Wordsworth: 1818–1819
It is hard to imagine a bleaker outlook for the advancement of Wordsworth’s literary reputation than that which presented itself in 1818. Preoccupied with campaigning for the Lowther brothers, alarmed by the Jacobinical stirrings of the local press, harried by political opponents, and beset with financial concerns and worries for the education of his three children, the composition of poetry became, for the most part, a secondary concern. Neither The White Doe, the two-volume Poems, nor the ‘Thanksgiving Ode’ had helped to improve Wordsworth’s standing with the reading public, so it is perhaps hardly surprising that inspiration for the completion of a major literary work had begun to recede. Yet it would be wrong to assume that no poetry of note was produced during this period as, from the beginning of the year through to the spring of 1819, Wordsworth composed occasional verses that explore his feelings of creative frustration, fears of cultural irrelevance, and sense of embattlement. In this regard, the composition of ‘Inscriptions, Supposed to Be Found in, and near, a Hermit’s Cell’ can be read as an exploration of the sense of cultural autonomy that the writing and publication of the political pamphlet Two Addresses to the Freeholders of Westmorland just a few months later would place in doubt. Aligned neither to patron or to place, voiced in the character of a social outsider, these imaginary inscriptions convey, variously, a preoccupation with the evanescence of thoughts (I), the fall of monuments into ‘shapeless ruin’ (l. 28) (II), the vanity of human wishes (III), and a plea to God for deliverance from ‘warring notions’ (IV, l. 1, and V). Unpublished in 1818, the inscriptions would eventually find a place in the 1820 Duddon collection, printed between the sonnet ‘On the Death of His Late Majesty’ and the translation of ‘The Prioress’s Tale’.2 In this new context the verses float free of the personal concerns that animated their composition, defusing, in the case of ‘IV. Near the Spring of the Hermitage’, the urgency of their questioning:
Only in submission to God can relief be found from the contradictions of literary patronage, but the use of litotes and the conditional and the delayed object at the end of this inscription – ‘Thus dishonouring not her station,/Would my Life present to Thee,/Gracious God, the pure oblation/Of Divine Tranquillity!’ (ll. 12–15) – belies somewhat the sturdiness of the hermit’s resolve. Peace in this formulation retains its status as the unrealisable horizon of human understanding, a point of quiet oblivion beyond the reach of history.
The successful election of the Lowthers to the East and Lonsdale wards at the beginning of July did little to relieve the troubled tempers of the Broughamites, and on the eighteenth Wordsworth worried that ‘a military force’ (MY II. 475) would have to be deployed to quash the spirit of rebellion. A concern that war might erupt within civil society came, as we shall see in the next chapter, to preoccupy Wordsworth in this period. The idea that the peace of 1815 might need to be defended informs two flower poems that appeared at the beginning of the new year. Like the daisy poems of 1802 and 1815, the snowdrop stands as a symbol of peaceful renewal, albeit, in this case, of renewal under duress. As meteorological and political storms whipped across Westmorland, the snowdrop provides a lesson in quiet resistance, offering gentle testimony to the triumph of the ‘Chaste’ in a time of inflated passions (‘To a Snow-drop, Appearing Very Early in the Season’).3 As illustrated by the opening lines of ‘Sonnet. On Seeing a Tuft of Snowdrops in a Storm’, a congruence of anti-Byronic and anti-Broughamite feeling, tinged with memories of those ‘high instincts’ before which ‘mortal Nature’ trembles ‘like a guilty Thing surpriz’d’,4 informs the poem’s celebration of the meek:
Observing how the snowdrops’ ‘helmets’ (l. 6) brave the winter blasts, the sonnet goes on to draw a striking comparison with the resistance of the ‘Emathian phalanx’ to the ‘immortal Theban band’ (ll. 11–12), a union of the ‘frail’ (l. 5) against overwhelming odds. More militant in tone than ‘To the Daisy’ and its accompanying poems, the connotations of passive endurance are all but voided by the poem’s allusions to classical epic and noble self-sacrifice.
Reviewing in ‘Malham Cove’ the collapse of worldly ambitions, Wordsworth could find, ‘mid the wreck of IS and WAS’, reasons enough to bemoan a career marked by ‘Things incomplete and purposes betrayed’ (ll. 11–12).6 The elegiac mood is sustained in two sonnets composed in the spring of 1819: ‘I watch, and long have watch’d, with calm regret’ and ‘Aerial Rock—whose solitary brow’, poems concerned with aging and creative decline. But while these sonnets, along with the ‘Inscriptions’, presented an image of the poet as baffled, betrayed, and disillusioned, in other poems from this period figures of transient beauty and neglected import provide a way forward, offering a ‘shield of Tranquillity’ to withstand the ‘suffering tumult’.7 As the year progressed, and questions of political and religious vexation ceded to matters cultural and aesthetic, Wordsworth would discover in ‘The Haunted Tree’ a way to convert the image of a ‘time-dismantled Oak’ (l. 7) into ‘a vision of English authority’,8 resistant in the nobleness of its decay to the self-indulgent luxuriance and Levantine eroticism of Keats, Shelley, and Byron.9 Composed in the late spring or early summer, it seems likely that the writing of this poem was prompted by the hostility directed at Peter Bell and The Waggoner – a hostility fomented, in large measure, by the Cockney School.
Tim Fulford and Jeffrey Cox have both written persuasively about the effects of the contest between the Lake and Cockney schools on Wordsworth’s late poetry.10 The discussion that follows does not add to this debate but seeks, rather, to read these narrative poems in relation to the debates about peace, war, and poetic creativity that have animated this study thus far. Drawing initially on the largely derogatory responses of the periodical press to these poems, the chapter aims to show how the radical experimentation of poetry devised in the 1790s and early 1800s chimed with the concerns expressed in later years for the weak, the embattled, and the neglected, suggesting the persistence of an interest in ontological levelling well into the period of apparent conservative decline. If the poet as a Tory campaigner fashions himself as the aggrieved victim of Jacobinical force, or as a voice in the wilderness, warning of the sensual poison of contemporary culture to an audience of none, the poetry that came to public attention in this period presents a rather more complex picture. In Chapter 2 I considered the representation of peace in The White Doe of Rylstone in terms of the participatory relationship between human and non-human beings. In this chapter I return to this consideration, paying attention to the ways in which these tolerant, playful, and essentially good-humoured poems rebut the image of the late Wordsworth as a peevish and obdurate prophet of gloom. An idea that the Thanksgiving volume held in abeyance thus returns to burden Wordsworth’s post-war imagination, providing an impression, however short-lived, of a world at peace with itself.
Peter Bell: Engaging the ‘Animal Within’
In his fine discussion of Peter Bell, Jeffrey Cox makes the point that when ‘a poem enters into the world, no matter when it was written, readers see it as speaking to both the present moment and contemporary writers’.11 As we shall see, discussion of Peter Bell and The Waggoner, poems drafted, respectively, in 1798 and 1806, but not published until 1819, invites consideration of some counter-factual histories, such as when, in 1814, on the cusp of issuing the Excursion, Wordsworth imagined a volume of narrative poems comprising the White Doe of Rylstone, Peter Bell, and The Waggoner. It is interesting to continue to speculate on how this volume might have been read and understood in the immediate post-war period, and in this chapter I will give some thought to how, as a collection, these ‘late’ early poems speak to a range of actual and possible concerns.
Consideration of contemporary reviews provides a useful entry point for this discussion. As Cox notes, the savaging of Peter Bell and The Waggoner was at least partially informed by feelings of betrayal. That, by 1819, the Lake School had demonstrably rescinded its support for democratic principles, with Southey established as poet laureate, Coleridge transformed into an apologist for Church and State, and Wordsworth outed as a Tory hireling, was a source of rancour for second-generation radicals. The furore against Peter Bell, drummed up by Wordsworth’s antagonists and manifested in the form of parodies and scathing reviews, could be read as a form of tribute, a last-ditch attempt by former admirers to laugh the lost leader into self-realisation and self-reform, or at least to maintain silence.12 But if this were the message that was delivered to Rydal, it was not the message that Wordsworth received. Writing to John Monkhouse, Sara Hutchinson observed that the abusive reviews, pre-empted by the appearance of John Hamilton Reynold’s parody, had the unintended effect of encouraging sales of Peter Bell, enough to demand a second edition of the poem within a fortnight of its publication. Prompted by this unexpected commercial success, but at the same time irked by the poem’s critical reception, the supreme offence of which was a public recitation of another parody in the house of Thomas King, the local Broughamite (MY II. 543), Wordsworth consented ‘to publish The Waggoner, just to give them another bone to pick’.13 Declaring ignorance ‘of the critiques to which you allude’ Wordsworth informed Hans Busk that it ‘is now 20 years since the “Duncery” of the periodical Press first declared war against me; and they have kept it up with laudable perseverance’ (MY II. 547). In addition to the Thomas King affair, Wordsworth must have been aware of the far-reaching influence of the Cockney School on account of the reprinting of Keats’s review of Reynold’s poem in the Kendal Chronicle.14 He may also have known about Leigh Hunt’s scathing judgement on Peter Bell in The Examiner, which spoke of ‘another didactic little horror’ of Wordsworth’s while denouncing its ‘half-witted prejudices’ and its ‘philosophy of violence and hopelessness’.15
The last phrase is resonant. In November 1815, at a time when ‘Freedom’ had been made ‘a pretence for old aggression’ Hunt was advocating a return to the ‘calm green amplitudes’ of peace and humanity.16 That Wordsworth’s Waterloo sonnets represented a threat to this vision was made clear by Hunt in an article for the Examiner in which he denounces the poet’s appropriation of Milton’s ‘oppressiveness of ambition’ to advance a poetics and politics of ‘power’.17 Far removed in its austere grandeur from the playful luxuriance of Hunt’s writings, Wordsworth’s compositions from this period become a cypher for the collusion of violent imaginings and authoritarian governance. When, in the summer of 1819, Hunt resumed his attack on the poet he no doubt saw in Peter’s zeal for brutality and subsequent Methodist conversion an echo of Wordsworth’s support for the divinely sanctioned violence of Waterloo. In both cases, the sinner, whether conceived as an individual or as the nation, is redeemed rather than reformed, set upon the path of righteousness following a life-changing katabasis.
Founded on ‘bewitching principles of fear, bigotry, and diseased impulse’, Hunt sees in Wordsworth’s tale a depiction of the forces of reaction that would retard the cause of peace, justice, and liberty.18 But as Cox suggests, he may also have responded to Wordsworth’s critique of ‘supernaturalism’, a rejection of the ‘realm of Faery’,19 in favour of ‘the humblest departments of daily life’ that, following Wordsworth’s earlier slights on Hunt’s Descent of Liberty and Keats’s Endymion, could have been read as an assault on the adolescent extravagancies of the Hampstead poets.20 When, in the poem’s Prologue, the narrator briefly entertains the wish to transcend ‘treasons, tumults’, and ‘wars’ (l. 27) it is possible that Hunt detected an element of parody, as if prior to settling for the embrace of the quotidian the poem were attempting to mimic the means by which a member of the Cockney School would seek to escape the ineluctable reality of historical violence. Peter Bell does in truth work hard to engage with the experience of conflict in everyday contexts, but to read the poem as a dour rejection of the politics and poetics of romance is to miss the extent to which by means of sly humour and subtle self-reflexivity the poem presents its own, beguiling, alternative to the fatalistic acceptance of life as perpetual war. Narrated from the point of view of an aging poet, ‘unfit’ for ‘high argument’ (ll. 839–40), Peter Bell discovers in its frequent avowals of mental and physical infirmity a perspective from which to subvert the claims of ‘ambitious Youth’ (l. 133), finding in its belatedness a platform for playful assertions of cultural authority. Conceived in youth, but speaking from a position of decrepitude, Peter Bell makes a virtue of its arrival in ‘an age too late’ (l. 132), deploying a limping, halting narrator, subject to disease, injury, and breathlessness (ll. 191–5), to advance a subtly subversive message. For while the depiction of Peter’s religious conversion confirms Hunt and other liberal readers in their suspicion of Wordsworth’s paternalism – and Wordsworth, as an opponent of Methodism, is no doubt guilty of hypocrisy in this part of the poem – there remains a strong element of radicalism in his determination to ‘dance’ and ‘play’ (l. 841) with readerly expectations, particularly in regard to the blurring of ontological categories, but perhaps also as a means to re-envision the possibility of a world of justice and thus a world of peace.
Contemporary reviews of Peter Bell make repeated mention of the poem’s perceived absurdities, insisting in the words of the Literary Gazette that ‘no talent can render that pathetic which is essentially ludicrous, nor great which is decidedly vulgar, not delightful which is glaringly disgusting’.21 Unsurprisingly, many of these reviews took exception to the poem’s lack of propriety in attributing moral feeling to an ass. Reflecting on Peter Bell, ‘a common everyday sort of animal’ and his ‘rare’ companion, the Edinburgh Monthly Review states that ‘so great are the respective claims to notoriety of these worthy characters, that we are, for a time, at some loss to determine to which of them the name of hero ought to be given’ before concluding that an ass is ‘too far beneath us in the scale of nature, to permit our sympathizing in its history’.22 With its ‘mild, reproachful look’ (l. 471) and capacity for grief, the donkey certainly conveys greater emotional intelligence than his obdurate human counterpart, but perhaps more radically the behaviour of this creature speaks to that larger sense of ‘life’ (ll. 611–12) in which the poem’s core value resides. In Wordsworth and the Poetry of What We Are, Paul H. Fry writes of Peter’s stubborn refusal to acknowledge the donkey’s claim on his affections, preferring to dwell in stonehearted denial of creaturely affinity.23 Thus, at war with nature, Peter proceeds to abuse the animal, the outcome of which is a retardation of the co-operative, seamless alliance and fluent, unbroken movement of man and beast that had been displayed in ‘The Idiot Boy’. Peter does, however, eventually demonstrate a capacity for empathy, and from the moment when he works with the creature to pull the dead man from the stream, the jerky, disjunctive movement that is the result of this asymmetric warfare falls into comforting lockstep. The rhetoric of mineral resistance to change, and of flinty indifference to suffering, manifested in the journeying couple’s numerous stops and pauses, as well as in the poem’s metrical and syntactical violence (‘He dealt a sturdy blow’, l. 460; ‘But I will bang your bones’, l. 485), is now gracefully softened. As the lines describing Peter’s transformation relay, the life of Peter Bell consists in the dissolving of physical and emotional ‘hardness’ (ll. 326–7), such that distinctions between human and animal, the secular and the divine, are relaxed:
Peter, in his newfound mildness, thus joins with the patient and long-suffering creature in the imitation of Christ, able alike to ‘feel the soul of Nature,/And see things as they are’ (ll. 814–15).
Like the ‘little chapel’ that ‘With greenest ivy overgrown’ dies ‘insensibly way/From human thoughts and purposes’, Peter Bell bows ‘to some transforming power’ (ll. 904–10), his identity as a sinner extinguished as he melts into life.
That such a quasi-pagan solution to the problem of sin should be countenanced by Wordsworth highlights, no doubt, the poem’s distinction from its nearest intertext, ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’. As Bernard Groom has argued, Peter Bell affirms that conversion to Christianity may be achieved without recourse to the ‘supernatural’ or to a ‘mythical heaven’ or, we might add, through atonement after the death of nature.24 In Peter Bell, the donkey is harried and oppressed but is spared the fate of the albatross. The representative of creation lives on and, as a result, the progress of Peter from sin to redemption can take place within a time and space that is recognisably of this world, far removed from the postlapsarian dead zone depicted in the ‘Rime’. The story of Peter’s transformation maps nicely onto his progress from brute superstition to Christian knowledge, as shown in the distinction between the lurid rhetorical fancies aroused by the images in the pool where the body of the donkey’s dead master lies and the plainly expressed conviction of sin expressed at the poem’s close:
‘Like one intent upon a book—/A book that is enchanted!’ (ll. 563–5), the seemingly unending flow of conjecture causes Peter to become fixated, ‘turned to iron […] Meet statue for the court of Fear’ (ll. 567–8). In ‘Part Second’ the scene finds a counterpart in the story of a man who, conning the pages of a ‘pious book’ (l. 792), becomes obsessed with a single ‘ghostly word’ (l. 806), a ‘word—which to his dying day/Perplex’d the good man’s gentle soul’ (ll. 804–5) and ‘Did never from his lips depart’ (l. 807). Disconnected from narrative, the enchanted word becomes an empty signifier, leaving both men, like the mariner, disconnected from community. By contrast, when Peter receives the word of God, it is experienced as pure sound ‘resounding from the woody glade […] clamorous as a hunter’s horn’, re-echoing ‘from a naked rock’ (ll. 990–2). Far removed from the ‘loud and dreadful sound’ that heralds the mariner’s return to land,25 the Word received by Peter is articulate and enlivening, an emanation of divine breath relayed through the voice of the Methodist preacher. Overcome with ‘joy’ (l. 1009), melting into tears (l. 1010), the ‘animal within’ (l. 1017) is reunited with the ‘flock’ (l. 995), rescued from deathly isolation by a potent act of grace. As ‘nature, through a world of death,/Breathes into him a second breath’ (ll. 1123–4), Peter, drawn to fellowship with the meanest objects in creation, now sees deeply into the life of things and, as a result, participates meaningfully in the life beyond self.
The difficulty, however, with the Christian reading of Peter Bell is that it overlooks the extent to which the transcendental dimension is troubled by the poem’s investment in imaginative excess. As the chapel sinks into decay, overwhelmed by natural growth in scenes anticipating the destruction of Rylstone Hall, we are reminded of how the world of matter, associated earlier in the poem with the ‘wild fantastic’ (l. 727) scenes of pagan superstition, resembles the sentient landscape depicted in the boat-stealing episode in The Prelude. In both cases, transgression is met with admonition as rocks morph into weird oppressive forms that ‘change countenance’ and ‘look’ at the guilty individual (ll. 734–5). Deliverance from this valley of associative fears comes with the ascent of the travellers to a realm of sublime clarity, a ‘high and open plain […] shining like the smoothest sea,/In undisturbed immensity’ (ll. 745–9). Yet even here, a solitary leaf, dancing in the ‘sportive wind’ (l. 754) serves, along with other fragments of the real – the drops of blood from the donkey’s wound, the ‘rumbling sound’ (l. 877) caused by miners detonating an underground explosive – to remind the potter of his ‘wickedness’ (l. 760). That these associative fragments can be traced to ‘common occurrences’, as Groom suggests,26 in no way diminishes their affective power, and while their placing in the poem is no doubt intended to depict the potter’s journey from pagan fancy to Christian imagination, their material richness resonates more strongly than the ‘blank’ (l. 751) written word.
If Peter’s journey from brute superstition to Christian faith is meant as a gentle rebuke to the supernatural excesses of Coleridge’s ‘Rime’, it is a journey that struggles to subdue that poem’s lingering potency. Even as, in the abandonment of ‘high argument’, Wordsworth seeks a mundane alternative to Coleridgean ‘Spirits of the Mind’ (l. 966), the emphasis in Peter Bell on the uncanny sentience and vibrant inter-connectivity of plant, mineral, and animal being pushes the poem back in the direction of its sublated pre-Christian origins. Partaking alike in the animal’s wounded condition – the aged narrator is ‘sore from a slight contusion’ (l. 193), while Peter is ‘crippled sore in his narration’ (l. 1085) – poet, potter, and beast are united in a world of suffering, akin to the Buddhist notion of Dukkha. Small wonder that contemporary critics should have objected to the poem’s mulelike determination to level the hierarchy of being while simultaneously failing to see the strangeness of the spirituality concealed by the strategic invocation of Methodism and the public concessions to Anglican orthodoxy. Frequently denounced as puerile, simplistic, and absurd, Peter Bell provokes readers into believing that a beast can mourn (l. 468), ‘shake with joy’ (l. 606), and ‘rightly spell’ (l. 697). As the Eclectic Review would go on to say of The Waggoner, in seeing all things ‘as possessing equal claims upon his sovereign attention’,27 Wordsworth’s ‘late’ narrative poem promotes a form of radical simplicity, advancing the belief, to adapt a formulation of Ian Bogost, that ‘things can be many and various, specific and concrete, while their being remains identical’.28 It is to the examination of this peaceful life, founded in a shared sense of being, that this chapter now turns.
The Waggoner: ‘All Together, as We Go’
Reviewing Peter Bell and The Waggoner in June 1819 the Theatrical Inquisitor pointed out that Wordsworth’s ‘excessive egotism […] occasions him to attach a degree of importance to the merest trifle which comes from his hands’.29 A few weeks later, the Eclectic Review declared that Wordsworth lacks a sense of the ‘ludicrous’, explaining that his ‘imagination’ is ‘so accustomed to exert itself with intense interest upon things comparatively mean and trifling […] that no adequate feelings shall be left for all that is in itself grand, or important, or captivating; and the relative magnitude of this latter class of objects shall be lost in the estimate of the mind, for want of a standard of measurement’.30
Twenty years earlier, in Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth had parodied precisely this zeal for measurement, observing how an enthusiasm for calibration worked to forestall the attainment of the sublime – ‘He says he is three score and ten,/But others say he’s eighty’ (ll. 7–8) – before showing how, to the ‘gentle reader’ (l. 75), ignoble quanta yields immeasurable returns: ‘thanks and praises seemed to run/So fast out of his heart, I thought/They never would have done’ (ll. 98–100). Thus, ‘Simon Lee’ ends not with the delivery of a ‘tale’ (l. 76) but with a deathly outpouring of tears, a spontaneous evacuation of the heart brought on by the severing of the ‘tangled root’ (l. 94) that binds the old man to life and labour.31 But just as, in the late 1790s and early 1800s, readers of Lyrical Ballads failed, typically, to grasp Wordsworth’s fun with measurements, estimates, and relative magnitudes, so in 1819 readers found themselves troubled by the ways in which Peter Bell and The Waggoner confound category distinctions. Class, of course, is a resonant term here, suggesting at once the categorisation of things that have qualities or attributes on common as well as a system of ordering based on social and economic status. As is well known, Wordsworth’s aggrandisement of huntsmen, potters, and waggoners violated class in both senses of the word and was widely perceived as a Jacobinical assault on social hierarchies. Hazlitt’s observation of 1825 is apposite here: despite the poet’s well-publicised conservatism, and indeed in a contravention of the attack made in 1818 on the ‘right-royal’ poetics of the ‘Thanksgiving Ode’, Wordsworth’s muse remains essentially a ‘levelling one’, a manifestation of the revolutionary principle of ‘equality’ (CWWH IV. 214–21). What is interesting about the Eclectic Review’s response to The Waggoner is how class anxieties, in the ideological sense, are linked to concerns about Wordsworth’s narrowness of attention and how a focus on the mean and the trivial prevents the mind from maintaining ontological distinctions, such as the difference between the great and the small, the elevated and the low, and the sublime and the ridiculous. Here’s what The Eclectic Review goes on to say:
In the extensive horizon of his capacious intellect, all distant interests it should seem are dwarfed, while, as he lies recumbent, a shrub, or a blade of grass, acquires from nearness a microscopic magnitude occupying the whole field of vision. Or perhaps, in the profound abstraction of his contemplative solitude, princes and potters, heroes and donkeys, would pass before him in the landscape as things of scarcely perceptible difference of configuration, and as possessing equal claims upon his sovereign attention. Under such circumstances, a simplicity would soon come to pervade all the associations of ideas excited by external objects, which would forbid the impertinent intrusion of the ludicrous.
Reminiscent of Kant’s description of how best to ‘get the full emotional effect from the magnitude of the pyramids’,32 Wordsworth, in getting ‘too close’ to the object of his attention, gets lost in the detail and, as a result, loses a sense of the difference between the vast and the small, the exalted and the low – which, for this reviewer, amounts to saying that in his ‘simplicity’ Wordsworth is unable to discriminate between the sublime and the ridiculous.
That Wordsworth, in 1819, presented a challenge to readers wishing to square Wordsworthian bathos with Wordsworthian sublimity is nicely illustrated by the Monthly Review. Struggling to get a measure of The Waggoner, the writer notes sardonically that ‘Throughout the piece […] we detect a sly covert sort of irony, an under-tone of playfulness, smiling at the mock heroics of the author; and preserving that difficult but exact spirit of bombast, which betrays a consciousness of misapplied sublimity, without rendering it quite gross and ridiculous’ before going on to single out examples of the poem’s tonal inelegance.33 Possibly conceived under the spell of Don Juan, the first two cantos of which had been praised in a previous issue of the journal for blending ‘the witty and the sublime, the sarcastic and the pathetic, the gloomy and the droll […] with such power of union’,34 the review captures something of the flavour of Byron’s own attacks on Wordsworth, which ranged wildly from mockery of the ‘simple WORDSWORTH’ in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers to the dismissal of the ‘unintelligible’ Excursion in Canto I of Don Juan.35 For Byron, Wordsworth emerges as a baffling provocateur: on the one hand, an ‘apostate from poetic rule’ for whom ‘Christmas stories tortured into rhyme/Contain the true essence of the sublime’;36 on the other, the high-minded creator of a ‘system to perplex the sages’.37 In Don Juan Canto III, Byron, as if wishing to settle the question of how best to classify Wordsworth, devotes two stanzas to maligning The Waggoner, condemning the poem as ‘scumlike’, a product of ‘bathos’ vast abyss’ (stanza. 100. ll. 892–3.). Attuned, perhaps, to the poem’s Miltonic echoes, Byron regards Wordsworth as the Jack Cades of song, a ‘vulgar’ renegado and devotee of the ‘little’ (stanza. 99. l. 885; 100. 895.), whose parodic reframing of Paradise Lost falls far short of the satiric grandeur of Absalom and Achitophel and the elegant suavity of The Rape of the Lock.
Like Byron, the Monthly Review struggles to put Wordsworth in his place: there is a note of genuine perplexity underpinning the review’s mock praise of the poet as ‘the Prince of Poetical Burlesque’ (p. 39) and a suspicion that The Waggoner might indeed be ‘joyful’ and ‘ingenious’ (p. 37). Elsewhere, as if seeking to resolve the questions raised by this writer, the British Critic, in one of the few appreciative reviews of the poem, determined that Wordsworth shows ‘by a subdued under-tone of humour, by a playful hint’, that he is indeed ‘master of himself, aware of the real rank of his subject, and not parsing it with disproportionate zeal’.38 Repeating precisely the terms used by the Monthly Review to debunk The Waggoner, the review counters that writer’s sardonicism by insisting that ‘this is a new class of poetry’ (p. 466), distinguished from works ‘of a more stimulating kind’ (p. 465) by the exercise of ‘moral sympathy and human fellow-feeling’ (p. 469), only to conclude that ‘the nature of the subject will be a stumbling block to many; it is easy to call it “a poem on the discharge of a drunken waggoner,” and to ask whether that is fit matter for poetry, to be gravely written by a philosophical poet, or seriously read by full-grown men’ (p. 479). As these reviews unwittingly reveal, the question of whether The Waggoner is playful or serious, sublime or ridiculous, appears undecidable; the undecidable question then becomes a provocation, a reminder of all that makes Wordsworth disproportionate, indiscriminate, and, ultimately, unclassifiable.
The story of how The Waggoner came to print comes with its own share of accidents, conflicts, and absurdities. From its inception in 1806 to its publication in 1819, the poem’s fate is interwoven with loss of one sort or another. At its core there is the catastrophe of John Wordsworth’s drowning aboard the wreck of the Earl of Abergavenny in February 1805, a loss registered in the elegiac ‘Rock of Names’ passage.39 The tone of the poem that Wordsworth composed a year later in which these lines were initially incorporated is light and playful, but the focus on the forging and breaking of happy allegiances bears the trace of that other, once cheerfully forged but now sadly despoiled, ‘file’: ‘W. W., M. H., D. W., S. T. C., J. W., S. H.’.40 Through its association with the death of John, the departure of Coleridge, and, later, in 1812 the unexpected loss of Wordsworth’s daughter Catharine, The Waggoner bears the imprint of a poet’s grief. But there is mischance too in the poem’s journey from manuscript to print. Paul Betz has documented the history of the poem’s several promised incarnations, from the anticipated publication with Peter Bell in 1809 to the proposed collected narrative poem volume of 1814, but on at least one occasion the existence of the poem itself had come under threat. As Charles Lamb observed in a letter of May 1815, during one of Wordsworth’s visits to London, ‘[h]as Wordsworth told you that coming to town he lost the manuscript of the ‘The Waggoner’ and ‘Peter Bell’ and two hundred lines of a new poem, and that he is not certain he can by any means recover a correct copy of them’.41 Though the manuscript was subsequently discovered, The Waggoner seems never to have fully overcome a link with textual precarity. In an intriguing aside, Betz notes that ‘the recent theft of a Prelude manuscript from the carrier’s cart’ may have been ‘a factor in the dislike that Wordsworth expresses at the end of the epilogue for the small carts that replaced Benjamin’s waggon’ (pp. 14–15). John Williams has suggested that Benjamin’s cumbersome conveyance, with its unwieldy team of fellow travellers making slow, halting progress across difficult terrain, could be read as a cypher for the author’s difficulties with ‘The Recluse’.42 The suggestion is intriguing, not least because of the ways in which The Waggoner freights its own progress with teasing allusions to other works by Wordsworth, his aspiration to be read as a grand, national poet in the Miltonic manner, and his self-defeating attraction towards the slight and the fanciful. Anxieties concerning the progress of ‘The Recluse’ no doubt weighed heavily on Wordsworth’s mind in the winter of 1805–6, but there is, I think, a more particular concern informing the development of The Waggoner.
As documented in The Prelude, the writing of the ‘philosophic Song’ (1. l. 230) had long been established as a priority for Wordsworth, but the desire to write ‘a narrative Poem of the Epic kind’ (EY 594) on ‘some British theme, some old/Romantic tale, by Milton left unsung’ (A-B Stage Prelude 1, ll. 179–80) had not entirely abated. As throughout January Wordsworth corrected the first eight books of The Prelude thoughts of the as yet unfulfilled promise of ‘The Recluse’ may well have informed the development of The Waggoner.43 But the latter poem’s fascination with the raising and dashing of epic expectations, a narrative of decline corresponding to the projected tales of fallen empires outlined in The Prelude,44 suggests that the ghost of that other, abandoned, work provided the more immediate and specific stimulus. Might there be a connection here between those eight books and the ‘eight sorry Carts’ (l. 827) that appear at the end of the poem as the ‘Unworthy Successors’ (l. 828) of Benjamin’s ‘lordly Wain’ (l. 822)?
The idea of The Waggoner as a mock-heroic reflection on the unfulfilled ambitions of a would-be writer of epic takes force when we consider the positioning of the poet within the poem. The Waggoner opens with a description of the end of a ‘burning’ day in June (l. 1), echoing the establishment of solstitial time found in ‘The Ruined Cottage’ and ‘Resolution and Independence’. The lumbering entrance of Benjamin and his Wain into this ‘close and hot’ (l. 14) environment is contrived carefully to complement the air of dreamlike suspension linked with this time of year (stitium: stoppage). Redolent of the opening lines of Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ (‘That far-off tinkling’s drowsy cheer’, l. 26; ‘And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds’),45 the poem focuses glancingly on that other, mute inglorious Milton, the ‘simple water-drinking Bard’ who lives ‘where the DOVE and OLIVE-Bough/Once hung’ (ll. 58–9). A former tavern, Dove Cottage stands in the poem as a device to evoke the source of Benjamin’s temptation and fall while alluding playfully to Wordsworth’s self-positioning as a poet in the Homeric tradition. The link between the strenuous, halting progress of the waggon (‘Many a stop and stay he makes,/Many a breathing fit he takes’, ll. 36–7) and the intermittent development of ‘The Recluse’ should again be noted here, along with the allusions to Paradise Lost, Genesis, classical tragedy, and epic.46 But though the introduction no doubt establishes a connection between Benjamin’s soon-to-be outmoded labour and the poet’s attempts to bring to completion ‘a poem so vast in conception, so ponderous that he would never complete it’,47 it is important to note too that much of the interest of the ensuing tale is derived not from a leaden sense of a failure of Imagination but from an enlivened delight in the ability of Fancy ‘to quicken and to beguile the temporal part of our nature’, to create effects that ‘are surprising, playful, ludicrous, amusing, tender, or pathetic, as the objects happen to be appositely produced or fortunately combined’ (Prose III. 36–7). Recognising this quality in the poem, Edward Quillinan noted that the ‘introductory passage about the glow worms was intended to shew the principle on which it was composed & to put the reader in the state of mind favourable for the perusal of a poem of fancy—It is all fancy’.48 Revised in 1836 in an attempt to recapture the tone of the 1806 manuscript version of the poem, the glow-worm passage chimes with ‘The Pilgrim’s Dream’ as a restatement of the benignant influence of the lowborn and neglected, but also as an endorsement of the value to human life of artistic play. Thus, though rooted in grief, disappointment, and frustration, the poem seeks to recover, through the ‘rapidity and profusion’ and the ‘felicity’ with which ‘thoughts and images’ are ‘linked together’, a tonic impression of life released from care. Perhaps further, the poem grants insight into how it might feel were the poet to take a lesson from Ovid instead of Homer, discovering in drunkenness an escape not only from the daily grind but a shimmer of how one might live in a world released from war. The allusion to the Dove and Olive-bough is in place to remind us not only of the defeated ambitions of an epic poet but of the covenant which brings about a peaceful relationship between God and his creation. That such a covenant can be recovered only in a moment of intoxicated bliss, reminiscent of Noah’s drunken attempt to recover the lost innocence of Eden (Genesis 9. 20–4), in no way detracts from the poem’s ability to give voice to the yearning to have done with the social, political, and, indeed, ontological divisions on which conflict is founded.
Was the dedication to the alcoholic Charles Lamb, one of the poem’s earliest and most appreciative readers, meant to serve as a covert warning of the dangers of narco-poesis? Certainly Lamb seems to have recognised ‘a kind of shadowing affinity between the subject of the narrative and the subject of the dedication’;49 but, as Anya Taylor has noted, Wordsworth the water-drinker is acutely sympathetic of the plight of the afflicted Benjamin, treating his hero with dignity and respect and avoiding condemnation.50 Henry Crabb Robinson, who, along with Lamb, was treated to an early reading of The Waggoner, records how Wordsworth ‘praised Burns for his introduction to Tam O’Shanter—By bringing together all the circumstances which can serve to render excusable what is in itself disgusting—Thus interesting our feelings and making us tolerant of what could otherwise be not endurable’.51 Crabb Robinson goes on to express admiration for the poem’s ‘grace and […] delightful [del to passages] of description and elegant playfulness’, noting how the description of ‘the dancing and joy in the Ale house’ is informed by ‘the Spirit of kindness and indulgence Wordsworth praises in Burns Tam O’Shanter’.52
If Wordsworth felt that the austere moralising of Peter Bell was best suited to its dedicatee Robert Southey, then what was the dedication to Lamb meant to signal if not the suspension of moral judgement out of a spirit of kindness and indulgence? In A Letter to a Friend of Robert Burns Wordsworth gave formal expression to these sentiments, decrying James Currie’s fault-finding Life while defending Burns’s ‘charitable indulgence’ of ‘vicious habits’ in his depiction of Tam O’Shanter’s drunkenness (Prose III. 124). Published in May 1816, shortly after the Thanksgiving volume and informed, perhaps, by memories of Lamb’s self-excoriating ‘Confessions of a Drunkard’ of 1813, the letter reflects also on The Waggoner’s Burnsian combination of ‘primary instincts’ and ‘convivial exaltation’, in which, ‘though there is no moral purpose, there is a moral effect’ (124). Here, in a manner far removed from the vatic detachment of the ‘Thanksgiving Ode’, Wordsworth writes approvingly of the poet who, ‘penetrating the unsightly and disgusting surfaces of things, has unveiled with exquisite skill the finer ties of imagination and feeling’ that bind the addicted ‘to practices productive of so much unhappiness to themselves, and to those whom it is their duty to cherish;—and, as far as he puts the reader in possession of this intelligent sympathy, he qualifies him for exercising a salutary influence over the minds of those who are thus deplorably enslaved’ (Prose III. 124–5).
If, then, in The Waggoner there is a target of approbation, it seems rather to be Wordsworth than Lamb as, recalling Milton’s Elegia Sexta, the poem pokes fun at the moralising Homerian who, ‘drinking soberly from a pure spring’, writes ‘about wars, and a heaven ruled over by Jove who has outgrown his boyhood, about heroes who stick to their duty and princes who are half gods’.53 The poet of The Waggoner writes too of wars and of the deleterious effects of god-like power, but the perspective adopted by this poet is more attuned to ‘the felicities of love and wine’ and thus more sympathetic to the ‘conditions of others’ than the angry writer of epic (Prose III. 124). In Benjamin’s mock-heroic journey we encounter a ‘poetic self’, not unlike Burns, and a hero, not unlike Tam O’Shanter, who, following initial resistance to temptation, gives way to the ‘spirit of pleasure’, discovering in the shelter of the village inn, ‘while the storm is roaring, and heaven and earth are in confusion’ and ‘the night is driven on by song and tumultuous noise’, a vision of humanity ‘blended into one proud and happy composition of elated spirits’ (124).
That The Waggoner serves to convey an image of the peaceable society, however flawed and however temporary, is nicely illustrated by the passage describing Benjamin’s encounter with the wandering sailor and his wife and child. The meeting follows a description of a storm. Inspired by a passage in Thomson’s ‘Autumn’, nature is presented here at war with itself. Harried by rain falling like ‘drops of lead’ (l. 157), advancing on a road that is ‘batter’d’ and ‘shatter’d’ (ll. 184–5), the battle-weary travellers eventually arrive at the grave of King Dunmail: ‘He who had once supreme command,/Last king of rocky Cumberland;/His bones, and those of all his Power,/Slain here in disastrous hour!’ (ll. 207–10). Indicative of that old abandoned ‘British theme’, the waggoner passes ‘through this narrow strait,/(Stony and dark and desolate)’ (ll. 211–12) in recollection, perhaps, of the Spartan defence of Thermopylae, only to be halted by the voice of a woman, pleading for shelter. Reminiscent of the encounter with wartime suffering depicted in ‘The Female Vagrant’ but differing in the ease with which hospitality is extended and the alacrity with which it is accepted, the poem represents Benjamin as a model host, willing to accommodate the woman and her baby unconditionally and without expectation of return. The woman’s sheepish acknowledgement of her hitherto unnoticed sailor husband draws attention to the disparagement with which wandering servicemen and their families were commonly viewed, but Benjamin, true to the goodness of his nature, is no less willing to provide shelter for this man.
The sights and sounds of a ‘Merry-night’ (l. 305) at the Cherry Tree lure the travellers to the poem’s primary scene of temptation. The description of the evening’s entertainments, which struck a chord with Crabb Robinson, do indeed owe a debt to Burns, but there are echoes too of the dizzying sights and sounds of London, as described in Book 7 of the recently dispatched and almost lost Prelude. Corresponding to that description, the pub scene in The Waggoner draws energy from a critical mass of present participles, single, double, and off-centred rhymes, closed and open couplets, anaphora, accumulated exclamation marks, and jumbled category distinctions:
Evoking the jubilant cacophony of an evening of serious drinking, the passage conveys the sense of a world in which, subjected to the mad, associative logic of intoxication, even the most lifeless objects join with the collective spirit: ‘The very bacon shows its feeling,/Swinging from the smoky ceiling!’ (ll. 343–4). What the comedy of the poem reveals, both at the level of form and at the level of content, is the power of ‘affective’ bodies, due to their participation in modes of common ‘substance’, to enter into strange and unforeseen alliances.54 If in the London book of The Prelude the relation of ‘self-destroying, transitory things’ is tempered by the disciplinary logic of ‘Composure and ennobling harmony’ (l. 740–1), here the delight in drunken fancy appears to be unconstrained. The poem, however, does provide an intimation of the disaster that is to come, as Benjamin, forgetful of ‘care’ (l. 355) and ‘strife’ (l. 357), is compared to ‘A Caesar past the Rubicon!’ (l. 356).
As narcotic forgetfulness descends on the travellers (shades here of Homer’s lotus-eaters), the mood of collective ‘bliss’ (l. 373) is interrupted by the sudden entrance of the sailor with ‘A ship of lusty size;/A gallant stately Man of War,/Fix’d on a smoothly-sliding car’ (ll. 381–3). Convention has it that the sailor functions in the poem as a satanic tempter, ushering Benjamin into the inn before he has had a chance to exercise his judgement.55 This may be true, for like the devil (and, for that matter, Lord Byron) the man has a ‘limp’ (l. 379), but his presence in the poem also highlights the condition of those who, having placed their lives in the service of the state, were denied adequate medical and social care.56 Like many other disabled naval veterans of the period, the sailor supplements his living by displaying a handcrafted model warship, in this case a representation of Nelson’s flagship, the Vanguard. A popular subject for sentimental painters and graphic satirists alike, the disabled sailor proceeds to regale his audience with a vivid account of the Battle of the Nile. Attuned to the satirist’s stark depiction of aggressively enterprising penury rather than to the sentimental portrayal of a member of the deserving but objectified poor, Wordsworth, as John Williams points out, frames the sailor’s tale as an opportunity to debunk the ‘virtual beatification’, less than a year after his death, of Admiral Lord Nelson.57 That Nelson should be toasted as ‘England’s pride and treasure,/Her bulwark and tower of strength’ (ll. 423–4), by a profligate member of the fleet highlights the means by which hero-worship could be deployed to provide distraction from the hardships of war. Presented as a ‘Showman’ (l. 395), the sailor, whose performance appears again to be related to The Prelude’s account of the disorderly showiness of the metropolis, highlights Nelson’s own capacity for self-promotion – a capacity that Wordsworth had criticised in ‘The Character of the Happy Warrior’. Motivated perhaps by a sense of the contrast between the rectitude of his brother John, whose death passed virtually unnoticed to the world at large, and the dubious morality of this highly publicised martyr to a vainglorious cause, the sailor’s account of the Battle of the Nile is appropriately extravagant, making use of ‘uncouth terms of art’ (l. 401) (‘A sight that would have rous’d your blood! [l. 406]) and desacralised biblical language (‘Let this be Land, and that be Sea’, l. 409), to expose the tawdry elevation of its subject.
Commenting on this passage, Theresa Kelley draws attention to the narrator’s subsequent gloss on the battle, which with its pointed allusion to the conflict between Satan and God in Paradise Lost (‘The dismal conflict, and the might/And terror of that wondrous night!’, ll. 419–20), debunks still further ‘the heroic sublime’.58 But the Miltonic allusion also reveals the trace of that unwritten epic poem on some British theme. As filtered through the poem’s quasi-Shandian depiction of the model ship, the Battle of the Nile becomes, in Susan Stewart’s sense, a fetishized object, a locus for ‘an experience which the object can only evoke and resonate to, and can never fully recoup’.59 Echoing the means by which the model and its supplementary narrative ‘plays in the distance between the present and […] experience as it might be “directly lived”’,60 the poem shows how the representation of war ‘creates a longing that of necessity is inauthentic because it does not take part in lived experience’.61 Trading on the promise of restoration (‘You’ll find much in little here!’, l. 394), the sailor’s promise of the real, ‘And you shall see her in full trim;/I’ll set, my Friends […] every inch of sail upon her […] masts, sails, yards,/He names them all’ (ll. 396–401), with its punning allusion to Corporal Trim’s exposition of the Battle of Namur, exacerbates rather than resolves the breach between representation and the ‘ultimate experience’, intensifying the audience’s longing for war as the lost horizon of everyday life.62
As I have argued throughout this study, although Wordsworth’s poetry participates, to some extent, in the pleasure of destruction, it works at the same time to scrutinise and expose the mechanisms that enable such participation. In The Waggoner, the linking of alcohol-induced reverie, nostalgia, and showmanship with the techniques of excitement and aggrandisement deployed in popular histories, ballads and songs, prints, paintings, and commemorative plates goes some way towards deflating the manufacture of consent that precluded rational debate about Nelson’s standing as a national hero. When, after concluding his narrative by pledging a draft to ‘England’s pride and treasure’ (l. 423), the ‘battered tar’ (l. 433), having led Benjamin by example to quaff a ‘deep, determined, desperate draught’ (l. 432), leaves the inn ‘a hero, crown’d with laurel’ (l. 435), his actions, appearance, and honours function as a traducing of Nelson’s own, narcotic, appeal. To have published such an expose of the fostering of pro-war sentiment in 1806, within a year of Nelson’s death, would have been foolhardy, but in 1819, as positive appraisals and commemorative wares continued to command attention in British culture, publication could be seen as a no less contentious gesture. That Benjamin succumbs to temptation, joining in with the devil’s draught, is a demonstration of the power of populist media to institute a culture of agreement inoculated against dissent. Against the promotion of this form of reactionary levelling, Wordsworth’s poem makes a small but defiant stand, offering in its quirkily inverted representation of state-sponsored war culture a parodic point of critique.
But as I have intimated, levelling of another kind takes place in the poem, offering at least the potential for readers to gain a sense, albeit momentarily, of how life could be lived after war. Theresa Kelley, invoking Charles Lamb’s praise for the poem’s ‘spirit of beautiful tolerance’, argues that The Waggoner is informed by ‘the most obvious values of the beautiful—benevolence […] and social coherence’.63 Kelley goes on to advance a reading of the poem that highlights its investment in images of shelter and rest, noting how those victims of wartime displacement – the mendicant sailor and his family – are protected from the storm: a vision of natural life safe from sovereign violence. The Waggoner’s elegiac conclusion does indeed provide a beautiful alternative to those traces of sublime terror that seem, at times, to threaten the poem’s progress, but the spirit of tolerance exhibited in these lines seems to me to exceed the category of the beautiful, at least insofar as Kant determines the beautiful as that which ‘concerns the form of the object’.64 To retrieve the sense in which The Waggoner’s drive for inclusivity reaches beyond the rigid opposition of the beautiful or ‘bounded’ object and the sublime or ‘unbounded’ object, we need to return to The Waggoner’s activation of the poetics of fancy, as advanced in the Preface to Poems of 1815, and to the interest displayed in the ascription of consciousness to non-human beings and inanimate objects, which the poem shares with The White Doe of Rylstone and with Peter Bell. In both cases, I suggest, peace is discovered not in the antagonistic labour of self-realisation, still less in that labour’s silent aftermath, but in the sensual comingling of beings and things.
Involved and Restless All
Throughout its course, The Waggoner provides glimpses of this shared, collective life: the team of horses that acts as a chorus, responding with ‘one mind’ (l. 133) when the going is legitimate, halting ‘reluctantly’ (l. 326) when it is not; the mastiff that offers a ‘monitory growl’ (l. 430) when Benjamin joins in the toast to Nelson. Evidence abounds in the poem for the ability of creatures and even objects to exhibit human emotion, but the notion of a communal delight in being, first glimpsed at the Cherry Tree, is explored fully in Canto Third when, in the aftermath of the drinking session, the pace of the waggon, and of the poem, is dramatically accelerated. Working now as an assemblage of human and non-human actants – Benjamin and his waggon, the sailor and his wife and child, the model warship, an ass, the mastiff, and the team of horses – the waggon mounts ‘to a higher height/And higher still’ (ll. 467–8), pursuing a ‘greedy flight’ (l. 468) beyond the reach of conventional wisdom. As the team coasts ‘the silent lake’ (l. 473) the sense of collective joy becomes infectious, prompting the narrator to partake in ‘Their inspiration’ and ‘Share their empyreal spirits’ (ll. 474–5). Thus, with ‘enraptured vision’ (l. 476) informed by ‘fancy’ (l. 477), the narrator paints a series of ‘shifting pictures—clad in gleams’:
The single and double rhymes, metrical variations, and closed and run-on lines support the impression of a complex inter-animation of contrasting elements, providing a template for the lines that follow as, with ‘tears of rapture’, ‘profound entreaties, and hand-shaking’, the disparate company unites in ‘solemn, vacant, interlacing’ (ll. 486–8), prior to tethering the sailor’s ass and model ship to the rear of the waggon.
In the events that follow, the commitment to categorical blurring is sustained as Benjamin, reflecting on the happy conjunction of human, animal, model, and machine (‘we make a kind of handsome show!’, l. 518) and echoing the observations made by the narrator earlier in the poem, compares this newly created assemblage to a ship with ‘canvas spread’ (l. 522). Benjamin’s nautical reverie, along with his account of the ‘enjoyment’ of the owls of Windermere, ‘Mocking the Man that keeps the ferry’ (ll. 560–9, passim), speaks to the awakening of a creative power, shared not only by humans – sailors, waggoners, and poets alike – but by all things. The allusion here, of course, is to the Boy of Winander and to the owls that, with ‘mimic hooting’, usher in the sensation of an accord between mind and nature.65 In a manner distinct from the meditative sobriety of the water-drinking bard, the pilot of the wain, inspired by alcohol-induced conviviality, indulges in a spontaneous overflow of playful, ludicrous, and tender combinations. Benjamin’s delight in this poetics of fancy reaches its zenith at the canto’s conclusion when, absorbed by the sailor’s Quixotic combat with the mountain tops, he beholds ‘among the stars’:
In ‘Eve’s lingering clouds extend in solid bars’, a sonnet composed in 1807 but not published until 1819 where it stands as the concluding poem of The Waggoner volume, the ‘rich show’ (l. 11) of ‘Jove—Venus—and the ruddy crest of Mars’ (l. 5) reflected on the surface of Grasmere lake offers to ‘fancy’ (l. 10) a vision of ‘tranquillity’ (l. 14), at ‘happy distance from earth’s groaning field,/Where ruthless mortals wage incessant wars’ (ll. 7–8).66 If, by way of contrast to this poem’s assertion of Neoplatonic order, Benjamin’s vision of cosmic conflict suggests an inherent disorder in the universe, a case can be made too for regarding primal strife not solely as a destructive force but as a form of creative delirium. In that rhyming whirl of present participles, more akin to Ovidian intoxication than Homeric sobriety, the poem locates its pleasurable core as, no longer split between material flux and transcendental constancy, the world above and the world below meld in vibrant accord.
In this account of dynamic, universal entent, Wordsworth may have recalled his early engagement with Spinozian thought, which in Lyrical Ballads and the preliminary drafts for ‘The Recluse’ had informed the pantheistic notion of the ‘life of things’. But Spinoza’s description of a world in which objects struggle to maintain their integrity through the ceaseless forging of confederations with other objects bears no less on the political significance of The Waggoner. As advanced in the Political Treatise, the shifting world of conative encounters functions like a ‘commonwealth’ to realise the potential of its constituents in a manner that is beneficial to the well-being of the whole.67 Distinct from the Hobbesian notion of peace as the absence of war, which entails the perpetuation of a conception of being characterised by perpetual strife, Spinozian peace orients itself in relation to a state of harmony defined not by the externally imposed agencies of Law, Monarchy, or State Religion but by ‘a free people’.68 In this mode of temporary assemblages and fraught alliances, antagonism is recognised and accepted but is itself placed in a tensional relation with other countervailing modes, chiefly with the desire for self-regulation. Benjamin’s waggon, with its constantly morphing set of alliances, provides as apt an illustration as any of how such a commonwealth might function, for when tensions erupt peace is restored by the action of the meek, reacting against the imposition of sovereign power in the interests of the whole:
Kicked by the peace-loving ass, the warmongering mastiff thus learns his place in the team, but as is the fate of most alliances, the community of the waggon must soon come to an end.69
Canto Fourth opens with a flight of fancy and a shift from the tenebrous visions of the night to the lucent displays of the rising dawn. Tracking the journey of the ‘Muse’ (l. 595) over Raven Crag, the River Greta, and St John’s Vale, and from there to Skiddaw and Nathdale Fell, the poem registers ‘glimmering’ mountain tops and ‘glittering’ streams – momentary sights which, while shrouded in mist, ‘the merry sun/Takes delight to play upon’ (ll. 681–2). The journey north from Grasmere to Thirlmere is a journey too to the Rock of Names. Excised from the 1819 publication, the lines commemorating the meeting place between Wordsworth and Coleridge overshadow this journey, lending an air of expectant disappointment to the descriptions of the morning’s transient joys. The absent presence of Coleridge at the poem’s conclusion is a reminder no less of how poems belonging to the category of Fancy are, for Wordsworth, a guilty pleasure. Insofar as it distracts from the serious business of completing the long philosophical poem, The Waggoner runs the risk of attracting the censure of Wordsworth’s greatest critic. Nominated at the poem’s conclusion as the ‘Friend’, a loaded designation cementing the poem’s connection with The Prelude, Coleridge steps out of the shadows to displace Lamb as the poem’s primary addressee:
What the opening of the canto offers then is a reflection on the momentary pleasure that ‘makes my bliss!’ (l. 785). Presented to Coleridge almost in a spirit of defiance, responsibility for the poem’s creation is attributed not to the great ‘I AM’ of imaginative potency but to an unbidden vital force:
The address to the Friend follows the scene in which Benjamin is discovered by his ‘Master’. Presented in mock-heroic terms as shielded, like Apollo, from enemy scrutiny by the combined effects of mist and laborious ‘exhalation’ (l. 678), the Master nevertheless sees through the ‘radiant shroud’ (l. 722) to perceive the carnivalesque disorder within.
With Benjamin’s summary sacking the journey concludes, and with it ends the happy assemblage that presented a peaceable alternative to the rationalised antagonism of alienated labour. With the Master’s return comes the re-imposition of hierarchy and a corresponding loss of delight, but also and perhaps more pointedly a diminution of local memory. As the narrator sadly opines, the waggon served as ‘A living Almanack’, a ‘speaking Diary’ that ‘Gave to the days a mark and name’ (ll. 798–801). Related in purpose to the Old Cumberland Beggar, the waggon progressing ‘Majestically huge and slow’ (l. 807) enables the marking of the seasons, serving as a locus for the maintenance of community over time. When, gazing through the window of the Dove and Olive-bough, the poet observes the waggon’s replacement, ‘Eight sorry Carts, no less a train!’ (l. 827), he sees also the loss of the values of kindness and hospitality that Benjamin offered to the indigent poor. Significantly, the new arrangement lays stress on the isolation of its constituent parts: ‘one by one—See, perch’d upon the naked height/The summit of a cumbrous freight,/A Single Traveller—and there,/Another’ (ll. 832–5). The disassembly of the waggon and its replacement with a segmented train lead in turn to the exposure, both literally and figuratively, of those victims of modernity – ‘the lame, the sickly, and the old;/Men, Women, heartless with the cold;/And Babes in wet and starv’ling plight’ (ll. 836–8) – for whom the ‘lordly Wain’ (l. 822) no longer provides a ‘shelter’ (l. 841). Wordsworth may be alluding here to the exposure of his own poetic labours to violent contingency. He may also have in mind the reduction of creative spontaneity to the dreary realisation of that tyrannical schema, otherwise known as ‘The Recluse’. But imbuing all these fears is the sense of a world given over to the programmatic extinction of mutual satisfaction, self-governance, and enjoyment – the life-denying principles, in other words, of a community at war.
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