wordsworth. Like the Solitary, proud declarations of self-bafflement are placed alongside admissions of a gentler, less forceful kind as, at night, the poet ‘breathes a living fragrance from the shore,/Of flowers yet fresh with childhood’, while ‘on the ear/Drops the light drip of the suspended oar’ (stanza 86, 811–13). Here, echoing Wordsworth’s tribute to Collins, the poem works to slow down time, repeatedly emphasising the stillness of the scene to pave the way for a passage that responds to the ‘Immortality’ ode:
If, as the poem goes on to confirm, the stillness attained at this point is but the calm before the storm, critics have perhaps read too much into the fiery defiance of the ‘one word’ (stanza 97, l. 910), seeing in the destructive lightning bolt a final return to the antithetical mode.43 As the remainder of Canto III demonstrates, the poem advances a mood of harmonious interchange that engages with Wordsworth’s poetics more subtly than the previously cited stanzas. Though stanza 104 is devoted ostensibly to the recovery of Rousseau’s beauties, the language used is imitative of ‘Tintern Abbey’, albeit this time in a manner that, for being barely noticeable, is more effective than the poem’s more blatant borrowings:
***
Responding to the music of conjunction in ‘Tintern Abbey’ – ‘And […] and […] And […] and’) – the poem bridges those ‘gaps’ that threaten to mire the fruitful accord of nature in Hobbesian ‘devastation’ (stanza 95, l. 895), creating a ‘hallowed’ space of ‘something far more deeply interfused’. For a moment, adrift in connectiveness, one might even believe that Byron’s poem had reached an accord with itself.
‘Backward, in Rapid Evanescence’: Wordsworth after Wordsworth
We have seen how Memorials seeks to ‘glide’ or ‘smooth’ over gaps in expression, breaches in private and public history, and violations of artistic decorum. I have also observed how poems in the collection continue to mine these crises, finding in repeated acts of division the resources for repeated acts of healing. When Wordsworth revisits the Rhine he writes, therefore, with a mind to the restorative qualities of the river while, like Byron, reflecting on the river’s share in the bellicosity that informs its historical meaning. To reach this point, however, Wordsworth must first account for the relationship between time, speed, and perception; more specifically, he must isolate the mode of travel best suited to the contemplation of past, present, and futurity. The guidebooks to northern Europe stressed the importance of a comfortable coach. Heeding this advice Byron had commissioned a replica of Napoleon’s coach, a ‘performative and public act of mimicry’ that, according to Clara Tuite, aimed to transform a moment of defeat into ‘something of value’.44 We may imagine a scene: Byron at the carriage window, watching as the Rhine sweeps by, observing in the sequential images of beauty and ruin a resource for renewed acts of creative vigour.
Childe Harold makes no mention of the poet’s means of conveyance, but Memorials does, and for Wordsworth the medium is the message:
Confined to the carriage, unable to arrest the flow of images, the viewer succumbs to giddy narcosis. In this drunken state of being, recalling the queasiness experienced by Dorothy on the journey to Goslar in the winter of 1798, the poet is unable to record spots of time; the ability to memorialise the scenes that reel in ‘rapid evanescence’ is compromised. In the preceding sonnet the poet recalls the voyage down the Rhine made with Robert Jones thirty years earlier. Then too, the landscapes of the river had appeared and disappeared, offering a baffling succession of sights, to the waterborne voyagers (‘who shall count the Towers’, ‘Author’s Voyage down the Rhine (Thirty Years Ago)’, l. 6). Relief comes in the sestet when, released from hurry, the ‘slack’ning stream’ spreads like ‘a spacious Mere’ (ll. 10–11), affording, through its echo of ‘Home at Grasmere’, the travellers an opportunity to ‘measure/A smooth free course’ (ll. 11–12), and so to ‘Think calmly on the past, and mark at leisure/Features which else had vanished like a dream’ (ll. 13–14). In the view from the carriage, as objects dance in ‘Thespian jollity’, the heart is ‘defrauded’ (ll. 2–3). Here, in addition to experiencing the unreadable inanity of an accelerated past, Wordsworth may have in mind the performative intensities of the opening stanzas of Childe Harold III. But whereas Harold is jolted from point to point, seemingly unable or unwilling to halt the ‘whirling gulf of phantasy and flame’ in which he appears caught (stanza 7, l. 58), the inhabitant of Wordsworth’s carriage expresses confidence that ‘Pedestrian liberty shall yet be mine’ (l. 11). As signalled by the interjectory ‘Yet why repine?’ (l. 9), the volta breaks the flow of enjambement into units of ‘fit measure’ (l. 14). By means of discretely punctuated verbals and end-stopped lines the traveller is granted the power to ‘muse, to creep, to halt at will, to gaze’ (l. 12), regaining the ‘Freedom which youth with copious hand supplied’ (l. 13) by reclaiming ground that would otherwise give way to flux.
Thus prosaically, one foot at a time, the Memorials seeks to counter the oxymoronic imperative ‘Still must I on’ that, in Byron, prevents the attainment of that sustained point of stillness in which time is restored. Nevertheless, as subsequent poems reveal, the dual meaning of stasis, which Wordsworth revealed in the Duddon series and which he struggled to repress, is also present in Memorials. By stopping the flow of time, the traveller aspires to peace, but stopping the flow, as Byron and Wordsworth discover at Waterloo, may also lead to strife. How, then, to admit violence into the poetry of nature while holding on to a desire for peace? In the sonnet that follows ‘After Visiting the Field of Waterloo’ the poet marvels at the beauty of the River Meuse as morning spreads her ‘peaceful ensigns’ (l. 5), and its contrast with the ‘crimson stains’ (‘Scenery between Namur and Liege’, l. 3) that once, at a time when the area surrounding the river was ‘War’s favourite playground’ (l. 3), besmirched its ‘cities, heights, and plains’ (l. 2). In line 9, in what amounts to a meta-voltaic performance, the ‘eyes/Turn from the fortified and threatening hill’ (ll. 9–10) to muse on the serenity and stillness of the ‘watery glade’ (l. 11). Attributed to ‘gentle Fancy’ (l. 1) rather than Imagination, the shift from traumatic memories of war to scenes of sacerdotal calm is granted a surprising degree of force as a result of the heavily accented ‘Turn’ (l. 10). Elsewhere, in ‘Hymn, for the Boatmen, as They Approach the Rapids, under the Castle of Heidelberg’, Wordsworth adopts a six-line tetrameter stanza, rhyming abcbdd, a pattern suited to the poem’s description of travellers ‘swept along’ (l. 2) by ‘troubled waters’ (l. 6) whose faith is expressed at the stanza’s close – ‘All our hope is placed in Thee;/Miserere Domine!’ (ll. 23–4) – in rhyming couplet certainty. Long established as a symbol of heroic resistance to despotism, most recently during the campaign against Napoleon, the ruins of Heidelberg Castle are a reminder no less of how dreams of peace succumb to the return of war. Thus, ‘while through the meadows green’ (l. 9), the boatmen are lulled into believing ‘the peaceful flood’ (l. 10) will endure, their subsequent passage through raving and fretted waters confirms that lasting peace cannot be attained.
In the next sonnet, ‘Local Recollections on the Heights near Hockheim’, Wordsworth’s attention returns to those moments when, ‘with breath suspended’ (l. 4), strife is ‘Abruptly paused’ (l. 1). Inspired by a passage ‘recorded in the journals of the day’,45 the poem describes the reactions of the Austrian army as they observed the French retreat across the Rhine following their defeat at Leipzig in November 1813. The point of suspension, marked by the full stop at the close of the opening quatrain, leads to a cry of victory as the ‘barrier Rhine’ (l. 9) flashes before them. Echoing the sinuous course of the ‘unconquerable Stream’ (l. 14), as well as the ‘shock’ (l. 11) of the defending nation, the sonnet plays on the tension between movement and stasis, subordinating warring antitheses to the encompassing harmony of the divine. The connection between the account of the ‘men who gazed heart-smitten by the view’ (l. 10) and the description in stanza 60 of Childe Harold III of ‘eyes’ that ‘resign/Their cherish’d gaze upon thee, lovely Rhine!’ (ll. 574–5) was later flagged up by the editors of Byron’s Poetical Works, who appended the quotation from the ‘journals of the day’ that Wordsworth had cited in the Memorials as a note to the stanza:
When the Austrians took Hockheim, in one part of the engagement they got to the brow of the hill, whence they had their first view of the Rhine. They instantly halted—not a gun was fired—not a voice heard: but they stood gazing on the river with those feelings which the events of the last 15 years at once called up. Prince Schwartzenberg rode up to the cause of this sudden stop, they then gave three cheers, rushed after the enemy, and drove them into the water.46
In citing this passage from ‘Local Recollections’, the editors seem not to have considered Francis Jeffrey’s scathing judgement on the poem:
If his political sentiments partake of the spirit of the Morning Post, and other classical works of that refined description, we may wonder the less to find him recur to the same sources as the ‘perennial fountains’ of historic truth. Coming to the heights of Hockheim, near the Rhine, his lyre is awakened by a most notable anecdote, which he candidly admits to rest upon the following newspaper paragraph [quotes ‘When the Austrians took Hockheim […] and drove them into the water’]. We presume the Austrian soldiers never were in such a fit of sentiment at any other period of the monarchy: Our poet, however, takes it all as equally natural and true; and produces forthwith a Sonnet […] in which, after describing them as pausing ‘with breath suspended, like a listening scout’, he exclaims—
—which indeed is about as natural in thought and expression, as the historical passage that serves for its groundwork.47
Drawn verbatim, either directly from Wordsworth’s poem or from Jeffrey’s review, the passage’s anti-Napoleonic sentiments at first sit strangely with the pastoral delicacy of Byron’s verse, yet on further consideration may be read as congruent with the description of the ensanguined Rhine in stanzas 49–51. To Victorian readers, unperturbed by long-forgotten Regency turf wars, the incorporation within Byron’s poem of Wordsworth’s impressions of fluvial conflict may not have seemed strange at all. Indeed, for the attentive reader, particularly one with a knowledge of the classics, the intertwining of the bucolic and the bellicose on display in Childe Harold and Memorials may well have been a given.
Seeking in the course of the river an emblem of lasting peace, as Wordsworth had attempted in the Duddon sequence, proves a fraught endeavour in Memorials. If, as that sequence’s penultimate sonnet affirmed, the Duddon ‘mingle[s]’, at last, ‘with Eternity!’ (XXXII, l. 14), the Rhine, by contrast, remains in flux: ‘Smooth and green’ in one instance (l. 5), ‘fretting and whitening’ (l. 8) in another, leaving ‘men’ to ‘Wonder that aught of aspect so serene/Can link with desolation’ (ll. 4–5). In ‘The Jung-frau—And the Rhine at Shauffhausen’, from which these contrasting images are taken, the descent of the river into ‘madness’ (l. 9) is conveyed by the descriptive flood that follows the turn in line 7:
As the heavily worked Amherst manuscript confirms, Wordsworth struggled to bring the poem to a satisfactory conclusion and at one point had considered closing with ‘[Roaring like storms at war with some huge [alt vast] wood] Roaring with voice, no time extinguishet[h]/And doth in more conspicuous torm[ent] writhe’. As Geoffrey Jackson points out, ‘This leaf (3) was once pasted over DC MS. 177.4 […] WW completed his revision of lines 13 and 14 by writing at the top what was then the facing page (DC MS. 77.5): “And doth in more conspicuous torment writhe/Defeaning [sic] the region in his ireful mood”.’48 Jackson notes also that the word ‘writhe’ is written twice at the bottom of the page. The impression of the sonnet as itself a physically contorted, squirming production, running in excess of the author’s conscious control, is amplified by the closing allusion to the Temple of Mars, from Dryden’s translation of ‘The Knight’s Tale’: ‘In midst of all the Dome, Misfortune sat,/And gloomy Discontent, and fell Debate,/And Madness laughing in his ireful Mood’ (ll. 580–2).49 Dryden’s translation, which Wordsworth had previously criticised for failing to capture Chaucer’s ‘amiable […] ennobling and intense passions’ (EY. 641), lays great store on how, in the state of war, rational discourse gives way to ‘Menaces […] foul Disgrace/And bawling Infamy, in Language base,/Till Sense was lost in Sound, and Silence fled the Place’ (ll. 573–5). Recalling Wordsworth’s reservations about Dryden’s style – ‘there is not a single image from Nature in the whole body of his works’ (EY. 641) – the quotation from Palamon and Arcite provides a fitting conclusion to a poem in which the Rhinefall, ‘Turned to a fearful Thing’ (l. 10) on account, as Theresa Kelley and Robin Jarvis note, of its complex associations with religious, revolutionary, and imperial terror, has ceased to appear natural.50
Mindful of how ‘poetically impassioned’ language, focussed on ‘unpleasing subjects’ (EY. 641), undermines the corrective labour of the later verse, Wordsworth returns in ‘The Fall of the Aar—Handec’ to advance an image of natural beauty drawing sustenance from destruction. As flowers breath ‘life’ and ‘joy’ (l. 11) from the torrent, so humble worshippers ‘nod/Their heads in sign of worship’ (ll. 12–13), recognising in the river’s ‘fierce aspect’ (l. 1) an image of the divine. Read by Larkin as a demonstration of how beauty ‘assimilates the motion of the torrent and renders life-giving what is otherwise too violent to be available to age’, and by Jarvis as a ‘pacification of the sublime’, the poem continues Wordsworth’s interest in the politics and poetics of the torrent.51 More assured in its quelling of sublime terror than the Rhinefall sonnet, the verse derives much of its placing in the sequence after ‘On Approaching the Staub-Bach, Lauterbrunnen’. In this poem, appreciation of the waterfall is jeopardised by the ‘wild and savage’ song of the local beggars, which as Wordsworth states in an accompanying note, ‘reminded me of religious services chaunted to Streams and Fountains in Pagan times’.52 Identified by Dorothy as ‘two women’ (JDW II. 117–18), the pagan beggars whose song ‘with regret and useless pity haunt[s]/This bold, this pure, this sky-born WATERFALL!’ (ll. 13–14) represents a further instance of the intrusion of unruly feminine noise within the sober confines of the Memorials. Like ‘Fish-Women’ the sonnet is an exercise in disenchantment, debunking the fanciful associations of ‘thrilling melodies’ and ‘notes shrill and wild’ (‘no Mermaid warbles […] no caverned Witch/Chaunted a love-spell […] more musical’, ll. 5–9) by tracing its source to ‘the lips of abject Want/And Idleness’ (l. 10). Rejecting the intense lyricism that, in ‘The Solitary Reaper’, had made of the encounter with unrefined song a rich source of ‘raptures unconfined’ (l. 4), the verse is left with no alternative but to reconfigure itself as an ironic riposte to the desire for release from ‘human-kind’ (l. 1). As such, even as the final line reinstates an image of the Christian sublime triumphing over pagan fancy and, by implication, the potential return of jacobinical lawlessness, the haunting of otiose enthralment by uncultivated idleness recasts the poem as a self-reflexive commentary on the dashed expectations recounted in countless travel narratives and as a not-so-subtle dig at Byron’s hand-me-down account of the pleasures of solitude in Childe Harold III.
Forms of War and Peace
For Byron, I have argued, absorption in nature is shown to be an unsatisfactory alternative to the conflictual egotism of the Napoleonic self. And for the poet of Memorials, nature provides, at best, only brief respite from the exigencies of war. That said, there are occasions in the collection when readers catch sight of what it might be like to transcend violence, discovering at the silent horizon of human history a locus of enduring calm. Just as, in Wordsworth’s memorial to the Swiss patriot Aloys Reding, who opposed the ‘flagitious, and too successful, attempt of Buonaparte to subjugate [his] country’,53 the image of the votive stone ‘Touched’ by the setting sun (‘Memorial. Near the Outlet of the Lake of Thun’, l. 16) provides a figure for mutability that serves as a glimpse of eternity, so in other poems fragments of permanence flicker in the light of a peace yet to come. As with the memorial to Reding, such fragments are often politicised, recalling in their ruin recollections of heroic resistance to tyranny. In, for instance, ‘Fort Fuentes—At the Head of the Lake of Como’, a poem commemorating a visit to a site of strategic significance demolished on the orders of Napoleon in 1796, the discovery of a ‘sweet-visaged Cherub of Parian stone’, ‘upheaved by war’s sulphurous blast’ (ll. 1–2) and now overgrown with ‘moss and leaves’ (l. 13) with a ‘green, gilded snake’ twined around its neck (ll. 7–8), serves as a reminder of the Fall, the rejuvenation of nature, and the peace that will return ‘When the whirlwind of human destruction’ is ‘passed away’ (ll. 19–20).
In her journal, Dorothy notes the changes wrought on the landscape by the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, with the replacement of the old, traditional routes, which Wordsworth and Jones had followed in 1790, by the new, military roads constructed by Napoleon, being a particular preoccupation. As John Wyatt observes, the journal ‘portrays a damaged environment, chiefly ruined by war’.54 By the time the Wordsworth party reached the Simplon Pass, the sight of a landscape violently altered as a result of human interventions threatened to destabilise the memory of transcendence that had been documented in The Prelude. Whereas at Fuentes the toppled statue of a child could evoke, in spite of the world, an image of divine restoration, elsewhere in Lombardy Wordsworth faced starker and more recalcitrant monuments to the folly of man. In the sonnet describing ‘The Column Intended by Buonaparte for a Triumphal Edifice in Milan, Now Lying by the Way-Side on the Semplon Pass’, the poet encounters a fit emblem of defeated ambition: a blank, unscripted pillar. Designated as ‘Vanity’s hieroglyph’, the unreadable column nevertheless serves as a ‘choice trope’ of ‘Pride o’erthrown’ (ll. 7–8). Rightly scrutinised by Jarvis as a contradictory and perplexing image – how does a bare, uninscribed column work as a complex, verbal trope? – the prostrate stone serves, nevertheless, as a device for alerting the ‘Soul’ to history’s unrecorded ‘Crimes’ (ll. 11–12).55 The sonnet’s closing heroic couplet recalls the post-verbal ‘shrieks’ and ‘groans’ evoked by the field of Waterloo (ll. 13–14), but lifeless matter, no less than nature’s ‘silence’ (‘Fort Fuentes—At the Head of the Lake of Como’, ll. 18–20), provides a ‘hint’ (l. 11) of the peace that is to be found in quiet submission to ‘Power Divine!’ (l. 10). Here, Wordsworth shows how bodies, poems, and memorials alike, predicated on incompletion, gain meaning only by entering a relationship with the divine. In the absence of such a relationship, the work of sublimity falls short of the threshold, persisting only as mute testament to the limits of secular fulfilment. Peace, then, but only for a time.
In tracing the course of war and peace in Memorials, I have suggested that Wordsworth deploys shorter lyrics, with an emphasis on the sonnet, to resist the relentless carrying forward that is characteristic of Byron’s Spenserian romance. Simply put, the sonnet affords opportunities to combine movement with stasis, showing how, even amid change, points of stillness may be attained. As if to consolidate this notion, Wordsworth introduces to the sequence a poem written in Spenserian stanzas: ‘Processions. Suggested on a Sabbath Morning in the Vale of Chamouny’. As the title suggests, the poem evokes memories of Coleridge’s ‘Hymn before Sun-Rise, in the Vale of Chamouni’, but in contrast to Coleridge’s irregular blank verse, with its performance of spontaneity, Wordsworth’s adherence to the nine-line stanza and ababbcbcc rhyme scheme presents a more disciplined affirmation of the affinity between nature and God. Divided into two halves comprising four stanzas each, the first half centring on descriptions of Persian, Hebrew, Ammonite, and Roman ceremonials and the second focussing on the Catholic procession identified in the poem’s title, ‘Processions’ can be read as an extension of the gradualist history portrayed in Ecclesiastical Sketches. Sustaining the collection’s emphasis on slowness, stillness, and ease of transition, the poem contrasts the gaudy insistence of pagan rites, denoted by heavily accented present participles (‘gushing’, ‘tilting’, ‘dancing’, ‘Striking’; ll. 20–33, passim), emotional manipulation (‘[The Priests] Provoked responses with shrill canticles’, l. 22; ‘the haughty claims/Of Chiefs triumphant after ruthless wars’, l. 29), and abruptly shifting scenes, with the ‘sober litanies’ and steady pace (l. 40) of Christian pageantry. Utilising the full expressive potential of the Spenserian stanza, Wordsworth’s run-on lines imitate the ‘winding’ (l. 42) procession ‘Of white-robed Shapes, seemed linked in solemn guise/[…] by mysterious ties’ (ll. 48–50). Shifting from the description of ‘living monuments’ (l. 5) of antiquity to ‘the living Stream’ of Christianity (l. 48), the poem works hard to distinguish its rhetoric of ‘seeming’ – the procession ‘seemed linked’ (l. 49), the spotless figures ‘seem’ to be a ‘product’ of the ‘awful Mount (l. 57) – from the protean suggestiveness of pagan imaginings. Drawing on Ovid’s Fasti, Wordsworth sets the overbearing enthusiasm of heathen ritual against the quiet composure of Christian ceremony, laying stress, by way of a gendered rhetorical economy, on the ‘sisterly resemblance’ (l. 61) of the votaries to ‘everlasting snow’ (l. 58), ‘virgin-lilies’ (l. 59), and ‘swans’ (l. 60) – ‘fair Forms’ that ‘glide’, in recollection of the nun-like figures witnessed at Bruges.
In its determination to downplay the imaginative appeal of pagan ceremonials and to advance the cause of Christian worship, the poem appears to be directed at Shelley, Byron, Hunt, and Keats, the quartet now firmly associated in Wordsworth’s mind, thanks in large measure to Southey’s recent interventions, with the promotion of radicalism, atheism, and sexual impropriety. Specifically, in its suspicion of the poetics of Ovidian ‘metamorphosis’ (l. 69), ‘Processions’ appears to have the pretty paganisms of Keats and Hunt in its sights. The Christian representation of Chamonix might also be read as a pointed response to Shelley’s atheistic ‘Mont Blanc’, and indeed, as Peter Manning suggests, as a rejoinder to the hubristic sublime that is both conjured and guarded against in Book VI of The Prelude.56 But there is a close link, too, with Byron’s lines on the Alps in Childe Harold III, both at the level of form and at the level of content. In stanza 91, at the close of the most recognisably Wordsworthian section of the poem, Byron writes of the pagan predilection for ‘open air’ worship:
In a note to the stanza Byron takes this notion further, offering a provocatively syncretic defence of early Christian, Methodist, and Muslim devotional practices, writing of ‘The Mussulmans’ that ‘the simple and entire sincerity of these men, and the spirit which appeared to be within and upon them, made a far greater impression than any general rite which was ever performed in places of worship’.57 At first glance, Wordsworth’s stanzas appear to emulate Byron’s praise of outdoor devotions. Taking inspiration from Dorothy’s account of the procession, with its fanciful ‘connection’ between the white-robed figures and the ‘small pyramids of the Glacier’ (JDW II. 290–1), the poem seems to recast the mountain setting as a vast, natural temple, echoing related descriptions of open-air worship in The Excursion and Ecclesiastical Sketches. However, while faith inclines the observer to perceive resemblances between natural and spiritual forms, Wordsworth locates a disturbance in this inclination as, ‘Trembling’, he looks upon ‘the secret springs’ of that ‘licentious craving in the mind/To act the God among external things,/To bind, on apt suggestion, and unbind’ (ll. 64–7). Composed shortly after Ecclesiastical Sketches, in which the contemplation of the ‘beauty’ and ‘ancient stillness’ of Catholic ruins (‘Old Abbeys’, l. 3) becomes a source of spiritual rejuvenation (ll. 13–14), the prospect of living Catholic worship in ‘Processions’, with its ghostlike and potentially unending train of resemblances, raises the fear of that tendency of the mind to become untethered not only from reality but also from the divine.
Through recounting the hypnotic effect of these baroque associations, Wordsworth reflects also on Byron’s invocation of ‘the feeling infinite’ (stanza 90, l. 842), which ‘sheds a charm,/Like to the fabled Cytherea’s zone,/Binding all things with beauty’ (ll. 847–50). Blending Wordsworth’s ‘sense sublime’ with echoes of Ovidian eroticism, Byron becomes an exemplar of that tendency of mind to ‘bind’ and ‘unbind’, responding with momentary beguilement to passing resemblances while glancing over the deeper, more lasting satisfaction to be gained from sensing the ‘mysterious ties’ that connect a body of worshippers. With its emphasis on female purity girdling the Catholic Church, ‘Processions’ attempts to purge itself of Aphroditic connotations, only to signal in the stridency of its closing lines the destructive alure of ‘Fable’s dark abyss!’ (l. 72) and thus to record an enduring threat to the integrity of the Protestant imagination. Only in moments of fluvial stasis, or in the prospect of monumental ruin, can the mind yield an image of that peace that ought, ideally, to reside in the world.
Culture Wars
From beginning to end, Memorials bears the imprint of Wordsworth’s previous journeys to the Continent, as well as the more recent mark of Byron’s revisioning of the earlier poetry. Framed by this double consciousness, Wordsworth’s late collection endeavours to come to terms with itself, hindering the journey to peace by highlighting the disparity between personal and public histories and the brittle lines between lyric enchantment and ironic realism. The journey from Rydal to Lucerne, which for the most part followed the 1790 route, albeit in the reverse direction, folds back no less on the republican and atheistic stirrings that, at the outbreak of war, had placed Wordsworth as one who ‘sate silent’ when ‘prayers were offered up’ for Allied ‘victories’ (1805 Prelude, X. l. 270–3). Patriotic declarations are threaded throughout Memorials, but the collection’s allegiance to the values of the post-war British establishment is most clearly displayed in the ‘Ode to Enterprize’, a verse that announces the end of history’s ‘convulsive throes’, a reign of terror urged by the ‘Pharaohs of the earth, the men of hardened heart’ (the allusion to Napoleon is clear) (ll. 94–108; passim) and the coming of a new age of peace, born from the ascendency of Britain’s beneficent imperial mission. Offering itself as an annex to the sequence (the 1820 volume concludes in fact with ‘Desultory Stanzas upon Receiving the Preceding Stanzas from the Press’, a postscript poem adverting to the delicate negotiation of biographical settlement and visionary resurgence that, for critics writing after Hartman, constitutes the central interest of the collection), the ode seeks to align the sublime transports of philosophers and poets with the aspirations of Britain’s venture capitalists who, carried by ‘a thousand thousand sails’ (l. 143), will establish global peace through international trade.
The ode’s upbeat conclusion is shadowed, however, by the unsettled air of three preceding sonnets, the first of which, ‘Sky-Prospect—From the Plains of France’, picks up on the collection’s cautionary soundings on the over-exercise of Fancy. Observing the clouds, the poet discerns shapes resembling ‘proud Ararat’ (l. 2), the ‘Ark’ (l. 3), a ‘Lion’s shape’ (l. 4), and a ‘huge Crocodile’ (l. 5), but such innocent conjuring yields to the prospect of a ‘blazing Town’ at risk of ‘destruction’ (ll. 7–8). Despite the efforts of the volta to correct such alarmist ‘shows’ (l. 12), the sonnet remains troubled by its insight into the propensity of the poet to allow the ‘Mimics of Fancy’ to upbraid the ‘servile map of history’.58 The following poem, ‘On Being Stranded near the Harbour of Boulogne’, conveys similar alarm at the travelers being cast ‘back upon the Gallic shore’ (l. 1), unable to depart from the beach on which Napoleon, the ‘dreaming Conqueror’ (l. 8), forged his plans for the invasion of Britain. Set against this image of military folly is Wordsworth’s peaceful ‘project’ (l. 4). A completed work, contrasting with the ‘unfinished’ Napoleonic pillar that the party visited prior to embarkation, Memorials is presented here as an enduring counter-monument to the ‘vanity and arrogance’ of the would-be conqueror (JDW II. 332–3). But the verse’s attunement to the wave-like returns of historical contingency belies the rhetorical confidence of the terminal Shakespearian affirmation: ‘These local reflections ne’er can cloy/Such ground I from my very heart enjoy!’ (13–14). The line dividing the territorial ambitions of poet and emperor turns out, after all, to be written in the sand.
Wordsworth’s journey closes at Dover, and in the sonnet that commemorates this return the reader is alerted to the proto-tabloid clamour that ‘past/Thro’ Europe’, disturbing the poet’s holiday with ‘blast[s]’ of ‘Faction’ and ‘turmoil’ (‘After Landing—The Valley of Dover’; ll. 2–3). The news that ‘filled our hearts with grief for England’s shame’ (l. 4) is the Queen Caroline affair. If Lord Byron emerges in this context as a somewhat detached supporter of the queen, Wordsworth’s formal opposition is, if anything, more difficult to describe. At the beginning of the trial, Wordsworth, together with Coleridge, Crabb Robinson, and Sara Hutchinson, was professedly liberal in his attitude; however, by the end of the summer, sensing how the queen’s cause had been taken up in radical circles, his feelings had hardened. Still, throughout this period, Wordsworth did not venture explicit condemnation of the queen. Writing to Lord Lonsdale in October 1820, Wordsworth declared that he had had ‘little opportunity’ to know anything of ‘public affairs’ and that, in respect of the queen, ‘we deem ourselves truly fortunate in having been out of the country, at a time when an inquiry at which all Europe seems scandalised, was going on’ (MY II. 642–3).
Protestations of distance and detachment are at odds, however, with the side of Wordsworth that maintained a steady fascination with this cause célèbre; indeed, if anything, the poet seems to have been drawn to the queen, finding himself, even at a distance, in uncomfortable proximity with her scandal-beset body, as the following extract, taken from a letter to Mary, despatched from London in June 1812, confirms:
R. H- was at some distance from me, and I had no conversation with her. She is a fat unwieldly Woman, but has rather a handsome and pleasing Countenance, with an expression of hilarity that is not however free from Coarseness. This was a large Assembly, saw few pretty women, and many most disgusting objects; one I encountered of a tolerable face and features, but in her native bosom so huge and tremendous, that had you seen her enter a room in that condition I am sure the soul of modest womanhood in you would have shrunk almost as with horror. Her Breasts were like two great hay-cocks or rather hay stacks, protruding themselves upon the Spectator, and yet no body seemed to notice them—
Nobody, that is, except Wordsworth. How is the impartial Spectator expected to remain detached when faced with such ‘Coarseness’? At Lugano, in 1820, William and Mary slept in a room formerly occupied by the queen. As recounted by Crabb Robinson, this room was connected to one occupied by her suspected Italian lover, Bartolomeo Pergami.59 The impression of a man attracted, whether by accident or design, to the spectacle of royal déshabillé is confirmed by James Stephanoff’s Trial of Queen Caroline, a small watercolour capturing the moment on the final day in the House of Lords when the Pains and Penalties Bill was effectively quashed. There, Zelig-like, amid a crowd of onlookers, appears the head of Wordsworth, staring at the scene of the queen’s vindication, while Henry Brougham, Lord Lonsdale’s detested opponent in the 1818 Westmorland election, lords it up in his role as the queen’s chief advocate.60
Composed shortly after the trial, ‘After Landing’ appears, at first, to provide a fitting conclusion to Memorials as, elevated by ‘rural stillness’ (l. 14), the poet’s ‘Spirit’ reaches ‘a calmer height’ (l. 13), freed from the fractious rumour mill encountered in Europe. The concluding lines of the sonnet thus work to transform the poetics of discord that, throughout the collection, have threatened to undermine the establishment of enduring peace. But although ‘Peace’ in line 5 signals a decisive turn from those ‘noisy followers of the game/Which Faction breeds’ (ll. 1–2), with its connotations of tumult, servitude, and loveless reproduction, the lines that follow are peculiar, to say the least:
Inspired by a passage in Dorothy’s journal, ‘The scattered cattle quietly selecting their own food was a cheering and home-feeling sight’ (JDW II. 335), the sight signifies for William the distinction between continental over-cultivation and native spontaneity, which becomes, in turn, a not entirely coherent image of the difference between English and European ideas of liberty. Whereas, on the Continent, English tourists, prompted by the ‘Newsman’s blast’ (l. 3), become slaves to the ‘game’ – and here one wonders whether Byron, a sometime friend of Queen Caroline, is implicated in their number – at home the travellers are free to follow their inclinations, ‘rambling on without an aim’ (l. 5). However, in the wayward associations provoked by ‘majestic herds of Cattle free/To ruminate’ the distinctions between high and low become muddied: are the cattle a breed apart from the Faction that breeds? Does nature blindly consume, or do these creatures possess a capacity for higher thought? In its strained attempts to curtail such thoughts, the poem’s bid for sublimity falls into bathos, unable to shake off the unintended comedy afforded by those elevated cows chewing the cud while thinking deeply of England’s glory. Moreover, what are we to make of the ‘mellow horn’ and the ‘Season’s harmless pastime’? Throughout this passage, with its emphasis on ‘the sight of animals enjoying life’, Wordsworth may have in mind Cowper’s description of the ‘harmless sport’ of Eden.61 But in this ‘sin marr’d’ realm,62 does the hunting horn really present a safe alternative to the ‘Ruder sound’ of news-driven tumult?
Perhaps the conclusion of Memorials, with its echoes of the tonal awkwardness of ‘Fish-Women’, provides fit testimony to the vein of misogynistic strangeness that runs throughout the collection. Intended to consolidate a sense of native harmlessness, at odds with continental faction, ‘After Landing’ appears, on closer inspection, to be as fractured in composition as many of the volume’s avowedly more combative companion pieces. Whether centred on images of riparian calm, feminine beauty, or alpine stillness, peace, for Wordsworth, remains elusive, his attempts to quell the intrusions of historical violence, both past and present, threatened at every turn by descents into formal and thematic antagonism. If Wordsworth’s return to England, to peace and to conjugality, was meant to be read in triumphant contrast to the account of exile and marital antagonism depicted at the close of Childe Harold III, it is a triumph riven with the very tensions – historical, political, sexual, and artistic – that traverse Byron’s poem. In its very unlikeness, Wordsworth’s late poetry is perhaps more Byronic than it can afford to admit.
At Dover, Again
As previously noted, envois to daughters, lost and found or at the risk of loss, conclude Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage Canto III and Memoirs of a Tour on the Continent, 1820. But perhaps ‘conclude’ is not the right word. Certainly, in Wordsworth’s case, the several attempts to draw the sequence to a fit conclusion – ‘After Landing’, followed by two ‘annexed’ pieces, bearing their own title pages, ‘Ode to Enterprize’ and ‘Desultory Stanzas’ – suggest the poet’s reluctance to pronounce his memoirs at an end. Thus, during the course of the radical reshaping of Memorials as the first instalment of ‘Itinerary’ sonnets for the 1838 sonnet volume, Wordsworth announced to Henry Crabb Robinson that ‘There will be one addl Son: which I composed yesterday for a conclusion to the class of our Continental Tour in –20–’ (LY III. 522). Titled ‘At Dover’, the poem was originally included in a letter to Dora with the postscript: ‘Suggested by a passage in your journal, and sent as a peace-offering, at your dear Mother’s request’.63 Most likely arising from the conflict between father and daughter prompted by Dora’s decision that year, against Wordsworth’s wishes, to accept the marriage proposal of Edward Quillinan,64 the sonnet that brings the 1838 continental sequence to an end deserves consideration:
Wordsworth, of course, has visited this scene before, specifically in 1802 when the poet returned from Calais following his meeting with Annette and Caroline Vallon. In the sonnets ‘Composed in the Valley, near Dover, on the Day of Landing’ and ‘September, 1802’, feelings of individual and national appeasement are conjoined with uncertain results. The latter poem, in particular, with its ambivalent attitude to the proximity of France, separated by the narrowest of water margins (‘I shrunk, for verily the barrier flood/Was like a Lake, or River bright and fair’, ll. 5–6), highlights the extent to which dalliance with transgression blurs individual, national, and moral boundaries: ‘yet what power is there!/What mightiness for evil and for good!’ (ll. 7–8). Looking towards the coast of France, ‘drawn almost into frightful neighbourhood’ (l. 4), God alone knows how ‘Nations’, like selves, ‘shall be great and free’ (ll. 13–14).
The personal and public traumas expressed in 1802 and re-encountered in 1820 are decisively met in 1838 by the overpowering voice of Christian duty, the liberating outcome of which is truly catastrophic. For with its unequivocal submission to ‘the dread voice that speaks from out the sea/Of God’s eternal Word’, (ll. 11–12) ‘At Dover’ embraces a severance not only from the ‘shocks’ of human affairs but also from the aimless temporality, the ‘hourly din’ (l. 10) that taints visionary ‘wonder’ (l. 2) with natural doubt (ll. 5–7).65 From a creative perspective this renders ‘At Dover’ not only unsatisfactory but also estranging, for in its wish to establish lasting peace through submission to the eternal Word the poem speaks also of a desire to get to the end of poetry. As the allusion to Lycidas implies, while for Milton ‘the dread voice is past/That shrunk’ (ll. 132–3) the stream in which, according to Ovid, the river god Alpheus sought union with the nymph Arethusa, for Wordsworth the resounding of that voice suggests, over and above its obvious moral implications, a desire to do away with the very tradition that allows for the imaginary circumvention of sexual, moral, and creative constraints – the source, in other words, of poetic Fancy.66
If the strength of Wordsworth’s greatest poetry is a consequence of its openness to wonder, then the lesson of ‘At Dover’, by contrast, invites no such response; its Christianising authority is absolute. What the poem requires from its reader, therefore, is not interrogative freedom but irrational obedience. By drawing the ‘Spirit’ that oversees the passing shows of being into the frame of sensible experience, the freedom to question is exchanged for the illusory integrity of blind accession. Such a gesture is truly deadening, for the voice of God speaks as well of a loss of receptivity, of the openness to time that informs the Romantic imagination. Long associated with the recovery from physical and mental strife and with the return of inspiration, the fount of Arethusa, which, as The Prelude recounts, Wordsworth advised Coleridge to drink from during his stay in Sicily, is stilled.67 Thus, ‘At Dover’ marks the retreat from a vital source of creation and the embrace of a thanatoid peace, beyond the reach of poetry.
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