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Wordsworth and the Problem of Imaginative Story: The Case of “Simon Lee”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Andrew L. Griffin
Andrew L. Griffin*
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
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Abstract

Overshadowed by “The Thorn” and “The Idiot Boy,” Wordsworth's “Simon Lee” has attracted little attention. It is, however, a complex and ambitious poem, the product of a collision between narrative form and the demands of the imagination. “Simon Lee” does three things: it seeks to wean the reader from his low taste for stories; it displays a dramatic speaker learning to exchange narrative for lyric poetry; and, surprisingly, it undermines the whole proceeding, mourning for the very tales in verse that it abandons. Analysis of the poem from these three points of view sheds light on Wordsworth's ambivalence toward narrative. At the same time it helps us reassemble and relate three competing views of Wordsworth: as evangelist or moral teacher; as dramatist; and as the elegiac poet of the “Ode” and “Tintern Abbey,” whose tendency toward self-involution underlies and influences even his attitudes toward audience and genre.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 92 , Issue 3 , May 1977 , pp. 392 - 409
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1977

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References

1 According to de Selincourt, “On the text of no other short poem did W. expend so much labour as on Simon Lee” (The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire, 5 vols., Oxford: Clarendon, 1940-49, iv, 413). In a letter to Francis Wrangham (5 May 1809) Wordsworth mentioned “Simon Lee” among those poems he considered “interesting to a meditative and imaginative mind either from the moral importance of the pictures or from the employment they give to the understanding affected through the imagination and to the higher faculties” (The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth; The Middle Years, ed. Ernest de Selincourt et al., Oxford: Clarendon, 1939-70, i, 413). In subsequent references, the Poetical Works are cited as PW; the Letters …Early Years as EY; and the Letters …Middle Years as MY, i, and MY, ii.

2 The Simple Wordsworth (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960), pp. 35-41. Paul D. Sheats, The Making of Wordsworth's Poetry, 1785-1798 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 188-93.

3 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. J. Shawcross, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1907), i, 51.

4 Stephen M. Parrish, “Dramatic Technique in the Lyrical Ballads,” PMLA, 74 (1959), 85-97, argues thus and compares “The Mad Mother” to “Lady Anne Bothwell's Complaint” in Percy's Reliques. Wordsworth would have found examples of the genre, not only in Percy, but also in the popular magazine poetry of his day; see Robert Mayo, “The Contemporaneity of the Lyrical Ballads,” PMLA, 69 (1954), 486-522.

5 See John E. Jordan, “Wordsworth's Humor,” PMLA, 73 (1958), 81-93. For Jordan, however, it is not the narrator, or persona, but the narrative form that is being undermined or teased: by parody, as in the mock-heroic strains of “The Waggoner” and 'The Idiot Boy“; or by a means less easily identified, the sort of wry twist given such pseudosimple poems as ”Goody Blake“ by the pressure of the poet's own sophisticated and rather dark vision. In any case, as Jordan rightly stresses, ”simply telling a good story …was almost never enough for Wordsworth.“

6 Parrish, despite his interest in Wordsworth's dramatic voices, confidently assigns “Simon Lee” to the (for him) narrow class of lyrical ballads spoken by Wordsworth himself, in his own person (“Dramatic Technique,” p. 94). But Coleridge singles it out, with its cousin 'The Thorn,“ as representative of what he calls the poet's ”humblest“ and most ”colloquial“ works, at the opposite pole from the noble, the authentically Wordsworthian ”Tintern Abbey“ (Biographia Literaria, i, 51).

7 Mary of Buttermere is an example, her shape “returning” after it has been gently dismissed to stand again, as the speaker says, “in the way which I must tread,” preventing him from moving on until he has dealt with her (and her child) as they are at present, not just as they were (The Prelude, 1805, vii, 346-47).

8 Geoffrey H. Hartman, Wordsworth's Poetry, 1787-1814 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1964), pp. 146-50.

9 Sheats finds a similar release of aggressive energy in this sudden stroke but traces it to a different source: “It is …a gesture of defense, and even revenge, on behalf of a humanity caught in the inexorable processes of natural law” (p. 192).

10 Wordsworth, Preface of 1815 (pw, ii, 441). Coleridge, The Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. L. Griggs, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1959), n, 1013.

11 Thomas De Quincey, Suspiria de Profundis, in Confessions of an English Opium Eater …with its Sequels, Suspiria de Profundis and The English Mail-Coach, ed. Malcolm Elwin (London: MacDonald, 1956), p. 466.

12 The phrase quoted appears in a passage from The Prelude that presents a generalized image of action and motion stilled, or quelled, by transcendence of the fleshly and the many to the One (ii, 420-21). But the pattern fits almost every “spot of time” re-created in the poem, and none better than the most famous and debated of such passages, the crossing of the Alps (vi, 488-572). There, the speaker's anticipated pleasure in a purely muscular and athletic triumph is denied him by an ironic providence, which, however, turns him— by the way of frustration, as in “Simon Lee”—onto the right road, leading to one of the poem's central ecstatic visions, that of the great Apocalypse in the ravine of Gondo. This vision discovers a universe whose every force and movement are frozen eternally, held still in tensions within the Divine Mind. And though the poet-seer is presumably traveling through the ravine as the vision is revealed, we think of him, as usual, as fixed, “placed in the way,” before something unmoving and single (in this case, the All).

13 Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, 23 vols. (London: Hogarth, 1953-68), v, 525.

14 Marmaduke's last speech (the last words of the play) equates his choice of a wandering outcast's life with that of the penitent hermit or of the Roman suicide, falling on his “sword's point.” Marmaduke imagines himself henceforward as forever roaming, but without an object (“in search of nothing”), and shunning all human contact, neither giving nor taking:

No human ear shall ever hear me speak;

No human dwelling ever give me food,

Or sleep, or rest….

He means to wander through the world as blindly as old Herbert, his victim, but with his mind's eye wide open and fixed eternally on “The Spectre of that innocent Man”—an inward beholding, self-punishment by self-involution (PW, i, 225).

15 “Essay, Supplementary to the Preface” (PW, ii, 429; my italics).