Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-hc48f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-28T04:11:57.378Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Wordsworth's Descriptive Sketches and the Growth of a Poet's Mind

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Geoffrey H. Hartman
Geoffrey H. Hartman*
Affiliation:
University or Washington, Seattle 5
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The aim of this essay is to examine Descriptive Sketches (written in 1791–92, published with An Evening Walk in 1793) as a poem with its own personal and stylistic integrity. Though not, of course, a great or even very exciting work of art, its relation to Wordsworth's growth as man and poet has been neglected. One reason for this neglect is Legouis' account of its derivative nature: the many borrowings in it from eighteenth-century writers and the extensions of their technique. Legouis is controvertible only on the ground of method: by atomizing the poem he shows convincingly that a great proportion of phrases have a direct or exaggerated relationship to that “gaudiness and inane phraseology” Wordsworth was later to condemn. His view of Descriptive Sketches as mainly patchwork, though sincere and really alive to nature, has prevailed almost continuously. The few notable attempts to go beyond Legouis should, however, be mentioned. M. L. Barstow, an exact reader, discriminates Wordsworth's “faults” from those of the eighteenth-century landscape school, and states against Legouis that what we find in Descriptive Sketches is “not the remnant of an old style; it is the crude but vigorous beginning of the new.” But because of her specific approach, the study of Poetic Diction, she does not, except in a general way, correlate Wordsworth's stylistic struggle with a particular phase in his personal development.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 76 , Issue 5 , December 1961 , pp. 519 - 527
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1961

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Note 1 in page 519 La Jeunesse de Wordsworth: 1770–1798 (1896; English trans., 1897), Book i, Ch. v.

Note 2 in page 519 Wordsworth's Theory of Poetic Diction (New Haven, 1917), p. 95.

Note 8 in page 519 Lecture first given in 1936, reprinted in Wordsworthian and Other Studies (Oxford, 1947), pp. 1–33.

Note 4 in page 519 Representative Poems (New York, 1937), Introduction xxxvii-liii, and pp. 30–35.

Note 5 in page 519 “Emergent Idiom,” The Idiom of Poetry (Ithaca, 1946), pp. 109–134. G. W. Meyer's study of the early poems in Wordsworth's Formative Years (Ann Arbor, 1943), pp. 37–88, is a study of parallels between the poet's correspondence of those years and the sentiments expressed in his poems, and does not consider their style.

Note 6 in page 519 Biographia Literaria, Ch. iv.

Note 7 in page 520 AU citations are to the text of E. de Selincourt and H. Darbishire, Poetical Works of William Wordsworth (Oxford, 1940–49), i; hereafter cited as PW. The number following each quotation is that of its first Une.

Note 8 in page 520 See especially the ending, ll. 433–446, with its evocation of the sounds that emerge because of the night-quiet.

Note 9 in page 520 The Unes beginning “The brook and road” were first written, according to Wordsworth, in 1799, first published in 1845, and appear as Prel. (1850) vi. 621–640. It has been suggested that the “three hours of our walk among the Alps (which) will never be effaced” of Wordsworth's long letter to his sister in September 1790 (Early Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. de SeUncourt, 1935, i, 32) refer to this experience of crossing the Alps via the Simplon pass (Max Wildi, “Wordsworth and the Simplón Pass,” ES, xl [1959], 226 ff). If so, the mystery of the omission of this episode in Descriptive Sketches deepens. In the September letter the mood is so cheerful that several hypotheses have been offered to explain the difference between it and the melancholy of D.S. Yet the letter contains in germ the themes of rapid succession and strong contrast emphasized by D.S., which is composed at almost two years distance from the event and already begins to deepen through memory its interpretation, a process that will take many years to complete (see below).

Note 10 in page 521 Prel. (1850), vi. 592 ff. W. G. Fraser pointed out in the TLS of 4 April 1929 that the rising-up of Imagination probably occurred as Wordsworth was remembering his disappointment, rather than immediately after it (i.e., in 1804, not in 1790).

Note 11 in page 521 Coleridge's theory of Imagination was based in part on this later talent of Wordsworth's. He was first fully convinced of his friend's powers on hearing an early version of Guilt and Sorrow, and what impressed him was (to give the quotation in its entirety) “the union of deep feeling with profound thought; the fine balance of truth in observing, with the imaginative faculty in modifying, the objects observed; and above all the original gift of spreading the tone, the atmosphere, and with it the depth and height of the ideal world around forms, incidents, and situations, of which, for the common view, custom had bedimmed all the lustre, had dried up the sparkle and the dew drops” (Biog. Lit., Ch. iv). [The latter part of the quotation, which I omitted, is already an interpretation of the effect of Wordsworth's poetry in intentional terms.] For the best description of Wordsworth's later technique, see F. A. Pottle's “The Eye and the Object,” Wordsworth Centenary Studies, ed. G. T. Dunklin (Princeton, 1951), pp. 23–42. What I have called ‘blending’ is related to Pottle's ‘fade-out.‘ In a letter quoted by Pottle, Wordsworth admits his liking for a poetry “where things are lost in each other, and limits vanish, and aspirations are raised.”

Note 12 in page 521 See Prel. (1850) i.301–302; 351–356; and vi.746 ff.

Note 15 in page 521 PW, V, 16 and 382–383.

Note 14 in page 521 I.e., from the beginning to the end of time (proleptic phrasing). The experiential order of the two sights is reversed in Prel. vi.

Note 15 in page 521 E.g., 11. 283 ff. and 424 ff.

Note 16 in page 522 Names of rivers at the Chartreuse (Wordsworth's note). Cf. Prel. (1850) vi.439: “the sister streams of Life and Death.”

Note 17 in page 522 Cf. Barstow, Poetic Diction, 98 ft.

Note 18 in page 522 Prel. (1850) iii.157 ff. shows that the poet became aware of the despotism of the eye as early as his Cambridge years, i.e., from the age of 17 on.

Note 19 in page 522 PW, v, 4.

Note 20 in page 522 Cf. Prel. (1850) xii.131 ff.

Note 21 in page 523 “Mont Blanc” (1816). The long excursus on liberty at the end of D.S. (702–813) is an attempt to identify the idea of Nature with the idea of Freedom even though the actual descriptions of Nature given previously evoke Powers that are not purely on the side of Freedom—they often show man stunned and superstitious.

Note 22 in page 523 Prel. (1850) vi.624–640. The fused or composite nature of this vision is suggested by the appearance in it of two details attributed in D.S. to different parts of the Alps: the “torrents shooting from the clear blue sky” (D.S. 130) belong to Lake Como, and “Black drizzling crags” (D.S. 249–250) to the region of the River Reuss. Como came immediately after the Simplón pass, and it is possible, of course, that these features were transferred from the gloomy strait to the localities mentioned by D.S. What matters is that poetically Wordsworth achieves in one sketch what all D.S. failed to achieve.

Note 23 in page 523 Prel. (1850) xii.139 ff.

Note 24 in page 523 See Shelley's “Mont Blanc,” especially 11. 12–48.

Note 25 in page 524 Having discussed imagery in section two, I deal with it here only insofar as it bears on syntax and verse-form.

Note 26 in page 524 Early Life of William Wordsworth (London, 1932), p. 128. Cf. Pottle, The Idiom of Poetry, pp. 129–130. But Pottle thinks Wordsworth's couplet developed from his use of octosyllabics in “The Vale of Esthwaite” and perhaps in a (presumed) early version of An Evening Walk.

Note 27 in page 524 A heart that vibrates evermore, awake

To feeling for all forms that Life can take,

That wider still its sympathy extends

And sees not any line where being ends

Verses added to An E.W. in the revision of 1794 (PW, i, 10).

Note 28 in page 524 The octosyllabic form of the couplet, on the other hand, does not have room for such tension between closed and open. It trots along too efficiently.

Note 29 in page 525 Cf. Pottle on Wordsworth's maturer technique in “The Eye and the Object,” op. cit.

Note 30 in page 525 See the examples collected by Legouis in Early Life, Book I, Ch. v., and cf. Barstow, op. cit.

Note 31 in page 525 Three other features of Wordsworth's earliest style may be linked to this pattern: (1) the placing of a transitive verb in an intransitive site: “Where rocks and groves the power of waters shakes / In cataracts”; (2) the pluralizing, also illustrated by the above; and (3) the abuse of the possessive pronoun to effect quick personifications (“Behind her hill the Moon, all crimson, rides”). The last, in particular, helps the poet to spread the sense of life through a multiplication of bounded or quasi-visual entities; the possessive pronoun both linking two objects and giving each separate status through the implied personification.

Note 32 in page 525 Prel. (1850) xii.121–147. It is interesting that the dominance of the eye coincides, at one point, with that of the analytic intellect, a fact supported by the present study. From both the explicit and stylistic evidence here given it is difficult to agree with scholars who have dated the period of the eye's dominance as late as 1793 (de Selincourt) or even 1795 (R. D. Havens). The poet himself calls it something “almost … inherent in the creature,” and such depictions as “The Ruined Cottage,” II. 85–108 (PW, v, 381382), suggest that this dominance was always potentially present. The confusion may be resolved by remembering that W. in the above-quoted passage distinguishes between an almost inherent and an accidental tyranny of the eye: the latter is directly associated with the crisis of 1793 ff., and was aggravated by “picturesque” habits of thought, but the former predisposes to the latter and is more relevant to D.S. and the growth of the poet's mind. Interesting discussions of Wordsworth's “eye” are those of M. Mead, PULA, xxxiv (1919), 202–224; H. W. Garrod, Wordsworth (Oxford, 1923), pp. 73–81; W. G. Fraser, RES, ix (1933), 457–462; and Gerhard Hensel, Das Optische bei Wordsworth (Marburg, 1930).

Note 33 in page 526 Of the two interpretations here given, the first (v. my previous paragraph) is implicit in D.S. and culminates poetically in Prel. (1805) vi.553–572; and the second (v. this paragraph) is not fully realized until the moment of composition which produces Prel. (1805) vi.525–548. The poet allows both passages to stand side by side, so that the later intuition (1804) forestalls, without negating, the viewpoint of the lines composed some five years earlier (1799).

Note 34 in page 526 Prel. (1850) xiii.290 ff. Cf. Coleridge's “we receive but what we give, / And in our life alone does Nature live,” Dejection: An Ode (1802).

Note 35 in page 526 PW, V, 5. The Prospectus is taken from the end of “The Recluse,” but may have been written as early as 1798: see PW, v, 372.

Note 36 in page 526 PW, v, 340–345 (Appendix B).

Note 37 in page 526 The anagogical function of contrast may recall Plato, Republic 523 ff., and 532 ff., where the Dialectic is conceived as at once initiating thought and emancipating the student from a “despotism of the eye” (the phrase is Coleridge's, v. Biog. Lit. Ch. vi). Yet, for Wordsworth, Nature itself is pro-paedeutic, and participates providentially in the dialectic ascent from visible to invisible. Perhaps the “abstruser argument,” never entered into, yet promised as “matter for another Song” (“The Recluse”? W.'s philosophical epic? v. Prel. [1805] xi.176–185, cited above) would have clarified the relation between Wordsworth's thought and Plato's. According to Christopher Wordsworth, the poem's title, “The Prelude,” was fixed on after the poet's death by Mary, so that no clear evidence exists linking it to the of Republic 532 (v. Memoirs of W. W. [London, 1851]; but see an interesting speculation by A. F. Potts in W's Prelude: A Study of Its Literary Form [Ithaca, 1953], pp. 366–372). My suspicion is that in the later W. a strange new linkage of Plato and Paul was in the making, “Nature” being under-sood as the res factae of Romans i. 20.—That the contrasts in the scene of storm studied above are anagogical rather than “picturesque,” i.e., essentially different from those of the “Pleasures of the Imagination” poem, is indicated by W's own (not unambiguous) comment: PW, I, 62. The finest example, however, of anagogical contrast is found in the vision from Snowden that brings the Prelude to a close.

Note 38 in page 527 Cf. W's note on “There was a Boy,” Wordsworth's Prelude, ed. de Selincourt (Oxford, 1926), p. 531.