Wordsworth's Poems of Travel 1819-42: Such Sweet Wayfaring (Romanticism in Perspective)

Wordsworth's Poems of Travel, 1819–42 'Such Sweet Wayfaring' John Wyatt General Editors: Marilyn Gaull, Professor of ...

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Wordsworth's Poems of Travel, 1819–42 'Such Sweet Wayfaring'

John Wyatt

General Editors: Marilyn Gaull, Professor of English, Temple University/New York University Stephen Prickett, Regius Professor of English Language and Literature, University of Glasgow This series aims to offer a fresh assessment of Romanticism by looking at it from a wide variety of perspectives. Both comparative and interdisciplinary, it will bring together cognate themes from architecture, art history, landscape gardening, linguistics, literature, philosophy, politics, science, social and political history and theology to deal with original, contentious or as yet unexplored aspects of Romanticism as a Europe-wide phenomenon. Titles include: Toby R. Benis ROMANTICISM ON THE ROAD: The Marginal Gains of Wordsworth's Homeless Richard Cronin {editor) 1798: THE YEAR OF THE LYRICAL BALLADS Peter Davidhazi THE ROMANTIC CULT OF SHAKESPEARE: Literary Reception in Anthropological Perspective Charles Donelan ROMANTICISM AND MALE FANTASY IN BYRON'S DON JUAN A Marketable Vice Tim Fulford ROMANTICISM AND MASCULINITY: In the Writings of Burke, Coleridge, Cobbett, Wordsworth, De Quincey and Hazlitt David Jasper THE SACRED AND SECULAR CANON IN ROMANTICISM Preserving the Sacred Truths

10.1057/9780230286214 - Wordsworth's Poems of Travel 1819-1842, John F. Wyatt

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-11

ROMANTICISM IN PERSPECTIVE: TEXTS, CULTURES, HISTORIES

Mark S. Lussier ROMANTIC DYNAMICS: The Poetics of Physicality Andrew McCann CULTURAL POLITICS IN THE 1790s: Literature, Radicalism and the Public Sphere Ashton Nichols THE REVOLUTIONARY T : Wordsworth and the Politics of Self-Presentation Jeffrey C. Robinson RECEPTION AND POETICS IN KEATS: 'My Ended Poet' Anya Taylor BACCHUS IN ROMANTIC ENGLAND: Writers and Drink, 1780-1830 Michael Wiley ROMANTIC GEOGRAPHY: Wordsworth and Anglo-European Spaces Eric Wilson EMERSON'S SUBLIME SCIENCE John Wyatt WORDSWORTH'S POEMS OF TRAVEL, 1819-42 'Such Sweet Wayfaring'

Romanticism in Perspective Series Standing Order ISBN 0-333-71490-3 (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, Englanc



Malcolm Kelsall JEFFERSON AND THE ICONOGRAPHY OF ROMANTICISM Folk, Land, Culture and the Romantic Nation

'Such Sweet Wayfaring' John Wyatt

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Wordsworth's Poems of Travel, 1819-42

First published in Great Britain 1999 by

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MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world

ISBN 0-333-74813-1 First published in the United States of America 1999 by

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ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, INC., Scholarly and Reference Division, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 ISBN 0-312-22113-4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data WyatUohn, 1931Wordsworth's poems of travel, 1819-42 : ksuch sweet wayfaring' / John Wyatt. p. cm. — (Romanticism in perspective) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-312-22113-4 (cloth) 1. Wordsworth, William, 1770-1850—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Travelers' writings, English—History and criticism. 3. Wordsworth, William, 1770-1850—Journeys. 4. British—Travel-History—19th century. 5. Old age in literature. 6. Travel in literature. 7. Romanticism—England. 8. Aging in literature. 9. Poetics. I. Title. II. Series. PR5892.T73W93 1999 821V7—dc21 98-54306 CIP

©John Wyatt 1999 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 9HE. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. 10 9 8 08 07 06

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire



A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.


To Imogen who begins her journey




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Acknowledgements

ix

1

Introduction

1

2

Peter Bell's Company

13

3

Cerulean Duddon and its Tributaries

30

4

Memorials of a Tour, 1820: the Lessons of Europe

55

5

To the Springs of Romanticism: Yarrow Revisited

80

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Unfinished Business: the Second Scottish Journey

100

7

The Italian Tour of 1837

118

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Conclusion: Such Sweet Wayfaring?

137

Notes and References

158

Bibliography

165

Index

169

vn 10.1057/9780230286214 - Wordsworth's Poems of Travel 1819-1842, John F. Wyatt


Contents




The spring of ideas that eventually flowed into this book was principally from research carried out at the University of Southampton under the wise and generous supervision of Professor James Sambrook. I was then looking into the connections between Wordsworth and early nineteenth-century scientists, particularly the geologists. Lifting the little-disturbed cover of the later poems for this specific purpose revealed a very varied and challenging world. The enquiries happily coincided with a small teaching commitment at the Chichester Institute of Higher Education, where an innovative course on literature and place is pursued in the School of Geography. I am grateful for discussions with colleagues in the Institute's Schools of English and of Geography and particularly for the never-failing support and encouragement of Paul Foster, Emeritus Professor of English Studies. Librarians at the British Library, the University of Southampton Library and the Chichester Institute Library have been helpful and prompt in their supply of material. I am indebted to the Governors of the same Institute who encouraged even senior staff to continue to teach and to study, providing, in my case, support with typing and a sabbatical term at the University of Southampton. My sincere thanks go to the team of people who have struggled successfully with my manuscripts in many drafts: Debbie Bates (who also coordinated the final draft), Sue Shannon, Kim Hale, Sue McGuire and Jill Sellwood. Without their unstinting help during my busy life managing an institution of higher education, all would have disappeared. Finally, I am grateful for the experience and wise advice of Professor Stephen Prickett in bringing this book to its present state. All the errors in it are mine.

IX



Acknowledgements




Introduction In 1820, when William Wordsworth was fifty, he stopped with his wife and sister and other friends, at a well-visited travellers' rest at Chamonix in the Alps and discovered that his name had gone before them. Dorothy Wordsworth's journal records one inscription with pride: The names of many of our Friends and acquaintances were discovered; and quotations from my Brother's poems - 'Matthew' and 'Yarrow Visited' with 'Sad stuff affixed to the latter, by way of comment, in another hand-writing. Some spirited pencil sketches in the same book. (D. W. /., II, p. 287) This brief reference tells us much about the subject of this book, Wordsworth the mature traveller, and about his reputation. On this European journey, he travelled in the territory where he might well meet acquaintances as well as 'old Friends'. His poems were known, and appreciated by many. The landscape of the Alps stimulated the literate and cultivated to remember the poet who was most obviously associated with feelings about wilder nature. What, however, do we make of the unknown commentator who wrote 'Sad stuff in the visitors' book? Today, the comment would be negative, a remark so well used in public discussion that it is almost non-ironic. In 1820, the comment was to be read at its face value the poem conveyed touching, sad sentiments and was appreciated as such. The message to us from Dorothy Wordsworth's record is to remember that Wordsworth's poems require a reading in the historical context in which they were published. Wordsworth's poems written from 1810, after 'the great decade', had a bad reception from some in his own time, but their fate has been worse in the twentieth century. The story of the fading powers of the great innovative poet has been told again and again. Immediately, Wordsworth's critics, among them poets who had 1 10.1057/9780230286214 - Wordsworth's Poems of Travel 1819-1842, John F. Wyatt


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sipped from the young Wordsworth spring such as Shelley and Keats, went public in their dismay at what they saw as betrayal by a leader of radical literature. Although much of their anger was directed at Wordsworth's political acts, at his support for the Tory aristocrats such as Lord Lonsdale and at his acceptance of a graceand-favour job, the new generation was dismayed by what was read as reactionary sentiment and conventional moralizing. Victorian eminences such as Browning and Matthew Arnold analysed the great fallings away from the freshness of youth. Wordsworth had provided them with one explanation. 'The shades of the prison house' had indeed entrapped 'the growing boy'. In the twentieth century, the majority of school and college courses dedicated to what was to be called 'the Romantic Period' repeated the same theme of a long disappointment. The explanations were frequently psychological: Wordsworth's childhood was his main source of inspiration and he had grown beyond it; Wordsworth had retreated into a fearful conservatism in the way that young radicals do; the libido of youth had become exhausted by the diminishing respectability of middle age; the investment in imagination had run dry and could not be sustained over a lifetime. In 1923, H. W. Garrod set the language for decades: 'the most dismal anticlimax of which the history of literature holds record' (Garrod, 1923, p. 138). Because each generation reinterprets ageing (and dying) in its own ideological terms, it is revealing to look again at such commonsense views of how literature is sustained or diminished. This book is an attempt to reinstate Wordsworth's writing from 1819 onwards as a body of work which earns more than the passing glance and which does not deserve the occlusion of not being seen at all. The thesis is that for this poet ageing was expressed not in rest, but in movement, normally an attribute of youth. There have been interesting attempts to reconsider the later poems. Until Hill's study, 'Wordsworth's Grand Design' (1986), most sorties into the later poems never succeeded in encouraging a wider and more critical audience because, my argument goes, frequently analyses were concerned with individual poems in isolation from their context of publication. The most comprehensive cover of the subject for most of this century has been that of biographers. Batho's book (1933) entitled The Later Wordsworth was for a large part an account of Wordsworth's life at Rydal Mount, although she made interesting points about the variety of poetic



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forms produced by the poet and set out for the modern reader the sequence of publication from 1813 onwards. Batho did not have the benefit of the first thorough biography of this century, Mary Moorman's two-volume study (1957 and 1965). Noticeably Moorman's second volume begins as early as 1803, putting her weight of interest into volume one in the youthful years. Gill (1989) gives new attention to the years after 1810. His biography not only makes valuable comments on works that are now hardly ever read; he writes of these years with the conviction that they 'cannot be dismissed as of "merely biographical interest"'. I share with this biographer and critic the following judgement about the primacy of the years 1798 to 1807, but also his assessment of the later years : It is not likely that this literary-critical evaluation will be reversed. What needs to be recognized, however, is that, as Wordsworth grew older, he became a stronger, not a weaker, power in national culture. (Gill, 1989, pp. vii and viii) Gill sets out to illustrate how, when Wordsworth ceased to be an important poet for most of his critics, he managed to matter to his contemporaries. This collection of readings of the itinerary poems is an attempt to elaborate on what Gill aimed to do: 'to bring out the significance of this paradox' (Gill, 1989, p. viii). Other critics, rather than biographers, who have commented with interest on the later poems have expressed mystification tempered with respect for individual poems. John Jones (1964) concluded his seminal work on Wordsworth's imagination with a summary view that in Wordsworth's writing after The Excursion of 1813 the 'greatness' is in 'the style'. Jones's interest in what the later poems meant, though not elaborated, is in Wordsworth's own belief system, revitalized through the poems. Hartman (1987), as ever, makes penetrating comments upon a number of later poems which I shall acknowledge in the appropriate chapter. He expresses what I believe anyone who reads long sections of the later verse must feel: 'There are, nevertheless, strange happenings in the later poetry which has a precarious quality of its own' (Hartman, 1987, p. 331). Gill (1989), by detailed studies of the late verse, similarly trails for the reader tantalizing views of qualities which are not easy to locate but deserve the effort. Manning (1990) reinstates The Excursion as a whole text to be read and understood and challenges the notion of a decline in Wordsworth's powers as a poet. Rachel



Introduction


Trickett (1990) and Jonathan Wordsworth (1982) also ask for our respect for the changed tenor of the later poems. The most recent, sustained study of Wordsworth's later poetry is by William Galperin (1989 and 1993). Galperin's approach is to respect the corpus of work of the later years and to draw from it certain conclusions which have relevance to the nature of Romanticism. His earlier study pays particular attention to The Excursion (as well as to poems after 1813), while my own is concerned with the poems written after 1819. There are emphases in my work which can perhaps not only turn to hidden recesses but also map continuities in this long period of poetic creation which Galperin's ray has illuminated in a new way. Particulars of our common concerns and differences will be referred to at appropriate points. The poetical and literary context in which the later poems were written coloured the explanations that have been imposed on them for over one hundred years. They now demand a new method of reading. Twenty years of radical reappraisal of criticism as a process and of Romanticism in particular point the way towards this new way of hearing the later poems. Three perceptions have acted as incentives for a new approach to the poems that Wordsworth published after he became forty-nine. First is the serious discussion of 'what is the text?', a question pursued with disturbing wit by Fish (1980). The second is the vision that McGann (1983) shared with readers in his A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism. Literature, McGann reminds us, enters society through the mediation of 'complex publishing and academic institutions'. 'Pedantic though it may appear to be,' he continues, 'insight is gained from a determined attempt to re-create the physical appearance of the text in the context of its production, reproduction and reception.' His analysis of Byron's publications led the way for readers to see how well-known (and well-worn) texts first originated and were mediated through various institutional filters. My interest is less with the reception of texts by publishers and more with the recreation of the experience of readers of Wordsworth's first publication of his later poetry. As the following pages show, the act of reading is often an exercise in poetical archaeology. Peter Manning (1990) has also proved inspirational because of his emphasis on rediscovering the original context of Romantic poetry. His 'new historicism' has been specifically applied to The Excursion, reversing years of critical preference for 'The Pedlar', the prototype of Book I. He has been



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led to the opinion that there is a 'considerable, if oblique, force possessed by much of his [Wordsworth's] later work'. These poems are 'not entirely a corpse, the dessication [is] not entirely complete' (Manning, 1990, pp. 273 and 295). My study is concerned with the decades after the publication of The Excursion, but this choice does not deny the significance of that major work as a marker of the poet's maturing into a senior citizen. The first principle I have adopted in presenting a new view of the later poems is that they require reading in the sequence in which they were actually published. That is to say each of the sets of poems analysed in the following chapters has been reassembled for consideration. The principle of reassembly has been to consider each set as it was first published as a collection, for this is how it was first read. We have to take the imaginative step of reading the text as if it were newly put before us. This might appear to be a familiar act of literary historical review. In fact it is rarely achieved; for Wordsworth's texts can be difficult to reconstruct. 1 Wordsworth has himself swept across the trail and carefully readjusted the publication of his work by frequent reordering, recollecting and reclassifying. He saw reorganization of poems as a duty of the poet. His publishers, after he became a popular 'best seller', colluded with him in the process, because a new kind of readership continuously demanded new editions (see Gill, 1998). Two processes occurred, both obscuring the moment of first publication. One was a careful resorting of poems and interleaving old with new verse. The second was a re-editing of texts, best seen of course in the text that, substantially, was not published in his lifetime, The Prelude. In one sense, new variations have always been the literary scholar's interest. They are hardly the neglected children of the literary nursery. More difficult to persuade readers to undertake is the uncovering of the original sequence of publication, therefore a reader's guide is required. In each of the following chapters, I have attempted a reading from material available in modern editions, but reordered into original structures in order to give a different insight into Wordsworth's first schemes. This arrangement is not the same as the highly respectable literary process of finding and clarifying first drafts. That is another business in others' territory, admirably handled by the Cornell editions of Wordsworth's poems. Occasionally, where I have discovered insights from that source, I have used them. 2



Introduction


The British edition which largely consolidated Wordsworth's own final revisions, and therefore behind which the modern reader has to search, is de Selincourt and Darbishire's five-volume collected works. This famous scholarly apparatus is invaluable, not only because of its editorial expertise, but also because it is still the only possible edition for the general student or reader and it is true to Wordsworth's own wishes for the sequencing and categorizing of his poetic production. For that very reason, it makes the later poems less graspable. They are frequently layered between strata of poems written in the poet's younger years which readers have met in very different and selective contexts (for example, The Lyrical Ballads, the Great Ode, the elements of Poems in Two Volumes). What I am proposing as a reading still makes the modern standard editions the basic text and provides a route-way through them. Wordsworth began at an early stage a long process of editing what he had already published. As Gill has said of this constant reordering: 'The whole body of his poetry became provisional until it had been rethought' (Gill, 1990, p. 387). In order to make a different and, in many cases, a more illuminating view of the poems, I have made a commentary as if the reader has not met them in any new setting. The revealing feature of this exercise is that it is possible to see new connections between the poems and, in key instances, with pieces of prose published with them. There are modulations within one element of a collection, such as a group of sonnets, or between a longer poem and the next sonnet or the following group of sonnets. The second device for a new reading has been to hold in the mind the social context in which the poet was writing. I mean this in both a national and a local sense. The people within the network of Wordsworth's associations and friendships both stimulated his work and directed the nature of his judgement of the public for whom he was writing. Key family members and friends became identified with each of the collections that I have selected to read in depth. His brother Christopher, for instance, assumes a presence in the collection of sonnets and longer poems published with the sequence known as 'The Duddon Sonnets' (Chapter 3). Dorothy Wordsworth is never distant from the poet's work, but there is a difference between her inspiration in such early works as The Lyrical Ballads and the collection of Wordsworth's poems ostensibly based on her Journal of the family's tour on the continent in 1820 or of the Isle of Man in 1828. The figure of Henry



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Crabb Robinson occupies the foreground in the later collections, not only because he was Wordsworth's travelling companion on journeys which concluded with three of the collections (Chapters 4, 6 and 7), but also because he was the subject addressed in dedications. He serves as a kind of ideal type of reader, well educated, thoughtful and loyal. Another aspect of context is the change in social standing of the Wordsworth family. After 1819, the financial position at Rydal Mount improved. The long legal wrangle with the Lonsdales had ended, a secure income had been provided and Wordsworth's books were beginning to produce profit. Indeed, in 1837 the journey to Italy, which is the subject of one of the collections considered here (Chapter 7), was made possible by a publisher declaring a substantial surplus on Wordsworth's sales. Even more significant than the security provided by income were the social settings in which the poet spent his time. To see the Lake District as a rustic retreat, isolated from the developing industrial urban-oriented growth of nineteenth-century England is to be blind to the cultural variety of English provincial life of the time. Alongside Bath (by 1820 declining as an upper-class cultural preserve), London and the two ancient universities of England were numerous provincial centres with scientific, cultural and educational institutions of remarkable vitality. The Lake District, not least the Rydal area and Keswick, also attracted intellectuals and their families, particularly in the summer months. Thomas Arnold of Rugby and Oxford made a home at Rydal. The Southeys and Sir Humphrey Davey and his wife lived in Keswick, very close to the Wordsworths. Rich families kept country houses there and, though not all of them were culturally inclined, some were patrons of the arts. Prominent among them were the Marshall family in their holiday home at Hallsteads at Ullswater. John Marshall of Leeds had married Dorothy Wordsworth's oldest friend. The Wordsworths visited them frequently and there met academics of distinction: William Whewell, future Master of Trinity College Cambridge; Professor Sedgwick, the geologist; William Rowan-Hamilton, mathematician and Irish Astronomer Royal; John Herschel, astronomer of Cambridge; to name but a few. The Marshalls also had a town house in Grosvenor Street in London, where Dora Wordsworth and her father were frequently guests. 3 The links with Cambridge and then Oxford flourished. Honours to the poet, including eventually the Laureate-ship, were forthcoming from the powerful ones of the English literary world.



Introduction


It is in considering this setting of friendships and networks of acquaintances that we should remember not only the circumstances in which Wordsworth was writing from the age of fifty, but also glimpse a prestigious element of his intended audience. Gradually he changed from being an outsider, although never to be totally assimilated into a polite elite as his detractors imagined, but at least a figure of accepted stature, to be tinged with reverence. An anecdote from Crabb Robinson sums up his slightly marginal, but far from excluded position. In 1836 Robinson attended a party at Miss Rogers' house in London: Among those present were Milman, Lyell, and Sydney Smith. With the last named I chatted for the first time ... Wordsworth was present this evening. I noticed that several persons seemed to look at him askance, as if the poet were some outlandish animal. (Robinson, 1872, II, p. 175) Wordsworth's position in religious debate illustrates his individualistic position, but he lived in an individualistic age. His religious conformity as it has been judged by succeeding generations has to be set in the context of a religious turbulence (see Prickett, 1976) and Wordsworth played his part in that excitement of ideas. I shall illustrate this important aspect of his later work in appropriate chapters. Phrases such as 'the Victorian reader' seem to suggest that the readership of the 1840s was uniform in its taste and united in its approbation. As well as oversimplifying a complex social scene, it is certainly not the case that Wordsworth attracted every reader to his work. The reading public was volatile and changing as the years passed. The emphasis in this study on the reader (or as Wordsworth's prose works of criticism frequently say, 'the Reader') is partly in a modern tradition which has turned literature away from an occupation with authors and with their intentionality and partly because Wordsworth's own attention, particularly in the later works, is towards a particular kind of Reader. Discussion of Wordsworth and of Wordsworth's poems (and they are not the same thing, of course) assumes a conventional and even commonsense view of a division between a younger poet and an older, somehow 'different' poet who inhabited the same identity. Galperin's study, Revision and Authority in Wordsworth (1989), has been a major brake on the apparently unstoppable master theory of seemingly inevitable, declining trajectory from the



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heights of youth infused with radicalism and creative energy to post-1810 middle and then old age tainted by conservatism and literary caution. Galperin makes a challenging assertion to anyone writing about the poems written after 1810 or, as in the case of this text, after 1819. In the first place, he asserts that the later poems must not be read autonomously but in relationship to the earlier poems (see also Rajan, 1980 and 1986). This is wise counselling, although it places a heavy duty on the modern reader if a large selection of later poetry has to be studied in any detail. My own study of the later poems does not deny the continuities, but it asks for a degree of autonomous reading in order to examine the poems written after 1819 as sets of created endeavour intended to be interrelated with one another and with contemporaneously published work. I believe this approach does not deny the imperative to see the life-work as one poetic mission, a point I wish to return to in the summary remarks of the final chapter. The second, more difficult insight from Galperin is that of the continuity of the canon. The clear distinction between 'early' and 'late' Wordsworth, he asserts, is a revision of actuality, encouraged by Matthew Arnold and consolidated as orthodoxy in the twentieth century. My own study will, I hope, illustrate continuities and consistencies and even perhaps permit certain poems to enter a hitherto tightly restricted list of 'approved works', restricted that is by age phase. If, however, it becomes dangerous critical ground to use the terms 'early' and 'late', then I am afraid I have trampled into it with few reservations. My excuses are simple and therefore dangerously 'matter of fact' (a sociologically dubious category). For discussion purposes everyone needs a collective term for poems published after a certain date (and I have set out in other places in this introduction why 1819 is not an arbitrary starting point). More important than convenience and central to the argument of this study is that Wordsworth was a self-conscious recorder of ageing and of the poetic process that swam its wake. That general issue I shall pursue again in the concluding chapter. The contentious issue of 'intentionality' is in the foreground of this study because Wordsworth's intentions are part of his carefully recorded presentation and inevitably therefore present a complication to the modern critic. An overarching approach to the poems of the later years is to concentrate a reading on a remarkably consistent subject. The poems written after 1819, when recollected as in their first public



Introduction


appearance in the way that I have indicated above, can be categorized into two major subjects. One is the elegiac, partly a well used literary convention and partly an almost inevitable reflection of the ageing of Wordsworth and of his friendship circle. The other subject, the theme of this account, is the remarkable source of inspiration in travel and in the inclusion of a wide range of localities. By this I do mean only the collections of poems that Wordsworth described as itinerary, the Memorials of a tour on the Continent, 1820, the visits to Scotland and the Isle of Man, and the memoirs of a tour in Italy, 1837, but also collections which focus on a particular area either in the spirit of the late eighteenth-century 'loco-descriptive' genre, such as The River Duddon: A series of sonnets, or in the 1819 collection of Peter Bell and four sonnets, located in Swaledale, Yorkshire. Two remarks need to be made about concentrating on Wordsworth as a traveller and as a poet inspired by location. 'Location' in Wordsworth studies almost automatically implies the Wordsworth home. However, the collections of poems considered in this book, even including the 'Duddon Sonnets', are not a reworking of the Lake District inspiration. They range from the Yorkshire Dales through Germany, Switzerland, Italy and France, and, in the United Kingdom, one 'outer valley' in the Lake District and an itinerary in Scotland and in the Isle of Man. The second remark is that Wordsworth was always an itinerant despite his public identification (but not by himself) as a Laker. 'Home' may have been at Grasmere, but Wordsworth's writing before 1800 began with a European tour portrayed in 'Descriptive Sketches', then travelled on through 'Salisbury Plain' and 'The Borderers' to The Prelude in its early forms. Biographies of Wordsworth demonstrate that he was in many ways a restless poet, but usually attention has been drawn to his habits of composition, of making poetry as he walked around the lakes and over the fells of Lakeland. There was another more wide-ranging restlessness, never more so than after the age of forty-five when his financial resources improved and his family had become less dependent. The most recently discovered correspondence between the poet and his wife (Darlington, 1982) originates in their frequent separations because of travel. The letters depict the poet's traverses on horseback across England, and, most striking, a keen interest in and appreciation of maps and published guides. The catalogue of the Rydal Mount Library assembled after Wordsworth's death includes a considerable collection of guidebooks, maps and travellers' material.



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In 1962, Bernard Blackstone proposed a thesis that Romantic poetry was a 'literature of movement'. His argument was summarized: 'the devotees of the Grand Tour sought pleasure in instruction, or bric-a-brac; the Romantics travel to escape' (1962, p. 4). My understanding of Wordsworth as a poet of movement is based on an opposing view, that Wordsworth's quest in travel was for discovery of the self of the European world and of its history. In recent criticism valuable attention has been given to the meaning of travel and travel writing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (see, for instance, Pratt, 1992 and Bohls, 1995). My intention is not to generalize from the subtext of the travel poems, but to understand one poet's highly self-conscious use of a genre. Wordsworth's own knowledge of himself as the poet-wanderer of the later poems can be a guide for the reader of the later poetry. There is a consistency of the theme of travel. I have proceeded chronologically in the chapters that follow. The 1819 publication of what might well be entitled the Yorkshire collection ('Peter Bell' and four sonnets) is my starting point, followed by a chapter devoted to the Duddon sequence of sonnets. These two collections were concerned with travel in a restricted sense of remembered journeys, re-used for reflection and for a new role as Poet-Guide. Next follow chapters on actual journeys, the four formally described Itinerary Memorials. I conclude with some remarks on what I believe this survey of the travelling poet tells the reader about him, but also conclude with the wanderer's interpretation of the duties of a Guide for those who like him took to a road, whether internally or in reality. Two further explanations are needed for readers unfamiliar with Wordsworth's poetry after 1807.1 have begun the journey with the older Wordsworth at 1819 and therefore omitted considerably weighty works of the decade from 1810 to 1819. The Excursion must be viewed as a major poem of mature years, written in a very different form than the 1805 Prelude A One aspect of the publication of The Excursion and the poems of 1815 certainly cannot be left as the end of a stage of literary life. The Preface to the collection of poems of 1815 and 'The Essay supplementary to the Preface' (W. Prose, III) are far from being the closing commentary on what has already been written. They represent a mission statement for the future which, I believe, is realized in the poems newly written and collected after 1815. Issues raised by these two prose statements of poetic intent are referred to in the



Introduction


following chapters. One is the detailed categorization of poetic forms: 'The materials of poetry, by these powers collected and produced, are cast by means of divers moulds into divers forms' (W. P., II, p. 432). The itinerary poems demonstrate Wordsworth's continuing interest and ability in poetic form and poetic tradition, again a feature of 'The Essay'. Finally, 'The Essay' is a manifesto for the realignment of the respective roles of reader and poet, and consequently a new emphasis on 'the People' rather than 'the Public'. These last notions of authorial seriousness of purpose are unfolded in the collection of poems after 1819. An objection might well be raised about a survey which purports to be about journeys in the later poetry, but omits journeys of the mind, although the collections of poems associated with the 1819 'Peter Bell' and the Duddon Sonnet sequence are in a sense mental voyages based on records of actual itineraries. A major collection of the later years which I have not considered in detail in this study is even more a kind of intellectual travelogue. This group of poems, which I have had some hesitation in excluding from this company of the poems of travel is the sonnet sequence Ecclesiastical Sketches (or, in one form entitled Ecclesiastical Sonnets). They have an itinerary form, tracing the path of Christianity across Western Europe, recreating episodes in places of historical significance. In truth the engine for the sequence is history or destiny rather than the geography of their setting, although the Rhine is a major symbol of the unity of European history. The sonnets have recently received excellent attention from A. G. Hill (1986 and 1992) and so I have not attempted to restate his argument but admire his conclusion. A link can be made between this formidable historical survey in sonnet form of the history of Christianity and poems published at the same time. In Chapter 4, that link between that sonnet series and the itinerary sequence of the Memorials of 1820 is made explicit. Finally, there can only be one genuine reason for another text on Wordsworth, and that must be to turn the modern reader's attention to the greatness of this major poet and thereby, to use his own language, to give pleasure. Wordsworth himself assumed that was why people read poetry and why poets wrote. I offer a means of access to the last thirty years of Wordsworth's life, where there are many pleasures to share with him.



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Peter Bell's Company In 1819, Wordsworth published Peter Bell: A Tale in Verse which has a number of connections with the theme of travel. The chief poem of the volume is about an itinerant potter and the story may have been first discussed by Wordsworth and Coleridge as they walked the Quantock Hills in Somerset. More significantly, the geographical setting for the poem and for three of the four sonnets that accompanied it is a territory which the poet and his family traversed for many years. In many senses the locale of this volume was the preparatory land - a passage through which you journeyed before reaching home at Grasmere. Of all Wordsworth's long poems, 'Peter Bell' has been obscured by the critical attention it received even before publication. It suffered a unique combination of fate and fortune. On the one hand a wave of destructive criticism struck its shore when it was rumoured to be ready for printing. On the other, the volume in which it appeared was one of the first to be bought enthusiastically by readers, a new public who were not influenced by parodies made by the intelligentsia. Subsequent commentary on the poem has added to the fog that covers the actual form in which the poem was presented to its first readers. Most critics of Wordsworth, even in the present century, have rejected 'Peter Bell' in the terms of the pre-publication critical commentary and, on the whole, felt that Wordsworth would have been wise not to have published it at all. Many have taken the view that the poem marked the first sign of a deterioration of judgement by the poet in his fiftieth year, presaging worse to come. One assumes that, if 'Peter Bell' had appeared in Lyrical Ballads, at a time when its first version was actually created, it would have been forgiven, but a stray from 1795 or 1802 could not be permitted to range free in 1819. By 1819, a story of a rough, itinerant potter who was to repent because of the shock of discovering a dead body in a lake and the pathos of a faithful donkey was not to the taste of The Edinburgh Review or of leading poets of a new, more sophisticated generation. 13 10.1057/9780230286214 - Wordsworth's Poems of Travel 1819-1842, John F. Wyatt


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Attention to the form in which it was published in 1819 and to the poems that accompanied it in that edition is long overdue. A new reading, so that we too can see it as readers of 1819 saw it in its first appearance in a new volume, is required. That reading would see not only 'Peter Bell' but a collection with four other poems, for Longman published Peter Bell: A Tale in Verse along with four sonnets in 1819. Three of the sonnets were inspired by William Westall, an artist, whose engravings in the neighbourhood of Ingleton were themselves published in 1818. One final sonnet was entitled 'Composed during one of the most awful of the late storms, Feb. 1819'. The 1819 volume was not to rest undisturbed for very long. In 1820, the collection of five poems, one long and four very short, was broken up. The sonnets were separated from 'Peter Bell' and recategorized for a new publication, part of the poet's scheme of presenting his poetry in a new format to a growing readership. 'Peter Bell' effectively escaped from its companions. Yet, there in 1819 at what was a crucial period in Wordsworth's middle years as a poet was a publishing fact - an edition of five poems. Does their association mean anything? Scrutiny of Wordsworth's correspondence or that of his scribe, Sara Hutchinson (see Coburn, 1954), certainly justifies taking the form created by the publication of 1819 seriously. Wordsworth always regarded the assembly of a collection and the patterns that assembly makes as an exhausting but essential task. We know this to be true of the early days, for instance from the correspondence of the period spent in preparing the second edition of Lyrical Ballads. Furthermore, each work within a published collection required careful preparation before being revealed to the readership. The poem 'Peter Bell' itself was a long time in making. The preface of 1819 dedicated to Robert Southey makes that clear in an image of human growth. The poem, the dedication states, had been through childbirth and juvenile life and now had reached maturity, a long coming-of-age. The text of the long poem was never a secret. It had suffered a number of amendments, but it had seen the light of many days, revealed often to close friends and relatives. As early as 1805, John Wordsworth wrote to ask for a copy. It was something he wished to enjoy in the solitude of his ship, savouring its qualities already enjoyed at Dove Cottage (Ketcham, 1969). How are we to understand the positioning of four small poems alongside this slowly matured long poem? Were they merely



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makeweights in the volume with 'Peter Bell'? Even these sonnets were not mint new to some readers of the 1819 collection. The three sonnets occasioned by Mr Westall's 'Views of the Caves' had already been published unofficially by Blackwoods and then, at Wordsworth's own request, by a Cumbrian newspaper. Was this, their third outing, merely as a form of padding for a slim volume? To assume that the four short poems were insignificant is to neglect their collective importance as a cohesive unit, deliberately introduced as a subset within the set of the book. The authority of the publisher and, at times, the opposing authority of the poet play their roles in the eventual form of publication. It is fruitful to consider the contextual situation when any of Wordsworth's poems, particularly the sonnets, reach the critical stage of gathering in the form of a book. In a letter of January 1819, Dorothy Wordsworth had allotted to the four sonnets a qualified reverential blessing. 'William has written some beautiful sonnets lately that is all he has done.' 1 Posterity has been less complimentary by virtually neglecting them. They do not surface in the late twentieth century. These shorter pieces have lurked in the shadow of the critically over-lit long narrative poem. I believe it is necessary first to consider what the four sonnets are saying and then read through and beyond their individual meanings so that the published collection can be read as one poetic work.

THE ACCOMPANYING SONNETS The three sonnets that immediately follow 'Peter Bell' were 'suggested by Mr W. Westall's Views of the Caves and Caverns in Yorkshire', a 'coffee table' book or set of prints published in folio form in 1818. From Westall's collection of engravings Wordsworth selected two named places, Malham Cove and Gordale Scar. The first sonnet in the sequence of three sonnets is not identified with a specific Westall drawing. It is unnamed, a general limestone scenery location: 'Pure elements of waters! wheresoe'r.' 'Gordale' and 'Malham Cove' followed it in the 1819 volume, though the sequence of the last two sonnets was reversed in the 1820 edition of Miscellaneous Poems. In de Selincourt and Darbishire's twentiethcentury edition the 1820 sequence was repeated. We have to explore the significance of Wordsworth's original sequential choice of 1819 if we are to read the text as one poetic exercise.



Peter Bell's company


The first sonnet of the sequence considers the two different spheres in which the world's waters flow, surface and underground. The surface of the earth is a paradox. Although flowing streams appear to be in their element, they flow in a confused condition on the surface. The heat of the day and their long wandering journey through the hot plains contrast with a hidden, deeper world of simplicity where subterranean streams flow undeterred. They are a source of renewal, working deep from 'the marble belt / of central earth'. Below the normal, external world the benign purpose of the streams is clear. On the surface the landscape is described in peculiarly painterly fashion, like a Claude composition - populated by hart, hind and hunter. Even the midges are heraldic ('pursuivants') and the sun creates a classical afternoon of langour. By contrast, internally, the scene glimpses Dante-esque 'tortured souls', redeemed by the blessing of the purest waters. The next sonnet, 'Gordale', is a speculative sonnet rather than a descriptive poem. The steep scar and vertical cave mouth encourage reflection again with a historical, classical tone. The seeker after solace (or inspiration?) is urged to explore the Gordale cave, where he will find a local deity, recumbent with a mineral crown beside a broken urn. The god of (underground) rivers is not a god of the external world - he 'hides his lineament by day'. His hidden powers may be deep in the earth, but, as in the first sonnet, they bring renewal. The Malham Cove sonnet depicts a surface landscape not an underground idyll, nevertheless it is also a scene firmly associated with historic myth and legend. The poet asks if the shattered landscape is the result of an abandoned project by the legendary builders of the Giants' Causeway. Ossian is thus invoked. Then a classical allusion (to Phoebus's eye) reminds the reader of Greek perfection in building. A contrast is made between a perfect building fallen into ruin and an imperfectly planned and executed project abandoned in failure. The final lines summarize the poet's open-mindedness on the question raised. The fourth sonnet, 'Composed during one of the most awful of the late storms, Feb. 1819' has tantalizingly less to tell us than the three-sonnet sequence before it. This sonnet presents immediate links with the narrative of 'Peter Bell' in that it is about a distressed human figure finding a moment of revelation and redemption. The lost soul (he 'fail'd to seek the sure relief of prayer') surrenders himself to the wild elements. The gale, though it occurs at midday,



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renders everything as gloomy as in a storm at night and nature is at its most threatening. Lightnings 'prowl / insidiously'; trees tear 'their yellow hair' and there are howling wolves, creatures of the night. The wandering man lifts his head and then there appears a space of pure sky, circular in shape ('orb' in 1819, 'disk' and 'disc' in later editions) a 'shield of tranquillity'. Invisible unlook'd-for minister Of providential goodness evernigh! (Ketcham, p. 280) The association of this sonnet with the triad of sonnets based on Westall's views may appear slight. The editor of the Cornell edition of the shorter poems of 1807-20, noting Wordsworth's letter to de Quincey, then editor of The Westmorland Gazette, when all four sonnets were offered for publication, suggests that this storm scene sonnet was presented 'as a bonus for the publication of the other three'. One could argue alternatively that this link with 'Peter Bell' is firmly locked in place by its positioning at the end of the book. The fourth sonnet's last lines reinforce the theme of salvation and of course Peter Bell is a redeemed man. A closer connection, however, lies within the short sonnet sequence. The classical allusions of the three Westall sonnets continue into the fourth sonnet. The gap in the storm clouds is 'a shield of tranquillity', a Platonic image. The man in the dark suffers in a landscape of the fable of distressed Nature, half animal (lightenings 'prowl') or half human (trees tear their hair) but these images are transformed by a shield in which relief to the disturbed soul is presented. What have these sonnets to do with each other and, more problematical, with 'Peter Bell'? Some obvious points need stating first, then less clear connections require tracing. First, but only obvious if attention is turned away from the single text to the larger text of the published volume, is the common regional location of the triad of sonnets and of 'Peter Bell'. This is why it is possible to classify the volume as a set of poems of travel. The final, fourth sonnet may not be clearly located, but the others are all poems about Yorkshire. The episodes of Peter Bell's transformation occur in Swaledale. The River Swale is depicted running silently beneath a cliff close to the quarry and in the last line of the poem there is a specific identification of 'Leeming Street' 2 which runs between Catterick and





Boroughbridge. As early as 1802, Dorothy Wordsworth's journal referred to 'Peter Bell' as 'the Yorkshire Wolds poem'. The Swale is in a very different geological (limestone) region than the Yorkshire Wolds (chalk). Either Wordsworth had not concentrated his poem on Swaledale at this early stage or Dorothy was not being precise geographically. There is no uncertainty, however, about the location of the Westall sonnets. The engravings by Westall depict the Craven District a few miles south of Swaledale. It is worth reminding ourselves of the significance to Wordsworth and to his family of the Yorkshire dales. The 1819 publication, far from initiating a new poetic 'territory' concentrates on a relatively small area of land rich in personal association and, most important, one through which the Wordsworths had travelled at major moments in their lives. It was in West Yorkshire that Dorothy Wordsworth was brought up after her separation from her brothers. Here Wordsworth visited her in the 1790s as they rebuilt their childhood. Mary Wordsworth and her sister, Sara Hutchinson, lived in West Yorkshire and from that county, William took Mary as his bride-to-be over the Pennine passes back to Dove Cottage. In July 1807, William and Dorothy visited Bolton Abbey then travelled onwards via Gordale Scar, Malham, Settle and on to Kendal. In 1821 Wordsworth again visited the Craven District with Edward Quillinan. The area is closely addressed in Wordsworth's Guide to the Lake District in 1810. There Wordsworth described in a summary fashion the main routes to Westmorland and Cumberland, but he pauses to draw attention to the 'great fall of the Tees above Middleham interesting for its grandeur, as the avenue of rocks that lead to it, as to the geologist' (W. Prose, II, p. 155). Gordale and Malham are particularly noted, with a literary reference - to Thomas Gray's Tour of Northern England (W. Prose, II, p. 186). Weathercote Cave, another subject of Westall's engravings, is also identified in A Guide. Thomas West's Guide to the Lake District, a source of reference when Wordsworth's A Guide was being prepared, describes Yordas Cave and Gordale Scar with an eye for the picturesque possibilities. This collection then is about a location away from home. Home by 1819 was settled permanently in the Lake Country. The past of the Wordsworths in relation to the poems in the 1819 edition is not the whole story. It may be significant too to observe what the landscape is as well as where it is. The unifying geological influence is limestone. The Westall etchings explore the geologically classical



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features of limestone scenery. In the early nineteenth century the area around Ingleborough was already established as the acknowledged centre in the Northern Pennines for definitive description of limestone scenery. Early research into the nature of the special features of chemical erosion and faulting peculiar to the rock type were carried out in Derbyshire and in the Craven District. The River Swale is a surface river but to the north and south of its steepsided valley, particularly in the district around Feetham, there is ample evidence of streams disappearing and reappearing as in the first sonnet. Swallow holes and escarpments resulting from smallscale faulting are found, for example on Reith Low Moor, Calver Hill and Bolton Moor. Wordsworth himself refers to the precipitous limestone crags in 'Peter Bell': The rocks that tower on either side Build up a wild fantastic scene; Temples like those among the Hindoos, And mosques, and spires, and abbey windows, And castles all with ivy green! (Jordan, p. I l l ) Wordsworth's knowledge of the distinctiveness of limestone landscape is evinced in his Guide as well as in poems of later years, such as 'To Lycoris (To the Same)' published in the collection of 1820 along with the River Duddon sonnets. Studies of Wordsworth's understanding of contemporary geological theory (such as Cannon, 1964, Dean, 1968 and Wyatt, 1995) show that the poet had some knowledge and a degree of interest in contemporary scientific matters relating to land forms. The disparaging comments in Book III of The Excursion3 on the trivial activities of field geologists are not to be read as one (literary) culture dismissing another (scientific) culture. In 1819 the two intellectual spheres were in close community. What is particularly significant in respect of the group of sonnets currently under discussion is that the artist, Westall, was even more acquainted with the geological world. William Westall (1781-1850), whose etchings encouraged Wordsworth to compose, was an illustrator or an artist belonging to a class of assistants or support staff on whom scientists and explorers depended. Late eighteenth-century explorers included in their expedition teams scientists and artists as well as





adventurers. Secord (1994) has written on the hierarchical position of these artists in the world of natural history. They stood somewhere between gentlemen and skilled artisans. Westall's major contribution to geographical exploration was from 1800 to 1803, accompanying Captain Matthew Flinders on a journey of exploration round the previously unexplored north-east coast of Australia. A shipwreck left the crew stranded for some months, but Westall's sketches and illustrations of natural history and landscapes were undamaged. More were added to the collection during a long and leisurely return to England via the Chinese coast, India and the Cape of Good Hope. Westall exhibited his drawings in London, then settled in Keswick, where he was not only geographically but also socially close to Southey. In the years before and after 'Peter Bell' was published, he prepared engravings for Southey's prose and poetry. Westall was also well known at Rydal Mount. Wordsworth gave him a first draft of the sonnets based on his etchings, although he appears not to have been given permission to pass them on to the Editor of Blackwood where in fact they first appeared. Sara Hutchinson was one supportive friend. Through her he contacted the Wordsworth family at Rydal Mount. To her, he expressed in 1820 the never-to-be-fulfilled desire to draw and to publish scenes from Wordsworth's poems. Sara ordered copies of his prints and tried to interest her relatives and friends in buying them. She found him to be 'a most worthy creature full of kind feelings and tenderness to all living things' (Coburn, 1954, p. 160). Westall's weakness (according to Sara) lay in his choice of wife who was judged to be plain, awkward in manner and provincial in accent (Coburn, 1954, p. 210). Mrs Westall, for our purposes, had one other distinguishing feature. She was the sister of Adam Sedgwick, Fellow of Trinity College and Professor of Geology in Cambridge. Professor Sedgwick was an admired friend of Wordsworth, providing an excellent example of the association between Wordsworth and the newly established popular science of geology. Westall's set of engravings of the district near Ingleton are remarkable for their attention to geological features, as well as for their artistic vigour. They are Romantic engravings conveying a sense of awe generated by the tonal contrasts of the cave and crag scenery. The collection of prints is preceded by a brief commentary referred to by Wordsworth in his own notes accompanying the publication of the sonnets. Westall's notes make specific reference



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to current information and theory on mineral characteristics of limestone scenery. The information on the Yordas Cave engraving is even more up to date with contemporary interest in extinction. It refers the reader to 'petrifications of animals no longer known to exist' (Westall, 1818). One particular engraving directly makes a published geological reference. Weathercote Cave depicts a deep dark cave entrance and in the foreground is an array of bones. One is a large jawbone, another a set of ribs, one looks like a fossil bone of a limb. Remember that in this period, the discoveries by Cuvier in the Paris Basin of fossils of prehistoric animals were widely discussed. Fossils of large beasts had been discovered in the Ohio River Valley in the USA and papers speculating on their origin had been published. More locally, William Buckland, Reader in Geology at the University of Oxford, was engaging in the period 1818-21 in explorations in the Pennine Caves of Kirkdale. These field excursions led to the publication of his studies of 'hyena bones' in 1823 in a popular work Reliquiae Diluvianae (Buckland, 1823). Westall's vivid and vigorous drawing and skilful etching produced a set of illustrations of caves and cliffs which still have the power to disturb. The Yordas Cave engraving is particularly memorable for its depth of dark tones, which contrast with the light of the cave mouth, and for the bizarre ribbed walls made by limestone deposits. An underground stream emerges from the depths (see Ousby, 1990, p. 139). The etching of Weathercote Cave looks like a drawing executed deliberately to accompany a romantic poem or story. A gentleman rests a steadying hand on the shoulder of a woman who, on hands and knees, peers down a deep, black gulf into which a cascade tumbles. On the rock face high above them is a small figure perhaps enjoying the view, perhaps seeking for minerals. How strange then that Wordsworth's sonnets written with Westall's evocative engravings before him produced references to classical themes and to philosophical contrasts between inner and outer stream rather than to descriptions of picturesque or sublime scenery! Wordswoth is not rivalling the painter's art by describing the landscape, nor is he conveying the feelings engendered by a vivid drawing. Instead he is using the work of art as a stimulus for an act of moral guidance, as a lens through which human truths can be considered. Before commenting on the inner and outer worlds of the sonnets, it is worth remaining briefly with two other pictorial manifestations





associated with the 1819 publication. A minor connection between the engraver or painter's arts and the finally published poem, 'Peter Bell', is the influence of Benjamin Robert Haydon. As editions of the poem have for some time noted, Wordsworth underlines the religious crisis of the potter's strange pilgrimage by depicting the markings of the Cross on the donkey's back. It is suggested that Wordsworth had noted this significant feature in one of Haydon's paintings. Although Westall's sketches did not accompany Wordsworth's poems, one picture did. Sir George Beaumont had made a drawing and subsequently an engraving to illustrate the poem 'Peter Bell' and it appeared as the frontispiece of the volume. This was available to the poet as early as 1808 (W. L., II, pp. 194-7). Dorothy Wordsworth expressed pleasure that it did not slavishly follow the poem, for the poem's narrative largely takes place in moonlight. Beaumont's etching is in daylight. A traveller sits near a pool; there is a donkey and an attendant dog nearby. The surrounding rock formations could well be those of a shallow limestone quarry. Sir George Beaumont was of significance to Wordsworth as an artist in addition to his role as a patron. Already one of his paintings, 'The Thorn', had been an inspiration for a narrative in the second edition of Lyrical Ballads. What may have escaped many Wordsworth students is the fact that Beaumont saw himself and was seen by others as much more than a rich amateur. He was an enthusiastic connoisseur who added significantly to the national collections in his late years. He exhibited in Coleorton and in his London house a range of late eighteenth-century European landscape painting and contemporary water-colours. Beaumont saw himself as a teacher of aspiring artists, not least of Constable. Beaumont's own engraving printed in the 1819 volume together with the three sonnets that close the volume based on another artist's engraving should remind us that Wordsworth's stimulation is from images of a much wider provenance than the Lake District provided. He circulated, particularly from 1815 onwards as he started to travel more widely in the United Kingdom, in an environment of private galleries and patronage of visual arts. Nature was mediated through two arts, poetry and the graphic. Ian Ousby (1990) holds the opinion that turning away from the picturesque by the Romantic poets implied a turning away from paintings. I believe this is not the case with Wordsworth's poetic inspiration, particularly in later years. 4



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What then are we to make of a volume, read as a whole creative work, that commences with what a narrator (an eccentric flying narrator at that) states is a tale about a simple man converted by dramatic events in a raw and uncivilized part of the country and ends with four highly crafted sonnets deriving their themes from classical and heroic literature and artistic stimulation? There are three answers to this question: the importance of the cave as an image; the fact that 'Peter Bell' is a poem that matured and came to fruition in a different context than in the simpler certainties of Lyrical Ballads; and the message conveyed explicitly in the sonnets about the sources for artistic renewal.

THE IMAGE OF THE CAVE In the early nineteenth century, caves were popular for scientific as well as for philosophical reasons. Rupke (1990) has studied the keen interest shown by German natural historians in evidence emerging from the exploration of caves, particularly in the Harz Mountains of Germany. These interests were not maintained in a separate scientific world insulated from poetic or philosophical reflections. Cave systems for early geologists were pathways into explanations for the origins of the earth because they lead into Nature's deepest secret recesses, like Wordsworth peering into hidden depths in the 'marble belt of central earth' in his Westall-inspired sonnet. The German mineralogists conjectured about an 'Urwelf or prehistoric world and perhaps a glimpse of 'a golden past where harmony reigned' (Rupke, 1990, p. 244). These European speculations might seem remote from Wordsworth's interests, but it is worth remembering that there were two phases of the poet's life when he had close associations with scientists who were at the forefront of their new disciplines and in correspondence with European colleagues. The younger Wordsworth had scientific links through Coleridge with Humphrey Davy, William Beddoes and James Watt Junior. In 1798 Coleridge studied at Gottingen University, a centre for speculative enquiry into natural history, while William and Dorothy Wordsworth were relatively nearby in Goslar. From 1820, the poet's network of friendships with scientists included Sedgwick, Whewell and William Rowan Hamilton. All belonged to a community of scientific interest with regular representations from France and from Germany in particular.





Caves were also interesting to the seeker after aesthetic sensation. As Wordsworth prepared his own Guide to the Lake District in 1810, he turned to Thomas West's Guide of 1780. West's comments on Yordas Cave (one of Westall's engravings) is typical of picturesque language: 'Having never been in a cave before, a thousand ideas were excited in my imagination on my entrance into this gloomy cavern, which had been for many years dormant' (Ousby, 1990, p. 244). The stimulus is not wholly external; classical influences add powerfully to the sensation. West quotes Ovid and Virgil. He speculates with a 'frisson' whether he might meet 'Cadman',, Diana and Acteon: 'As we advance further and the gloom and horror increased, the den of Cacus and the cave of Polyphemus came into my mind.' Another of Westall's locations for engraving, Weathercote Cave, also provided West's eyes and ears with 'the sublime and the terrible'. Wordsworth's visits to the Yorkshire caves has been mentioned previously. The 1805 Prelude gives two major references to significant cave experiences. The most obvious is in Book V where the poet, sleeping in a cave near the sea, dreams of the Arab fleeing from a Deluge. The second is in an important passage in Book VIII. The poet compares the first experience of city life with entering an Aegean island cave or the Yorkshire Yordas Cave. He 'sees, or thinks / He sees' the shifting, changing shapes that the flame of his torch portrays on the roof and walls. Paul Hamilton (1986) analyses this episode to illustrate the reversal of the Platonic myth, presenting an alternative fictional reality inside the cave - an explicit turning aside from a classical doctrine of reality dimly perceived in life's cave. I shall want to return to that theme later. A third reference to the power of a cave is only a year later than the 1819 publication, but actually first drafted in 1802, the second poem of a pair dedicated to Lycoris, ('To the Same'). There the theme, like the Yordas lines and the Westall sequence, relates to inner and outer reality with the revealing conclusion justifying a retreat from the present into a preferred, better controlled world of memory: We two have known such happy hours together That, were power granted to replace them (fetched From out the pensive shadows where they lie) In the first warmth of their original sunshine, Loth should I be to use it: passing sweet Are the domains of tender memory! (W. P., IV, p. 98)



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The 'Ode to Lycoris' was published with the River Duddon sonnet sequence and other poems. The ode is, as its title makes clear, of classical origin. Lycoris, the unfaithful lover of Gallus, is referred to in passing in Horace's Odes (Book I, XXXII), but the most important appropriation is from Virgil's last Pastoral, Book Ten of The Eclogues. In the third sonnet based on Westall's drawing, a classical deity is invoked, a Silenus figure drowsing in his cave, wearing his 'mineral crown'. Other intertextualities from literature's tradition occur in the two other Westall sonnets, such as the damned in 'the marble belt of the earth' and the giants who built the Giant's Causeway and Fingal's Cave. The above-ground landscape in the first Westall sonnet is a classical, pastoral convention - of noon-day heat and labour contrasted with the inner coolness of the cave. Is this simply the reformed, classical Wordsworth, abandoning the Romantic rejection of the ancient world which had been so much cultivated by the Enlightenment? To make such an antithesis is to assume simplistic dichotomies which position Romanticism as opposed to Classicism, the Gothic versus the Palladian. Romanticism contained a wide divergence of sources and of styles. It should also be remembered that there is a biblical, hidden text in the 1819 publication. Balaam's ass lurks behind the story of the dumb beast who knows a greater truth than Peter Bell knows. The effect of layers of reference classical, biblical, scientific - is to present a poet in at least two worlds, one a literary inheritance, the other a contemporary artistic experience. Although the answer to what was created by the 1819 publication is not wholly to be found in the arrangement of the assembled volume, that 'rhetoric of arrangement' supports the essential message of the poems themselves.

'PETER BELL'S' COMPANIONS This analysis is concerned with a volume not with a single poem. I shall conclude therefore not by a rereading of one poem, but by placing 'Peter Bell' in the context of the accompanying sonnets. It has to be said that there is no immediately appreciable similarity between the two, the one a simple story of simple people, the sonnets cool and classical, yet the associations between them are structured. 'Peter Bell' is introduced by a prose dedication detaching the poem from what may have previously linked the poet and





Southey in the public's eye. It asks for the poem to be read as an instance of ideas emanating from ordinary life and not from extraordinary circumstances or from supernatural occurrences. Paradoxically, after the statement of intention of the Dedication, the prologue to 'Peter Bell' immediately enters the supernatural realm. The narrator literally takes off in an image of flying above the natural. He is brought down to earth by committing himself to narrate his story to ordinary, well-grounded people. The artistic high-flier is further controlled by the small party he addresses. They insist that he begins his tale at the beginning and abandon literary flights of fancy. The tale the narrator tells of Peter Bell is about redemption through shock. A terrifying combination of events strikes through the hardest heart which had been hitherto untouchable. These conversion events are natural, not supernatural. They are visual, the sudden uprearing of a drowned man, the lashing trees in the storm, the donkey's pathetic grin and his patterned back, but they are also sounds, particularly the little boy calling his father in the mouth of the cave and the Methodists' hymn-singing in a lonely place. These circumstances penetrate below the calloused surface of Peter Bell. One immediate association with the sonnets is the topic of remorse and change of heart. Though the three Westall sonnets are about renewal and regeneration through withdrawal below life's surface, it is sonnet four which is clearly about the impact of nature on conversion. If it does not exactly echo 'Peter Bell', it at least sounds the theme of spiritual change in a different context. Peter Bell, the character, was saved by a vivid perception in a spot of time, a moment of revelation in Swaledale. Unlike the protagonist in the sonnet, Peter's journey did not begin in a state of spiritual despair and torment. The sonnet is not set like the narrative poem in moonlight either, but is depicted as day turned into night, a death-in-life experience. The parallels are there, however. The break in the clouds is the reverse of the abyss of the lake in the quarry, of the cave into which the child shouts, but also the reverse of the depths of the caves of the previous sonnets. The figure in the sonnet looks up, as Peter looks down into the lake. Peter and the sonnet's protagonist both discover truth through an intermediary reality, Peter a shape in the lake, the sonnet's figure 'an orb' or 'a shield'. An orb, a shield or a below surface image have in common that they are substances interposed between the observer and nature.



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The last mentioned image of a substance other than subject or object should remind us that in these poems of middle age (and perhaps not only in them), Wordsworth composes within a context of art. What, at first sight, appear to be familiar human and natural objects typical of Wordsworth's poems of the period 1798 to 1807, such as the outcast human wanderers or the uncultured wilder landscapes, are found in a new context in the poems of later years. They are set within a controlled artistic frame. Easthope, after examining the separation of subject and object in Wordsworth's 'The Solitary Reaper', describes as art the poem and the song within it: art 'mediates between subject and object, making good all the opposition and differences just mentioned' (Easthope, 1993, p. 50). When we turn to a later collection, such as that of 1819, it is possible to perceive that a wider context of art, the pictorial, is also a mediator. As his poetic journey continued, Wordsworth presented places, but with a purpose. That purpose was to make it possible for the reader (and the poet?) to find renewal, even though that new start was only the courage to survive. 'Peter Bell' had been detached from its partners in Lyrical Ballads and kept waiting in the wings, ready to act when the dramatic moment arrived. The poet who had emerged from the years preparing The Excursion had now shifted his focus. The long-delayed narrative could be appropriated for an artistic and cultured text, a text stimulated by a painting by Beaumont or an etching by Westall, as in the past a landscape or the memory of it had been the energizing factor. To return to the prologue to 'Peter Bell' is to appreciate the shift of poetic vision. It is a strange poetic episode, an exercise in Fancy. The narrator tells us that he has 'a little Boat, / Shaped like a crescent moon'. If this lengthy and elaborated device were only to create a figure of speech suitable for an observer-poet, a vehicle for an omniscient storyteller, it would still be over-exotic. So it was judged to be by many. The other actors in the prologue to whom the narrator descends to give his account are unaware of the vehicle of Fancy by which their visitor arrived. The device is for the Reader's benefit, not for the imagined audience waiting for a story. The narrator has viewed the world from the Andes to Libya, from the Dnieper back to Britain, and through the planetary system, holding in the process a unique, half-humorous conversation with his transport. He has achieved in this flight a position which is to become typical in the later poems. The magic boat enables the narrator to look down with the eye of a cartographer. A different





device with the same perspective of viewing an expanse of landscape or even a whole region from the top is to be repeated in an image in the prose Guide where Wordsworth takes his reader as if on a cloud above the highest peaks of the Lake District. Similar images occur in the later sequences of poems of travel. Put into historical context, Wordsworth's fanciful excursion, viewing a land from flying vantage, is not so extraordinary. The end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century witnessed an excited interest in ballooning. The 'Peter Bell' prologue opens with a reference to a 'huge balloon'. In 'To Enterprise', published in 1820, he lists amongst other modern improvements 'Soaring Mortals glide between or through the clouds' (see Chapter 4). Simultaneously with technological advances in mining and transportation, and with military developments, a new technology of map-making was emerging in Europe, a technology demanding a view from above. The first English geological maps were produced in the period 1816 to 1822. In aspiring to a country-wide vision, Wordsworth was a man of his time. The significance of 'flying' moments is not that they are fashionably aeronautic. The position of the poet in relation to his subject is now on the agenda as Wordsworth assembles collections of poems around his itineraries. How much of the changes that occurred between the writing of The Excursion and the publication of Peter Bell in 1819 arose from Wordsworth's own closely considered theory of artistic composition, by now openly divergent from Biographia Literaria? How much arose from a deliberate attempt to speak in a new voice, unencumbered by previously held dogmatics? In the event, what is spoken is part of a continuing debate begun years before in Somerset and in Dove Cottage. The preface to the volume addressed to Southey might well have been addressed to Coleridge, for again it takes up the tangled issue of the sources of Imagination. The short sonnet collection of 1819 may ostensibly direct the reader to Imagination, the below ground level of the human mind as it were, but what is discovered there is weighted towards pictorial Fancy (Ossianic giants, Silenus figures, the pathetic fallacies in scenes of dramatic storm). The scenery on the stage of the 1819 volume is pictorial in 'Peter Bell' and in the sonnets. The landscape of Yorkshire with its strange geology is a stage with natural features, a symbolic context for the play of tensions and the resolutions in inner lives. Peter Bell and the



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nameless traveller of the last sonnet both shift internally into renewal and resurrection. The poet's voice in the Westall sonnets appeals for a return to an underworld of inner certainties, and deep reconciliations. The poet and his readers are presented in 1819 with a travel account in one locality, a world of a didactic and moral narrative conveyed by accounts of people in a foreign setting and by scenes which might well be the subject of a painter's canvas. Such is the poetic material for the travel accounts of the next twenty years of the travelling poet.




Cerulean Duddon and its Tributaries Peter Bell: A Tale in Verse and four sonnets of 1819 is a concentration in a restricted geological area and a concentration in poetic scope. The collection of poems next published, in 1820, is a wider ranging excursion with branching forays. The River Duddon, a series of Sonnets, Vaudracour and Julia and other poems to which is annexed a topographical description of the country of the Lakes in the North of England was a much more substantial volume than Peter Bell. Although the title suggests a location in the main in the 'Country of the Lakes', the poems following the sonnet series are stimulated by the wider literary realms of Romanticism. My reading of this volume, however, is that the core of the volume is about journeying, first through a loco-descriptive series of sonnets about a little-known valley in the Lake District, then a supporting periphery of two major prose accounts, one a substantial Guide to the Lake District and the other a memoir of a Lakeland personage. The other poems in the volume reflect on this central mirror of location which in turn reflects on them; that is, the collection is to be read as a whole rather than as a collection of individual poems. The volume is inevitably more complicated to address than Peter Bell. Although there are individual poems which, as yet, I cannot argue persuasively as part of a pattern or intended series, I hctve no hesitation in identifying a planned structure to the volume. First in the collection is the Duddon Sonnet Series, a continuous poem of travel, then the two prose works separated by a second subset of poems which is linked with the Duddon Series and with the longer prose work, 'A Topographical Description'. In this chapter I intend to proceed in the order indicated in Wordsworth's own title. A preliminary word on the way in which the collection was prepared for publication by Longmans is necessary. The correspondence of the Wordsworth family gives an account of a season 30 10.1057/9780230286214 - Wordsworth's Poems of Travel 1819-1842, John F. Wyatt


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of rapid original composition as well as of a time of rewriting and reordering of material already written. The majority of the River Duddon sonnets themselves were newly composed 1 in 1818. Mary Wordsworth writing to her sister Sara on 1 December 1818 notes: 'William is asleep from sheer exhaustion - he has worked so long he has written 21 sonnets (including 2 old ones) on the River Duddon - they all together compose one poem' (W. P., Ill, p. 506). There are other indications that the series was planned to be read as a unified work. In December of 1819, presumably after the arrangements had begun with the publisher, a dedication to Wordsworth's brother, Christopher Wordsworth, was written. This dedication should be seen not as an introduction to the sonnet sequence, but as a companion poem to the whole volume, for the dedication's subtitle is 'With the sonnets to the River Duddon, and other poems in their collection'. The prose passages were written at different times. The shorter, but in the context of a volume of poetry still a lengthy passage of annotation, is a memoir of a simple village priest, The Reverend 'Wonderful' Walker. Wordsworth had this character in mind in 1813 when he created the figure of the village priest in The Excursion. In the sonnet series, the poem on Walker's parish, Seathwaite (XVIII), is the occasion for the detailed account of his exemplary life. The biographical material actually grows out of a six-paragraph account of the Roman remains near Hardknott Pass added to by a lengthy extract from Green's Guide to the Lakes which Wordsworth had also consulted in producing his own Guide. Walker is described through straightforward narrative and also through the device of letters of real (or imaginary?) visitors to the remote house in which he lived. The second and longest prose work, 'The Topographical Description', ends the whole volume. It was not written originally for this purpose, but produced in 1810 to accompany a series of prints of Lake District scenes by Joseph Wilkinson. In 1820 the purpose was explicit. 'The Description' is introduced by an explanation that it was attached to the volume: 'From a consciousness of its having been written in the same spirit which dictated several of the poems and from a belief that it will tend materially to alter them.' This last phrase, 'to alter them', is a striking remark in the poet's interpretation of how a reader receives a set of poems in the context of other poems in proximity. The other poems in the volume are of varying dates of publication, but the majority were written between 1816 and 1819. The



Cerulean Duddon and its tributaries


most interesting biographically is 'Vaudracour and Julia'. This narrative poem of young, fated love and an illegitimate child we now know appeared in the 1805 draft of The Prelude. Commentaries usually home in on the autobiographical associations with Wordsworth's own youthful life in Revolutionary France. In 1820, these personal associations would not be meaningful to a contemporary readership, except in the poet's own family. In the notes below the title Wordsworth emphasized realism but not autobiography: 'The facts are true; no invention as to these has been exercised, as none was needed' (W. P., II, p. 59). The translation of Chaucer's The Prioress's Tale and 'Repentance' date from 1801 and 1802, but the rest of the collection was new, a product of the fruitful second half of the decade that ended in the 1820 publication. An analysis of the relationship between the sonnet sequence and the two prose passages will follow later, but an immediate observation on the arrangement of the collection is useful for seeing the volume as a complete work of art. First, it is apparent that Wordsworth was diligent in his middle years, as much if not more so than in his early poetic life, in a quest for varieties of poetic form. The Preface to the 1815 volume, with its careful delineation of six types of poetry of 'divers moulds and divers forms', is exemplified in this collection. There are major narrative and dramatic contributions ('Vaudracour and Julia', the Chaucer translation, 'Dion', 'Artegal and Elidure'). The 'lyrical' category included odes, hymns, songs and ballads. There are five odes as well as other examples of the other modes in this category. Descriptions and, of course, sonnets represented what Wordsworth classified in the 1815 Preface as 'the Idyllium' and in this category of poetic form he included Toco-descriptive poetry'. The sonnet sequence is in this tradition. Didactic poems are easily identified - the story of Canute and Arthur may be better assumed under this category than as a narrative. Even the sixth poetic form, philosophical satire, is not entirely absent as 'A book came forth of late called Peter Bell' adopts the mode if not the subject matter of traditional satire. Finally, what do we know of the intended readership? The poems suggest an ideal reader who knows his or her classical sources and has orthodox Christian sympathies. It Is also an educated readership in a wider sense, because Wordsworth now can rely on appreciation of subject matter which thirteen or fourteen years before he himself had helped to form and to which he had given poetic status. The mountains and romantic history of



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Scotland as well as of the Lake District ('Cora Lynn', 'A Brownie's Cell', 'Hint from the Mountains') were a (shared) literary experience between poet and the growing number of enthusiastic Wordsworthians. From the publisher's point of view, the collection must have represented the first major edition since The Excursion and therefore an occasion for a confident launch. Intriguingly, the end paper of this 1820 edition when it was first published was devoted to a different kind of writing, but perhaps to the same readership. The boards of the first edition include an advertisement panel for Longman's other books: Bakewell's Introduction to Mineralogy, John Playfair's Outlines of Natural Philosophy, and other geological and mineralogical works by Greenough and Mawe. There is even a jocular piece of popular science, King Coal's Levee or Geological Etiquette: a Geological Primer in Verse. The audience for Wordsworth's collection was a newly created educated public, oriented to natural history and prepared for the poet who best represented their intellectual concerns and their sentiments, a public prepared to enjoy demanding verse with lengthy prose commentary and even a guidebook enclosed in the volume!

THE DUDDON SONNET SEQUENCE Modern readers (if there are any) of the Duddon sonnets may best know number XXXIV, 'After-thoughf, with its sonorous, almost Tennysonian ending: And if, as toward the silent tomb we go, Through love, through hope, and faith's transcendent dower, We feel that we are greater than we know (W. P., Ill, p. 261) Few critics2 have concerned themselves with all the 34 sonnets, but significantly 'After-thoughf has had attention (see, for instance, Hartman, 1978). Readers often know of these late sonnets through anthologies. 'After-thoughf is well anthologized and therefore in its individual form better known than those that have been rejected by editors. Useful though such collections are for keeping individual poems alive, selection in an anthology focuses




Wordszoorth's Poems of Travel, 1819-42

attention on the individual poem. The consequence has been to neglect many of Wordsworth's preliminary guidance that all 'compose one poem', that they should be read as a 'series', and that they together may be considered one poem (W. P., Ill, p. 508). It is with this injunction in our ears that we shall pursue the connections between the parts. One unifying feature of the river's journey is the explicit intertextuality. Wordsworth, both in the poems themselves and in later notes added to them, draws the reader's attention to classical models. The first sonnet directs us to compare his task with that of the Latin poet, Horace. There are also more contemporary influences at work, if we are to believe the poet's notes, some written later of course or dictated to Miss Fenwick. Coleridge, he reminds us, 'more than twenty years ago; used to speak of writing a rural poem, to be entitled "The Brook"'. (W. P., Ill, p. 503). Tactfully, Wordsworth suggests his own river sequence may modestly remind Coleridge of unfulfilled ambitions. Burns is quoted as a poet of rivers as are two other, lesser poets called upon to illustrate that a sequence of sonnets can be written in the 'loco-descriptive' mode. They are John Dyer, author of 'Grongar Hill' and 'The Fleece' and William Crowe who wrote 'Lewesdon Hills' in 1788. Wordsworth concludes his notes on 'The power of waters over the minds of poets' with the Psalmist's words: 'There is a sympathy in streams, - one calleth to another.' The classical and modern literary tradition is not only invoked to associate the sequence with traditional poetic forms, it is also a device to reflect on the status of the Duddon itself. Again, Wordsworth's notes echo the themes of the first sonnet which associate the springs of the Duddon with prestigious names from antiquity. 'It is with the little River Duddon as it is with most other rivers, Ganges and Nile not excepted - many springs might claim the honour of being its head' (W. P., Ill, p. 504). Classical associations continue as he defines the river's status, playing with the mild irony that the small, unsung stream is as worthy of the poet's esteem as are any of the great rivers of the ancient world. 3 Traditional literary association is only one of a number of continuities. A prominent structural unity pursued throughout the sequence is a doubly woven strand, the image of human development, of growth and change, coupled with the device of an excursion through the hours of one day. In the opening sonnets, the River Duddon is an infant, tended at birth by 'handmaid Frost',



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guarded by Desolation, its Patron-saint, foster mothered by Earth. In Sonnet IV, the Duddon is still a 'cradled nursling', but in the next sonnet, childhood develops and flowers. Mirroring the river's own growth is a domestic picture of rural children playing by their cottage on the river's bank. In Sonnets VII and IX and X youth appears in the growing form of the river: 'The struggling Rill sensibly is grown into a brook' (W. P., Ill, p. 249). To cross the growing stream requires stepping stones, and the sonnets next portray a picture - like accounts of the love-sick youth and then the young lovers daringly poised both in their life and in the path of the stream. By Sonnets XII and XIII the river has become a 'swift stream' in a 'deep-worn channel' and the river is 'angry Duddon' with a 'Dread swell of sound'. The maturing of the river and of human life is not always smooth and progressive. In its mid-passage through the Seathwaite channel the river re-enters a mountain phase of youth. In its deep gorge, its waters are swollen by a vigorous tributary stream. From Sonnet XIX onwards, the poet describes the river in terms of early but uneasy maturity, there are deceptively deep pools of 'still repose, the liquid lapse serene', but there are passages where the river will change its temper and 'Dance like a Bacchanal from rock to rock tossing her frantic thyrsus wide and high!' The poet's own journey is similarly broken. It is noon and the poet-traveller cannot progress. In Sonnets XXIV to XXVII the river and the poet's path are separated for midday rest. As the noontide rest ends, the poet renews his journey along the stream, which has now become substantial, a place where 'heatoppresf cattle gather in the shade cooled by the breeze from the river. There are fish in its sheltered shallows. By the afternoon of the poem, the Duddon is no longer 'stripling' or 'stream' but a 'pleasant River' (Sonnet XXX) which in Sonnet XXI creates a 'gentle roar' heard in the 'wave-washed grave-yard'. As evening glows, 'a crimson splendour' (Sonnet XXXII), the Duddon is maturely crossing first its flood plain, then achieves its wide estuary 'in radiant progress towards the deep'. The conclusion is both the end of the day and the end of the river, absorbed into a greater expanse as it flows 'to mingle with Eternity!' The analogy with the final phase of human life and the ultimate extinction of individuality in Eternity is drawn, as are the traditional metaphors of the journey of life, the river path of the human career, and the idea of growth declining terminally.





If the poetic 'day', the growth of human life and the river's own motion provide one continuity, there is yet another strand which combines and unifies. It is the consciousness of the Duddon valley's place in history. Although the upper reaches and the origins of the river near Wrynose Pass are obscure and 'No sign of hoar Antiquity's esteem / appears' (Sonnet III), in the preceding sonnet the first glimpse of a dominant image of the continuity of human life has appeared with dramatic force. These were once the forested haunts of now extinct beasts, the bison and the huge (Leigh) deer, hunted 'Thousands of years before the silent air / Was pierced by whizzing shaft of hunter keen!' (W. P., Ill, p. 247). In Sonnet VIII the figure of the first human to find the stream emerges with all his mystery enhanced by the obscurity of time. The primitive hunting regime before recorded history surfaces again in Sonnets XV and XVI with a conjecture about the rituals, associated with the niche-like rock structure of the Seathwaite channel. Perhaps they were made by pre-historic, even perhaps by pre-diluvial people, associated in the poet's mind with the tribes recorded in Alexander von Humboldfs travel accounts. The ancient pre-human Canadian wilderness is evoked in Sonnet XII: Dread swell of sound ! loud as the gusts that lash The matted forests of Ontario's shore By wasteful steel unsmitten ... (W. P., Ill, p. 251) If pre-history is a dark questioning shadow where the origins of the Duddon lie unexplored, recorded history takes on a discernible shape through the shades as the river progresses. Sonnet XVII records the point in the Duddon's journey near to Hardknott Pass where the Roman camp had been discovered and close to the Druidic stone circle at Stone-side ('the country people call it Sunken Church') (W. P., Ill, p. 508). In the same sonnet the Danish Raven is invoked as well as the 'imperial Bird of Rome'. At Seathwaite Chapel, a more recent figure - yet still a character of the past - the Reverend 'Wonderful' Walker, reminds the poet of Chaucer's simple priest, of George Herbert and of Goldsmith's poems. Two unnamed historical sources are explored in Sonnet XXVII and XXIX. The first records a decayed historic 'ancient Hold / Its line of Warriors fled' and the second the old Quaker graveyard known as



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the sepulchre. The Duddon's journey then continues past the ancient church of Ulpha, with its own graveyard memorials, on to the sea of Eternity. The After-thought closes a personal history: 'We Men, who in our morn of youth defied / The elements, must vanish...' (W. P., Ill, p. 261). Reading the sequence with Mary Wordsworth's guidance that they 'all together form one poem' is one level of understanding . A different dimension can be achieved by tracing the patterns of continuity within the loco-descriptive regime of a day's perambulation. Various readings are possible, but the following suggests not only a poetic will to forge links within a chain, but also a modulation of feelings stimulated by the scenic components of the poem. Like the stream itself (or even more like the analogue, 'the stream of life'), there are eddies and circles of mood. Early in the sequence there is a modulation between threat and tranquillity. In Sonnet IV the Duddon, no more than a rill, becomes deceptive and even seductively dangerous. It appears as 'a glistening snake / silent, and to the gazer's eye untrue'. With an unexpected momentum the rill ('robed instantly in garb of snow-white foam') appears to mock the traveller and to subdue - 'the dastard' who cannot dare to follow the cataract. In the following sonnet, the poet-wanderer turns, as the river does, away from 'unfruitful solitudes, that seemed to upbraid / The sun in heaven!' and steers the sonnet to a quiet domestic solution with children playing under the watchful supervision of their mother. Nature becomes benign again. The idyll continues with Sonnet VI ('Flowers') yet, after this calming, pastoral episode, the next sonnet begins with a threat. The 'lovesick stripling' dallies with the dangerous in nature; he does not seek to be lulled by it. He dreams his sensual wish to change into the rose at his loved-one's breast. A mid-sonnet retraction turns the poet and reader away to the occupations of the 'calmer mind'. A careful placing of the primitive and the modern river takes place between Sonnets XV and XVIII. The high cliffs of the rock gorge at Birks Brig and at Pen Crag stimulate the conjecture that ancient pre-diluvial idol worshippers created the niches in the rocks. The sixteenth sonnet begins by correcting such presumptions as 'fruitless', but immediately passes to a larger-scale hypothesis borrowed from Humboldfs voyages, an American Indian tradition about sacred sculptures who escaped the world-wide flood. Sonnet XVII continues into recorded history with Danish and Roman imperial birds, the Roman army camp and the Druid





circle. The next sonnet ('Seathwaite Chapel') is of a different recent history. The octet of the sonnet is vocative, calling on 'Sacred Religion' and 'Mother of love', but the sestet turns to the human form of the perfect pastor rooted not only in an English parish but also in English literature. The sonnets at midday (from XXIV) also fascinatingly play commentaries on each other. The 'Resting Place' is a sonnet of languorous idleness but with faint tremors of unease and temptation. A typical Wordsworth negative ends this sonnet with what Fancy may tempt: 'Here wants not stealthy prospect, that may tempt / Loose Idless to forego her wily mask' (W. P., Ill, p. 256). Fancy does indeed prevail, so that in the following sonnet XXV, the Poet wanderer is led to imagine an air-borne visit by his loved one, but the sestet is guilt-ridden: ... here dwells soft ease: With sweets that she partakes not some distaste Mingles, and lurking consciousness of wrong; Languish the flowers; the waters seem to waste Their vocal charm; their sparklings cease to please. (W. P., Ill, p. 257) Sonnet XXVI immediately provides the consolation - 'Return Content'. It must be remembered that this is one of the poems which had been written sixteen or seventeen years previously, prepared as a hymn to childhood. Here the recollection of the childhood influence of the Duddon provides the release from adult lethargy and an escape from the oppressive, midday, enforced rest. It leads us, in Sonnet XXVII, to thoughts of ageing, the decay of ancient houses, but, a consoling thought this, also hope for a new era of peace: ... if men with men in peace abide, All other strength the weakest may withstand All worse assaults may safely be defied. (W. P., Ill, p. 258) Thus reassured the Poet resumes his walk with the Duddon in full flow, its shaded banks protecting cattle and sheltering the fish



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and indeed protecting the traveller himself. Duddon has become 'the Leader'. Early in the sequence, in Sonnet III, the Poet asks the river, 'How shall I paint thee?' and, as he sits on a stone to consider a reply, he adds a hope that his verse could be a 'speaking monument'. The sequence is memorably visual. The poet essays pictorial impressions, either in short episodes within a sonnet or in whole sonnets, creating brief picture-like narratives. In Sonnet IV, the mountain cascade dowses the Adventurer who climbs above the stream to ascend its tumultuous rock bed. In Sonnet V the playing children are watched by the mother. The Pen and Wallow-barrow Crag are the refuge of shy nymphs. The effect is that created by early nineteenth-century painters of sentiment, decorative and moral visual stories fit for the domestic drawing room. Sonnets which frame a story are XIII, 'Open Prospect', the domestic household celebrating while the storm-fed river races by, or Sonnet X, the pleasing picture of the two lovers crossing the stepping stones, the boy gently teasing his 'shepherd-lass'. These are gentle, sentiment-loaded pictures in words, pictures of domestic or pastoral ordinariness. Other picture sonnets are wordpaintings of imagination. The most notable is Sonnet XXI, where personifications of Time and Memory spectacularly bring to life a moment of 'new being': From her unworthy seat, the cloudy stall Of Time Breaks forth triumphant Memory; Her glistening tresses bound, yet light and free As golden locks of birch, that rise and fall On gales that breathe too gently to recal Aught of the fading year's inclemency! (W. P., Ill, p. 255) In Chapter 2, I emphasized the impact of the visual arts on the poetic collection. With the River Duddon series, there is no clear link with identifiable works of art (at least that have yet been claimed), but visual descriptions are constructed and mental pictures stimulated. A reader would discover in the series and in the accompanying poems that there are descriptions of human or divine groups in the kind of settings studio artists were composing. This was a period when domestic art flourished in the new urban





centres of the kingdom. With the rapid developments of the engraver's skill, art became the widely available property of a wider social class, and every picture had a narrative. One other feature of the Duddon sonnet sequence should not be omitted in an attempt to understand the context to which we have access because of a continuous reading. It is the documentation that accompanied the sonnets. There is an accompanying authentication to justify the poet in writing about an unknown valley off the well-trodden route. There are footnotes in the main text, in addition to introductory notes and the substantial prose passages of 'Wonderful' Walker. What does this last supportive account actually support? It is worth examining the qualities of this ideal parish priest for they will reflect on the poetic material in the sonnet sequence. In the first place, the country priest is loyal to his locality. Other places of preferment have been offered to him but were refused, not only because of his own wish to be left uninterrupted in his life's commitment, but also, unselfishly, he foresaw disturbance for his parishioners in being amalgamated with another parish. To Walker, they are people 'who not only live in the happy ignorance of the follies and vices of the age, but in mutual peace and goodwill with one another 7 . He adds that there is 'not one dissenter amongst them' (W. P., Ill, pp. 512 and 513). Wordsworth excuses Walker's intransigence about the admission of dissenters into the social structure of his parish. The explanation is that Walker is a traditional figure - 'He loved old customs and old usages'. Supported by his hard, diligent work as a country craftsman as well as by his roles as scholar, village teacher, administrator and priest, he cheerfully accepted the discipline of hard labour. No lines were drawn between leisure and work, between places of work and worship. Walker taught his charges from the chancel steps at Seathwaite and sat at the spinning wheel as he heard their lessons. 'Frugality and temperance' were virtues added to industry. All these virtues, admirable though they were, might well have been 'mechanical' and deadening to 'the more precious parts of his nature' but in fact his moral nature was undamaged by his hard work. Dedication to service was the crucial element, Wordsworth suggests, in Walker's success as a moral example and religious leader. He held a jealous attachment 'to the doctrine and frame of The Established Church', which, Wordsworth explains, perhaps does more than excuse his hard line on Free Churchmen.



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The biographical sketch turns to the physical epitaph, the stone from a North Wales quarry erected at the door of Seathwaite church. The sentiments engraved on it are echoed by further letters of commendation after the priest's death. A mill, a product of industrial change, has been erected by the Seathwaite brook, a sign of the considerable social changes since the time that Walker died. Wordsworth asserts that this priest, if he had remained alive, despite the industrialization of his flock, would still have been as energetic in his duties and in his character 'though in many instances with widely different effects'. The final elegiac letter (from 'The Christian Remembrancer') is about prayer for duration. Walker's sermon made the writer think 'that one of the beloved apostles had returned to mortality, and in that vale of peace had come to exemplify the beauty of holiness in the life and character of Mr Walker'. The idealized figure is not confined in his associations to one short Lakeland valley. A reader of all the poems in the volume would be reminded of 'Wonderful' Walker when he read about an angel descending to an English valley in one of the odes at the end of the 1820 volume (the 'Vernal Ode'). The Duddon valley is in a long perspective 'a vale of peace'. Although the river rages and there are storms, the sonnet sequence is constructed as a framework of reconciliation and security. Like the life of 'Wonderful' Walker there are long-term historical certainties validating daily energy. For Walker they are the Church's historical practices giving confidence to his vigorous moral and social duties. The River Duddon too has flowed on through history and in its present form acts as the priest did in easing and softening the rigours of time. As early as in the mountain streams section, the infant river offers a peace offering: 'Yet thou thyself hast round thee shed a gleam / Of brilliant moss, instinct with freshness rare; / Prompt offering to thy Foster-mother Earth!' (W .P., Ill, p. 247). The first glimpse of prehistoric Man, inheritor of 'hideous usages, and rights accursed', is calmed by the gentle river. The Duddon has an irenic 'soft record': 'Thy function was to heal and to restore, / To soothe and cleanse, not madden and pollute!' (W. P., Ill, p. 249). Even in modern times, the River Duddon acts as a cleanser. The blood and rough handling of 'Sheep-Washing' (Sonnet XXIII) and the noisy voices of the sheep-shearing fade away - 'The stains are fugitive'. Finally, the end of the river's journey is all peace: 'Majestic Duddon, over smooth flat sands / Gliding in silence with unfettered sweep!' (W. P., Ill, p .260). Nature is here the reconciler. The Christian pastor





is the human correlative of Nature, the guardian of a place and the purveyor of a peace. The final note of the sonnet sequence is to be found, not in 'After-thoughf, but in Sonnets XXXII and XXXIII. Sonnet XXXII links Duddon's estuary with the wide ocean and the wider regions in which its waters will mingle round the English coast to the 'sovereign Thames'. The sonnet 'Conclusion' transcends these earthly associations. The sonnet fuses the river and the poetguide who has accompanied the stream on its life career. Wordsworth chooses the proper noun he used in The Excursion for his major actor: The Wanderer seeks that receptacle vast Where all his unambitious functions fail. (W. P., Ill, p. 260) Is the Wanderer the stream or the poet? These lines are at the fulcrum point of the sonnet. In the following sestet the Poet is addressed. Just as the river loses itself in the local ocean so the ageing poet is mixed into the eternal future : And may thy Poet, cloud-born Stream! be free The sweets of earth contentedly resigned, And each tumultuous working left behind At seemly distance - to advance like Thee; Prepared, in peace of heart, in calm of mind And soul, to mingle with Eternity! (W. P., Ill, p. 260)

THE POEMS THAT ACCOMPANY THE DUDDON SONNETS There is no simply available pattern either of narrative or of arguments in the collection of over thirty poems that follows the series of sonnets on the Duddon. Some are lengthy narratives. Their common tone is one of moral teaching, but otherwise they show no unity of location or of setting. Some are sonnets, such as 'Lady! I rifled a Parnassian Cave' or 'The stars are Mansions built by Nature's hands', on classical themes or generally directed at the



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natural calendar. Others again are about places, but not in any sense like the Duddon sequence with any continuous or linked geographical association. If there are no surface signs of unity in Wordsworth's arrangement of this set of poems, we must look for deeper patterns, for relations between poems that are tonal, revealing words that colour the collection. I believe there is a uniform mood of resignation and tempering of enthusiasm in poem after poem - until the three final odes emerge with a confident, more robust message. The poet consciously writes as an ageing man, most directly in his personal poem to Dora Wordsworth: 'A little onward lead thy guiding hand' with the dedication that their mutual love will have an uplifting effect: 'To calm the affections, elevate the s o u l / A n d consecrate our lives to truth and love' (W. P., IV, p. 94). This is a poem positioned late in the series, but its dying fall is not restricted to the end of the volume. The same mood of quiet resignation in old age appears early in the set in 'To Lycoris' and the linked poem, 'To the same'. There is a predilection for withdrawn places. It is directly addressed in 'The Brownies Cell', in 'Composed at Cora Lynn' and in 'The haunted tree'. There is no dejection or loss in these poems of withdrawal from busy life. Each cave, cell, place of retreat has its own attendant beauties; nevertheless these poems are reservations for the man who knows his years are advancing to death. Another consistent theme is morality. The narratives, the long 'Vaudracour and Julia', the 'Lament of Mary Queen of Scots', the 'Brownie's Cell', 'Dion', 'Artegal and Elidure', the Prioress's Tale (from Chaucer) and above all 'Canute and Alfred' detach themselves from violent action and seek the way of peace and rest. 'Artegal and Elidure' exemplifies this strong moral preaching. Unlike Chaucer's divided brothers of The Knight's Tale, the brothers of Wordsworth's knightly story do not end their quarrel in bloody conflict. The good man willingly surrenders the crown to his erring brother. He in turn is reformed by the charity of this generous act. In 'The Pilgrim's Dream', the glow-worm triumphs over the massive energy of the stars. In 'A fact and an imagination', Alfred is the triumphant victor because of his Christian idealism over the over-active Canute. The moral message of 'Repentance' is clear - if you sell your patrimonial lands you will inherit only the grave in which you are buried. It would not be very demanding to see here the Wordsworth over whom Shelley or The Edinburgh Review critics shook their heads. Individually each poem compared with the poems of 1799 to





1807 concentrates its energy on declining vigour, compromise and unchallenged rectitude. There are, however, some continuities with the younger Wordsworth and the radical tradition which appear to be abandoned in his later verses. A new reading of the poems reveals emphases that are to sound more clearly still in the collections that follow the 1820 publication. As Jonathan Bate has so well shown in Romantic Ecology, there is a significance in Wordworth's naming of places. Bate proposes that poems which arise from inscriptions, or from the Wordsworth family's own attachment of names to Lake District places, signify an absorption of the self in the landscape. Such a direct identification of the poet, his people and his place is a clear feature of his younger days but it is present also at this later stage. This volume includes two instances of naming poems. One is 'Descriptions supposed to be found in and near a Hermit's Cell'. This is a strange collection of epitaphs and ephemeral-like short stanzas quite unlike the naming of places in poems before 1807 or even in The Excursion. The poem that directly links with, yet differs from, the early Wordsworthian naming of places is 'To—, on her first ascent to the summit of Helvellyn'.. It is different in two ways. First, it was not in fact composed close to the time of ascent. The woman to whom the poem is dedicated climbed Helvellyn before (years before?) the poem appears to be written. Her mind is the storehouse of a past moment of physical and spiritual excitement. What she inherits is also an induction into a new form of sight, for she has become capable of seeing the whole world by her courage in climbing the Lake District's highest ridges. She can 'inherit the Alps and the Andes', but even more distant, 'The untrodden lunar mountains' (W. P., II, pp. 286/7). The local achievement has created a window into the whole of the observed universe. It is another example of the high perspective that, in the last chapter, I noted in the Prologue to 'Peter Bell'. The view from on high may celebrate the locality below, but, more than that, it extends the range of locality to a traveller's wider bounds. Three more substantial odes demonstrate the same theme of the outer waves of experience generated from local or domestic centres. They are to be found in the final pieces which, with the prose Topographical Description, end the volume. 'The Pass of Kirkstone', 'Ode 1817' and 'Ode Composed upon an evening of extraordinary splendour and beauty' have this in common, that they end the volume on a note of high expectation, even of solemn commitment, in the sense that they take the reader into the two mystic dimensions



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of deep time and distant space. They widen the scope of the volume as the reader prepares for its close, opening rather than closing the experience, and significantly prepare the reader for the long prose description. All these are substantial poems, distinctive of this phase of Wordsworth's life. They have a new prophetic tone as visionary in their own way as the clear prospects of the poems of early manhood, but now they are from high ground, from a vantage Parnassus, delivered by a far-sighted seer. The ode composed about 'An evening of extraordinary splendour and beauty', according to the editor of the Cornell edition (Ketcham, p. 258) was probably written in the summer of 1817 but completed a few months later. In its first, manuscript form it had three verse stanzas. When published in 1820, new lines were introduced as a penultimate stanza. The new stanza is concerned with an imaginative image of ascending ridges, as Wordsworth put it in his note to the 1820 volume, 'a kind of Jacob's Ladder' referring the reader to 'The account of the Lakes at the end of this volume'. These and other links between the Topographical Description and the poems will be explored a little later. The ode is a good example of 'late Wordsworth'. It begins from a moment of actual observation. Just as the poem dedicated to a woman's ascent of Helvellyn starts at an identified moment of time and local place and then widens to a vast experience of space, so this ode begins from an experience of one glorious sunset moment and develops to ethereal dimensions. This moment is not transitory like the 1805 Prelude's 'spots of time', which leave behind troubled notions of unexplained, disturbing feeling. On the contrary, this evening's power is definite and lasting. It is transcendentally clear rather than elusively evocative: But 'tis endued with power to stay, And sanctify one closing day, That frail mortality may see, What is? - ah no, but what can be! Time was when field and watery cove With modulated echoes rang, While choirs of fervent Angels sang Their vespers in the grove; Or, ranged like stars along some sovereign height, Warbled, for heaven above and earth below. (Ketcham, p. 258)





The present moment has turned time back to a golden age, an age of angel choirs. Yet this is no message of loss, for the past idyll could not be more perfect than the present. Heaven and earth are not divided. Earth can reveal 'This silent spectacle - The gleam / The shadow - and the peace supreme'. The second verse stanza, as well as continuing to portray through the essential present the ideal past, adds what is to be a permanent feature of Wordsworth's later poetry - a context of realistic place. From worlds not quickened by the sun A portion of the gift is won, An intermingling of Heaven's pomp is spread On grounds which British shepherds tread! (Ketcham, p. 259) The third verse (the later addition) directs itself to the biblical theme of Jacob's Ladder but, as the footnote underlines, also to the present geography of the Lake District, the common visual phenomenon of the multiple receding profiles of the ranges of hills. The fourth verse moves back to the immediate past, to the poet's own childhood experiences, to his own morning of 'blissful infancy' surviving, until this moment, 'only in my dreams'. With echoes of the ode 'Intimations of Immortality' the poet now 'Rejoices in a second birth' and, as the gleam fades, the ode closes on a mournful note of night's dark approach. Enclosed by time the opening great sunset and the final, dying gleam - a religiously ecstatic experience has been expressed, never detached from its actual earthly origins, but reaching to spiritual levels outside earthly time and space. The next ode in the sequence (inserted after the poem to Dora, 'A little onward') is the ode: 'The Pass of Kirkstone'. The association between this highly localized descriptive ode and the following prose Topographical Description is clear. In later editions of The Topographical Description (A Guide) its linkage is made even clearer. Wordworth introduced the ode into editions of A Guide when they were published subsequent to 1820 and separately from the accompanying verses of the 1820 publication. The ode 'The Pass of Kirkstone' harmonizes with the preceding evening ode through its theme of spiritual renewal, but this time in the context of depth of time. The poem begins with the traveller's



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By something cognizably shaped; Mockery - or model roughly hewn, And left as if by earthquake strewn, Or from the Flood escaped: Altars for the Druid service fit; (But where no fire was ever lit, Unless the glow-worm to the skies Thence offer nightly sacrifice) (W. Prose, II, p. 251) Egyptian monuments, stone tents as old as the earth, an ancient tower - the imagined human artefacts are tested against the experience. This is not the language of reality, but the language of possibility. Each possibility is the product of 'strong fancies' as the opening lines of the ode clearly state. The natural world has been tricked out with the trappings of human history. The second and third verse stanzas take the reader deeper into history with a solemn note of the passing of human power. Roman legions have journeyed this way, but passed on as conquerors do. They come but they go. Meanwhile these high moorlands are a retreat for those who require spiritual renewal: 'Who comes not hither ne'er shall know / How beautiful the world below' (W. Prose, II, p. 253). The play of mind with its sequence of illusions and fanciful notions has been a secondary experience, but in its own way endorses the power of the physical sensation of grandeur and sublimity. History and its temporariness have touched the traveller, but history has passed on. Then follows reconciliation and review. The penultimate stanza of the ode closes with prophetic clarity - that effort and will reap a reward, 'rich bounties of Constraint'. The poet's soul is 'grateful for delight / That wore a threatening brow', and as the clouds break as the traveller bids farewell to the desolate valley and Faith proclaims a hopeful message, 'Thy lot, O man, is good, thy portion fair!' Immediately after the ode 'The Pass of Kirkstone' is placed the most visionary poem of the series. It looks backward to history, but



sensations as he journeys through the deep, deserted cleft of the Kirkstone Pass. It is less a description of the high moorland region than a catalogue of fanciful notions that the scenery creates in the mind of the traveller:


forward to a new golden age. The 'Ode, 1817' or the 'Vernal Ode' was intended in its positioning in the sequence of the collections as a key poem of Parnassian prophecy. Not only is it the concluding poetic message of the 1820 collection, immediately before the 'Topographical Description', it held for years afterwards a confident place in Wordsworth's view of his own work. In the dictated notes to Isabella Fenwick, he says that this poem was 'Composed to place in view the immortality of succession where immortality is denied as far as we know, to the individual creature' (Ketcham, p. 544). The first images are once more from a classical, pastoral source and, as in the ode to evening, an angelic figure is created. The angel's song is the burden of the ode. We are not to be misled - the angelic figure is not a miraculous appearance; it is 'in presence of that spiritual eye / That aids or supersedes our grosser sight' (Ketcham, p. 237). The eternal and inextinguishable stars that belong to the angel's 'native habitation' are 'free from semblance of decline'. 4 The stars are at one extreme a Divine indication of immortality. At the opposite end of the spatial and temporal scale is the humble bee. Its hum murmurs to the angelic poet a sound that is of extreme antiquity 'a company / Of ages coming, ages gone'. Perhaps this small vestige of the earth's long past is also a remnant of its golden age - 'Thy sting was needless then, perchance unknown' (Ketcham, p. 241). Then angels and humans mixed familiarly in a 'universal heaven'. The idyll is, however, not purely ethereal; its origin is firmly located - in England. The angel of the opening lines of the ode descended to play his golden harp in a very distinctive place - an English landscape. He is compared to a firm, old British castle tower. An English spring has tempted a supernatural being to leave an eternal home in order to enjoy the changing season on earth. Destruction and decline, as in the 'Ode on a beauteous evening', are not denied, but the poem celebrates a moment when a vision of eternity was perceived. The brief moment was created by two stimuli: the actual English landscape and the creative, inspired life of the poet. Trickett notes: 'Here in "The Vernal Ode" the creatures are singled out with an extraordinary sense of the history of the kind' (Trickett, 1990, p. 48). The theme of continuity, which early in the volume has been a pervading aspect of the Duddon sonnets, is repeated here in the closing of the volume of 1820. Decay and change are inevitable, like the river's flow or like the historic civilizations that have traversed the region, yet the opposing



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dimensions of renewal and continuity are as strongly present in the images of England. These images the poet has established as he assumes his mature responsibility. The same interplay of loss and gain is there as the reader continues to read to the end of the volume in the Topographical Description. Before passing on to consider that major prose contribution, one more poem is worth consideration for its establishment of a climate of tradition and historical continuity. It is the dedication of the volume to Christopher Wordsworth, the poet's brother. In later reorganized collections, the dedication precedes the sonnet sequence. In 1820 it is in a pivotal position roughly half-way through the volume, like a finger post to the course that the reader is to follow, if he or she pursues the poems to the volume's end. The dedication begins with a domestic reminiscence. The poet is assumed to be writing at Christmas. The local carol singers have visited and their song reminds him of past festivals within the family of his childhood. His brother, now a career-prelate, comes to his mind. He is in a very different place, in Lambeth, removed in place, time and social setting from the rustic community of the Lake District. 5 The poet reminds himself of what they shared and what still pertains, at least in some favoured parts of the kingdom. The heart of the dedication is a hymn to tradition: Hail ancient Manners! sure defence, Where they survive, of wholesome laws; Remnants of love where modest sense Thus into narrow room withdraws, Hail, Usages of pristine mould And ye that guard them, Mountains old. (W. P., Ill, p. 245) A close look at the invocation and particularly at this verse shows that this is no simple retreat into rustic security. 'Defence', 'where they survive', 'Remnants of love' are the signs of the insecure culture that requires guardianship. The vulnerable locality deserves service, a fiduciary duty. The sonnets that begin the volume develop the image of the 'narrow room' of domesticity. The children at Cockley Beck, 'Wonderful' Walker's parish and his home life, the village people sharing their folk-tales on a stormy night - these are the old usages that, though still visible in the




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THE TOPOGRAPHICAL DESCRIPTION The Guide to the Lake District which completes the 1820 volume appeared in print for the first time in 1810 in virtually the same form. The Wordsworths were fairly disparaging about the engravings by Wilkinson which were the main reason for the 1810 publication, but the poet nevertheless addressed his task seriously and had even considered a companion volume to describe Snowdonia. 6 'The Description' (or Guide as it became known) in fact proved to be one of Wordsworth's best-selling works and continues to be published today. A separate edition, though only three years ahead, was not in Wordsworth's mind in 1819 as he prepared the Duddon sonnets series volume. Johnson, using the title of later separated editions, picks up this link between prose and poetry: 'The River Duddon requires A Guide for a sense of aesthetic completion in the same way, but for the opposite reasons, that The Wasteland benefits from the "Notes" appended to if (Johnson, 1973, p. 122). Wordsworth's own note goes further: the 'Description' will 'tend to alter' the poems. In what sense is the reader's perception of the poems changed? The answer, I believe, lies in the emphasis given to certain ways of understanding the natural world, discoverable in a reading of the Duddon sonnet sequence in particular, but also in a reading of the accompanying poems. The 'Description's' light shed on the verse that precedes it makes certain features prominent above the level at which they would be normally perceived by a reader who reads the Individual poems separately out of the context in which each first appeared in print. The most striking feature of the Topographical Description to a reader of other guide-books to the Lake District is its orderly, indeed near-scientific presentation. 'Scientific', used in the contemporary sense of the organization of ordered natural knowledge, is a word that was applied to the first edition of the piece. Dorothy Wordsworth writing in 1809 says 'It is the only regular and I may say scientific account of the present and past state and appearance of the country that has yet appeared' (W. L., II, p. 872). It should be



present, require protection. The journey down the Duddon in sympathy with its landscape and its people had endorsed the poet's guardian role.

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gradually emerging from this study that the reader is the focus of much of Wordsworth's later work. He set the tone of the Description by concentrating on the reader as a new tourist. His aim was to avoid the assumptions of late eighteenth-century guidebook writers (such as Grey, West and Green) that the tourist desired only to stand and receive sensations at appointed 'stations', admiring the picturesque with the aid of a Claude glass. Wordsworth's Description was designed to encourage 'habits of more exact and orderly description'. The opening of the 1820 version adopts the map-maker's perspective - from on top. In Switzerland, Wordsworth had admired a panoramic model of the Alps which presented overall patterns of mountains and valleys. 7 His own vantage point is one of fancy. He asks the reader to imagine a bird-like position on an imaginary line half-way between Great Gable and Scafell. The Lake District's elementary structure, an eroded dome with radiating valleys, is then laid out to view. The lakes lie in deep troughs radiating from the mountain hub like the spokes of a wheel. The Duddon valley is one of them. If the reader has already read the poems in the 1820 volume, he or she will recollect that the poem 'To —, on her first ascent to the summit of Helvellyn' has the same elevated perspective over the lakes and, in the internal eye, over the whole of the world. The contemporary reader would be further reminded that the Duddon sonnets are described in a similarly orderly geographical manner - the path of a river from source to sea (with geological intervention creating episodes of violent flow such as at Seathwaite). The geography of the Duddon is explicit, if the sonnets are read in sequence, and sequence and order are pursued in the description of its sister Lakeland valleys in the Description. The scientific tone is maintained, in our modern sense of the word, by the introduction of various items of specialist geological information. It has been assumed that Wordsworth borrowed this kind of technical material from the professional local geologist and guide Jonathan Otley. 8 There are some difficulties in accepting this explanation because of the sequence of when the two sources were written. Wordsworth's original Description appeared eight years before Otley's publication. Certainly, in later editions of what became A Guide, more technical terms like those used by Otley are introduced. The origin of the information matters less than the nature of the information Wordsworth wished his readers to consider.





The first chapter of the Description, as it is printed in the volume of poetry, is descriptive but also analytical. The characteristic shapes of the valleys with their steep sides and flat bases, the upland pastures and the sharp edges of the crags are described in the language register of the physical geographer analysing a landscape of glacial erosion (although fifteen or more years were to elapse before that explanation would be generally acceptable to the Fellows of the Geological Society of London). Wordsworth's description is scientific in the sense that he proposed a categorization of the shapes of the hills, a device based on the processes by which they came about: The soil is laid bare by torrents, and burstings of waters from the sides of the mountains in heavy rains; and not infrequently their perpendicular sides are seamed by ravines (formed also by rains and torrents) which, meeting in angular points, entrench and scar the surface with numerous figures like the letters 'W and Y'. (W. Prose, II, p. 175) Wordsworth in these passages is involved in how the erosion occurred as well as its outcome, in the same way that Otley or the more sophisticated geologist, Professor Adam Sedgwick, presented the scenery of the Lake District to those who had scientific interests. The basic distinction contemporary geologists were making in their analysis of mountain shapes - between those with smooth rounded edges and bulky outlines and those which are sharp-edged, craggy and precipitous - is also the categorization Wordsworth applies in his Description. There are specific geological identifications, for example schists and limestone are correctly identified and attention is drawn to the phenomenon of Floating Islands. More fundamental still is Wordsworth's knowledge of chemical erosion: The iron is the principle of decomposition in these rocks; and hence, when they become pulverised, the elementary particles crumbling down overspread in many places the steep and almost precipitous sides of the mountains with an intermixture of colours, for example, like the compound hues of a dove's neck. (W. Prose, II, pp. 175-6) Other writers (such as Kelley, 1988) have confirmed that Wordsworth was aware of current writing on the theory of the



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Earth. Certainly in his Description there is an unmistakable reference to the distinction between 'primary' or 'primitive' formations (such as the original mass of mountain and fell) and 'secondary processes' (the action of weathering) which soften the forms of the 'original' earth. The conclusion, that Wordsworth was aware that contemporary geology hypothesized a long period of earth history before the arrival of animal or human life, is unavoidable after reading the Description. The same long perspective on the history of the earth is also that of the Duddon sonnets where the poet-wanderer asks his reader to imagine a landscape before mankind arrived. Bate (1991) has drawn our attention to Wordsworth's consciousness of the environment and its vulnerability to change and destruction. The Lake District in his Guide is no longer a place for privileged aesthetic contemplation from vantage points, and certainly not a place where horror can be generated in a controlled manner as it had been in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. It is now an endangered landscape because of new house-building, the planting of unsuitable trees and the agricultural changes that disperse the yeoman farmers. This is a landscape of reality, but tempered with Fancy and literary and particularly classical allusions. The Description, like the poems that it accompanies, is written for a new audience, not the specialized, artistic drawing-room adventurer for whom Gray composed, but a knowledgeable, even scientifically aware new audience, partly urban but committed to rural values. Many were visitors, but a number, a significant number, became 'inmates' themselves and, like Coleridge and Southey in the first decade of the century, made their homes in the heart of the countryside where they had previously been occasional worshippers. The Description and the poems are written for a historically conscious reader. The second section of the work attends to the archaeological and historical associations aroused by the landscape. Certain key locations, almost icons of the Lake District past, are drawn to the reader's attention. Long Meg, the prehistoric standing stones, the Roman camps and the ancient houses appear in the Description, as they do in the Duddon sonnet sequence. More recent history, in the form of the enclosures and the takeover of small estates by rich developers, also has its place. The Description identifies the present environment as a successor to a vanished natural community. There is evidence of extinct beasts, such as the Leigh deer. Wordsworth is aware of the removal of the forests that once clothed all but the highest mountain ridges. The sense of an older,





lost landscape and a present threatened, vulnerable location sets the prevailing mood of the Description, reflecting that of the poems in the 1820 volume, that is when they are read as a continuous exercise. That mood is antithetical: decay shadowed by duration. Byatt (1970) describes this tension: 'It is an image again of eternity in charge and decay' (Byatt, 1970, p. 274). As we shall see in the next chapter, the same tension is an undertone of Dorothy Wordsworth's journal in the year when the family party visited Europe and the Alps. In that significant year, 1820, more benign winds of family fortune were to bless the Wordsworths. By 1820, the poet had achieved a readership which appeared to be secure and developing. His minor post in the local civil service provided a reliable income and the family had entered a phase of peace. The tragic family deaths of the first decade of the century had left wounds but they had healed. As they set out on the kind of continental excursion many middle-class intellectuals were undertaking, their thoughts were partly of their own past, particularly of Wordsworth's youthful visit to the Alps and to France. They also carried with them a sense of change, a sensitivity to European history which was to be further developed in their itinerary. This is the subject of the next collection of poems and of my next chapter. The reader of the 1820 volume who wishes to follow the poet's progress (the poetic and the physical) is prepared for the movement out of the homeland of the Lakes into Europe. The Duddon valley is an image of the preoccupation of all the itinerary poems with the ambiguity of continuity. Its destination is time-defined, for its streams link it not with the concurrent Lakeland heartland, but with historical London: In stately mien to sovereign Thames allied Spreading his bosom under Kentish downs, With commerce freighted or triumphant war. (W. P., Ill, p. 260) And yet... the attendant observer, the wanderer-poet, concludes the sequence with an infinite view. The river 'seeks that receptacle vast / where all his unambitious functions fail'. The real Duddon may be 'allied to [real] sovereign Thames', but it leads to a vaster mingling beyond space and time - with Eternity. The tensions of history and place are to be further explored next, but in Europe, not in the valleys of home.



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Memorials of a Tour, 1820: the Lessons of Europe To excavate the original publication of Memorials of a Tour, 1820 is a typical exercise in Wordsworthian archaeology. It was published as an individual volume in 1822, but informed the reader on its front page that it formed the fourth volume of a collection of miscellaneous poems. Within a year the collected edition (a three-volume edition) had been published in which the sequence of poems originally in Memorials had been disturbed by an excision, the removal of four poems, one of which never entered subsequent collections. 1 Memorials of a Tour, like the Duddon sonnet sequence, was written as a single piece of poetic composition. The circumstances of the writing are well recorded in the family letters. Memorials of a Tour appeared in print at the same time as The Ecclesiastical Sketches which had been the major poetical task after Wordsworth's return from the continent. Moorman's (1965) opinion of Memorials was that 'they are in fact the least interesting series of poems Wordsworth ever wrote' (Moorman, 1965, II, p. 402) and she suggested that the writing of Ecclesiastical Sketches had exhausted his powers. She exempted the 'Ode to Enterprise' from this criticism, finding 'a classical perfection of style and the beauty and originality of its images' (Moorman, 1965, II, p. 402). Whether or not Wordsworth was worn out, he certainly revived quickly enough to create the poems of Memorials in a very short time between November 1821 and the following March when they were published. During that winter of composition, Dorothy Wordsworth was writing her journal of their visit to Europe of 1820. Her brother was fully conscious of her efforts during his own composition as we know from notes accompanying the poem and from comments made after their publication. Initially, Wordsworth intended to produce notes to accompany his sister's 'Recollections'. In the event 'The Recollections' did not appear until after her death and 55 10.1057/9780230286214 - Wordsworth's Poems of Travel 1819-1842, John F. Wyatt


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Wordszvorth's Poems of Travel, 1819-42

the set of poems turned out to be much longer than a verse accompaniment to a journal. It is from our present position of advantage that we can reverse the original intention and read The Journal as an accompaniment to the poem sequence. (The convention of signifying Dorothy Wordsworth's 'Recollections' as The Journal will be observed in the following pages.) With the exception oi the weeks spent in Paris on the return journey, the accounts of places in The Journal and in the poems are parallel. As I shall note later, there is a correspondence of mood as well as of factual observation between them, not least in the ever-present recollection of William Wordsworth's tour as a young man over the Alpine section of the journey. There are interesting variations of emphasis between the prose account and the poetry which highlight the diverging path of creativity that William Wordsworth was taking in his later years. Dorothy Wordsworth's account gives the practical background of the arrangements for travelling. This was no youthful excursion, such as Wordsworth and his friend, Jones, had pursued on foot in 1792. The party was middle-aged, relatively well-off and as comfortable as it was possible to be on Europe's roads and in German, Swiss, Italian and French hotels in 1820. Furthermore, it was a travelling party, not a pair of travellers. In addition to the three Wordsworths (William, Mary and Dorothy), Thomas Monkhouse, his new wife, her sister and their maid accompanied them at least as far as the Swiss cities when Mrs Monkhouse rested. She then withdrew from the Alpine exertions. In Switzerland, they were joined by Henry Crabb Robinson and his servant, adding an experienced linguist to the party. There were other travelling companions from time to time, notably a young man who was to die by drowning shortly after he and his friend left the Wordsworths' party, an event which inspired a poem in the sequence. In Paris and in Boulogne, the party met other friends and close acquaintances of distant times, such as Annette Vallon and Wordsworth's natural daughter. The party's mode of travel was varied: rented coaches and river boats through Belgium and Germany, 'char-a-bangs' and mules in Switzerland and Northern Italy, and coaches again in France. Finally, the return Channel crossing, from Boulogne to Dover, nearly ended in disaster as the ferry caught on a sandbank from which the Wordsworths and other passengers had to be rescued. The itinerary of this vacation is as strongly maintained in Memorials as in The Journal, although Dorothy recorded the fine detail of inns, the hospitality (or lack of it) of local people and local customs.



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The journey, though traditional in the sense of being pursued over what for many British travellers were familiar, conventional routes, provided personal experiences and anecdotes. Incidents which became poems, such as the meeting with an Italian itinerant salesman in the Southern Alps, the tragic death of the young American who had travelled for a short time with the poet's party, the occasion of the eclipse of the sun near Lake Lugano, are related as highly individual experiences, inspired perhaps in tranquillity by the sister's Journal and, to a lesser extent, by Mary Wordsworth's briefer written accounts. The poet's individual response to the shared, recorded experience is as marked an element of this presentation of the communal tour as are the careful choices of metre or of rhyme. Mention of two notable features of Memorials, metre and rhyme, brings me to the technical way in which Memorials were gathered and presented. Whereas in other collections from the period of his later life, Wordsworth simply chose the vehicle of the sonnet sequence, in Memorials of 1820 there is as great a variety of verse forms as can be found in the rest of Wordsworth collections. Certainly sonnets provide the main core of the collection, but, as in The Lyrical Ballads, the poet demonstrates the range of his art. After the first nine sonnets, there is a marked break provided by the fourverse, 'Hymn of Boatmen at Heidelberg'. Seven poems further on, in 'Scene on the Lake of Brienz', there is a 17-line piece in couplets, followed by a 19-line piece (Engelberg) and a seven-stanza poem, 'Our Lady of the Snow'. The twentieth poem (in our modern numbered collection), 'Effusion', is composed of three stanzas elaborately rhymed. Longer poems, each with varied stanza forms and rhyme schemes, occur more frequently in the second half of Memorials, with a remarkable 'Ode to Enterprise', in the same form as Wordsworth's 'Ode on Immortality', with varied length of verse stanzas and a pattern of rhyme changing between stanza and stanza. As Gill (1989) has commented, the poet who, in a hidden way, experimented with ease in his youth, continued to extend his skills by exercising his poetic craft in his maturity and old age.

THE 'ODE TO ENTERPRISE' The relatively long ode which subsequently became detached from the main body of Memorials deserves attention as a doorway to



Memorials of a Tour, 1820: the lessons of Europe


understanding the nature of Wordsworth's poetic creation at this period. Wordsworth later claimed that his Ode was stimulated by an episode on the travellers' journey involving a meeting with an Italian traveller who had sold his wares in England and returned to Switzerland to retire and to re-establish a mountain home for his family. The incident is the subject of one of the poems in Memorials as well as being recorded at length in Dorothy Wordsworth's Journal. Paired with a contrasting experience, the discovery of a little boy with goats as companions in the darkness of an old, decaying shed, the poem 'The Italian Itinerant and the Swiss Goatherd' is a strange combination of two thoughts on human endeavour, one the experienced travelling salesman, confident and outgoing, the other, the little boy, shy and withdrawn, locally rooted and untravelled. The poem ends with a conventional prayer that the 'morn of life' will receive its 'natural blessedness' in another context than in the recent wars waged for liberty or than the actions of heroes and patriots. The 'Ode to Enterprise' pursues a very different theme. Its verse preamble traces the ancestry of Enterprise (by Ambition out of Hope, nursed by Fancy). In the youth of the world, the poet imagines that Enterprise is free and youthful, living by the Euphrates, a demi-god, surviving as a Middle Eastern hunter-gatherer. The poem next considers modern times. Wordsworth traces Enterprise in action, and, in so doing, presents a set of ideal early nineteenthcentury Romantic Europeans of remarkable variety - the young warrior, aspirant men, the boy-sailor up in the shrouds, the chamois hunter with his sure-footed skill. The poem then becomes remarkably up to date. Two types of contemporary adventurer, balloonists and underwater explorers, are praised: 2 And hast Thou not with triumph seen How soaring Mortals glide between Or through the clouds, and brave the light With bolder than Icarian flight? How they, in bells of crystal, dive Where winds and waters cease to strive For no unholy visitings, Among the monsters of the Deep; - Within our fearless reach are placed The secrets of the burning Waste;



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(W. P., II, pp. 282 and 283) Enterprise is not only intellectual and scientific in its intentions, it is closely related to political ends. It is Enterprise which can restore a 'prostrate Nation', through the agency of a single heroic individual. By a typical Wordsworthian shift, a kind of reversal of confidence, the poem then turns to the tyrants of the world whose Enterprise is activated by the god of war, 'Dread Minister of Wrath'. 'The Pharaohs of the earth, the men of hardened heart' lead their peoples into desolation. The references to Napoleon are obvious: An Army now, and now a living hill That a brief while heaves with convulsive throes Then all is still; Or, to forget their madness and their woes, Wrapt in a winding-sheet of spotless snows! (W .P., II, p. 284) The final stanzas descend from the larger spheres of history, where youthful players make their mark, to the immediate, the ageing poet's own role. He invokes the demi-god to beat in the hearts of a 'veteran few' whose thoughts, in their maturity, are compared to a stark landscape: That to their object cleave like sleet Whitening a pine tree's northern side, When fields are naked far and wide, And withered leaves, from earth's cold breast Up-caught in whirl winds, nowhere can find rest. (W. P., II, p. 285) Specifically, Enterprise's modest, 'contented Votary' has tasks. They are to encourage by lessons drawn from gentle, natural forces such as the lamb's cry, the sound of the breeze and the song of the nightingale.



Egyptian tombs unlock their dead; Nile trembles at his fountain head; Though speak'st - and lo! The polar Seas Unbosom their last mysteries.

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(Freedom's impregnable redoubt, The wide earth's storehouse fenced about With breakers roaring to the gales That stretch a thousand thousand sails) (W. P., II, p. 285) This remarkable ode includes many of the themes that individually are conveyed by other poems in Memorials. If the Ode is read in its original place in the sequence, the essential burden of these itinerary poems (and of the other itinerary poems of the later years) emerge. They are: an urgent sense of patriotism, a sense of historic destiny and, combined with a sense of the moment when history is being made, a registering of mutability and of the tension of decay and renewal. There is also a growing concern, underlined by the poet's own interest in ageing, to set life's experience in the context of religious belief.

TO TRAVEL IS TO CONFIRM THE EXPERIENCE OF ENGLAND The perspective of the travel poems is established by the opening poems just as it is by the first diary entries of Dorothy Wordsworth's Journal. It is that of an outside observer. This is tourist poetry and tourist travel writing, observing the notoriously ugly fishwives of Calais, regretting the partiality of glimpses of scenery as the coach races up the Rhine Valley, observing strange customs such as the Roman Catholic religious observances. In the twenty-second poem, the poet remembers hearing the ancient Swiss mountain song the 'Ranz des Vaches'. Traditionally reminding the exiled Swiss of home, the song calls the poet to think of his own distant home. By poem XXIV, 'The Eclipse of the Sun, 1820', the note of homesickness is again sounded. The darkening landscape frees the poet's imagination at first to visit the pinnacles of the Gothic cathedral of Milan, but Fancy does not remain in Europe. As light begins to return to the Italian landscape, imagination takes a longer flight.



Finally, the spirit of Enterprise is called upon to focus on one place, the British Isles. In a patriotic effusion, Wordsworth praises his own country:

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O ye, who guard and grace my home While in far-distant lands we roam What countenance hath this Day put on for you? While we look round with favoured eyes, Did sullen visits hide lakes and skies And mountains from your view? (W. P., Ill, p. 186) The final stanzas rhetorically ask if the poet's home has been spared 'sickness, sorrow, or distress'. His own lack of news from home is proving to be like an eclipse (a 'sad blindness'), but it is also a test of his trust that those left behind will carry out their domestic responsibilities and triumph over adversities, despite his absence. This is not in any sense a poem written on the immediate occasion of an eclipse. It may be an excellent example of 'emotion recollected in tranquillity' since both the Journal and the poems were written after the return to England. It is a reconstruction of sensation composed in the security of home which the poet briefly imagined had been vulnerable, yet there is a sense of remembered feeling quite unlike the recollections associated with Wordsworth's early poetry. As Curran remarks about the 1820 tour, it is 'a series that by its very notion distances us from the inner life of the poef (Curran, 1986, p. 59). The final set of itinerary poems continues to refer to England and to the end of the circular journey. In poem XXX ('Stanzas composed in the Simplon Pass') there is a consonance with the poem of the eclipse. Again, the poet thinks at first of distant prospects. In the eclipse he and his Fancy flew to Milan; in the Simplon he thinks of the famous Italian cities he has not visited, Naples, Pompeii, Florence and Rome. The Simplon is a turning point in the journey - a moment of turning northwards and homewards, and indeed the last verse raises the longing for home: As we rest in the cool orange-bower side by side, A yearning survives which few hearts shall withstand: Each step has its value while homeward we move O joy when the girdle of England appears! What moment in life is so conscious of love, Of love in the heart made more happy by tears? (W. P., Ill, p. 190)





Faith in the certainty of England is paraded in the final verses, not least in the strongly patriotic 'On being stranded near the harbour of Boulogne' (XXXV). This is a nationalistic poem par excellence. Wordsworth poetically chides the 'furious waves' which 'cast ye back upon the Gallic shore' and impeded his return to England. He stoutly reminds the French port of the failures of England's conqueror 'the Corsican his cap and bells / Haughtily shake, a dreaming Conqueror!' (W. P., Ill, p. 197). The next sonnet is dedicated to the moment of return to Dover. The news of English difficulties and follies (perhaps the trial of Queen Caroline), had reached him overseas, but at Dover he thinks of none of these affairs, only of the traditional English pastoral peace. The fined sonnet (XXXVII, 'At Dover') was added much later in 1837 but is not out of tune with its preceding sonnet. It effectively repeats the famed sonnet of 1802 'On Westminster Bridge' praising the urban stillness, but on this occasion the quietness of rural Kent is contrasted with the turmoil of the Continent. To understand the patriotic closure of the poetic sequence, we must remember the publishing context of Memorials. The preceding Ecclesiastical Sketches in many ways might be considered the transformation of the Wordsworths' European tour into a political/historical (and, of course, religious) message. The image of a river drives that earlier sequence of sonnets which traced the development of European Christendom. The great Rhine was readily present in Wordsworth's memory. In the twelfth sonnet of Part II of the sequence the reference to the recent European visit is explicit: Down a swift Stream, thus far, a bold design Have we pursued, with livelier stir of heart Than his who sees, borne forward by the Rhine, The living landscapes greet him and depart; Sees spires fast sinking - up again to start! (W. P., Ill, p. 390) The same image of the ail-too rapid transit of visual experiences for the traveller is found in Memorials in Sonnet IX and in the (later displaced) poem, 'The Author's Voyage down the Rhine (Thirty years Ago)'. The point here is not to trace close connections between the two sequences written within the same period, but to identify



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the shared energy of this period of Wordsworth's life that impelled both publications. Displayed here is a powerful surge of confidence in the role, not only of his country in Europe, but also in that country's ecclesiastical leadership of Christendom. The Ecclesiastical Sketches are an elaborated argument, sustaining religious directionalism. Christendom marches forward in a divinely intended progression, a turbulent development, but nevertheless an advancing, improving state of civilization. Simultaneously, the geologists and biologists of the time were persuading themselves and their readers that their studies of fossils, stratigraphy and evolution confirmed that a Divine Will was demonstrable in Nature. Wordsworth turned to the history of Europe to demonstrate that a destiny had prepared the way for the English political system supported by the English Church. His own glorious country, although a part of European Christendom, was conveniently detached and aloof from the Continent's error-ridden history. The Ecclesiastical Sketches map the ebbs and flows of Christian progress. In Memorials some of the same ecclesiastical material is reused - the seventh and eighth sonnets purport to be composed before Charlemagne's throne at Aix-la-Chapelle and in the cathedral at Cologne. Significantly both sonnets are poems about halfcomplete and ultimately inadequate ends. Charlemagne's throne does not impress the traveller: Why does this puny Church present to view Her feeble columns: and that scanty chair! (W. P., Ill, p. 168) The poet would prefer a more momentous symbol of Christendom's might. Using an account from a well-thumbed travel guide, Ramond de Carbonniere's adaptation of Coxe's Travels in Switzerland in a Series of Letters (1789), Wordsworth's vision reaches out to the deep cleft in the Pyrenees, a giant stroke by Roland's sword in his Romantic defence of Europe. Cologne Cathedral is an unfinished edifice, because the continent does not provide the level of leadership Christianity requires. To complete the grand design of the Cathedral, the poet has to invoke angel craftsmen. Fancy is the finisher. Although in Church matters Europe can only prepare the way for the leadership of England, political history offers good examples of





European liberty fiercely defended and preserved, notably recorded in the Swiss section of the journey. The Alpine recesses become icons of freedom and independence and their cantons' heroes stand for the rejection of tyranny. So in Poem XX the poet is moved by memories of his visit to the painted tower where William Tell is supposed to have been tested in the famous episode of shooting at an apple on his son's head. Interestingly enough it is not Tell who receives highest acclaim, but 'that sweet Boy' who is one of the best souls 'who when their trials come / Yield not to terror or despondency' (W. P., Ill, p. 177). Next, the town of Schwyz is praised in a sonnet commemorating its many years of independence. The twenty-fourth poem, 'The Church of San Salvador, seen from the Lake of Lugano', was one of Wordsworth's own favourite poems. Again William Tell appears, for this beautiful place is where he sought refuge and renewal. The climax of the poem is in praise of Arnold Winkelried, a hero of Swiss wars of independence. Switzerland serves both as an emblem of Europe emerging from tyranny in the past and as a reminder of political crises of the present.

A PRESENCE OF HISTORY A presence of history pervades Memorials in another sense: we have to reconstruct the sensations of travellers, and particularly of travellers from the United Kingdom travelling in Europe in 1820, five years after the Battle of Waterloo. The interval between the ending of Napoleonic domination and the Wordsworths' excursion through Switzerland and France was brief. Although Napoleon had been securely removed from the Continent, his long shadow is cast over what had been his demesne, in both the poetic accounts and in Dorothy Wordsworth's Journal. If anything conveys the effect of close contact, indeed of intertextuality with another literary work at a period of creative activity, it is the similarity of mood between the sense of recent history in The Journal and in the poems of the Memorials. Dorothy Wordsworth's account of the Alps is concerned at two levels with the obliteration of former landscapes. One we shall consider later in this chapter is the macro-level of Nature's own physical appearance, the sense of physical decay and renewal. The other is smaller scale, local and historical. Dorothy Wordsworth creates an archaeology of routeways, removed by rapidly changing events, literally overridden by Napoleon's invasion.



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Hamlets and single huts not far asunder: no thought of dreariness crossed my mind, yet a pensiveness was spread over the long valley where year by year, the same simple enjoyments go on in succession, and where the tempests of winter are patiently endured, and thoughtfully guarded against. Such feelings often accompanied me through this remote valley. (D. W. /., II, pp. 130 and 131) The daily life of the Swiss peasant may continue as though Napoleon and his army had never been, but the radical changes in routeways accelerated by the invasion and the resulting economic thirst of unquenchable tourism are regularly recorded. More than a passing note is taken of new roads. The Wordsworth family always experienced travel on foot whenever they could, so there is a frequent and detailed enumeration of the old traditional routes as well as their replacement by new more direct roads. Sections of the party, Dorothy and Mary in particular, leave the charabanc or the mules and attempt to follow the old trackways. Sometimes they are defeated by the steepness of the slope or by the erosion of glacially fed rivers. Sometimes they find a quietness and seclusion on the old trackway, which the relatively busy military road no longer possesses. From time to time The Journal records formidable feats of engineering, evidence of dynamited rocks or of laboriously levelled stretches on the mountainside. At other times, there is the mark of destruction and vandalism. The Journal portrays a damaged environment, chiefly ruined by war, but also by excess tourist interest. In the section on the return journey through France there are other evidences of the swath cut by violent historical times. Dorothy notes at intervals the unfinished business of the French Revolution and its wars - the former priest begging for food and clothing by the roadside, the French peasants who assert how much better off they were before the Revolution. The Journal is a document about people reawakening from a long struggle, and a once prosperous country bearing scars of experience. Elizabeth Bohls (1995) brings out the tensions in Dorothy Wordworth's travel journal in Scotland between the observer's detachment and the sense of closeness,



In one sense the life of Switzerland has continued despite the invasion by this powerful agency of change. The Journal muses on unchangeableness mixed with 'pensiveness' as if a remnant of ante-bellum life were lingering:


particularly to human suffering. The same 'divided task', to use Bohl's term, is evident in this European account. William Wordsworth's Memorials soon draw the reader's attention to the same erosion of landscape and peaceful culture by war, but the history is more explicit and more politically oriented than in The Journal. The fifth poem, a sonnet, 'After visiting the field of Waterloo', is a contemplation of the recovery of Nature after the major battle of European history. It is a sonnet which turns away from glorification of war to a solemn recording of loss and damage. The poet first invokes the 'winged Goddess' of war with her classical garlands of reward for the victory, then dismisses her: She vanished; leaving prospect blank and cold Of wind-swept corn that wide around us rolled In dreary billows, wood and meagre cot, And monuments that soon must disappear. The sonnet ends with the dissipation of patriotism and the final sensation of human horror 3 at the result of war: ... we felt as men should feel With such vast hoards of hidden carnage near; And horror breathing from the silent ground (W. P., Ill, p. 167) The mood is dispelled or perhaps redeemed by the next stage of the journey, portrayed by the following sonnet, 'Between Namur and Liege'. Here fought-over and famously defended territory is now a scene of peace with 'a sweet prospect' of what were once defensive emplacements 'like old monastic turrets'. Then the theme of war marches on to the sonnet referred to already about Charlemagne's capital of Aix-la-Chapelle, ending not with a modern hero, but with a mythical figure that had redeemed Europe. The poetic journey progresses into Switzerland where there are considerable opportunities for holding up the figure of Bonaparte to shame. The fourteenth poem is dedicated to the patriot, Aloys Reading, who, as it says in the author's preliminary notes, 'opposed the flagitious and too successful attempts of Bonaparte to subjugate their country' (W. P., Ill, p. 172). The town of Schwyz (XXI) is the next to be extolled for its history of freedom, with the footnote



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comment on the French breach of a long-held secure peace. Two poems further on, 'Fort Fuentes', considers the ruin of a great house 'upheaved by war's sulpherous blast' (W. P., Ill, p. 179). As a symbol of innocence destroyed, a stone cherub is discovered tumbled in the weeds of the garden. Nature has commenced her healing act on this vestige of broken order: Now gads the wild vine o'er the pathless ascent; O silence of Nature, how deep is thy sway, When the whirlwind of human destruction is spent, Our tumults appeased, and our strifes passed away! (W. P., Ill, p. 179) The closeness of this passage to the inspiration of The Journal is acknowledged in the preliminary note to the poem. I have already referred to the powerful verses in 'Ode to Enterprise' which record the failures of Napoleon in Egypt and in Russia. The narrative of Memorials records the return through the Alps and it is at the point where Switzerland is re-entered, at the Simplon Pass, that the ghost of Bonaparte is again raised and held up as a dreadful example of pride and arrogance. The twenty-ninth poem is 'The column intended by Bonaparte for a triumphal edifice in Milan, now lying by the way-side in the Simplon Pass', a sonnet with immediate concentration on the obvious symbol of defeated 'Pride oerthrown'. The final four lines of the sonnet raise the memory of suffering in modern war: The Soul transported sees, from hint of thine, Crimes which the great Avenger's hand provoke, Hears combats whistling o'er the ensanguined heath: What groans! What shrieks! What quietness in death! (W. P., Ill, p. 189) This sonnet begins, as it were in the eighteenth-century mode of taking an object as a monument for an abstraction, a personification of a vice meeting its just rewards, but ends in the poetry of experience of suffering. The poet has re-engaged with the effects of war that he felt on visiting the fields of Waterloo at the start of his tour.





The thirty-second poem presents a longer time-span of history. 'Processions: suggested on a sabbath morning in the vale of Chamouny' is one of the most disturbed poems in Memorials. The processions of believers to the Swiss church remind the poet of the history of those who have worshipped through long ages. The pageants of the Hebrews, the pagan rites of North Africa, the rituals of the people who lived before the flood, the Roman festivals were succeeded by Christian rites. Here the poem might have ended as an affirmation of the achievement of Christianity at the culmination of the predestined journey of humanity. In fact, it progresses to a less confident conclusion: Still in the vivid freshness of a dream, The pageant haunts me as it met our eyes! The haunting vision is stimulated not by the sense of suffering humanity but by the effect or contrast of nature. The white hoods of the people in procession are like the strange blanched shapes of glacial ice-peaks on the edge of the mountain valleys. The poet says he trembles as he considers 'that licentious craving in the mind / To act the God among external things' (W. P., Ill, p. 193). What does this 'acting the God' refer to? It appears to be the dangerous capacity 'to crowd the world with metamorphosis', to seek Fancyled similarities between objects in the world (such as the glaciers or the objects linked to ecclesiastical beliefs). 'Fable's dark abyss' (presumably the content of the opening verses) is to be avoided.. This kind of History can lead the faithful astray. Hard, realistic and more recent history returns in the final poem of Memorials. 'The Corsican' with 'his cap and bells' may threaten England but the poet knows that his country has 'checked ambition, tyranny controlled'. The long turbulent history of Europe has been experienced in the tour, summed up and left behind with relief, as the poet has returned to peace and security in his own country.

A DEEPER SENSE OF HISTORY - THE EARTH'S The Journal and Memorials are at one level a kind of contemporary journalism of a world at a crux of change after a violent war.. Change at a deeper level and in a different dimension also



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pervades the two works. The sense of duration and decay strongly felt in Dorothy Wordsworth's Journal are mirrored but transformed in her brother's poems. A striking passage, recording sensations of long-term change balanced by permanence, is to be found in Dorothy Wordsworth's Journal where she records her experiences at the heart of the Alps: No spectacle that I ever beheld - not even the ocean itself - has had an equal power over my mind in bringing together thoughts connected with duration and decay - eternity and perpetual wasting - the visible and invisible power of God and nature. (D. W./., II, p. 286) The theme of vying powers of destruction and renewal is not merely the conventional response of the first sight of the sublime Alps. The journey had deeper, biographical meanings for brother and sister. In the first place it was a kind of pilgrimage, a celebration of renewal and return to youth - a reunion with the journey on foot undertaken by William in 1790. One of the aims of that distant tour is echoed in the 1820 Journal in its first pages: 'it being the object of our ambition to cross the Alps on foot.' (D. W. /., II, p. 7). Another journey to the Continent is also evoked, this time Dorothy's own first visit to Europe in 1798. A rerun of the past creates tensions of opposing feelings, sometimes of compensation: ... whatever change, tending to melancholy, twenty years might have produced, they had called forth the capacity of enjoying the sight of ancient buildings to which my youth was, comparatively, a stranger. (D. W. /., II, p. 7) The first glimpse of the Rhine reassures her of her own unchanging emotions: T felt as much of the glad eagerness of hope as when I first visited the Wye, and all the world was fresh and new' (D. W. /., II, p. 38). Bruges represents a further example of duration in a longer timescale. The people hurry to church as their predecessors would have done two hundred years ago 'The streets bearing no stamp of progress or decay' (D. W. J., II, p. 18). Cologne Cathedral, however, is a monument to the folly of man-made permanence. The





Cathedral's ruins are saved ('yet ruins they are not') by Nature's 'ornaments' completing the unfinished work of the builders. Switzerland and its approaches provide the most dramatic examples of destruction but also a vision of awe-inspiring duration. The Falls of Schaffhausen, already described so well for Dorothy by Archdeacon Coxe's (or Ramond's) Guide, make for sublime feelings, a sense of danger and even vertigo, but (and here again we see a qualification of terror) 'it was not fear' and 'that was soon over'. In the midst of the most awesome sounds and sights of destruction, there is a sense of eternity - a perpetual destruction of an uplifting kind: While I lay on my bed, the terrible solitudes of the Wetterhorn were revealed to me by fits - its black chasms, and snowy and dark grey summits. All night and all day and for ever, the vale of Meiringen is sounding with torrents. (D. W. J., II, p. 132) The very activity of travelling is another reminder of the dimensions of the lasting and the transitory. In the final pages of The Journal, Dorothy Wordsworth reflects on her role as voyager: 'Here we were but passengers of a day. There we must live and die.' The home country is the closest in earthly life to permanence. These passages of opposing forces at work, both in nature and human life, are repeated only in two sequences in Memorials and changed in the process. In one sense the first sonnets do concentrate on time - the immutability of Bruges in twilight, the vestiges of medieval Aix-la-Chapelle or Cologne Cathedral - but it is in the ninth sonnet that we first hear the sound of racing time. The mood engendered in 'In a carriage, upon the banks of the Rhine' is strangely the reverse of the conventional sense of invigoration arising from the sensation of speed. The sonnet is worth quoting entire because much leads from it: Amid this dance of objects sadness steals O'er the defrauded heart - while sweeping by, As in a fit of Thespian jollity, Beneath her vine-leaf crown the green Earth reels: Backwards, in rapid evanescence, wheels The venerable pageantry of time, Each beetling rampart, and each tower sublime,



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And what the Dell unwillingly reveals Of lurking cloistral arch, through trees espied Near the bright River's edge. Yet why repine? To muse, to creep, to halt at will, to gaze Such sweet way-faring - of life's spring the pride, Her summer's faithful joy - that still is mine And in fit measure cheers autumnal days. (W. P., Ill, p. 169) The inebriated backward rush of place and time is an illusion of travel - or is it? Is the personal hastening of the years too closely paralleled by the passing vestiges of antiquity for the comfort of the traveller? The final quartet of the sonnet attempts some control by listing the personal changes of life in an orderly sequence. Each age has its rewards from travel, so long as its pace is dignified and controlled, 'to muse, to creep, to halt at will, to gaze - / S u c h sweet way-faring'. Control over sweeping pace of change is addressed in the next poem in the sequence, 'Hymn for the boatmen, as they approach the rapids under the castle of Heidelberg', a fervent prayer directed for assistance as the rapid flow of the river increases. Then, in the next three poems we are presented again with alternating speeds. First 'the Source of the Danube' praises the springing to life of the great trans-continental river: 'Not ... indignantly / Doth Danube spring to life' and Fancy with the spread of a 'moment's flight' imagines its exit into the Black Sea. The bewitching sounds of the musical beggars near the 'sky-born, Waterfall' in Sonnet XII draws attention away from the disturbing, destructive noise of the falls of Staub-Bach. The thirteenth sonnet is one of reconciliation and calmness. Although the river appears to hurl itself over a great drop (this image of a falling body is directly lifted from The Journal), the poet directs our eye to the flowers persisting along the edge, fed by the spray. The observer can recover from the force and speed with these visions - 'gradually, a calmer look bestowing'. The theme of the passage of time which is traced so consistently in the Duddon sonnets series is apparent once more in Memorials in the summary verses, 'The Desultory Stanzas'. In a mood of recollection, the poet's vision returns to the highest point of the tour. Once more the device of flying appears. Fancy takes the poet above the highest Alps. In the third verse, there is a clear textual





borrowing from Dorothy Wordsworth's Journal musings transience and permanence:

on

Where Mortal never breathed I dare to sit Among the interior Alps, gigantic crew, Who triumphed o'er diluvian power! - and yet What are they but a wreck and residue, Whose only business is to perish! - true To which sad course, these wrinkled Sons of Time Labour their proper greatness to subdue; Speaking of death alone, beneath a clime Where life and rapture flow in plenitude sublime. (W. P., Ill, p. 199) The idea of destruction is best appreciated from this imaginary position of advantage looking along the valley of the Rhone, over Monte Rosa and the Jungfrau on to the peaks at the head of the Valais. The images of destruction, unlike those of The Journal, are not balanced by instances of permanence. A verse on the history of the Swiss struggle for freedom suggests a lack of change: 'Let Empires fall; but ne'er shall he disgrace / Your noble birthright'. It is, however, a temporary reassurance, for ultimately it is Time that halts the idea of destruction and closes the poem, bringing the sequence of Memorials to an end. Time's passage is compared again to a rapidly backward spinning movement, as in the sonnet 'In a carriage, upon the banks of the Rhine': Life slips from underneath us, like that arch Of airy workmanship, whereon we stood or as in the 1822 version: Life slips from underneath us, like the floor Of that wide rainbow-arch whereon we stood. (W. P., Ill, p. 201) It would be simple to suggest that the theme of decay tempered by duration has changed between the Duddon sonnet sequence and Memorials because of the exhaustion of an imaginative theme.



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THE RELIGIOUS TRAVELLER Dorothy Wordsworth's Journal is not usually classifiable as a book of religious devotion, yet her observation of religions or religious belief and forms of worship occupies much of the notes of travel. It would have been unusual if a travel account written by a perceptive, well-read Englishwoman did not identify the different religious observances of the Catholic continent. A Protestant traveller had, however, to put aside prejudice temporarily at least in order to observe and to document, as well as to react with amused interest to the unusual or even the charming in strange rituals. Dorothy Wordsworth does not neglect the picturesque in strange and exotic devotions. Often the observations are literally from the arts. Her landlady and her two children are seen in their Sunday best - 'that might have been taken down from a picture some hundred years old' (D. W. /., II, p. 168). Earlier, at the ruins in Cologne Cathedral, her language is also from the register of visual art: ... while Nature has made her own ornaments framed in imitation of her works, having overspread them with her colouring, and blended them with the treasures of lonely places. (D. W. /., II, p. 42) At Coblenz the sacred music in the cathedral and the traditional costume remind her of 'Flemish masters'. Dorothy Wordsworth is attracted to the picturesqueness of continental religion, but has little sympathy for Roman Catholicism in its worst shape. The untidy priests and their desultory way of conducting services contrast with the simple devotion of the peasant worshipper. Her attention to religion, in short, is that of a self-confident outsider, but it is not that of an outsider to religious experience. The reader is made fully aware of her own stable beliefs.



I believe that there is another explanation for the different key to the playing of the tune of Time in Memorials. It is that in 1823 Wordsworth is more concerned to absorb Time along with other dimensions of the human passage of life into a newly forming religious belief.


William Wordsworth's attention to matters of faith and worship is more complicated. Where Dorothy is clear about her feelings, both aesthetic and religious, William is at times ambiguous, at times devout and occasionally fearful. A number of unsure poems in Memorials particularly deserve attention. The epilogue poem, 'Desultory Stanzas', was attached to the travel series as an 'envoi' just before publication. We have looked at this poem from the point of view of its sense of change and the wide sweep of its geographical vision. It is also a commentary on religious matters. Indeed it was suggested as a theme by Henry Crabb Robinson who drew Wordsworth's attention to the feelings they had shared about the busy movement of people on the bridge of Lucerne - 'a whole cycle of religious and civic sentiments' (W. P., Ill, p. 488). The poet, it will be remembered, is transported by Fancy to a master point of vision and so scans the Alps and their busy foothills and valleys. Both human activity and Nature are spread out for his scrutiny. As Crabb Robinson had suggested, the themes of political freedom and ancient religious belief come to the poet's mind as well as the geographical panorama. The interconnection of faith and antiquity of worship enters the poetic sequence as early as the two sonnets on Bruges. It is a city transformed by the 'Spirit of Antiquity', but it is not secular history that springs to mind. The language is from the religious sphere: 'devout solemnities', 'consecrated ground', 'Mounts to the seat of grace within the mind' (W. P., Ill, p. 165). The (later) addition of the poem 'Incident of Bruges' endorses the link between religion and locality. Patriotism and local loyalty is, however, not enough. The next poem turns to Waterloo and then the battlements of towns between Namur and Liege where territory and ownership had been bloodily disputed. Here too religious language prevails over war and nationality. The battlements remind the poet of monastic turrets. As the journey progresses, Wordsworth seizes the opportunity for a directly religious poem. The 'Hymn of Boatmen at Heidelberg' is the first in a short sequence of poems with religious themes. The next in sequence, about the Danube, is a hymn of praise for the river's religious generosity: it 'loves the cross, yet to the crescent unfolds a willing breast' (W. P., Ill, p. 170). A similar spirit of openness about religious belief pervades 'Composed in one of the Catholic Cantons', followed, in the seventeenth poem of Memorials, 'Scene on the Lake of Brienz', by a relaxed and



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fanciful allusion to the music of Angels, stimulated by a group of singers on the lake:

(W. P., Ill, p. 174) The shifts of mood from poem to poem in a sequence, something of a hallmark of the later Wordsworth, can be glimpsed in a clear example of a reversal of confidence. The nineteenth poem, 'Our Lady of the Snow', follows an assured and lightly handled set of poems, where the tone is charitable about forms of worship that might be deemed by English Protestants as superstitious. The poet plays with visual images to endorse religious musings, as in the eighteenth poem, 'Engelberg, the Hill of Angels'. Here there is a deliberate expressed conceit, imagining the clouds to be singing angels round the Alpine peaks. Nature is involved with Fancy in a device to suppress superstition: 'For gentlest uses, oft-times Nature takes / The work of fancy from her willing hands' in order to render 'spells and magic wands' unnecessary. Immediately, almost as if provoked by the stimulus of the words 'spells and wands', the poem that follows flows into troubled moods and contradictions. Its subject is the status of Our Lady of Sorrows on Mount Rigi. The faithful supplicants' offerings tell of 'unrelieved hope'. The mood of the passing traveller is dominated by the very name of the statue. He is pursued in his journey onward by 'a tender sense of shadowy fear'. He turns to the actual world and finds in the lowland pastures something more gratifying - a reconciliation with Nature, softening the harsh severity of the upper peaks where the Virgin's statue stands. This softer aspect of Nature is itself ambiguous. The image used to portray the lowland pasture is not a natural image, but one from art or craft, an artifice, like the statute of the Virgin - 'a flower-enamelled glade' (W. P., Ill, pp. 175/6). The sequence of poems closes down at this point on the conflicts contained within religious belief, in a spectrum from superstition closely related to nature through simple natural belief to mature and generous faith. The next few poems turn away to political matters, to the patriotic issues already described. Patriotism and religion in Memorials are never quite separated and so by the twenty-fourth poem 'The Church of San Salvador', there



What knew we of the blest above But that they sing and that they love

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Cliffs, Fountains, rivers, seasons, times. Let all remind the soul of heaven; Our slack devotion needs them all And Faith - so oft of sense the thrall, While she by aid of Nature, climbs May hope to be forgiven. (W. P., Ill, p. 180) Nature, the poem continues, is the mould of the patriot heroes. Tell and Winkelried assume a saintly role. During the Italian section of the journey the family visited Milan and respectfully viewed Leonardo's painting of the Last Supper.. Standing before the masterpiece the poet records a moment of religious awe. In the twenty-seventh poem about the eclipse a similar 'moment' is experienced, but now directed by Nature. The poet's mind is freed in the dark to wander over the North Italian Plain and even to reach out to Rydal Mount. Religious images predominate and there is a reminder of the Fall. The poem's conclusion is about Divine providence: Our faith in Heaven's unfailing love And all - controlling power (W. P., Ill, p. 186) Confident though that conclusion is, the mood of certainty disappears in the following poem and the ambiguity of the experience of what appears to be innocent and pleasurable returns. 'The Three Cottage Girls' is superficially a poem about youthful beauty and innocence, but there is threat and dread in the depiction: Blithe Paragon of Alpine grace, Be as thou art - for through thy veins The blood of Heroes runs its race! And nobly wilt thou brook the chains That, for the virtuous, Life prepares;



is a return to religious themes, with a hymn of reconciliation between Nature and Faith:


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The fetters which the Matron wears; The patriot Mother's weight of anxious cares.

Something of reassurance remains in the conclusion of the poem. With a conventional rhetorical question asking why do we need to follow a path 'with shadows overspread', the final stanza grants that, with the aid of Fancy, there is a kind of immortality for the young, naive singer, alongside the classical nymphs of the region. The poem most directly about religious belief is 'Procession - a sabbath morning in the Vale of Chamouny' which almost completes Memorials. It is one which I have already raised as conveying ambiguities of feeling. Certainly the poem is a strange collection of associations of ideas through alternating moods of assurance and doubt. The opening four stanzas are elaborate descriptions of ancient religious processions, then the actual procession which occasioned the poem is described as it was seen and described in Dorothy Wordsworth's Journal. The poet is haunted by the procession: 'Still in the vivid freshness of a dream / The pageant haunts me as it met our eyes.' The final stanza changes direction. There are no reservations nor ambiguity here. It is straightforward didactic verse admonishing fanciful thoughts that might lead to 'Fable's dark abyss'. Then comes the strangest admonition (or is it self-criticism?). The reader is enjoined to avoid the temptation 'to act the God among external things' (W. P., Ill, p. 193). The poet seems to be rejecting his own craft - the skill of seeking a moral or religious message in the experiences of the world and particularly of nature. This is a good point to end this analysis of Memorials. The Chamouny poem itself contains confusion and dissonances. Within its seemingly logical sequence there are ebbs and flows of poetic assertiveness. To Hartman, the poem is an illustration of the dilemma facing the ageing poet, 'trembling before his own creative will'. Hartman goes on to propose that the experiment of the long poem, 'The White Doe of Rylstone', tested the possibility of creating and controlling a fable. The difficulties he experienced then were to reappear through the poet-traveller's experience of continental superstition, with Wordsworth becoming sharply aware of the consequences of religious awe and uncontrolled fable (Hartman, 1985, p. 49). The Church of England, the argument continues, became



(W. P., Ill, p. 188)


important as a mediator between the conflict of three powerful agents, the stern demands of God, the energy of Imagination and the State/Patriotic Allegiance. 'Apocalyptic consciousness' such as may be found in parts of the Christian tradition aroused Wordsworth's deepest suspicions. Nature had to be defended against extreme forms of irrationally based religious belief. Hartman's analysis constructed though it is from the point of view of an individual but key poem in Memorials is essentially right. The poet's will at work is even more clearly seen in a reading of the poems as linked components in the longer poetic creation, for the Memorials are a unity. Wordsworth's ambiguity, his return to certainty and back again to uncertainty can be appreciated through the structure of the series of poems. The secure stepping stones are there - the rightness of English history and its predetermined position of leadership in Europe, the awesome persistence of natural forces, or the living examples of recent, violent history available as a warning to the discerning traveller - but there are complex waters flowing between these assured permanencies. The record of Wordsworth's subsequent work shows that these tensions were unresolved at least in terms of newly created pieces of writing. No new major collection was published for nearly ten years after Memorials, although revisions and reorderings of collected works occurred. The Prelude was slowly but methodically reviewed, and successive editions of A Guide to the District of the Lakes were published, but the searcher for Wordsworth's poetic growth, his new shoots of imagination, must wait for the next long journey, again partly following the route of the old Grand Tour. What are the persisting impressions left in the mind of a reader attempting to read Memorials as they were first published? In addition to the shifting moods of certainty and disturbance detailed above, there is toying with the Poet's ally (or is it his temptation?) Fancy. The reliability of the faculty by which a poet has conducted his trade is confirmed, but at times questioned in this sequence of poems. One image more predominant than any other persists. It is that of an uplifted vantage point. There are early hints - looking (down?) at the fishwives of Calais or at the field of Waterloo and at the defences at Namur. Then there are the two major statements of an Olympian poetic vision: the imaginative flight to the roof of Milan Cathedral in the poem about the eclipse and the final coordinating poem, 'Desultory Stanzas', with its leap to the point of vantage above Monte Rosa. The contemporary reader of



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Wordsworth might well remember the previous use of such an image in poetry - the flying poet - the narrator of 'Peter Bell' and, in prose, in the opening passages of A Guide. More important than any tracing of sources of inspiration is what this device of a high point of vision tells us about the poet's role. Wordsworth has indeed ascended Parnassus, not only to rest with his peers, but to extend his art, to see longer vistas and to share larger visions. Memorials, I have suggested, is a collection which, when read with Dorothy Wordsworth's Journal, illustrates well the new grounds of critical enquiry of our own times, intertextuality. The first text and the derived text, the prose Journal and the poetic sequence of Memorials, are not merely source and product; their different vision is a third 'text'. By visiting Europe and recording the visit, Dorothy Wordsworth created a record of the family's own story and revived the early life of her brother, this last almost her own experience because of her intense sharing of his life. She returned with a wider perspective than perhaps she expected, that of a Europe recovering from a major war and scarred by it, its landscape rerouted and reshaped for ever. Essentially Dorothy Wordsworth's experience of travel was one of the past and how it had been changed by recent events. Her brother's experience, indebted though it was to his sister's perception, is very little concerned with personal history. The vision is now Olympian, looking outwards, further along the Alps into the troubled history of a continent and forwards into a future for humanity. His own youth is not the main focus for his memorial of this European journey. He now takes on the role of interpreter and prophet, befitting his poetic position and seniority both in age and experience. Memorials marks the assumption of the role of 'Senior Citizen Wordsworth' and he required time to work out how he would take on that responsibility. The opportunity arose ten years later in a less extended, but intensely literary itinerary, closer to home.




To the Springs of Romanticism: Yarrow Revisited From 1822, when Memorials of a Tour on the Continent, 1820 was first published, until 1835, Wordsworth produced no new collection of poems. That statement must be read with care. There were new editions and re-collections of poems; also individual newly written poems were published. By the second decade of the century, Wordsworth was sought after by editors rather than he seeking them. Even individual poems by well-known authors were attractive to publishers of anthologies. These were, in our terms, coffeetable books of poetry, well-bound volumes, some published annually, containing a wide range of literary material. Examples which included short poems by Wordsworth were a collection called The Keepsake and Alaric Watts's Literary Souvenir. It is also important to recognize with Gill (1989, p. 337, and 1998) that Wordsworth's preparation of new collections of previously published works in a reconsidered order, although not quite a substitute for fresh composition, was new creativity in the sense of a presentation of a fresh format of poetic experience. Gill suggests that a busier public life accounts for Wordsworth's concentration on renewal of existing composition rather than the creation of new collections with new material. An increase of social life and long absences from home may have contributed to Wordsworth's sense of well-being, but they did not encourage lengthy composition of new material; most pertinently they inhibited further work on The Recluse, as it had first been conceived. 1 The period before the publication in 1835 of Yarrow Revisited and Other Poems was certainly one of extensive travelling. Moorman (1968) chronicles the frequent absences from home. Most long journeys produced a few poems, but nothing that encouraged work on 80 10.1057/9780230286214 - Wordsworth's Poems of Travel 1819-1842, John F. Wyatt


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a major collection with a dominant theme. In 1823, Wordsworth was in London, Kent and then Belgium, where a sonnet on the city of Bruges was drafted and added to the earlier Belgian set of sonnets of 1820. In the following year, there were extensive visits to London, Cambridge and Wales. Three sonnets came from the Welsh tour. A very courageous return to old travelling experiences was undertaken in 1828, it is said without much prior planning, by William, Dora Wordsworth and Coleridge (see Holmes, 1998, p. 553). They followed part of the River Rhine and achieved a much needed harmonious holiday in a year when his sister's deterioration of health must have constantly occupied Wordsworth's mind. The next year's excursion was possibly more demanding physically. With his Yorkshire and Lake District friends, John and James Marshall, Wordsworth visited Ireland, but took an opportunity for intellectual fare by meeting friends like the Rowan Hamiltons, as well as tasting the experience of a run-down economy and sheer poverty. Wordsworth was to comment later to Isabella Fenwick that the pace of the Irish journey may have been the cause of a dearth of poems (W. P., Ill, p. 529). Some ambitious longer poems ('The Egyptian Maid' and 'The Russian Fugitive') were composed during these active years of travel. They reflect more of the study and sedentary reflection than of the dust and clamour of voyaging. Sometimes, however, travel and writing occurred simultaneously in a mode that was common in Wordsworth's youth. In 1830, in his sixtieth year, he composed poems while riding Dora's pony from Lancaster to Cambridge. The journey that inspired the title given in 1835 to one core set of sonnets and poems which I wish to examine in this chapter was initiated by literature but extended by nostalgia. In 1831, Wordsworth and Dora Wordsworth fulfilled a promise of long standing to visit Sir Walter Scott in his home at Abbotsford deep in his loved locality (see Anderson, 1997). This journey produced a set of poems, some written en route, as Dora recalled in her journal, some completed or started in the following months of rest at Rydal Mount. This set of poems beginning with 'Yarrow Revisited' and a sonnet of farewell to Scott should be considered as one poetic achievement. Again, I suggest a reading of the set 'as one poem', because they were composed in this manner and with this intention. In the case of the volume in which the set was first published in 1835 under the title Yarrow Revisited and Other Poems, the travel poems were in the company of an interesting prose essay called



To the springs of Romanticism: Yarrow Revisited


'Postscript' and a variety of other poems composed in this later flowering of creativity between 1830 and 1835. The prose 'Postscript' relates to the themes of the poems in the volume, or so the poet claims. He does not specify which poems - those directly arising from the visit to Scott in 1831 or those from other sources but I attempt in this chapter to test the connection between the prose passage and the 1831 itinerary collection. The companion poems to the Yarrow collection are not marginal to this study, for many of them arose from an extension to that pilgrimage. In July 1833, Wordsworth again set out for Scotland, partly to complete the journey he had undertaken two years earlier with Dora, partly to enjoy a visit which his sister Dorothy had enjoyed in 1828. Wordsworth, with friends of long standing Henry Crabb Robinson and John Wordsworth, set out in a thoroughly modern manner by steamship, first to the Isle of Man and then to the West of Scotland visiting famous landmarks such as Staffa and Iona. This journey produced its own sequence of poems and I shall discuss that component of The Yarrow Revisited volume in my next chapter. The set of poems directly related to revisiting the Yarrow and its presiding literary guardian, Sir Walter Scott, has many of the marks that are recognizable in the previous memorials of travel. Travel not only opened new sources of inspiration, it reopened old springs. Some, typically, arose from Dorothy Wordsworth's continuing inspirational presence. Her perceptions of Scotland from her journal of 1803 in particular are a living text in her brother's poems written almost thirty years later. Wordsworth's own experiences of Scotland, not only as a traveller in 1803, but as a reader of other travellers' tales and of border ballads and particularly of Ossian, contribute a distinctive tone to the new poems. The title of the volume, and of the opening poem 'Yarrow Revisited', indicate to the reader the nature of what is to follow - a literary journey to seek cultural roots. The theme is at one level the quest for a revival of sensations from young manhood with an opportunity to pay respects to a cultural giant, Sir Walter Scott. At another level, the set of poems creates a contemporary political and social commentary. Sir Walter Scott was seriously ill in 1831. Plans were well formed for him to leave Abbotsford in order to seek a last-chance cure in Italy. Scott had invited Wordsworth to renew their friendship before he left for what proved to be his final journey. Dora Wordsworth and her father took up the invitation after some



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delays. From Dora's diary, we have a clear picture of an emotionally charged reunion of two old friends. The Wordsworths continued to take a vacation from home after their duty of friendship had been willingly performed, travelling further into Scotland and back to England. The itinerary after Abbotsford and Edinburgh deliberately followed the old ground of two significant tours. The first was in 1803 with Dorothy Wordsworth and (initially) with Coleridge. The second was a retreading of a visit in 1814, when Wordsworth was accompanied by his wife and her sister, Sara. In a sense then, the visit to see Scott in his valedictory phase and to take a minor additional excursion has to be understood as a complex layering of recollections. There is another instance of intertextuality from Dorothy Wordsworth's Journal. The poems test and investigate the strength of earlier literary experience. The experience of 1803 had been mediated through his sister's language, a sister who by 1835 was incapable of revising or revisiting her past, no longer able to sit alongside the poet as he composed. The title of the collection, Yarrow Revisited, itself reveals the strata of literary experience which underlie the 1835 collection, for twice Wordsworth had written about the River Yarrow and its valley, a river, as I shall illustrate later, closely associated not only with Scott, but also with the popular ballads of early Romanticism and with contemporary enthusiasm for Scottish culture. One further complexity creating the context of the writing of Yarrow Revisited and Other Poems and of their subsequent preparation for publication in 1835 was the contemporary political situation and, more important, Wordsworth's own anxiety about the condition of English politics. The set of poems as it is now printed in the standard collections of Wordsworth's poetry does not appear initially to be politically oriented. The poems were, however, composed at a time of national ferment about which Wordsworth was extremely concerned on at least three fronts. The 1832 Reform Act, the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act and the Reports of the Commissions on the Ecclesiastical Revenues of the Church of England all roused Wordsworth's deepest fears about the stability of the country and about what he saw as the inhumanity and immorality of reform movements. In the last stages of preparation of the 1835 volume, Wordsworth set off for London with a troubled heart. The Wordsworth family hoped that his journey would relieve his mind from fears of impending disaster. In the capital, the conversations with those close to political life





only deepened his resolve to use his influence against reform and to state clear objections to change. The determination resolved itself in the form of the prose Postscript published within Yarrow Revisited and Other Poems, making that collection similar in mixed modes of poems and prose passage to the 1820 publication that included 'the River Duddon Sonnets'. 2

'THE POSTSCRIPT' The poetry inspired by his 1831 visit to Scotland was not only a useful container in which to include a piece of argument against reform. At least in Wordsworth's mind, though less immediately observable to the modern reader, the argument is also sustained by the poems as well as by the prose piece. Wordsworth makes the correlation clear. The reader, he says, will have seen in this collection of poems as well as in others 'a spirit of reflective patriotism and opinions on the course of national events' (W. Prose, III, p. 240). Although the normal practice would have been to publish this type of essay in a newspaper or journal with the poems supporting it, Wordsworth argued that the piece would be strengthened through the author's reputation: 'they may derive some advantage, however small, from my name'. Furthermore, as part of a poetic collection, the political arguments would be 'less fugitive'. One further advantage of a publication alongside poems, he suggests, is that the reader, by association with poetic pleasure, would be more receptive to the ideas and conclusions in the prose argument. Gill (1989) describes the prose as a work with a 'small but honorable place in the history of the nineteenth-century working class' (Gill, 1989, p. 380). Today arguments against reforms and changes of the Welfare State conducted by a liberal protester might well use some of Wordsworth's argument against Poor Law reform. The plea is humane, full of understanding of human frailty and based on an appeal to social justice. Although one or two of his reasons for holding to existing systems are unacceptable to late twentieth-century ears, the persuasion he attempts to deploy is not. What we have been trained to see as unrelieved reaction in the later Wordsworth's political make-up is, with the exception of his argument for the role of the upper classes in the administration of charity, not sustainable. 'The Postscript' is no reactionary Tory backwoodsman's manifesto. The reformers of the Poor Law attempted to reverse the long-



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standing practice of financial support for poor and destitute families in the parish. In its place, a Commission was established to extend or build workhouses in which the unemployed, the sick and the disabled without family support could live out their days in safety. These institutions were to be the alternative to support in the community. Wordsworth's arguments against the removal of Poor Law subsistence from able-bodied parents of families are partly an appeal to common humanity underpinned by an ingenious set of arguments to persuade the religious believer that faith can only be nurtured in families which are not depraved by living on the edge of starvation. The philosophical basis of Wordsworth's argument is Natural Law. All people are entitled to the support of the nation in order to maintain physical health and strength. This is one of the most sacred claims of civilized humanity (W. Prose, III, p. 241). The reformers may have been influenced by what they believed were rational principles ('the prudence of the head') but 'the wisdom of the heart' should not be supplanted. A telling argument in times of threatened national security is then deployed. Because the state depends upon the citizen's support in times of war, it should support its people when they cannot support themselves. Both these last two points are antiUtilitarian and by principle opposed to Malthusian economics. Practical theology is then deployed as an argument. Natural Law only takes a Christian nation part of the way. It may be 'natural' to leave people to support themselves, but in a state of nature there is likely to be small comfort for the destitute. The evidence (from travellers' tales for instance) is that the Indian in the wild or a 'savage islander' is not in a state of perfection; he must wait for the chance appearance of game to provide his food and may starve. A civilized country must not treat its citizens in such a way. Wordsworth instances a contemporary scandal of two working-class parents who carried about their dead baby for four years rather than rely on parish charity for its burial. The poor are naturally proud and should have a dignified life in emergencies. They should not have to rely on the outcome of occasional charity. Modern poverty is not inevitable or natural but an outcome of economic conditions or of accident. Unplanned occasions such as shipwrecks, trade depression, new inventions or overseas competition may rapidly overwhelm any working family. A civilized country would respond to individual calamity with timely assistance. More detailed contemporary issues are then considered, such as





the value of joint stock companies and legislation to permit them to operate. Wordsworth believed these institutions would encourage a participating community of workers. Britain can only gain world respect by humane treatment of its poor. France, by contrast, is seen as a nation which does not reach the exalted status of Britain and, typically, it adopts unenlightened attitudes to those suffering the vicissitudes of modern trade. The final part of the essay is concerned with a conservative argument against the contemporary reform of the Church of England. Christopher Wordsworth, the poet's brother, had been a member of the first Commission which reviewed the possibility of reform of pluralities and other ecclesiastical administration. Here Wordsworth has been well briefed and as a traditionalist occupies the stage. Not all his arguments, however, rest on the reactionary principle of keeping things as they are. The rapidly growing industrial cities demand a service from a Church system staffed by a large number of curates under the supervision of an experienced educated vicar. The reformers would abandon such arrangements as instances of out-offashion pluralities. Wordsworth analyses the key work of the decade. 'Reform' is a dangerous word when it is applied indiscriminately, meaning only 'change'. If these final paragraphs of the essay are read without the majority of the essay, we would indeed recognize the traditional conservative political thinker whom we have learnt to recognize as the older Wordsworth. What justified the poet's self-analysis of this collection as a collection written in a 'spirit of reflective patriotism' containing 'opinions on the course of national events'? There is no direct or plain answer to this question. The first part of the collection (the itinerary poems of the 1831 tour) begins with a recollection of a Romantic landscape entwined with a tribute to Sir Walter Scott, then pursues an itinerary through part of Western Scotland, back to the poet's home and ends with an 'Apology' for the poetic exercise. To explore this poetic journey in search of a political message will not be a fruitless task, but it will require some peeling off of other layers.

THE TRIPLE INSPIRATION OF THE RIVER YARROW As the opening poem's title suggests, 'Yarrow Revisited' is inspired by a return to a favoured landscape. It is also an uncovering of three episodes of poetic inspiration and a commentary on the sources of



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poetic inspiration in this period of English cultural life as well as at further points in Wordsworth's own advance into old age. The first poem about the River Yarrow, written in 1803, was not about the river at all, but rather about not visiting the river. It is best read in company with the much better known 'Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey', itself a poem of half-achieved revisitation, for the landscape of the Wye Valley and of Tintern is also about distancing from the presented actuality of Nature. In the case of 'Tintern Abbey' the poet begins by sketching what still remains from a previous visit from a superior station both of place and time. The sensations of the previous visit and the emotional and philosophical reverberations of visiting the past occupy the rest of the poem, ending with the famous invocations to the arts and skills of the prepared mind which he hopes his sister will grow to enjoy. Dorothy Wordsworth is again the accompanying figure in the valley of the Yarrow. On their visit to Scotland in 1803, the Yarrow would have been a natural place for two literary figures to visit. Its poetic fame depended on two popular ballads, William Hamilton's 'The Braes of Yarrow' and John Logan's poem of the same name. Both ballads rely on stories which claim a traditional origin. In the first, a young man is killed by a rival on the banks of the Yarrow. In the second, a maiden tells of the moment when she heard of her lover's death through the appearance of his ghost at the same spot. Sir Walter Scott was to explore further romantic sensations of the location at nearby Newark Castle in one of the 'Lays of the Last Minstrel'. The poem about the decision not to visit the inspirational river in 1803 acknowledges the feelings associated with the rivers, but Wordsworth's narrator leaves the river unvisited, firmly leading his companion on to seek feeling directly from Nature rather than by association from Art. If, in 1803, the poetic argument is towards actual experience, the solution was not permanent, for, in 1814, the subject is again addressed in 'On Yarrow Visited, September 1814' published in a collection called Memorials of a Tour in Scotland, 1814. It is as if the power to reject the traditional source of poetry had not survived and the pull of the ancient stories and of the river associated with them had proved insistent. Wordsworth begins with a poet's question, contrasting image and reality. He invokes a Muse to lift his sadness, yet the mood of depression is allowed to return in the third verse stanza. The scene at dawn is 'not unwilling to admit / A pensive recollection'. Of course this is no true recollection, for





Wordsworth did not visit the famous site of Romantic tragedy, except in the mind's play on historical ballads. Wordsworth turned in verse four to these original sources, questioning the likely location for the lover's death and for the story of the 'water-wraith' that warned the maiden. The next four verses extol the reality of the Yarrow, its lakes and its longer valley, ending in a fanciful exclamation that it is 'sweet' to imagine decking 'True-love's forehead' with autumnal fruits. A touch of ageing then cools the idyll: And what if I enwreathed my own! 'Twere no offence to reason; The sober Hills thus deck their brows To meet the wintry season. (W. P., Ill, p. 108) The closing stanzas sustain the mood of ageing. Like the traveller-poet, the early morning mist that covered the highest hills is about to disappear. The actual experience of the Yarrow is neither permanent nor reliable. It is the ability to imagine the river that sustains the departing poet: I see - but not by sight alone Loved Yarrow, have I won thee (W. P., Ill, p. 108) Again the Yarrow's power is not its own. The transience of Nature makes that source impracticable. 'Fancy', however, is a permanent aspect of the Poet's life, so the river lives on in the Poet's mind. In the 1835 collection of poems considered in this chapter, the opening poem revisits the Yarrow and once more revives not only the account of the ballads of tradition, but also the two previous literary visitations by Wordsworth. At this point the literary origin is doubled in power: not only are the old ballads reactivated, but so is the inspiration of a living poet who, unlike Wordsworth, had directly utilized the location as a creative exercise. In some ways Wordsworth's third poem, stimulated by Sir Walter Scott's dying year, is like an act of expiation to the river - for not having made creative use of its inspiring setting on previous occasions.



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'Yarrow Revisited' may be largely concerned with an envoi for Sir Walter Scott; yet there is within it a deeper message. Nature alone is insufficient. The essential need is for nature to be fired by poetic imagination in order to accomplish its duty of care and uplifting encouragement to humanity ('thy pensive duty'). In concentrating on the interaction of nature and man, Wordsworth maintains a thread of consistency with the two Yarrow poems, the one unvisited, the other approached with a cargo of literary memory. Yarrow gave to Wordsworth 'looks of love and honour' when he first approached the scene in his earlier state of uncertainty, close to guilt, about approaching only with literary reminiscence. Then he had 'Beheld what I had feared to see, / Unwilling to surrender / Dreams treasured up from holy days ...' (W. P., Ill, p. 264). The poem of 1835 is not a fearful re-encounter. Now there is more certainty about the Muse's power in relationship with unaided nature: And what, for this frail world, were all That mortals do or suffer, Did no responsive harp, no pen, Memorial Tribute offer? Yea, what were mighty Nature's self? Her features, could they win us, Unhelped by the poetic voice That hourly speaks within us (W. P., Ill, p. 264) We should not discount 'localized Romance' such as simple ballads. The poem draws to its close confirming that 'the visions of the past / Sustain the heart in feeling / Life as she is'. The power of memory returns in full flood in the concluding lines. The Yarrow has eternity in its flow, not on its own account but because future Bards will compose, inspired by its beauty. Again, the poet is confident of the river's permanence in his own mind because memory's 'shadowy moonshine' is more precious even than the light of reality: To dream-light dear while yet unseen, Dear to the common sunshine




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Wordsworth's Poems of Travel, 1819-42 And dearer still, as now I feel, To memory's shadowy moonshine

The sonnet that follows 'Yarrow Revisited', 'On the departure of Sir Walter Scott from Abbotsford, for Naples', retains the mood of a farewell hymn. At this point, reviewing the longer 'Yarrow Revisited' and the second poem, the sonnet, one could be forgiven for pressing the question: what had these pair of poems to do with Wordsworth's statement in 'The Postscript' that its accompanying poems conveyed a similar message of contemporary social importance? To pursue that enquiry we must turn to the rest of the poems in the itinerary collection, both examining the patterns Wordsworth created as he carefully placed them in order in following his route through Scotland and tracing the persistent themes generated by reading the collection 'as one poem'.

ON LEAVING YARROW The journey is followed poem by poem, mostly in sonnet form, from the border country of the Yarrow through the Southern Uplands to Edinburgh (poems III to V) and across the lowlands into the road to the Western Highlands - the Trossachs, (sonnet VI), Loch Etive (Sonnet VIII), to Oban (IX) and Mull (X), Glencoe (Sonnet XIII), to Loch Lomond (XVII) and back to the Borders. The final poems of the journey are set in England as the poet draws nearer home by way of Inglewood Forest, Penrith and Appleby. Like the Duddon sequence of sonnets, there is a geographical direction to the sequence unifying the collection, in the Duddon's case by a progression down a single river valley, in the case of 'Yarrow Revisited' by the poet's own circular tour. The unity of the collection does not only rely on the actuality of the poet's journey. Again, as in the Duddon sequence, there are internal linkages, connections between sonnets, creating a sense, when the collection is read together, of patterns of beads on a single strand of a necklace. Following the invocation to the departing Sir Walter Scott in the first sonnet of the collection, the mood remains elegiac in tone with



(W. P., Ill, p. 265)

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three sonnets on ruins and decay - 'A place of burial', 'On the sight of a manse' and 'Composed in Roslin Chapel, during a storm'. This set of sonnets not only relates to the sadness of the opening passages about the stricken poet but also establishes what are to be the first notes of a dominant theme on the decay of ancient forms. At dawn, the birds transform the dismal associations of the ancient South of Scotland burial ground. The old priest of the fourth poem 'has yet a heart and hand for trees and flowers'. He is a recluse, 'Nor covets lineal rights in lands and towers'. In 'Roslin Chapel' the wind is the organ and the chapel bell. Herbs and weeds have grown in the arches of the chapel, indicating 'all things blending into one' (W. P., Ill, p. 267). The mood is ultimately one of reconciliation of nature - continued into the sixth poem, a sonnet, 'The Trossachs', where everything acts as a confessional for an old man ('one / Taught by his summer spent, his autumn gone, / That Life is but a tale of morning grass / Withered at eve' (W. P., Ill, p. 267). The initial set of sonnets is a public statement that pain of ageing can be assuaged, the pain of the ageing poet who not only bids farewell to his dying friend but also sees his own decline through the symbols of the passage of time in the ruins and cultural remnants of the past. There is even less consolation as the journey proceeds deeper into Scotland. Here the experience of social change and decay is more pressing. Sonnet VII deepens the foreboding of social decay with its identification of loss. The muted pibroch, the traditional clothes of a disappearing culture and a decaying shield are contrasted with the ever-busy new steamboat and the ridiculous sight of a Scottish shepherd under an umbrella: All speak of manners withering to the root, And of old honours too, and passions high. The closing five lines ask whether, in these circumstances of rapid (industrial) change, Imagination survives, assisting virtue: 'If not, O Mortals, better cease to live!' (W. P., Ill, p. 268). The following sonnet is an exercise in ironic bathos. The octet is in quotation marks, spoken by a complacent Muse, 'in the net of her own wishes caught'. The Muse has created an idyllic magic landscape with a heroic past recorded in 'native song'. The sonnet's final six lines harshly remind the reader of the subjugation of the Scots:




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(W. P., Ill, p. 268) The Fenwick note to this sonnet comments on the penultimate line: 'the lower order of Highlander's hatred of their superiors had encouraged emigration and their abandonment of love of country.' An impressive sonnet comes next with an image which acts as a climax to the theme of the decay of noble traditions. It is the account of an imprisoned eagle kept at Dunollie Castle, near Oban. The poet contrasts this 'vexed' bird with the soaring example that Wordsworth saw on his Irish journey. The topic is not primarily about the abuse of nature, it is about the chained, reduced spirit of Scotland. The castle itself is castigated: 'Dishonoured Rock and Ruin!' (W. P., Ill, p. 268). The sense of past glories now diminished continues, but with attention to fainter clues of former greatness. The sonnet 'In the Sound of Mull' could have been a poem of the 'naming of places' in Wordsworth's system of categories, but those places are now 'Spots where a word, ghost-like, survives to show / What crimes from hate, or desperate love, have sprung', place-names which are vestiges of a bloody, warlike past. The poet doubts if all these linguistic clues to Scotland's glory 'stamped by the ancient tongue / On rock and ruin darkening as we go' should be dismissed by modern men in less warlike times as tales of an uncivilized past. Any society that also named a set of peaks 'Shepherds of Etive Glen' held reverence for 'patriarchal occupations'. The past and the Muse of poetry are then jointly evoked as if to balance the gloomy, tentative respect shown to the old Gaelic placenames of the Sound of Mull. Contrasted with the traditional pastoral settings of classical Greece are the wild peaks of Tyndrum. There the storm is an awesome reminder of the Almighty's powers delegated to nature in its untamed condition. As if to endorse the living hope and reconciliation that still can be found in the Highlands, the following sonnet (XII) praises the new mausoleum of the Earl of Breadalbane built next to the family's ancient mansion. Flere there is a concord between Nature in its loftiest forms and the careful nurture of a family dwelling by a rooted (aristocratic?) family.



... the course of pride Has been diverted, other lessons taught, That make the Patriot-spirit bow her head Where the all-conquering Roman feared to tread.


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(W. P., Ill, p. 270) Like the simple, good priest of Sonnet IV of this sequence, harmony with nature through care of the land is the secret of content. Stillness and rest now take up the continuing theme. Sonnet XIII is a poem of ease in a withdrawn place. In 'At the head of Glencroe' the ease is more than physical. This is a rest of the soul likened to a bird hovering or to the fish maintaining its position against the force of a torrent. Similarly, the fourteenth poem, 'Highland Huf, praises the simple life of the Highland home in which the poor have peace because they are in their simplicity loved 'as nature loves'. 3 The longer poem, 'The Highland Broach', acts like a hinge in the poetic display of presentations of scenes of Scotland past and present. It is an historical account of an artefact with ancient origins, the brooch that acts as a pin holding the drapery of the traditional clothes of a Highland woman. The poem appears to concentrate upon the indestructibility of the brooch from generation to generation, except in modern times when the ornament has been lost. The exact origin of the brooch may be hidden in preChristian times but its derivation from a more accepted tradition is clearly authenticated in a classical golden age: By wanderers brought from foreign lands And various climes, was not unknown The clasp that fixed the Roman Gown; The Fibula, whose shape, I ween, Still in the Highland Broach, is seen, The silver Broach of massy frame, Worn at the breast of some great Dame (W. P., Ill, p. 272) These past times were favoured, mystical ('No common light of nature blessed / The mountain region of the West'). It was the



... 'mid trim walks and artful bowers, To be looked down upon by ancient hills, That, for the living and the dead, demand And prompt a harmony of genuine powers; Concord that elevates the mind, and stills.


famous Heroic Age dear to Romanticism: 'While Fingal heard what Ossian sang'. In the Dark Ages that followed, amidst all the destruction, women still preserved and wore the broach. Even throughout internecine clan war and destruction, it survived. The gravest destruction came in modern times as canals crossed the Highland region and busy towns grew up in what had been remote rural areas: Lo! ships, from seas by nature barred, Mount along ways by man prepared; Modern industry destroys the unbroken tradition. The broach has vanished by the time the poet writes. The only hope of its survival rests in its own indestructibility and the mysterious nature of permanence in the world. The spade or the plough or the erosion of a mountain stream may reveal and 'render back the highland Broach' (W. P., Ill, p. 274). The sixteenth poem, 'The Brownie', is also about relics of an old civilization. On this occasion the remnant is from a noble family, the Macfarlanes. Just as the tradition of wearing the broach has almost ended, so the Solitary of the poem has reached the point of extinction, dying in the cold in a cell on a remote island. He chose to live in this remote spot, 'With no one near save the omnipresent God / Verily so to live was an awful choice' (W. P., Ill, p. 274). His consolation in his place of exile was that he was sustained from 'all frightful gloom' because he was 'familiar with the eternal Voice'. The theme of eternity and permanence is sustained in the next sonnet, 'To the planet Venus, an evening star'. Is it, the poet asks, love as much as light that makes the planet shine so brightly at the moment the sun relinquishes its hold on the world? In Sonnet XVIII, there is a pause in the themes of large perspectives, the decline of civilizations and the consolations of wildest nature and the universe. 'Bothwell Castle' is an echo of the opening of this itinerary set of poems in that it is a poem regretting that the journey must proceed without the diversion of a visit, just as Yarrow was unvisited in 1803. This time there was no deliberate omission ('Passed unseen, on account of stormy weather'). The poet had visited on a previous occasion and the memory of this earlier visit sustains the present disappointment, perhaps even more powerfully than the reality of the present:



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Memory, like sleep, has powers which dreams obey, Dreams, vivid dreams, that are not fugitive; How little that she cherishes is lost!

The links between this poem and the next two are slight, although they are all poems of calm and repose. The first was stimulated by a painting of Daniel quietening the lions, and the second about the small River Avon, less famous than its English sister yet purer because it is less adulterated by the blood of the battles of history. As the journey proceeds across the border into England, a reader of the poem in its sequence would note the continuity of calm, the peace of the Border River Avon. Past triumphs and powers are extinguished. History is full 'of rights that fade', held by warriors of the past (the sonnet on Inglewood Forest). The legend of 'Harf s-horn tree, near Penrith' provides a tale of an ancient act of violence, a hart pursued to its bloody death by a dog that itself does not survive, expiring in a tree that still flourishes. The moral is one of victor and vanquished both destroyed, but the poet makes a final generous acknowledgement to them ('let no one chide'). Verse should preserve the ancient story. The notion of places that enshrine old stories and traditions continues into the twenty-third poem ('Fancy and Tradition'). Again, like the Scottish poem that is placed early in this collection (Tn the Sound of Mull'), the naming of places holds in folk memory the accounts of legend. The physical artefacts are not enough. History's 'meagre monument' cannot convey the sense of the past in the same powerful way as Fancy does, for Fancy 'localizes' Powers we love. In 'Countess' Pillar', the memorial to a seventeenth-century aristocrat who left a legacy to feed the poor, the poet praises a living tradition because it leads to moral thoughts and actions and another aspect of History with a moral purpose. Finally, the sequence closes (before the culminating 'Apology') with an admonition that the collection of Roman relics (contemporaneously being uncovered at Penrith) is a fruitless task ('Mere Fibulae without a robe to clasp') unless they have a purpose to 'chasten Fancies that presume / Too high, or idle agitations lull' (W. P., Ill, p. 278). The final poem in this particular sequence based on the journey of 1831 is the formal 'Apology'. The poem begins with a further reminder that the preceding verses should be read in the light of knowing they were written in a determined structure:



(W. P., Ill, p. 275)

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(W. P., Ill, p. 279) The poet admits the unapparent connection, but in the image chosen to convey one aspect of underlying unity, he chooses an analogy of timelessness and persistence - the figures of processions of kings in ancient monuments in the Middle East. The reader is asked to excuse any note of dejection in the reading of the poems. The sources of the emotion for which he apologizes are the decline of Walter Scott and his own advancing years, but also threatening public events: And every day brought with it tidings new Of rash change, ominous for the public weal. (W. P., Ill, p. 280)

REFLECTIVE PATRIOTISM I have taken a dual approach to this sequence of poems, first emphasizing their continuing and patterned linkages and second highlighting the main themes that emerge from a continuous reading. The claim made by Wordsworth in the prose essay that accompanied the poems that the poems are of political and social significance still demands some uncovering. The explanation is at one and the same time literary and political. Wordsworth probably did not distinguish between the two. The journey to see Sir Walter Scott was itself a recognition of the decline of a literary period, the end of a great tradition embodied by the dying poet and novelist. Scott himself was not the only fading pulse of the past. Scotland's own literary history was a flickering lamp and yet it had illuminated the end of the previous century and shone on the paths that the poets of Wordsworth's youth had followed. The evocation of Romance in the songs of Ossian had acted as a powerful influence on his contemporaries, although later revelations had shown that their source was more



... yet the several Lays Have moved in order, to each other bound By a continuous and acknowledged tie Though unapparent

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contemporary than ancient, more fashion than antiquity. Wordsworth in this sequence does not travel as many of his contemporaries did seeking a stimulus from locations enriched with folk-tales and sagas. His poems praise Fancy and Imagination, but he is under no illusion, the culture of Fingal and of Ossian is long gone: The heroic Age expired - it slept Deep in its tomb! - the bramble crept O'er Fingal's hearth; the grassy sod Grew on the floors his sons had trod: Malvina! Where art thou? (W.P., III, p. 272) Wordsworth's Yarrow Revisited volume would serve well as a key document for mapping the progress of Romanticism as, in England, it changed in the Age of Chartism and political reform. The volume is a conscious marking of the end of the first great phase of Romantic writing as Scott's life is ending. History, the absorbing interest of the Romantic writers, is due for reassessment at this point. Wordsworth takes on the responsibility of reinterpreting the icon of the Highlands as he travels from Scott's territory into his own past and into Romanticism's favoured land. For a well-read, emotionally prepared visitor the Highlands of Scotland are remarkable and touching, not for what can be found there, but, according to this new interpretation, for what can be no longer found there. The image of the Celtic herdsman sheltering under his umbrella (Sonnet VII) tells all: 'All speak of manners withering to the roof. There are remnants of a culture remaining, but they are vestiges. The admired figures of the sonnets are the relic survivors who, like the Brownie in his cell, stoically survive in an interaction with Nature. Others take up arms against despair and decay by working with Nature to renew the landscape: the good Priest in his humble manse, or the Earl of Breadalbane's family who design and build to recover their ancient control over traditional and patrimonial territory. The sequence of poems based on the journey from Abbotsford is through a culturally decaying land. It is the threnody of a failed culture that creates the associations of these poems with the prose 'Postscript'. The poetry is a chorus of warning to complement the





practical admonition to the reformers of the prose polemic. By contrast, the positive signs of life on the journey can be easily listed. The admired personages are those whose horizon is limited to the local and the traditional. The peasants in their Highland hut survive, for they are in harmony with nature as they last out their days. Others, more elevated socially, remind us of traditional ways of charity and its beneficial effects upon the nation - the 'harmony of genuine powers' of the new mausoleum and its 'trim walks and artful bowers', or the lasting memory of aristocratic greatness and beneficence of the Countess of Pembroke who bequeathed an annual gift to the poor at Penrith. The past, like the remnants that the archaeologists uncover, is dead unless a moral purpose has kept it alive. In the 'Postscript', Wordsworth had argued strongly for the benefits of local charity administered by those who had the means to care for their poorer neighbours. This traditional source of survival was infinitely preferable to the utilitarian Commissioners created by the recent Act of Parliament. The conservative poems of this collection echo this theme. True patriotism, 'reflective patriotism', demands a critical eye, a true understanding of history and a robust support for traditions that are necessary for the nation's survival. Old, decayed traditions are to be observed too and their demise noted as a warning for the future. The excursion to Scotland in 1831 was in one sense, a renewal of creative energy. 4 The sporadic verses of the previous ten years had been as occasional sparks from an old fire. Now Wordsworth's prophetic vision had been relit by a visit on remembered pathways. Something more substantial than occasional creation had occurred. Recollection and the energy that memory provides were perhaps what the loyal readership of Wordsworth expected. What they now heard, perhaps with little surprise for the majority of those who had admired him unreservedly, was a new political tenor. To the well-loved poetic manifesto a new social doctrine had become attached. Perhaps the intimations that reached Rydal Mount in 1830 of Scott's departure from Britain reminded Wordsworth that the senior poetic garland must be worn by a successor. Who that was to be was obvious after the excursion to the Yarrow. The great carrier of the poetic tradition had virtually handed the task on to Wordsworth in the literary-haunted groves of Newark Castle and the Yarrow. Wordsworth rose to that challenge in 1835 with this sequence of carefully collected travel poems. In the penultimate



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Bear witness, Ye, whose thoughts that day In Yarrow's groves were centred; Who through the silent portal arch Of mouldering Newark enter'd; And climb the winding stair that once Too timidly was mounted By the 'last Minstrel', (not the last!) Ere he his Tale recounted. (W. P., Ill, p. 265)



stanza of the title poem of the series there is one extra personal meaning in the phrase in parenthesis. It can be read as a reference to Scott, but it is ambiguous enough to include the Bard that took up his role of leadership:

Unfinished Business: the Second Scottish Journey The visit in 1831to bid farewell to Sir Walter Scott and the writing of Yarrow Revisited released creative energy. Two years after that summer excursion, Wordsworth made a brief holiday visit to the coast of Cumberland, mainly to stay with his eldest son, John, who held the living of Moresby, near Whitehaven. The limited holiday resulted in a small but distinctly new phase of writing circling around the themes of quietness and peace, best symbolized by the sound of distant waters. These poems, when collected together in the Yarrow Revisited volume of 1835, numbered nine, although they were increased to 16 as 'Evening Voluntaries' in one of the last collections made in Wordsworth's lifetime. In the same year that he visited Moresby, 1833, Wordsworth again set off on a tour with Crabb Robinson. John Wordsworth also accompanied them on this excursion by steamboat to the Isle of Man and to the West of Scotland. It was a short holiday of only two weeks, but this active period produced what became known as the 'Itinerary poems of 1833' or 'Poems suggested during a tour, in the summer of 1833'.

EVENING BY THE SOUND OF THE OCEAN Although the set of poems named 'Evening Voluntaries' in the 1835 edition Yarrow Revisited are away-from-home poems, hardly classifiable as itinerary, they deserve some consideration before the main poems of the 1833 expedition to the Isle of Man and West Scotland are considered. They are significant, not least because of their position in the 1835 edition. They were placed before the Memorials of 1833, separated from them only by two poems, 'The Labourer's Noonday Rest' and 'A Wren's Nesf, and they establish a mood which the sonnet sequence develops. The sequence of voluntaries 100 10.1057/9780230286214 - Wordsworth's Poems of Travel 1819-1842, John F. Wyatt


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is slightly different from that which appeared later in the mid-1840s collection of poems of Youth and Age and thence in de Selincourt and Darbishire's collection of this century, but essentially the mood is not altered by the sequence. One poem, 'Throned in the sun's descending car', the last in the 1835 set of Voluntaries, did not appear in print again. What unites the 'Voluntaries', apart from their subject matter of the sun's setting and the sound of distant waters, is their form. They typify the older poet's continuing interest in exercises in traditional prosody. Wordsworth's sources in late eighteenthcentury writing, particularly Thomas Gray and William Collins, can be clearly seen. Occasionally, as in the short impromptu 'The sun has long been set', an early experiment (from 1802) is repeated. The final poem of the 1835 sequence, the one suppressed later, was acknowledged to be a deliberate compilation of Thomson's and other poets' lines (W. P., Ill, p. 396 and note). On the whole, however, the poems are not experimental; rather they are exercises in traditional forms, which a reader of Cowper might well appreciate. The shepherd, bent on rising with the sun, Had closed his door before the day was done, And now with thankful heart to bed doth creep, And joins his little children in their sleep. The bat, lured forth where trees the lane o'er shade, Flits and reflits along the close arcade; The busy dor-hawk chases the white moth With burring note, which Industry and Sloth Might both be pleased with, for it suits them both. (W. P., IV, pp. 1-2) The couplet is the favourite rhyme scheme. Five of the nine poems are subdivided into verse stanzas. All show a proficiency with a kind of verse which, we have been taught, Wordsworth was an agent for overturning in his youth. The ocean is a dominant image in the poems, particularly the ocean at rest. The deep's dormant threat and its inherently stormy nature are acknowledged in 'Composed by the sea shore', or in 'By the sea side', or 'On a high part of the coast of Cumberland', but essentially the sea that has inspired the older poet is gently ebbing or flowing in a mood appropriate for old age:



Unfinished business: the second Scottish journey

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(W. P., IV, p. 2) The moral implications of the subdued power of Nature are not neglected, any more than they are in the poetic observations of the itinerary poems that follow. The Divine presence is also registered, not least as a standard of peace and permanence against which the temporary rest of evening is measured. The 'sober hour' has been one of reflection appropriate for a sage in his older years. The themes of reflection, the security of Britain, the temporary peace of Nature, the suggestion of a greater peace of faith, prepare the reader for much that is to follow.

THE ISLE OF MAN AND SCOTLAND EXPEDITION Like the journey to Italy three years later, the idea of a visit to key tourist attractions had been long in Wordsworth's mind. Despite his sense of ageing, he was completing a personal objective when he set out again in 1833. His prose preamble to the set of poems within the volume entitled Yarrow Revisited and other Poems explains that the 1831 Scottish visit had been late in the season and therefore his journey to the West of Scotland had been cut short. The main places of interest now were the Romantic Isles and Highlands, soaked in memorials of Ossian and redolent of the early Celtic Christian saints. Why then did he take a circuitous route via the Isle of Man? Part of the explanation lay in his decision to use a modern means of transport in order to approach the West of Scotland. Steamships were at this stage well organized for the tourist business and so he became a thoroughly modern traveller shipping out of Whitehaven to Douglas and then on to Oban. Another piece of unfinished business, a family imperative, further persuaded him to choose this route. Dorothy Wordsworth had visited the Isle of Man in June 1828. She too had travelled by steamship. Her brother was impelled to follow the path described in her diary, at least for the first phase of the journey. The absent sister became again a



One boat there was, but it will touch the oar, With the next dipping of its slackened oar; Faint sound, that, for the gayest of the gay, Might give to serious thought a moment's sway, As a last token of man's toilsome day!

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powerful influence on the itinerary. The experiences recorded in her short Journal of that visit were a hidden determinant of Wordsworth's selection of the places he chose to address in the verses about the island. The means of transport and the memories of Dorothy's visit (alive in his own mind in 1833 sadly not at all possible to be alive in hers) were the initial stimulus, but, as ever, he made the actual experience his own. To readers of the previous Memorials of Wordsworthian travels the structure of this set would be familiar. The collection, as originally published in 1835, is a sonnet sequence. Only in a later publication were two longer poems introduced. Once again it is possible to identify clusters of poems with short thematic developments. The basic unity of these Memorials is the actual itinerary with some interesting additions, particularly in the opening and closing sequences. On this occasion the account of the journey begins and ends in the home territory. The first ten and the last nine sonnets of the sequence are placed in the Lake District. 1 The first poem is a formal adieu in Horatian style, but the onward movement of the poetic journey is delayed while the second and third sonnets establish a key theme of the excursion. The antiquities in the Northern Lake District remind the poet of Merry England and of the responsibility of the present age to live up to the civilized manners of the past. The River Greta, then the Derwent, lead the poet not directly to his place of departure, Workington, but to two places of his own past - Cockermouth Castle, the town of his birthplace, and Brigham, where the Nun's Well is situated and where the poet had been deeply moved by the local legend. Again, the almost sacred places of his own history have to be established before the journey can begin. Dorothy Wordsworth's Journal of her 1828 journey also records Cockermouth. Her comment was typically prosaic and factual: their childhood home was dilapidated. Wordsworth's sensation about their shared birthplace was differently typical, he invested the locality with his own developmental history. One more theme - a pre-embarkation pause this - is taken up in the sonnet 'To a friend - on the banks of the Derwenf. The poem is in tune with the tender emotions of the preceding sonnet, 'Nun's Well'. It is a poem of encouragement to persist, a prayer for renewed commitment dedicated to his son, John, who held the local living. John had also been the subject of the sixth sonnet on Cockermouth Castle. This poem is highly personal. It relates the poet's own uneasy position still alive between two grim marks of time, the deaths of




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And You, my Offspring! That do still remain, Yet may outstrip me in the appointed race, If e'er through faults of mine, in mutual pain We breathed together for a moment's space, The wrong, by love provoked, let love arraign. And only love keep in your hearts a place (W. P., IV, p. 23) The geographical rationale for the sequence resumes with a sonnet on the place from which Wordsworth is to embark, Workington, but it is not a contemporary descriptive piece. The subject is a dramatic moment of Cumbrian history, the landing of Mary. Queen of Scots, at the mouth of the Derwent, preparatory to her fated journey to imprisonment and death. As the second and third sonnets had forecast, the monuments and memorials of history, public and private, are to occupy a prominent place in these 'Memorials'. The sea journey is under way in the sonnet that in 1835 followed the evocation of Mary, Queen of Scots. The long poem, 'St Bees', was inserted in a later edition between the tenth and eleventh sonnets. Reading in the sequence of the original edition, we see that the narrative continues to dwell on historical associations. The first sonnet at sea, though purporting to be composed 'in the channel between the coast of Cumberland and the Isle of Man' actually imagines the shepherd high on a Cumbrian mountain top, 'Scawfell or Blackcomb'. There the uneducated shepherd in his private thoughts or in talking to his children by the domestic hearth explains the clouds and their changing shapes over the Isle of Man. His theories satisfy 'the simple and the meek, / Blest in their pious ignorance, though weak / To cope with Sages undevoutly free'. This is no passing nod at quaint, untutored philosophy, for the realm of legend returns in the next sea poem, a sonnet referring to the belief that the Isle of Man was protected from marauders by mists that rose up when its coasts were threatened. From the simple shepherd's explanations to the legendary accounts which explained natural phenomena in an age of faith we



both his parents and of his own two children. Catherine and Thomas had died over twenty years previously, but are never forgotten. Wordsworth offers up a prayer of reconciliation for any lack of love or respect between himself and his living children:

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are led then to a cautious reprise in the next sonnet, 'Desire we past illusions to recall?' Wordsworth pulls back from a wholehearted reinstatement of Fancy in opposition to science. There is a temptation to 'hide / Truths whose thick veil Science has drawn aside' (W. P., IV, p. 31). Science should not be denied its sway; it presents no threat to faith, for: The universe is infinitely wide; And conquering Reason, if self-glorified, Can nowhere move uncrossed by some new wall Or gulf of mystery; which thou alone, Imaginative Faith! canst overleap, In progress toward the fount of Love (W. P., IV, pp. 31-2) The theme established in this triad of sonnets changes to a contemporary figure as the itinerary moves into Douglas Bay, Isle of Man. The former public leader of the island, Sir William Hillary, who established there the first lifeboats, is the subject of the first island sonnet. Dorothy Wordsworth's journal refers to a rescue he personally performed when she was visiting Douglas. The tower, built to aid the search for shipwrecked sailors, described in Wordsworth's sonnet was erected only in 1832. The theme of danger at sea is picked up immediately in the sonnet 'By the seashore, Isle of Man' with its play on the apparent innocence of the calm bay and its deceptive depth in which the unwary have drowned. The following sonnet relates such an episode. 2 A general moral is abstracted from the incident: ... for doubtless, he was frank, Utterly in himself devoid of guile; Knew not the double-dealing of a smile; Nor aught that makes men's promises a blank, Or deadly snare: (W. P., IV, p. 33) Another moral lesson is proffered in the next Isle of Man sonnet. The subject is a retired Marine whose house had been built to face inland. The poet conjectures that this decision may have been because of the desire to put aside the past:




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Wordsworth's Poems of Travel, 1819-42 He, in disgust, turned from the neighbouring sea To shun the memory of a listless life That hung between two callings.

The poet prays for peace for this man 'doomed though free / Selfdoomed, to worse in action'. Memories of the Solitary of The Excursion may arise for some readers. Indeed, Dorothy Wordsworth's journal comments on a house at Douglas Bay: 'a beautiful sea residence for the Solitary' (D. W. /., II, p. 404). A different figure of retirement is offered in the next sonnet, 'By a retired mariner (a friend of the author)'. This moral picture of a peace-loving ex-sailor, poor in the world's terms but richly content with his quiet home, was based on Wordsworth's brother-in-law, Henry Hutchinson. Dorothy Wordsworth had been met by him when she landed in Douglas in 1828 and she stayed with his family. The device of an imagined narrator ('Supposed to be written by a friend') continues in the sonnet, 'At Bala-Sala, Isle of Man'. The imagined speaker (Hutchinson again perhaps?) describes himself as 'A grey-haired, pensive, thankful Refugee'. The old tower of Rushen Abbey, weather-stained but occasionally lit by the sun's beams, is an analogy for his own ageing brow. Age here is peace and withdrawal, the tone of this group of three sonnets. The mood changes to political involvement in the final two sonnets of the Isle of Man phase of the journey. 'Tynwald Hill' is a 'miniature' of the British state, and once a seat of ordered hierarchical government ('Degrees and Orders stood, each under each'). Snaefell, the island's highest peak, is personified as a guardian of British liberty, urged to survey the 'three Realms' of Britain at times of risk. The following sonnet is a stirring call to remember Britain's greatness and its recent triumph, 'When Europe prostrate lay, the Conqueror's aim'. The tone is confident: Her sun is up the while, That orb whose beams round Saxon Alfred shone; Then laugh, ye innocent Vales! ye Streams, sweep on, Nor let one billow of our heaven - blest Isle Toss in the fanning wind a humbler plume. (W.P.,IV, p. 36)



(W. P., IV, p. 34)

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The Isle of Man set of sonnets begins with legends about the defence of the realm supported by nature's mists and ends with the confident call to nature to rejoice in the history of the land and in its tradition of Liberty. The itinerary by sea to the West Coast of Scotland begins with 'On the Frith of Clyde', a poem about an eclipse and with the next sonnet about the view of Arran from the steamboat. The poet's fanciful mind turns from the modern means of travel with its noisy engineers and overcrowded passengers to the inland hills and the high rocks that he is passing by. The contrast between the peace he can imagine in the remoteness of the distant vistas and the disharmony of the boat or the spectacular colours of Ailsa Craig emerging after the eclipse encourages 'sententiae' about the unity of great and small: If the mind knew no union of extremes, No natural bond between the boldest schemes Ambition frames and heart-humilities. Beneath stern mountains many a soft vale lies, And lofty springs give birth to lowly streams. (W. P., IV. p. 37) This then is no rejection of the modern, for all its noise and mechanical clatter. The poet adopts a wise compromising position, reconciliation is firmly in place. The journey at this point transects the Scottish tour of 1831. Dunolly Castle (revised in spelling from 1831), it will be remembered, housed a captive eagle, which Wordsworth had seized on as an image of the chaining of liberty. Two sonnets of 1833 continue with the theme of the eagle. The first notes that the captive was no longer there, though a mosaic had been created by workmen to commemorate the proud bird. Art, in mosaic and in verse, had given some kind of life to the poor eagle. The theme of the shackling of Liberty is again explored in the second sonnet of the pair, this time with the more precise political comment that the imprisonment of the wild creature is like the sad and continuing abuse of the humanity of slaves. The reader of the modern collected works of Wordsworth must omit the long poem 'Written in a blank leaf of Macpherson's Ossian' which was first published in 1827 and inserted later than





1835 between the sonnets from the Firth of Clyde and the next natural port of call on the steamboat journey. Four sonnets inspired by the Cave of Staffa, with its associations with the Ossianic legends, and four Isle of lona sonnets linked with early Christian history are the next unit in the structure. This miniature collection would have been familiar material for the reader of 1835. The places associated with Fingal and with the Christian saints and missioners had been well-trodden tourist attractions since at least 1780. Keats visiting Staffa in 1818,3 like Wordsworth in the first two of the sonnets, had regretted the throng of visitors. Wordsworth writes of the tradition which lies buried beneath the surface of modern busyness and (with the advent of the steamboat and the study of geology) of mechanical laws, processes and explanations. Modern commercialism is even present in the sacred place of lona, where the travellers are greeted by ragged children selling pebbles. This group of sonnets turns the reader towards well-tried consolations in times of change. When the crowds have gone from Fingal's Cave, the imaginative visitor may still see the visions that former ages (and Ossian) thought they saw by magic: 'Yon light shapes forth a Bard, that shade a Chief (W. P., IV, p. 41). Destruction and decay may be ever present in the magnificent power of the sea against the great cliffs and in the huge caves, but flowers surviving even on the pillars at the entrance to Fingal's Cave remind us not only of durability, but of the direction of the Universe: it stands sustained Through every part in symmetry, to endure, Unhurt, the assault of Time with all his hours, As the supreme Artificer ordained. (W. P., IV, p. 42) Similarly the missionary church of lona has long passed away, but faith or the memory of faith lingers. The mysterious mists, like those which guarded the Isle of Man, surround the island of St Kilda as a divine shield and also as a warning to sailors who approach the Isles from the west. Significantly, there is a social message as well as a religious one in the penultimate sonnet of this mini-series. Just as in Tynwald's hierarchical structure, so in lona the poet is reminded of an order of society which sustains the moral code:



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And from invisible worlds at need laid bare, Come links for social order's awful chain

The final component of the journey is a return home via Greenock, not a doleful city of Dante's vision but a modern bustling port, and through Ayrshire, with a brief homage to Burns's home. The journey has not yet completed its circle. The meaning of the final nine sonnets set in Cumbria is conveyed through dominant themes that the poet has selected. Again a structure emerges. The River Eden is the setting for three sonnets which turn from nature to art, following by association the sonnet that had reflected on Burns's early life. The river itself, though near to the poef s home, had not had its due praise because: For things far off we toil, while many a good Not sought, because too near, is never gained. (W. P., IV, p. 45) Yet through a child's phrase about the dead poet's poem on the daisy, life is injected into the 'repose of earth, sky, sea, and air'. The sonnet 'Fancy and Tradition' appeared at this point in the 1835 edition; later it was transferred to the final part of the 1831 Scottish 'Memorials'. 'Fancy and Tradition' also turns to imaginative life, to the stories that may be associated with a locality such as tales of parting lovers, a hermit's vision, a wise man or a bard sunk in thought. History (that is to say, modern historical research in the Niebuhr sense) would only note the facts of these legends, but 'there is an ampler page for man to quote'. The sonnet's quiet plea for a different way of experiencing a sense of place and of its past is taken up again in a sonnet about the power of art. Close to the river at Corby is a monument by Nollekens, which illustrates a theme that is close to home and to the poet's mission. The statue of a dying mother and her dead child has the effect of assuaging grief. Art is 'triumphant over strife / And pain'. A further, pious thought arose from continuing contemplation of the statue in the third River Eden sonnet. In Christ's day the arts communed directly with the artistic Idea, but today they move around the Divine Sun like planets.



(W. P., IV, p. 43)


Two sonnets, whose social significance I intend to note more below, next take the traveller into the modern world of practical rather than aesthetic arts. At the Nunnery near Crossfell, the raging river which soothed the praying nuns in the past still has a calming effect on the visitor who comes to visit nature 'with studious Taste'. There is, however, an even more dramatic development waiting to change the valley: What change shall happen next to Nunnery Dell? Canal, and Viaduct, and Railway, tell! (W. P., IV, p. 47) This final couplet leads to the sonnet 'Steamboats, Viaducts, and Railways', often extracted from the sequence in anthologies, often considered as an oddity outside a nature poet's canon. Set in the context of this sonnet sequence, it is easier to understand this sonnet as part of a complex response to social change and modern disturbance. Indeed this sonnet, although previously published in 1822 and 1827, was deliberately reawakened and introduced in 1835 in the sequence of this point. The sonnet about the prehistorical monument Long Meg occurs next in later editions than 1835, so in a contemporary reading the sequence of 1835 continued immediately into two poems, again of contemporary significance, but at this juncture not a commentary on technological change but upon social order. 'Lowther' and 'To the Earl of Lonsdale' are probably the most difficult of all the sonnets for the modern reader to accept. Wordsworth's support for the local aristocracy is not easy to comprehend, not least because of our knowledge of the long struggle his family had engaged in to release their inheritance from that same noble grip. Wordsworth is not writing here about his own history, but about the idea of social authority. These are poems that betray his deep distrust of reform in the name of democracy. A more approachable local family next appears in the sequence. In the penultimate sonnet, 'To Cordelia M— of Hallsteads, Ullswater', Wordsworth addresses the daughter of a friend of very different political persuasion from the Lonsdales. The Marshalls of Leeds and Hallsteads were wealthy textile manufacturers with Parliamentary affiliation opposed to the Conservative aristocracy, yet Wordsworth was welcomed as part of their circle and he found their company congenial. On more than one journey, the latest to



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Ireland, he had been in John Marshall's company. 4 This sonnet to Cordelia Marshall for the perceptive political reader gave something of a balance to the two previous loyal, conservative verses. The subject of the sonnet is slight and conventional, a necklace made from Cumbrian silver, but the theme of local value is appropriate for the final verses of the home-coming poet. The concluding sonnet repeats the notion of that precious quality discoverable at home where detail outshines the more often admired exoticism of distant places. It is 'Thought and Love' which assist 'The Mind's internal heaven' to inspire the poet, not, we assume, the physical act of travelling to famous, distant places. Reconciliation with home has been achieved.

'ST BEES' HEADS' One long poem published in an interesting way should be considered, if briefly, at this point, not least because it was written in 1833, inspired by the sea journey to the Isle of Man and notably takes up the religious theme of the 1833 itinerary sonnet sequence. It is 'Stanzas suggested in a steamboat off St Bees' Heads, on the Coast of Cumberland'. The long poem of 18 stanzas was published in the 1835 volume but only incorporated between the tenth and eleventh sonnets of the 1833 itinerary series, after publication in F. W. Faber's Life of St Bega in Lives of the English Saints (1844), edited by J. H. Newman (see W. P., IV. p. 403). Faber was gratified to be able to reproduce a poem which built a bridge between orthodox Anglicanism and the movement in the Church that was soon to create deep schisms and secession. That reconciliation was intended by the poem is clear from Wordsworth's own note as published in the 1835 edition: The author is aware that he has been treading upon tender ground: but to the intelligent reader he feels that no apology is due ... Charity is, upon the whole, the safest guide that we can take in judging our fellow-men, whether of past ages or of the present time. (W., 1835, p. 280) The poem which celebrates the history of the monastery on St Bees' Heads describes the succession of pious members of the





orders who occupied the monastic institutions in that isolated place. The monks and nuns left a record of various acts of faith, of charity and of succour to those who suffered both on land and sea. The Protestant Wordsworth's note to the poem is careful to explain that 'the ambition and rapacity of the priesthood' had encouraged abuses formalized in unacceptable religious rites. He is equally at pains to explain why he, a non-Catholic, is recounting the history of piety in this location. The sincerity with which the nuns, monks and priests cared for the survivors of shipwrecks or for those who came destitute to their door justifies the poet's praise and excuses other failings recorded by history. The poem is also interesting because of its form - a sequence of nine-line stanzas, each stanza ending with a variation on the words 'of St Bees' (for example, 'who keep watch before the altars of St Bees' or 'Nor hear the loudest surges of St Bees'). Wordsworth informed the reader that the stanza form was adapted from Charlotte Smith's poem 'St Monica', also on a monastic subject. 5 It has to be said that the great dangers of this kind of stanza (the final three lines must rhyme and so the final line of the stanza risks appearing repetitious and contrived) are more perilously approached in Wordsworth's poem than in the model he followed. The poem opens with an anxiety that the control men now have over the elements, for instance by the steamboat's mechanical power, could be enervating. He calls upon the waves to give some excitement and uncertainty to life ('Up, Spirit of the storm!'). Immediately, the valiant gesture is withdrawn (that wild wish may sleep') because of the memories of the many wrecked and drowned below the headlands of St Bees. The movement of the poem gathers pace as the chronology of the religious communities is recounted, ending with their dissolution at the Reformation. In modern times, the failings of the past are redeemed by the building of the new school. The final verse is addressed not to the past but to the dangerous tides of contemporary education: Alas! The genius of our age, from Schools Less humble, draws her lessons, aims and rules. To Prowess guided by her insight keen Matter and Spirit are as one Machine; Boastful Idolatress of formal skill She in her own would merge the eternal will: Better, if Reason's triumphs match with these,



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Her flight before the bold credulities That furthered the first teaching of St Bees.

The footnote asks the reader to make a cross-reference not only to The Excursion but also to The Ecclesiastical Sketches. The authority of the Wordsworth's orthodoxy was needed when dealing with the 'tender ground' of ecclesiastical practices. I have drawn attention already to the strength of religious writing in these later itinerary poems, particularly from the Memorials of a Tour on the Continent, 1820 onwards. The nature of the Wordsworth family's commitment to the worshipping life of the Church of England, particularly in Grasmere after their elevation to Rydal Mount, emerges in letters and journals. Dorothy's journal of the visit to the Isle of Man, for instance, reveals an experienced though critical churchgoer. She is keenly aware of false or unrealistic piety, as in an incident when a young Methodist companion ignored the material condition of a poor woman and urged spiritual nostrums on the sufferer. The Church in her local community is, however, an important element of Dorothy Wordsworth's life until her serious illness in 1833. We shall see in the next chapter that Wordsworth was to consider and to record in verse an attitude to a different manifestation of faith on his next excursion. The poem on St Bees prepares the way to understand what to many modern readers may be an unexpected gesture of the older man, a generous openness to understanding a foreign way of life.6 The monastic vocation was a troublesome issue for many of Wordsworth's contemporaries and he is prepared to engage with that topical matter in verse. These insights into Wordsworth's beliefs and their relationship to contemporary controversy are one aspect of these 'Memorials'. There are two other issues of the day on which the sonnets are explicit; both are aspects of modernization, the advance of technology and the tide of political and social reform.

ALAS! THE GENIUS OF OUR AGE An unexpected insight into the Industrial Revolution emerges from a study of these late poems. We are used to the Wordsworth who



(W. P., IV, p. 30)

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In your harsh features, Nature doth embrace Her lawful offspring in Man's art; and Time, Pleased with your triumphs o'er his brother Space, Accepts from your bold hands the proffered crown Of hope, and smiles on you with cheer sublime. (W. P., IV, p. 47) In the 1833 sequence there are other sonnets with sympathy for the products of technological change, alongside a prophetic warning of the limits of Rationalism. The sonnet that precedes 'Steamboats, Viaducts and Railways' ends with the open question (but not the condemnation) of what change will happen to Nunnery Dell with the canal, viaduct and railway's arrival. A note in the 1835 edition gives interesting and approving detail: At Corby ... the Eden is crossed by a magnificent viaduct, and another of those works is thrown over a deep glen or ravine at a very short distance from the main stream. (W., 1835, p. 236) A similar note of reconciliation, this time with Science, is heard in the thirteenth sonnet (as published in 1835): 'No - let this Age, high as she may instal / In her esteem the thirst that wrought man's fall'. Science can enlarge its domain but the horizons of the created world are boundless and will always require faith to reach them in order to attain perfection at 'the fount of Love'. The confident message that material progress and scientific discoveries will not disturb faith should be seen in the context of the contemporary publication of the Bridgewater Treatises, a set of monographs devoted to Christian apologetics, justifying the discoveries of science as support for religious and biblical belief. The 1833 sonnets and the Treatises share a spirit confirming a directionalist, secure Universe planned by a benevolent Deity.



regretted 'getting and spending' or who castigated agricultural reforms which displaced yeoman farmers such as Michael. The poet who writes a sonnet on 'Steamboats, Viaducts and Railways' is another matter. The ending is as progressive as any technological innovator could wish:


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This independence upon oar and sail, The new indifference to breeze or gale, This straight-lined progress, furrowing a flat lea, And regular as if locked in certainty Depress the hours. (W. P., IV, p. 25) 'On the Frith of Clyde' the 'dull Monster and her sooty crew' continue to oppress the poet and make him wish to escape, although his reason tells him that the human mind requires 'union of extremes' and that there is a bond between boldness and humility. The sonnet 'Steamboats, Viaducts and Railways' may end in a proffered crown, but the new mechanical world has 'harsh features'. The chief complaint in the final verse of the poem, 'St Bees', is that 'Matter and Spirif are as one Machine. Reason in Science, though 'conquering' (Sonnet XIV), is not all-powerful, it is controllable by Faith and by other forces. The concluding sonnet reminds us what these forces are - 'Thought and Love companions of our way', the well-tried companions of a wanderer-poet. Steam power may be hailed as a new element in human experience, but social change is more worrying. The burden heard throughout this sequence, more strongly than in the 1831 sequence of poems, is that social reform is dangerously imminent. The prose 'Prospectus' discussed in the last chapter is relevant here as it was intended to be to the theme of authority and to the threats to tradition identified in sonnets in the 1833 sequence. The opening poems do more than wave a conventional farewell to home before travel. The homeland is 'by Time's parental love made free, / By Social Order's watchful arms embraced'. The last line of the sonnet is conditional - 'If that be reverenced which ought to last' (W. P., IV, p. 21). 'Merry England' is the title of the following poem. It is a vehicle for a solemn warning about the forces assembled to destroy that national ideal. Some deem that respect for England's former glory is like bird-lime, a snare 'for inattentive fancy'. The



The steamboat on which Wordsworth travelled acts throughout the record of the journey as a reminder of technology's progress a not always pleasant one. The straight-line trajectory of the boat off the coast of St Bees, independent of winds, is sufficient stimulus to rouse the poet to consider more difficult, challenging times:

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Can, I ask, This face of rural beauty be a mask For discontent, and poverty, and crime; These spreading towns a cloak for lawless will? (W. P., IV, p. 21) The poet's response to the discordant voices of materialism that do not respect tradition is to ask heaven to forbid their dire view. The spectre of uncontrolled democracy is raised in the sonnet, 'Tynwald Hill': only the maintenance of degree and order can resist the 'mortal change' that afflicted the ancient civilization of the Isle of Man. The same authority is symbolized by 'social order's awful chain' in the last line of the sonnet, 'The Black Stones of lona'. There is a necessary form of control which is required and sanctions the punishment of the guilty. The current threat to the state is from demagogues who purvey 'a flying season's rash pretence'. It is obvious that Reform Act legislation is in Wordsworth's mind. The firm insistence, as the sonnet sequence closes, on the integrity and authority of the Lowther and Lonsdale family reminds the reader of what Wordsworth regarded as the foundation of 'Merry England'. Despite the resounding support for the local aristocracy there is a troubled, less confident air in the sonnets as a whole. The pervading symbol of protection is the encircling sea, but this is viewed ambiguously. The ancient guardian is not impenetrably powerful and even slightly untrustworthy. It is not only the sea mist that is said to protect the Isle of Man and St Kilda. It is also an assurance verified by an irrational, uneducated tradition, an argument from superstition, not Reason. Finally, the sequence of sonnets in this collection deserves an overview of their position in Wordsworth's personal journey through life. The opening poem bidding farewell to Rydal depicts the poet as the quiet recluse: 'One who ne'er ventured for a Delphic crown'. This unexpected though conventional disclaimer of ambition is mirrored in the second sonnet. 'The Enthusiasf is one who should not repine because of his age, for the land is ready to welcome him with instances of Antiquity and Taste. Personal associations with Cockermouth and Nun's Well at Brigham are part



utilitarian, atheistical value system interprets Merry England in a similar light.

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of the poet's knowledge of his own history. I have already noted that in the accompanying sonnets about Wordsworth's origins in the northern Lake District he makes peace with his family and links his past and the present at the aged castle at Cockermouth. If the setting out on a journey is that of an old, wise traveller, the return is one of gratitude for homecoming and for the small-scale pleasure of the domestic scene. The River Eden, the dignified monuments in a small church, the local precious metal adorning an old friend's daughter all console. They endorse the domestic satisfactions of the concluding sonnet. At the close of the 1833 itinerary sequence, the reader might be forgiven for thinking that this last collection of 'Memorial Poems', gathered in a volume deliberately bringing together early and late poetry, is the swan song of a retiring writer. In the event, there was to be yet another major journey with its Memorials, a tour of considerably more ambitious objectives than the short excursion to the Isle of Man and Scotland. The 1833 journey was a venture into the links between home and the past, the poet's past and the locality's past. The next journey was to reach out to the European past again, as Wordsworth had done in 1820 and in The Ecclesiastical Sketches.




The Italian Tour of 1837 'It is too late', Crabb Robinson reported in his diary, of Wordsworth's reservation about their tour of Italy. 'It is too late ... had I but youth to work it up.' In the event, it was not too late to produce a new 'Memorials' collection after a successful itinerary. The poet and his friend and fellow traveller of some experience made a reasonably harmonious journey to Italy (although there were some tensions between their styles of life) and, in so doing, fulfilled one of Wordsworth's deferred ambitions. In 1820, he had curtailed the family's Italian visit at Milan because of cholera in the Apennine cities. Now he was able to complete the tour that all welleducated men and women of the time wished to achieve with visits to the major Renaissance cities of Rome, Florence and Venice, seeing and feeling the atmosphere of the Italian classical landscape of the Apennines and the Campagna. Although once again cholera in Naples caused a shorter circuit, Wordsworth, at the age of sixtyfour, had carried out his long-awaited cultural pilgrimage. The journey was not completely satisfying. As Crabb Robinson noted, the famous objects, although universally admired, served chiefly to bring back to the poet's mind absent associations dear to him. Wordsworth himself was more precise about his less than perfect experience. He was sure that it had been a mistake for a man of his age and temperament to travel without his attendant women-folk. The short dedication to Crabb Robinson mentions negative as well as positive advantages: Treasures I gained with zeal that neither feared The tolls nor felt the crosses of the way. (W. P., Ill, p. 202) Reservations apart, Wordsworth was still relying on travel for creative reinvigoration. Writing in 1831 to Basil Montague, a figure 118 10.1057/9780230286214 - Wordsworth's Poems of Travel 1819-1842, John F. Wyatt


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The Italian tour of 1837

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You say your disinclination to move increases every year - it is not so with myself. Travelling agrees with me wonderfully. I am as much Peter Bell as ever, and since my eyelids have been so liable to inflammation, after so much reading, especially, I find nothing so feeling to my mind as a change of scene, and rambling about; and my labours, such as they are, can be carried on better in the fields and on the roads than anywhere else. (W. L., V, p. 439) In Italy, Crabb Robinson recorded that, like a young man, Wordsworth walked miles, clambered up steep slopes to attain the best view, and rose very early to enjoy the full experience of daylight.

THE 1842 COLLECTION The poetic result of the flood of new sensations from Italy was another itinerary set called again Memorials but, unlike the collection of the Tour of 1820, these Memorials were a relatively small component published in the company of a more substantial collection of other poems. By this stage, Wordsworth had changed publishers, from Longman to Moxon, with whom he had already had business dealings. 1 Whether the new business arrangement encouraged larger collections of new material is uncertain, but the previous collection of 1835 in which Edward Moxon was associated in a minor role with the Longman house had also produced a substantial collection. Perhaps Moxon's business eye had seen the value not only of bulk, but also of reissuing or reviving poems of youth as well as of age and of mingling old favourites in a new volume. The arrangement of poems in the 1842 collection encloses the Memorials between early and late poems. The structure of the collection is determined less by theme (although there are some harmonies of ideas within the selection) than by sequence of composition. It is as if the new editor had persuaded Wordsworth to capture his old audience with the known and then to lead them on to new delights. The title that his readers would first see as they opened the book was 'Poems chiefly of early and late years'. The



from a very distant and different period of his life, he explained his source of excitement:


Advertisement disarms any criticism that the interest of the collection is local by observing that the first substantial poem refers to the poet's interest in monuments, thus the reader is permitted to identify the incidents on Salisbury Plain with any locality of their choosing 'from other desolate parts of England'. After 'Prelude', the opening poem which later I shall link with Memorials, the reader is immediately involved in the narrative of 'Guilt and Sorrow or Incidents upon Salisbury Plain', written first in 1791 or 1792. The next batch of sonnets and poems belong to the period of 1798 to about 1812, except for 'Airey Force Valley' of 1836 and three other short poems that accompany it. Memorials of a Tour in Italy is then followed by a translation of 1801 from Chaucer. Later in the sequence another translation (Troilus and Cressida) of the same time appears. Finally the verse drama, 'The Borderers', like Salisbury Plain at the opening of the volume, is a rewriting of an early period piece based on local anecdotes and folk-tales.2 The sonnets and short poems in this last third of the collection are in the main either contemporary with Memorials or a little later in composition. One subset within this section of the collection is the sonnet sequence 'Upon the Punishment of Death'. It is tempting to search among them for themes that are cognate with the main focus of my attention, Memorials, but, in truth, the connection would be forced. Domesticity is one common feature between the poems in the collection. Another is gradualness, as against revolution or rapid or violent response to injustice. The sonnets on capital punishment are obviously conservative in tone, written as they were to improve the minds of legislators and to stiffen the backbones of members of parliament who might be waverers if propositioned by abolitionists. The prospect of total abolition of the death penalty was raised in the early 1840s during a period when harsh punishments were successfully reduced for non-violent crimes, so the sonnet sequence should be read as dealing with a major contemporary controversy, not as a philosophical or abstract work. Perhaps the poem that most clearly demonstrated the tone of this last part of the collection is the excellent short lyric, 'Airey Force Valley'. The scene into which the long cascade is falling is a place of retreat, like the peaceful spaces out of time in The Excursion, in the midday sequences in the Duddon Valley series, and now, in this volume, at Vallombrosa or at Laverna. Geoffrey Hartman in his subtly titled The Unremarkable Wordsworth has helped readers to see:



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THE ITALIAN ITINERARY The experienced reader of Wordsworth's collections in 1842 would find familiar signposts in the new collection. The sonnet predominates, but there are odes and pastoral pieces in a formal, rhymed manner. The continuity of Memorials is also clear. Wordsworth's own instructions to the reader, conveyed through Henry Crabb Robinson's ever-dutiful records of their conversations, confirm that a continuous effort is required to absorb the intended flavour, not only in respect of the itinerary poems but also of the poems of domesticity which illustrate the different phases of his affection for his wife. Memorials require no additional explanation for their own structured coherence, because, like the Duddon sonnets or the two Scottish sequences of the 1830s, the narrative of the journey provides the unifying framework, bearing one poem on to the next until the end is reached in reflective contemplation of a successfully achieved cultural pilgrimage. We have to look at the final edition of 1842 to see how the tour ended. The last two sonnets in the sequence as first published relate the crossing of the mountain frontier out of Italy into a disturbing new language community (Sonnets XXV and XXVI). The actual itinerary is closely followed and can be mapped without difficulty, although there are gaps which Robinson's diary usefully completes. 3 It is not, however, a guidebook set of poems that we are to follow in sequence but a reflective reconstruction of major themes that occupy the poet both in Italy and, more permanently, at home. The opening poem, 'Musings near Aquapendente', which establishes the mood of reflection for the poetic journey that is to follow, is from the point when the poet and his companion are in midjourney, deep into Italy's past and far into the Italian peninsula. From this heartland of Italy the following sonnets take us to a height above Rome, then for six more sonnets the theme comes to rest geographically but remains active historically in and near the city where Wordsworth reflects on the history of Rome and on the nature of history itself. Sonnet IX moves back to rural Italy and then



The later poems often require from us something close to a suppression of the image of creativity as 'burning bright' or full of glitter and communicated strife. (Hartman, 1987, p. 89)


pauses (in two sonnets) at a place redolent with Italy's ancient ways, 'Near the Lake of Thrasymene'. From here the poetic journey moves into the Apennines near Assissi and pauses again, absorbed in the sensations of faith and asceticism in that remote, mountainous region of convents and monasteries. The next point on the pilgrimage is literary, but no less a stopping place of pilgrimage to Vallombrosa (XVIII) associated with the young John Milton. The poet's brief residence in Florence generated four sonnets, including two translations from Michaelangelo. Three sonnets associated with Bologna appear next, but only in the 1842 volume. They were later removed, to appear as Sonnets X, XI and XII in the later collection of sonnets dedicated to liberty and order. The journey then moves north, pausing briefly 'In Lombardy' and then departs over the Alps into German-speaking Switzerland (XXV and XXVI). The penultimate sonnet in the sequence republished in 1845 was from Rydal Mount, plainly stimulated by the Italian journey but not included as a coda in 1842. One final sonnet in 1845, 'The Pillar of Trajan', is added almost as an afterthought. 4 Again, the 1842 publication did not include this summary piece. In any case, in terms of the actual sequence of travel it would have been out of place. There is, as readers will by now expect, more to the continuity of the sequence than a route map. Setting aside for the moment the important but not straightforward introductory role of The Prelude and 'Musings near Aquapendente', the sonnets (and the few longer poems) again can be grouped into patterns. These 'gatherings' of sonnets and longer poems relate to each other by theme and subject. The sonnets that follow 'Musings' are more than just about Rome, they are about how to understand Rome. The pine tree at Monte Mario is more touching, more disturbing than the city of Rome to the poet because his friend, Sir George Beaumont, preserved it. The city below 'crowned with St Peter's everlasting Dome' is supplanted (the Poet's verb) in its whole majesty by the act of imaginative memory made by the Poet (W. P., Ill, p. 213). Similarly, the Tarpeian rock of Capitol Hill in itself is disappointing, unless an effort of imagination is applied. The reality of history and the other inner reality (of feeling for history) being raised, there appears to be a natural lead to the composition of a sonnet on an issue of some contemporary intellectual importance. This is the Niebuhrian scholarly examination of facts which for some contemporaries swept aside years of a traditional history, the recreation of the past from memories of classical poets: 5



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... yet in our hearts we know How, for exciting youth's heroic flame Assent is power, belief the Soul of Fact

The next group of sonnets beginning with 'At Albano' is in contrast to the grandeur of Rome and to the weight of institutionalized Christianity embodied in St Peter's. The peasant he meets at Albano lives by a simple faith: 'The sky will change to sunny blue / Thanks to our Lady's grace'. Similarly the following sonnet is dedicated to hope. The dove by the River Anio reminds the poet not only of the story of Noah and the olive branch which forecasted a peaceful reconciliation with the Almighty, but also of the persuasively calming effect of living in the faith of the present: 'In what alone is ours, the living Now'. Sonnet XI sees a distinct change of subject and of mood, although the heroic past remains in the poet's mind. Italy's political subjugation oppresses the poet and steers the themes to revolution and civil war. The bloody history of Rome's struggle against Carthage is evoked at the site of Lake Thrasymene, now peaceful, its waters unadulterated by blood. Two sonnets celebrate the warlike past of the Roman people. 'The Cuckoo at Laverna' begins a different phase of the collection. It is a long poem in seven verse paragraphs, ushering in a sequence of sonnets dedicated to the district that Wordsworth called 'the three Tuscan sanctuaries', Laverna, Camaldoli and Vallombrosa. This is the territory of the religious hermits, monks and nuns who live remote from the busy world and dedicate themselves to a contemplative life, in St Francis's case through an accommodation with the natural world. The topical nature and indeed the controversial tone of this sequence of sonnets can be easily neglected in our own generation when St Francis has been accepted for so long as the icon of the humble and ecologically sound life. In 1830 and 1840, troubled by the contending religious forces of Evangelicalism and Tractarianism, the bringing to the fore of what was then little-known Catholic history was a courageous decision. The monks in their retreat appear again in the longer poem XVIII which is devoted to one of the roots of Wordsworth's life as a Poet. Vallombrosa, the place he had to put aside on the 1820 excursion, is now available for his long-awaited pilgrimage. More



(W. P., Ill, p. 213)


than the peaceful location, John Milton's association with it makes it a powerfully evocative site. It is a key moment in the poetic series. Wordsworth has now accomplished a life's quest. 'The realized vision is clasped to my hearf (W. P., Ill, p. 224). The long hoped for aim achieved, Wordsworth rests at peace lulled by the stream like the narrator-traveller at noontide in the Duddon sonnet series. Here nature's low-key sounds and murmurs of peace are akin to the holiness of the anchorites on the nearby hill. This long complex poem ends the subset of the passages of faith and religious commitment. The Florentine poems are associated through the history of the great city of the Renaissance with art. Dante's seat in the Cathedral (on which Wordsworth inadvertently rests - or was it a symbolic mistake?) is the first in this set. In later paragraphs, I shall return to the political aspect of this sonnet. Raphael's picture of John the Baptist in the desert is the subject of the next sonnet, followed by two translations from Michaelangelo. This pair of translations appears to be set apart from the itinerary theme, for they were composed quite separately, with the second being in draft as early as 1805. They have their place in the sequence because they are in the revered company of poets and painters in the quintessentially aesthetic city. The three sonnets which follow as the journey moves northwards from Florence are linked in theme and title - 'At Bologna, in remembrance of the late insurrections, 1837', 'Continued' and 'Concluded'. Later, all three were lifted out of the 1842 publication in order to add to the 12-sonnet sequence, 'Sonnets dedicated to liberty and order'. The triplet begins immediately with the admonitory burden of this set of sonnets: Ah why deceive ourselves! by no mere fit Of sudden passion roused shall men attain True freedom where for ages they have lain Bound in a dark abominable pit All three urge patience: Learn to make Time the father of wise Hope (First sonnet)



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Think not that Prudence dwells in dark abodes, She scans the future with the eye of gods

Alas! with most, who weigh futurity Against time present, passion holds the scales: Hence equal ignorance of both prevails, And nations sink; or, struggling to be free, Are doomed to flounder on, like wounded whales Tossed on the bosom of a stormy sea (Third sonnet: W. P., IV, pp. 132 and 133) The longer view should override the short-term passions of revolutionaries. There is 'space for golden means / And gradual progress'. These conciliatory, gradualist political sonnets are succeeded by a sonnet comparing the immortality of man and insect. The theme of human salvation is not so remote from the assurances of peaceful betterment compared with revolutionary exercises. Both the old man of Lombardy and his silkworm face a future of change: Both pass into new being, - but the Worm, Transfigured, sinks into a hopeless grave; His volant Spirit will, he trusts, ascend To bliss unbounded, glory without end. (W. P., Ill, p. 228) The journey continues into the departure phase with two final sonnets, again conveying a linked theme of political concern for Italy, for what it had been and for what it has now become under subjugation. A comparison with Memorials of a Tour on the Continent, 1820 at this point clearly shows how concentrated is the set of poems of 1837. Unlike the earlier European journey they do not begin with the preliminary steps of the journey to Italy. They hardly touch on the long journey home except for a final sonnet as the poet crosses the Italian frontier. The striking element that was absent in 1834 is the independence from family influence. For this, the last long excursion, there



(Second sonnet)


was no attendant, guiding document. In 1820, Dorothy's journal determined the shape of the series. In Scotland and in the Isle of Man she was a presence, but a diminishing one. In 1837, although Henry Crabb Robinson's notebook was available, the poet had to fashion his own framework for the record of the itinerary. What were the factors, the sources of poetic energy that determined the choices of selection and the emphases that Wordsworth made? To begin to answer this, it will be necessary to look closer at two poems that I put aside before tracing the unities within the series. They are the Prelude prefixed to the volume, 'Poems chiefly of early and late years' (W. P., IV, pp. 176-7), and the opening, long poem of the Italian Memorials, 'Musings near Aquapendente'.

THE PREFIXED 'PRELUDE' AND 'MUSINGS' The poem which faced the reader on opening the Moxon edition of 1842 was a 'Prelude' of 55 lines. Its position was temporary. In a Fenwick note, Wordsworth admitted that it would not be an appropriate 'Preface' for the full collection of his poems which he planned to produce at a later stage. Indeed the whole volume of 1842 was an interim publication, awaiting the phase when they 'will be assigned to their respective classes when my Poems shall be collected in one volume'. Although this preliminary poem was not composed during the Italian tour, it was written during a visit to John Wordsworth's rectory at Brigham in the same period as other poems which accompanied the Memorials. Its aim was to prepare the reader for all the poems that are to follow, so I shall want to consider its connection with Memorials. The 'Prelude' prepared the reader for the subject matter of Memorials and also for a method of reading them. The poet's voice is like the thrush that he has often heard in his wanderings and with which he begins the 'Prelude'. The song of poet and bird is restorative and calming ('which the unsheltered traveller might receive / With thankful spirif). It is not, however, an unmixed tune that is played ('though not without some plaintive tones between'). The outside world is congenial, but there are times of hostility: ... The descant, and the wind That seemed to play with it in love or scorn (W. P., IV, p. 176)



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The poems that follow must be accepted, like the 'showers of blossom swept / From tossing boughs', with alternating moods of dark and light, like the alternate shade and broken sunlight of the 'deep chestnut grove' and the 'orchard grounds' through which the poet is portrayed taking his 'desultory walk'. The dark and light are not mixed by chance or by whim. They are integral to the Poet's dual mission - to please and to instruct: Power hath been given to please for higher ends Than pleasure only; gladdening to prepare For wholesome sadness, troubling to refine, Calming to raise; and by a sapient Art Diffused through all the mysteries of our Being, Softening the toils and pains that have not ceased To cast their shadows on our mother Earth Since the primeval doom. (W. P., IV, p. 177) The hope of this book is to encourage those 'who not unwillingly admit / Kindly emotion tending to console / And reconcile' to be grateful for the still surviving benefits 'by faith / In progress, under laws divine'. Such a benign function is vital in those days when the people are depressed by 'unforeseen distress' or when they are roused to anger by 'venal words'. Two recurrent topics of the old Poet's mission emerge here - the notion of the 'People' and the threat to them of disturbance by revolutionary incitement. The Poet is committed to speaking to the People to put forward another way, a lesson justified by his own long experience of life. This 'Prelude' is a much underrated statement of the Poet's role in society, deserving at least to be commented alongside the 1815 Preface, if not in comparison with the prefaces to The Lyrical Ballads. All three prefaces restate at different moments in the poet's political journey a public role and a relationship to the people in the society in which the Poet writes. 'Salisbury Plain' follows the 'Prelude' and then the reader passes on to the long poem 'Musings near Aquapendente' where the pervading messages of the 'Prelude' are embodied in a reflective and a fanciful vision. The point of vision is once more one of surveying the world from a superior station. Alternating light and dark, confidence and doubt, are rapidly established in the opening





lines. The poet, resting near the waterfall that gives the small town and place its name, opens with a conventional poetic exclamation of homage from his own history; he is the 'Mountaineer by habif. The desire to praise is immediately qualified: 'presumptuous thought!' - it fled 'Like Vapour, like a towering cloud, dissolved'. This negative tone is in its turn rejected, overturned by the dramatic physical features of the scene, the gloomy chasm, the flash of falling water and the broken cone-shaped hill. The present scene is not in itself sufficient to hold the line of thought in the poem, any more than the physical descriptions of the Wye and Tintern Abbey were sufficient to hold back the flood of memory and rededication of the main message of that poem. A smallerscale, natural object, an outburst of golden broom, reminds Wordsworth of the flowering that, later in the season, will grace the hillsides of his own home. At this point the traveller's Fancy seizes the poem's narrative line and, through a long image of a transported vision, the Poet imagines a bird's-eye view of Lake District landmarks - Seat Sandal, Helvellyn, the deep, radiating valleys lying between the 'skeleton arms' of mountains ('Not Apennine can boast of fairer'). The imaginary flight of the poet's wandering soul continues down the edge of Greenside Fell, across Glenridding screes and on to Glencoign. 6 The relief found in mental refuge of memory of the homeland and the wide sweep of Fancy that he has pursued are not sustained. The poet's voice and thoughts return to Italy. The associative link is provided by the memory that the valleys in the Lake District once were the home of ballad-makers and minstrels. The idea of ballads by association then links Sir Walter Scott ('the Wizard of the North'), those distant hills where Scott and Wordsworth had climbed, and the present scene, for it is here that Scott came for recovery during his last illness. The memory of their last meeting, by the Yarrow is painfully recorded. The mood is then changed with an effort: Peace to their Spirits! why should Poesy Yield to the lure of vain regret, and hover In gloom on the wings with confidence outspread To move in sunshine? (W. P., Ill, p. 205)



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Wordsworth gives thanks that he is spared despite his own advancing years. The lines that follow are a dutiful prayer of gratitude for present delights, but also for a recent escape from drowning in the Bay of Genoa. A later note draws an obvious comparison with Shelley's death in the same seas. Here Wordsworth deliberately steers the subject into a hymn of praise for the middle way and illustrates his message from nature's opposites - the dew with its unceasing powers to recreate the desert hyssop and the storms of nature against which the roots of cedars by their very resistance are strengthened. In the middle zone there is 'a blest tranquillity' which this traveller is able to savour as he temporarily rests in his wanderings in these, his new but so long sought surroundings. The poem next turns to what Italy has to offer to the contemplative Man of the via media. Pisa, with its relics of the faith of the Crusaders and the Middle Ages, generates an atmosphere of piety and long surviving grandeur. From all the many images of the past that Italy supplies, he opts for those that will be recreated in memory: 'those images of genial beauty, oft / Too lovely to be pensive in themselves / But by reflexion made so (W. P., Ill, p. 208). These images are, he opines, so appropriate for an ageing poet. Italy provides him with many such: Savona, the homelands of the seventeenth-century poet, Chiabrera, the memories of Horace and of Virgil, reawakened by visits to the areas where they lived. The Christian past of Italy is active in his receptive, traveller's mind when he remembers the Mamertine prison where St Peter and St Paul were said to have been kept. The historical survey concluded, the poet turns to one of the archetypal images for the passing of time and, of course, an appropriate one for his poetic location. An ever-flowing cascade provides him with a portentous and critical metaphor for the path of Humanity. More and more swiftly people are carried along in a stream of mixed value in modern times. A full quotation reveals the Seer's view of the gains and losses of science and industry. ... The Stream Has to our generation brought and brings Innumerable gains; yet we, who now Walk in the light of day, pertain full surely To a chilled age, most pitiably shut out From that which is and actuates, by forms,




Wordsworth's Poems of Travel, 1819-42 Abstractions, and by lifeless fact to fact Minutely linked with diligence uninspired, Unredefined, unguided, unsustained By god-like insight. To this fate is doomed Science, wide-spread and spreading still as be Her conquests, in the world of sense made known (W. P., Ill, p. 211)

Expediency is the nation's 'published guide', not moral law. Utilitarianism rules now ('By gross Utilities enslaved'). To hold in check the stream of modern rushing progress, humanity requires a sense of history. Wordsworth's phrase is a key to much of the Memorials of 1842. We need, he proposes, 'an ennobling impulse from the past' (W. P., Ill, p. 212). As the poem closes, the Poet's mission again returns. The time he has passed in this and in other historical locations in Italy will have been well spent if it has restored the Poet's sense of purpose. The poem ends in the same spirit as the 'Prelude' to the volume, offering the Muse to 'vexed and disordered' times at least for 'the scattered few', the dedicated ones who are friendly 'To soberness of mind and peace of hearf. The last lines lead the reader on into the rest of the itinerary sequence: 'Let us now/Rise, and tomorrow greet magnificent Rome'. 7 This major poem stands in its own right as a poem from old age and about old age. It has been properly appreciated as a late flowering by modern writers, such as Stephen Gill: In this opening section of recollection enshrined in a fusion of old verse and new and in its tone of sober joy, Wordsworth's most characteristic verse is heard for the last time.' (Gill, 1989, p. 406) It is, however, not to be admired as a poem standing alone, although it can be appreciated as such. It is also a keynote poem for the poems of the Memorials collection for they continue to reflect as well as develop the shifts of mood with which 'Musings near Aquapendente' begins the sequence. Such changing poetic weather is not of course the prerogative of the older poet. Modulated hopes and fears can be appreciated in the early Books of The Prelude, or in 'Lines composed above Tintern Abbey', in the Lucy Poems, and on into the later works. The sonnet form itself can assist such changes



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of emotional weather within the short space of 14 lines, often at the 'volta' point of the sonnet when the octet is completed and a shift of view or theme occurs in the sestet. An example of this structural shift is within the sonnet, 'At Rome', where opening disappointment is felt at the first view of the Holy City, but is assuaged at the turning point of the sonnet by the solution, an active use of the imagination in transfiguring the reality. Other mood changes are to be observed between pairs or triplets of sonnets, where confidence is followed by doubt or reservation or vice versa. The alternation of attitudes to the bloodshed and civil life of Italy's past is exemplified, for instance, in the three sonnets (XI, XII and XIII) composed to record the visit to Lake Thrasymene. The most important thread that ties the introductory poem, 'Musings', to the other elements of these itinerary Memorials is, however, not that of the alternating moods and balances within the feelings of the Poet, but the unity of his public role as prophet and monitor of moral health. The culmination of 'Musings near Aquapendente' quoted above is one aspect of this admonitory role and it is followed through in other poems, both in the itinerary set and indeed in much of the volume of 1842. An even more prominent theme is political rather than social and it is sounded throughout the Memorials. In 'Musings' the poet is not only recreating the cultural history of classical Italy, he is establishing the richness of what had been contrasted with the weakened state of divided and subjugated Italy. The journey to Italy took place at a highly significant period in the emergence of Italian nationalism. From 1815 the land we now call Italy was divided into kingdoms, each of which depended to a greater or lesser degree on more powerful neighbours. The Austrian Empire extended into Venetia and part of the plain of Lombardy, the Kingdom of Savoy ruled in Piedmont, the Papal States were another unit, and in the South of Italy there was the troubled Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. These volatile political elements existed in separate antagonisms that thwarted attempts at unification until almost twenty years after Wordsworth's death. Nevertheless at the time of his visit in 1837, Wordsworth, and indeed any perceptive English traveller, must have been conscious of the many stirrings of independence. In the year that Wordsworth made his visit, the nationalist Mazzini was exiled in England. There had been attempted revolutions, ruthlessly suppressed largely by Austrian troops in 1820 in Sicily and Naples





and in 1830 in the Papal States. The three sonnets composed with the memory of Bologna 'in remembrance of the late insurrections' were addressed to the Carbonari (charcoal burners) whose first resistance to oppression took place during the Napoleonic occupation. Wordsworth's ambiguity about them arises partly from his sympathy for any spirit of freedom and liberty, particularly under Napoleonic invasion and indeed under any alien yoke, and partly from his anxiety about groups of 'insurrectionists' who might end in emulating the excesses of the French Revolution. Wordsworth's political sympathies were clearly with the aspirations of those who aspired to liberty, but against those who were organizing themselves to fight for independence and freedom particularly from Austrian domination. How his readers interpreted his sonnets is another matter. There is a revealing comment on the reception given to the poet on his return. A Mrs Fletcher, a liberal neighbour of Wordsworth, noted in her Autobiography of 1839: 'the poet on Italian politics is all we can desire' (W. P., Ill, p. 501). Liberalism and nationalism were assumed by many intellectuals to be one and the same good aim. Contemporary, active political excitement should not, however, be assumed to lead to poetry that is unambiguously political or polemical. There are on the one hand explicit statements reminding modern Italians of the achievements of their predecessors. The first explicitly political sonnet is XI, 'From the Alban Hills looking towards Rome': 'Forgive illustrious Country / These deep sighs.' The sonnet ends with the promise of a 'third stage of thy great destiny' (W. P., Ill, p. 217). The nineteenth sonnet, 'At Florence', explicitly associates the Poet's task with national freedom. Dante's chair in which Wordsworth rested reminds the visitor not only of sacred poetry, but of Dante's national loyalty: But in his breast, the mighty Poet bore, A Patriot's heart, warm with undying fire (W. P., Ill, p. 225) Other sonnets in the sequence are less direct in their association with Italian freedom. In Sonnet VII, 'At Rome', immediately after the triad of sonnets on the nature of history, there is the expression of sympathy for dispossessed patriots. The perceptive travellers who have observed the patient patriots, suffering under the



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yoke of the foreigner 'Nor must, nor will, nor can, despair of Thee!' (W. P., Ill, p. 215). The patriot is, however, submissive, saving his scorn for the privacy of his home at the ending of the day. In a rapid change of tone after the previously quoted sonnets on Italy's warriors of Lake Thrasymene, there is a depiction of violence. In 'Near the same Lake', Wordsworth raises the spectre of the bloodstained ghost of the commander still blindly and ruthlessly seeking his victory at the site of battle. All the fears of the unwanted and unexpected effects of revolution are presented in this chilling image of warfare. Even the religiously directed sonnets are not entirely apolitical. Sonnet XXIII, 'Among the ruins of a convent in the Apennines', is not what it first seems. Apparently in praise of ruins and their evocation ('to sight still more forlorn'), they actually record the devastation of sacred rites by the armies that, from Napoleon onwards, have violated the Italian state. The Fenwick note is clear: these are recent religious ruins, found all too often in Italy, Germany and France, the flotsam of the wave of war and anti-clericalism that succeeded the French Revolution. Although they lack the venerable atmosphere of the ruins of the monasteries of Britain, they are a potent reminder of the destruction of a national culture. It is as Wordsworth leaves Italy that his feeling for the country's subjection and the struggle comes to a climax. In a pair of sonnets (XXV and XXVI), he first sounds a call to action: 'awake / Mother of heroes, from thy death-like sleep'. More telling still is the moment when the poet crosses the frontier and hears German speech again, the speech, of course, of Northern Italy's occupying power. The German voices 'filled the heart with conflict strong'. On a much earlier personal pilgrimage, as The Prelude records, the crossing of the Alpine divide had left the young poet and his companion with mixed sensations and unclear emotions. At this frontier the experience is unambiguously associated with liberal politics. The journey to Italy has reminded Wordsworth of the younger man that he has been, the radical liberal-minded citizen of the world. Although the final poem in Memorials was imported from a previous period, 1825, 'The Pillar of Trajan' is an appropriate text for the closing of the sequence. First, the Italy that Wordsworth has experienced has required from him a commitment of will. In Rome it was necessary to make the dead monuments vibrate to the powers of his memory. There are signs that the summoning of Fancy was difficult. His journey was not borne along by the grace





of Dorothy Wordsworth's journal, unlike the poems of the 1820 itinerary or the Scottish visits where, if not her presence, at least her journal was always to hand as a subdued but powerful voice as he composed. A deliberate act of summoning poetic inspiration without his sister's presence was necessary at intervals. He had to admit that even the sound of the cuckoo at Laverna had been heard first by his travelling companion and therefore he was relating an experience without immediacy. Now in the quiet of Rydal Mount a further act of calculated memory was necessary to commit the Italian excursion into print. At least he had a long-term almost natural inclination to work in this way, and even found or sought consolation in the familiar theme of the mind creating a better picture of the truth than the first light of actuality. At Trajan's Column he had gazed on the curved figures round the marble memorial. A transformation took place as he dwelt in memory on the incident: Still are we present with the imperial Chief, Nor cease to gaze upon the bold Relief Till Rome, to silent marble unconfined, Becomes with all her years a vision of the Mind. (W. P., Ill, p. 231) Memorials of the Italian journey may well have not been what some of his readers expected if they were new to poetry and excited by younger contemporaries like Tennyson, yet for the majority the collection of his memories of this excursion only served to confirm the identity of the poet who had by this stage achieved national accreditation. He was the essential, cultured English traveller, educated and prepared, receptive to all that the vestiges of classical civilization could provide. The Englishman abroad conveyed in his travelling equipment his natural historic preoccupations, not least a Miltonic respect for liberty which included admiration for those Europeans who had died in freedom's service. Equally, and at times in tension against libertarianism, was a fear of the revolutionary excesses that had been so evident in France in 1792. The old prophet had returned home in 1837 from his last major visit overseas bearing a message that five years later he would publish as poems of hope for freedom, but cloaked in the cautious gown of patience and gradualness.



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The political context in which the collection of 1842 was written must be appreciated in order to avoid a summary judgement of seventy-two year old Wordsworth as a conservative and overcautious Anglo-centric tourist. Two courageous features stand out in opposition to the usual charges against him of reactionary politics. In the first place, he espouses, throughout this record of his Italian tour, the cause of hope. The sonnets early in the sequence, 'At Albano' and 'Near Anio's stream', are committed, just as is the simple peasant in the first sonnet of the pair, to a confidence in two time dimensions, the present and the future. There will be an improvement in conditions in due course. At the moment we must trust in the living present for all its hardship: ... but, while we plough This sea of life without a visible shore, Do neither promise ask, nor grace implore In what alone is ours, the living Now. (W. P., Ill, p. 217) It is wrong to assume that this is the poetry of passive resignation. The old seer holds to a long view of hope and gradual progress. That seer, however, can only speak to those who listen, those who in 'Musings near Aquapendente' are 'friendly' and who know his origins. They are required to be as familiar as the broom flowering on the Italian hillside. Wordsworth's adjective, 'friendly', seems inadequate in the grander setting of struggles for national liberty or in the circumstances of those in 'a chilled age' swept along by Time's stream. Yet, it is a singularly appropriate Wordsworthian word for human relationship. There is a large, ultimately vital theme of human hope created by a spirit of reconciliation and openness to others. One other aspect, again a quiet kind of courage, is to be found in the sections of Memorials which were perhaps the most challenging to compose. The respect for the vestiges of Roman Catholic faith in the mountain fastnesses of the Apennines was something close to a truce with a dangerous old enemy, a form of spiritual acceptance of an allied faith. The willingness to publish reflective verse on the once rejected faith was no less than an extension of a hand of friendship. A comparison between the Memorials of 1820 and of 1837 reveals an increased emphasis on religious belief and religious doctrine in





the last-named collection. Although the observation of religion is a feature of the European tour of 1820 (witness the poems on the medieval atmosphere of Bruges or the peasant ceremonies in the Alps), the description there is from the outside. Wordsworth observes the appearances of a faith which is not his own, but which he can comprehend. In 1837, the verse is often unequivocally from firm religious belief, no more so than in 'Musings near Aquapendente', the theme-setting opening poem: ... The faith be mine, That He who guides and governs all, approves When gratitude, though disciplined to look Beyond these transient spheres, doth wear a crown Of earthly hope put on with trembling hand: Nor is least pleased, we trust, when golden beams, Reflected through the mists of age, from hours Of innocent delight, remote or recent, Shoot but a little way - 'tis all they can Into the doubtful future. (W. P., Ill, p. 206) This expression of religious faith, repeated as we have seen in the proximity to St Francis's cell or in the remoter hermitages of the Northern Apennines, is not a spontaneous overflow of religious enthusiasm. In the passage quoted, it is even stoical and reserved in tone, but it is an expression of a personal relationship with a guiding Almighty Being who is asked to appreciate what little an old poet can do, but nevertheless is offered as a tribute, an expression of a belief that sheds a practical, if limited, light into the terrestrial gloom ahead.



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Conclusion: Such Sweet Wayfaring? A. E. Housman deemed that the two most original poets of the nineteenth century were Wordsworth and Swinburne (Ricks, 1988, p. 295), and in considering an epitaph suitable for Swinburne, who had outlived his earliest talent, he quoted Wordsworth's sonnet on the Venetian Republic: And what if she had seen those glories fade, Those titles vanish, and that strength decay; Yet shall some tribute of regret be paid When her long life hath reached its final day: Men are we, and must grieve when even the Shade Of that which once was great, is passed away (W. P., Ill, p. 112) At the end of any examination of Wordsworth's years after 1807, a decision has to be made about whether the formidable production of poems should be condemned with the faint praise of 'even the shade'? Is there only grief at the passing away of former greatness and mere 'tribute of regref at the years of decayed strength? This study is one answer to that question, for its main purpose is to reinstate into consideration of the continuity and development of Romanticism a sequence of poems written as a poetic agenda. The fact that, for succeeding critical generations, the verse selected here has been regarded as a lapse from the onward drive of Romanticism is a reflection on a narrow definition of a literary movement which not all those who worked at literary creation in the early decades of the nineteenth century shared. If we judge that Wordsworth's new work after 1819, and particularly that part of it represented in itinerary Memorials or originating in travel, is more 137 10.1057/9780230286214 - Wordsworth's Poems of Travel 1819-1842, John F. Wyatt


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than a 'shade', it does not mean that the poems of this time only require dusting down like forgotten manuscripts discovered in the literary critical attic. A conscious task of exploration, an intellectual journey, has to be undertaken in order to travel with the poet and to understand what kind of poetry (and at important times, accompanying prose) was prepared for first publication. A sustained reading of a prolific writer's oeuvre is demanding at any time, but Wordsworth's later poems, even when, as in this study, the selection has been from poems of journeying, demand special commitment to a form of reading which is rarely necessary in poems of our own times. That categorization of Wordsworth's 'later poems' is a complexity enough. Wordsworth's major writing life spanned over fifty years, from the early 1790s to 1844, the first twelve years of which have occupied modern readers almost exclusively. Verse written by younger poets after 1820 has the ring of those years, rarely of the later period. The Lyrical Ballads blazed the trail for a century of concentration on the lyric as a major form. Narratives certainly changed their nature from 1800 to 1850, but even in that genre, the difference between 'Simon Lee', 'The Idiot Boy', 'The Ancient Mariner' and, say, 'Manfred', 'The Idylls of the King' or 'Sohrab and Rustum' is of degree and style, not of kind. Browning's dramatis personae appear novel and radical, but they are prefigured in the various voices that introduce narratives in the Lyrical Ballads such as in 'The Thorn' or 'Peter Bell'. As for confessional poetry (setting aside The Prelude, which is in many senses not a poem of the period but a work outside it or, indeed, outside any normal literary time-frame), the tradition of lyrical musing and ruminative odes is taken on through the succession of poets from Shelley to Matthew Arnold. If we confine our gaze to Wordsworth's canon before 1807, then it is easy to appreciate what follows in the works of other younger poets as an inheritance almost like a genealogical descent. A restricted reading in this manner has the effect of limiting the scope of a poet who remained an active contributor to Romanticism as it evolved in early nineteenth-century Britain. What difference then does it make to alter the frame of consideration by considering the whole of Wordsworth's production or, to use Galperin's advice, stretching the same canon from early to later poems? Immediately, the new perspective reveals not similarities with younger contemporary poets but the opposite - considerable disparities. Wordsworth's work published new after 1813 is noticeably individual. It is rarely copied, extended or repeated by his



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younger contemporaries. One way of handling the difference is to argue that poetic fashions change and Wordsworth was stuck in time, even fixed in eighteenth-century modes that younger poets and their readers wisely abandoned. Studies of readership do not support most of that explanation. Cowper and Thomson, Gray and Collins continued to be popular at least thirty years into the new century. It is more important, however, not to be satisfied with the argument that Wordsworth was backward looking in the use of poetic forms. Wordsworth's continued use of traditional forms, such as the sonnet sequences, the loco-descriptive poems and the odes erected on a classical foundation, are deliberate exercises, but exercises of an experienced practitioner, with a purpose to entertain and to teach. More can be said about the uniqueness of the considerable offering of long poems and linked poetic sequences after 1813, a date chosen because it includes The Excursion. I cannot perceive that particular type of discursive poetic philosophy being followed by any poet of the next thirty or forty years. At least that is true of England, although in the United States there were modified but similar aims by writers of the 'American Renaissance' such as Emerson, Thoreau and eventually Whitman. My thesis has concentrated on only one mode of poetic activity, the sequences of travel poems, or poems of Memorials, but this concentration has the virtue of making the point even more sharply. Which poet, either of his own age or of the remainder of the century, aimed to produce, over more than twenty years, sets of sonnets and short odes constructed around the events of journeys, and personal journeys at that? The reply must be that it was not attempted again, except in individual poems such as Arthur Hugh Clough's 'Amours de Voyage'. A more profound question hangs over the study of 'Memorials' and related poems. It is, 'Why did Wordsworth do it at all and why over such a sustained period?' A simple reply, though only part of the explanation, is still worth making. It is that Wordsworth had always written poems of journeys and therefore continued to do so. In youth, maturity and old age, Wordsworth was the essential poet of wandering, excursion and the experience of journeys, whether for a day or for weeks. His earliest published work was identifiably perambulatory work, An Evening Walk. Descriptive Sketches Taken During a Pedestrian Tour among the Alps is another youthful work based on a significant journey. The Prelude, of course, is a compendium of movement whichever text we choose.



Conclusion: Such sweet wayfaring?


It addressed local and international journeying and drew poetic conclusions from its beginning in the changing breeze of a poet's solitary walk to its conclusion as the author ascends Snowdon with his companions. Narratives such as 'The Borderers' or 'Salisbury Plain' are clear instances of the journey poem. Peter Bell is the essential traveller, a restless voyager, if ever there was one. There are wandering, moving figures in The Lyrical Ballads', a foremost example is 'The Ancient Mariner', to which Wordsworth had much to contribute. The list goes on: 'Tintern Abbey', a poem of reflection on a tour of earlier days, the strange cyclic excursion of 'The Idiot Boy' or the movements of characters associated with the horror of 'The Thorn'. The perambulation of the Wanderer in The Excursion is as much part of that character's life story, lacking a settled base, as it was of Peter Bell, except that the Wanderer sought companions for his circuit of movements in the upland fells and down to the lakeside of the closing book of the poem. It could be argued that we have a single career of movement and therefore it was not remarkable that in his final thirty years, the travelling poet wrote more structured and identified travelling verse, with titles such as Memorials, but this is only to pause at the surface of the issue of his restlessness. Wordsworth's acknowledged debt to a tradition is crucial if we are to discuss further reasons for his continuity of poetic interest. The eighteenth-century poets whom he admired also produced poems of travel, albeit on a smaller, more local scale. The poems of this genre had two objectives, other than to amuse. They sought to extract moral lessons from a review of nature and also to share with their readers a cultivated person's judgement of aesthetic value in the briefly visited landscape. The perambulations of an author were opportunities for displaying taste, offered to an audience which itself possessed the taste to understand the presented landscape. Wordsworth's poems of travel after 1819 are less concerned with taste in that sense, but still with a common ground with readership, with the representation of an understood history of Europe and of Britain. It is still a shared landscape, shared, that is, with the emergent people of a nation that was establishing itself as a unified culture with accepted norms and as a home of freedom and moral rectitude. The moral lessons in the eighteenth-century travel poems are an essential of their composition, but in Wordsworth's series there is a broader and more diverse series of lessons presented, less individually and more communally moral. The



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famous sites of Europe and Scotland and the routeways to and from his home are the occasion for conveying a political, historical and social message about the position of the United Kingdom. These are not poems of locality confined in their messages to one regional locality; they are national poems. The kingdom portrayed is beyond the small scale of the eighteenth-century estate. Britain is the locale, and it is superior to the Continent, despite all current failures and the impending threats of irresponsible legislation hovering over the nation. This use of an itinerary literary tradition with clear presentation of a lofty, social, political and moral inheritance is one indication of the difference between Wordsworth as a writer of experiences of travel and his younger English contemporaries. Here is a notable instance of the fact that Romanticism had many forms, some of them contradictory and opposed. The problem with the simplified idea of Romantic travel as escapism (see, again, Blackstone, 1962, p. 4) is that it masks how different Wordsworth's travel poems are from those of the younger writers who nevertheless shared the nation's interest in European and classical locations. They sought to find in key European locations, such as the Castle of Chillon, the Jungfrau, Mont Blanc, the city of Rome, places which could be rebuilt in the mind. Wordsworth on the other hand followed and expanded the tradition of the previous century, through depiction of known places from which he could extract a public response guided by an individual, actual itinerary. Byron's Switzerland, Arthur Hugh Clough's Rome, Browning's Italy and Matthew Arnold's Alps are narrative in a different sense from Wordsworth's descriptions. To his contemporaries, the European stage is a setting for drama, the evocative backdrop for stories of people and their entanglement with ideas. Wordsworth, the Guide, considers the well-known sites in a different light. His eyes record the places, then his verse forms recast them for his readers in a way that they might well actually see them if they had absorbed his prophetic teaching. Shelley's 'Mont Blanc' is not a depiction in Wordsworth's sense; the mountain is in Shelley's mind and the reader is privileged to enter and then to leave that inner geography. Wordsworth's places are there in fact, altered for the visitor by the poetic format, and tinted with ethical and political messages, but actual and real geographical sites. Chamouny (as Wordsworth spelt it) provides an interesting illustration of 'Wordsworth's place' at three different periods of his life.




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Nicola Trott (1990) approaches the Romantic traveller from a different, but fruitful, perspective. She sees the Romantic poets matching the imagined with the real. Each poet's experience of the real is individually handled, but each has what she calls a 'strategy of recovery', by which the imagination must combine with nature. My argument is that Wordsworth's 'strategy of recovery' in his later poems is one of control. Whereas in his youth Wordsworth openly reacted to the shock of the force of the Alps and strove to communicate that sensation because others could share it when transmuted and be doubly empowered by poetry, in his later poems he exercises control over what he sees and submits nature to a controlled and managed Fancy. In old age, he retains a basic purpose, to turn the reader's mind with feeling towards the meaning of objects - a meaning beyond the Alps and, indeed, beyond Switzerland. The section in the earliest passage about Chamouny, Descriptive Sketches, describing the awesome storms of the Alps purports to convey the feelings of travellers with a diction appropriate for describing the sublime, the second cousin of terror. Last, let us turn to where Chamouny 2 shields, Bosom'd in gloomy woods, her golden fields, Five streams of ice amid her cots descend, And with wild flowers and blooming orchards blend, A stream more fair than what the Grecian feigns Of purple lights and even vernal plains. Here lawns and shades by breezy rivulets fann'd, Here all the Seasons revel hand in hand. Red stream the cottage lights; the landscape fades, Erroneous wavering mid the twilight shades. Alone ascends that mountain ... nam'd of white 2 That dallies with the Sun the summer night. Six thousand years amid his lonely bounds The voice of Ruin, day and night, resounds. Where Horror-led his sea of ice assails, Havoc and Chaos blast a thousand vales, In waves, like two enormous serpents, wind And drag their length of deluge train behind. Between the pine's enormous boughs descry'd Serene he towers, in deepest purple dy'd;



CHAMOUNY, THREE OCCASIONS


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Note 1:

The word is pronounced upon the spot Chamouny; I have taken the liberty of reading it long, thinking it more musical.

Note 2:

It is only from the higher part of the valley of Chamouny that Mont Blanc is visible. (W. P., p. 82)

The poem of 1793 then moves to a section on the political situation, written before the emancipation of Savoy, and a long description comparing domestic life under tyranny with a free political system. There is personification, feminine for the Vale of Chamouny, masculine for Mont Blanc itself. Havoc and Chaos are likened to beasts with a horrendous trail of destruction behind them. Ruin and Horror rumble on in destructive play, while Daylight and the Sun play their animated role in a relationship of dalliance and laughter. There is referential knowledge, appropriate for a serious work: the Greek allusion, the age of the earth (six thousand years), the accuracy of noting where Mont Blanc can be seen. The visual is in a pictured context, if not a picturesque one. That distinction is important in the setting of Descriptive Sketches. Here Wordsworth is at pains not to use the conventional descriptive and picturesque forms of his predecessors. In a footnote (omitted in the 1849 edition), he is keen to assert that, although T had once given to these sketches the title of Picturesque', in fact 'the Alps are insulted in applying to them that term' (W. P., p. 62). Although he eschews the picturesque, there is still a verbal sketch, a composition with elaboration of a visually exciting scene. The poem is not wholly, however, a set of portraits of scenes. As indicated above, mention is turned to the political state of Switzerland under subjugation. The Prelude of 1805 is also concerned with recent political events. The young poet's journey to Switzerland is recorded with the vivid memory of the intensity of life in a country celebrating the first anniversary of the Fall of the Bastille. The famous description of Mont Blanc in The Prelude should be read alongside Descriptive Sketches: That day we first Beheld the summit of Mont Blanc, and grieved



Glad Day-light laughs upon his top of snow, Glitter the stars above, and all is black below.

Wordsworth's Poems of Travel, 1819-42 To have a soulless image on the eye Which had usurped upon a living thought That never more could be. The wondrous Vale Of Chamouny did, on the following dawn, With its dumb cataracts and streams of ice A motionless array of mighty waves, Five rivers broad and vast - make rich amends, And reconciled us to realities. There small birds warble from the leafy trees, The eagle soareth in the element, There doth the reaper bind the yellow sheaf, The maiden spread the haycock in the sun, While Winter like a tamed lion walks, Descending from the mountain to make sport Among the cottages by beds of flowers. (Prelude, VI, 1805,11. 452-69)

In this passage there are textual borrowings from Descriptive Sketches - the five 'rivers' of the glacier, the contrast of the seasons, ice with spring flowers. The main concentration, however, is on the way in which the travellers experienced the first vista of the famous peak. It was a disappointment deep enough to justify the verb 'grieved'. The 'living thought' of the icon-like mountain had been destroyed by the reality. Unlike the view of the peak described in Descriptive Sketches, there is no attempt to soar to its summit with its near-perpetual daylight, nor is the many-streamed glacier the centre of the poet-observer's meditation. Galperin (1992) relates this episode to Wordsworth's rejection of the 'tyranny of the eye'. I find it difficult to accept that this deeply significant moment is wholly internal. There is an outward reality ever present as well as 'in the mind's eye'. The traveller's recovery from disappointment takes place literally at a lower level, where the valley in its richness envelops and subdues the ice-lion of winter. The contrast of richness and fertility, both outwardly in the Chamouny Valley and inwardly in the poet's mind, and the coldness of the reality of the Alpine peaks, again outer and inner, is at this point The Prelude's concern. It is significant that the passage in The Prelude which follows the Mont Blanc experience is the deepest emotional sequence of hope and disappointment, of imaginative elation and the reality of



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disappointment. This is the moment when the two young men found that by accident they had achieved a rite of passage. They had crossed the Alps. The Prelude's figuring of the Alps is one of alternating moods of excitement, fear and dejection. A different sequence of feeling persisted 15 years after the writing of the last quotation. This was in the new setting of the European journey of 1820. In 1805 the ebbs and flows were of the analysis of a dream still hovering at the time of composition. What was written in 1820 was not an attempt to recreate a visual experience as in Descriptive Sketches, nor an inner turmoil of a 'spot of time' as in The Prelude. The eight-stanza poem in Memorials is about the religious procession in the Chamouny valley and the strange likeness of the participants to the pinnacles of ice above the glacier stream. Still in the vivid freshness of a dream, The pageant haunts me as it met our eyes! Still! with those white-robed Shapes - a living Stream, The glacier Pillars join in solemn guise For the same service, by mysterious ties; Numbers exceeding credible account Of number, pure and silent Votaries Issuing or issued from a wintry fount; The impenetrable heart of that exalted Mount! They too, who send so far a holy gleam While they the Church engird with motion slow, A product of that awful Mountain seem, Poured from his vaults of everlasting snow; Not virgin lilies marshalled in bright row, Not swans descending with the stealthy tide, A livelier sisterly resemblance show Than the fair Forms, that in long order glide, Bear to the glacier band, those Shapes aloft descried. (W. P., Ill, pp. 192-3) Wordsworth's footnote referred to a larger religious procession in the Engelberg Valley, which was less impressive because it lacked the 'most beautiful and solemn peculiarity' of the glacial shapes. Here there is contrast as in The Prelude's Chamouny episode, but there is a very different outcome to this contrast, one which does





not console the poet but instead disturbs him. The 'sister resemblance' is not with flowers and serene swans but between the people at a moment of the exercise of faith and the solemn, even frightening glacier streams. The pillars of ice may or may not be the locus for faith. Their significance is not that they act as picturesque forms as ice maidens, but that they confuse the writer and reader as to their religious status. The poet's disturbance is properly understood when the two stanzas are placed back in the poem as a whole and, indeed, in the contextual neighbourhood of the poems that surround this poem. For, after all, 'The Procession' is a poem about religious illusions. The opening stanzas list the religious observances supported by generations of faithful worshippers, from Persepolis's cankered walls to the ritual dance and music of Rome. The danger of endowing natural reality with spiritual or even human attributes, however beautiful natural forms such as these ice glaciers may be, is the final note of the poem and its main message: Such insolent temptations woulds't thou miss, Avoid these sights; nor brood o'er Fable's dark abyss. (W. P., Ill, p. 193) It is passages like this which make me hesitate to support Galperin's view of 'the visible' in the late poems. Galperin identifies in this period a dissociation which 'allows Wordsworth to get beyond intentionality and to represent a life that is no longer paradoxical, arbitrary or symbolic, but one that, as Coleridge allowed, is merely contingent, visible, unwritten and unreadable' (Galperin, 1993, p. 211). The poet's disturbance at the procession with its freight of superstition and its all-too-ready assimilation of belief into the natural forms of the glacier seems to me to be markedly 'paradoxical, arbitrary' and near 'symbolic'. Again, the poet's strong lead in the last verse is a strong manifestation of intentionality. There is a clear, guiding hand of the author on the reader's arm, as indeed it has been throughout the poem. I do agree, however, with Galperin's overall conclusion that the later poems 'prove a challenge to the reader by the way in which the natural sights are selected, shaped and presented'. Perhaps, more than anything, the modern reader requires more than a minimum of historical cultural understanding to see why the scenes of the



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itinerary poems were selected. Not only was the sight of Mont Blanc on two occasions part of Wordsworth's experiential history. He is now writing at a period when Mont Blanc had assumed significant public status as an artistic (and popular) icon, a well-known image in the public mind. As such, its 'reality' was already well- or even overused, like that of Ailsa Craig or Fingal's Cave or the Schaffhausen Falls. A firm Guide to detach the reader from what was by then already a worn convention was deemed to be required.

THE SENIOR GUIDE How the Poet-Guide observes is important to appreciate in these later poems of travel. I have instanced the superior position adopted in order to survey the larger scene as a feature of these itinerary verses. The differences between Dorothy Wordsworth's accounts and those of her companion brother have also been noted in the preceding chapters. If we gather together the virtues of Dorothy Wordsworth's Journals, it will be easier to see what William Wordsworth was not doing as well as what his individual project aimed to do. Pamela Woofs detailed study (1991) of Dorothy Wordsworth's travel journals has explored new and deeper sources which were vitally alive for the Wordsworth household, the habitat in which the poet developed his mission. One dominant comparison emerges even more strongly after reading Woof's perusal of manuscript and other draft sources. It is Dorothy Wordsworth's closely detailed and factual recording. Coleridge admired her ability to write with perceptive accuracy: 'What is, anchors the raptures ... even when she cannot see, she cannot forget what is' (Woof, 1991, p. 154). The 1820 European tour illustrates well the difference between her observations (with to a lesser extent those of Mary Wordsworth) and William Wordsworth's poems which emerged from their collective experience. Where Dorothy Wordsworth avoids literary models (of which there were many in contemporary travel literature) and records not only the detailed sequence of the journey but the detailed elements that composed it, William exercises a 'reduction of detail, even to finding language an irrelevance in order to create an inner vision' (Woof, 1991, p. 152). It is important to add that such a comparison does not judge Dorothy to be a mere recorder of detail. Her close observation is assisted by the art of language, by metaphor and





simile, by pictorial analogies, not least with the Lake District and the domestically familiar. She may work from the secure ground of the familiar, but still records the excitement of sublime scenery and strives successfully for depiction of amazing and stirring sights. William Wordsworth's accounts of places and events on the other hand, as I hope I have indicated in successive chapters, are focused on the meaning of a place or of an incident. He takes on the duty of interpretation. The history of a location, whether literary, classical or politically recent, is as important, if not more important, than the moment of observation. These differences are more significant than explanations usually offered when Dorothy and William's work is compared. 'Different perspectives' on place, different 'personalities' or similar authorial character explanations, are less than adequate. In a letter to Christopher North, Wordsworth uses again his frequent analogy of travelling, this time in further defining his chief ambition to fulfil the role of the Great Poet: 'He ought to travel before men occasionally as well as at their side' (W. L., I, p. 350). The leader's or guide's position on a journey into the unknown had an appeal to which he continued to accede. His poems of youthful travel assume a lonely traveller in advance of the mundane, the ordinary and the unexceptional. His later poems are not those of a lone traveller. He is, as it were, accompanied by a party of readers. From time to time he must detach himself from the travelling party like the 'narrator' of the story of the River Duddon who steps aside from the river in order to rest and recover energy for his partnership with the stream. Even as late as the 1837 journey to Italy, there are moments when the aged poet steps aside from being the hortatory political guide and rests in the calm of the 'liquid lapse serene' of the falling stream and of his advanced years. The weight of poetic duty is taken on his shoulders again; the journey resumes, as Wordsworth's journeys always do, after this due pause. The noontide dreams by the Duddon, or the interlude in the lakes of Italy in 1820, or the wished-for stillness of the upland valleys away from the noise of ship's machinery in the Firth of Clyde - all are moments of suspension of movement, renewal moments of the journey. The Senior Guide from time to time has to ascend to a high and separate place. Wordsworth's images of flying or mountain-top vision have been identified in previous chapters. The vision once attained, he always returns to earth. Two images from the 1819



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publication, Peter Bell, illustrate the opposition of retirement and involvement in this stage of Wordsworth's poetry. In two sonnets based on William Westall's engravings described in Chapter 2, one image is of withdrawal into depths. The caverns are places of peace and relaxed imagination. Then the surface drama of moral regeneration is resumed. The second instance is in the final sonnet, where the troubled man has been wandering alone. Resolution of anguish comes from travelling. He travels through his pain. In movement, he is visited by the reconciling vision in the break in the clouds. The poet who took on the task of Guide in the period after whatever caused the turning point in his life was an experienced man and writer. His experience was of personal family loss and personal abuse, but as a man conscious of national reputation he suffered with the tribulation of a disturbed era, sometimes bitterly experiencing the threat that the country had faced in war and then in the years of rapid social change after Waterloo. Like the figure in the sonnet that closes the 1819 volume, the poet found resolution in movement and interpreted his public duty to be a traveller. Galperin (1989), in his detailed study of the later poems, particularly of the River Duddon Sonnets and of the itinerary poems, asserts that the change in Wordsworth's later poems was a shift of the centrality and authority of the author to the reader. He describes this transference, noted in a major way in the different leadership roles in The Excursion, in terms of irony. My study of how places in the later poems are presented leads me to see the figure of Wordsworth the Guide more consistently, explicitly and prominently. This leadership role identifies Wordsworth to the reader in a very different way than he or she read Browning, Tennyson and later Victorian poets who took on a public role. Wordsworth's role is a survival of the older, serious role of the previous century's poets with whom the younger Wordsworth was of course contemporary. Before them were equally impressive holders of the tradition of poet-guide. Virgil and Horace were travellers in something of the same sense. Like Wordsworth they also extolled the virtues of the home-base from which they and their poems set forth and returned. Dante and Milton were humanity's guides to a different journey, Heaven, Hell or Eden, but they carried the same responsibility. Wordsworth's poems based on a series of excursions belong to one strand of Romanticism, that which sought a continuity with the




Wordszvorth's Poems of Travel, 1819-42

poetry of the recent past and with classical models. If we remember the poetic forms Wordsworth used in this long second half of his writing life, it is clear that his commitment was grounded in the literary past through the practice of writing in formal modes. Rachel Trickett (1990) puts this well: 'In so far as he was a poet learned in literature, he retained those skills until the end.' To accept that Wordsworth was firmly committed to traditional forms should not leave us with the assumptions that the readership he aimed to serve was in the same sense traditional. A new readership was emerging and Wordsworth was as conscious as any writer of the duty to care for it. The new companion travellers had to be nurtured.

THE NURTURING OF A READERSHIP The voice of the sonnets, or of odes or longer poems of reflection, was Wordsworthian in a manner which his contemporary readers came to expect and to admire. Again, Rachel Trickett (1990) expresses this expectation of the later poems: 'a domestication of the heart and soul', their mode is 'hortatory'. Trickett continues to consider the new audience of Wordsworth's final years, who, she says, found this mode helpful. It was what they expected poetry should be: 'confiding, advising, consoling'. The poems are, however, not acceptable to this new readership merely because the language is simple. They 'make demands on the auditor' (Trickett, 1990, p. 51). The 'auditor' or Reader (Wordsworth's term) becomes the predominant partner in the exercise of publication in a way which marks off the older poet from the younger. If the 'Preface' to The Lyrical Ballads in the two major forms in which it was published concentrates on the Poet and his formidably responsible task, the later poems and the prose works that accompany them direct attention to the recipient of the Poet's mission. Wordsworth's major task after 1810 might be said to have been the creation of a readership and, although his success was slow in arriving, he continued to engage with that objective, concurrently maintaining his earlier aim of justifying the pre-eminence of the Poet among humanity. Galperin (1989) describes The Excursion as a fulcrum in Wordsworth's career. I would add the prose accompaniment to The Excursion as another important hinge in his career as a literary critic. The 'Essay, Supplementary to the Preface' of 1815 is the text where the poet's attention to the reader is elaborated. There is an explicit



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If there be one conclusion more forcibly pressed upon us than another by the review which has been given of the fortunes and fate of poetical works, it is this - that every author, as far as he is great and at the same time original, has had the task of creating the taste by which he is to be enjoyed: so has it been, so will it continue to be. (W. Prose, III, p. 80) What will be the indicator of success of this project? The reader's mind must contain 'a co-operating power', otherwise 'auxiliary impulses, elevated or profound passion cannot exist'. The author, the great and at the same time original author that is, who has a mission to widen the sphere of human sensibility, is addressed by the significant term 'leader'. In a vivid image, Wordsworth explains that leadership is not granted to once successful but now inactive artists, for they are like an Indian prince stretched out on a palanquin, flattered but inert. Leadership in this high endeavour is not for those who seek to head large groups of reader followers. It is not demotic. The objective is expansive but demanding, 'to extend the domain of sensibility for the delight, the honour and the benefit of human nature' (W. Prose, III, p. 84), so the development of disciples takes time. 'The poet must reconcile himself for a season to few and scattered hearers' (W. Prose, III, p. 83). The mission to a new readership has to be distinguished from a political campaign. It is at this point that Wordsworth makes an important distinction between the Public and the People. Wordsworth espouses an ancient cause to appeal to the 'Vox Populi which the Deity inspires'. The Public, on the other hand, is 'a small though loud portion of the community'. Such a group deserves only as much deference as it is entitled to, but they are not his aim. His poems are offered with 'reverence and devout respect' to the People. The People will justify the Poet's faith in them because the People's intellect and wisdom preserves good poetry (W. Prose, III, p. 84). It is from the period of 1815 that this partnership between himself as Guide and the Reader - a prepared and nurtured Reader - is initiated. The poems of the travel sequences are aligned so that this new audience can pursue a swelling theme. 1



intention established in the opening paragraphs: Wordsworth acknowledges that the theory originates with Coleridge:


A Guide as a leader and as an interpreter for those who follow is critically distinct from the role of the detached observer. This study has maintained that a Guide with authority, though not absent in Wordsworth's canon in early years, is conspicuously a figure after 1819. A self-conscious poet of this kind, concerned with duty to 'the People', would naturally be concerned to weave into the mantle of authority the inevitable seniority of growing old. Some reflections on ageing seen through the perspective of the poems and associated prose of journeying conclude this study.

AGEING The journey as a metaphor is an ancient figure for the processes of human life. Our own age significantly still uses travelling figures of speech (course of life, career, stages of life) to conceptualize the human condition. Now, as ageing has captured public, political and even academic attention, language has been occupied with economic or business registers. 2 Since the mid- or late-nineteenth century, the metaphor of biological change and the use of scientific concepts of growth, maturation and decline has dominated the language with a concomitant implicit assumption that there is something 'normal' and universal in the divisions of the human life. Add to this the pervasive language derived from the notion of evolution and ageing becomes a social construction. The modern mental framework is one of preparation for economic life, full 'normal' working life and eventual 'retirement' from the economic weal, reinforced by statutory or common practice arrangements such as employment contracts and pensions. Because old age is not enlisted economically, it is now classified as 'a problem', to be addressed by various mechanical means and devices such as medicine, reducing the biologically 'necessary' as far as possible so that it ceases to be a menace or an embarrassment to the aged themselves, but more conveniently loses its threat to the young. Social histories of ageing have usually concentrated on the emerging industrialization of countries such as the United Kingdom and have assumed that there was a considerable difference between attitudes to old age in the largely rural communities of the eighteenth century and the largely urban centres of late nineteenth-century Britain or America. Some studies (for example, Cole, 1992) have taken a deeper look at the transition from one type of



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society to another. Wordsworth's life traverses such a period of transition of rapid social and cultural change. As an author with considerable roots in the intellectual life of the previous century at the same time as being very sensitive to the changes through which he was living in the nineteenth century, he was conscious of the shifts in the social identity of older people and particularly of the older poet. Some of the traditional late eighteenth-century approval of the values, as well as the difficulties, of ageing are to be seen in his poetry, alongside modern images that conceived old age in new ways. A visual image of ageing, common in medieval literature but still persisting in a period that retained traditional faith, is the line that leads to a determined end, again a symbol of journeying. The goal of life in many ancient philosophical systems, whether intellectual or folk-based, is achieved by travelling towards transcendence, 'in which the goal of ageing is to bring oneself into alignment with an order of the cosmos' (Cole, 1992, p. xxix). The straight arrow-like path of life is appropriate within a moral system based on social behaviour having its due reward in another sphere. Chaucer's Pardoner's Tale has the figure of the aged man begging the earth to take him in so that he can complete his life's journey. Wordsworth's River Duddon (and there is an analogy with human life) ends its travels in a larger sea, naturally assumed into a greater existence. And may thy Poet, cloud-born Stream! be free The sweets of earth contentedly resigned, And each tumultuous working left behind At seemly distance - to advance like Thee; Prepared, in peace of heart, in calm of mind And soul, to mingle with Eternity! (W. P., Ill, p. 260) The account of Peter Bell is worth closer consideration in an iconography of journeys. Peter Bell's travels are like those of the Wanderer in The Excursion, from one end of the country to another without end or direction, for 'He two-and-thirty years or more / Had been a wild and woodland rover'. It is only when he finds his destiny through a horrifying encounter and the strange testimony of the faithful ass that his wandering gains direction, first to the bereaved widow's home, then to a more orderly moral life.




Wordszuorth's Poems of Travel, 1819-42

The second most common image of ageing, again from ancient times, is the cycle or returning wheel. It is complicatedly present in Shakespeare's Jacques' image of life as an actor's roles or 'ages'. The end is like the beginning. The circle is an image of progression towards restoration of the traveller rather than away from his or her origins. Home is the start and home the completion. 3 Two of Wordsworth's itinerary sequences of poems are of this kind, and it is perhaps not a coincidence that they are the three journeys most closely influenced by Dorothy Wordsworth's Journals and Recollections: the 1820 journey to Europe and the 1832 journey to the Isle of Man and, via the west of Scotland, back to home at Rydal. There are interesting differences of detail. The circle of 1820 is not as closed in Wordsworth's poetic sequence as in his sister's prose Journal. Wordsworth's return to England stops short at Dover. It is, as it were, sufficient to make a rejoicing at a safe return. The final poem, 'Desultory Stanzas', is written sometime later from home at Rydal, yet is distinctively a reflection on the journey, not part of the travel sequence. The 1831 and 1837 itineraries also have something of the figure of a circle. But they are completed or left half closed away from home. The 1831 itinerary in Scotland begins at Yarrow but the final sonnet closes the sequence at Penrith in the home region. As with the European journey of 1820, there is then a later, reflective addition to complete the sequence. It is indeed a strange perception of that sequence: No more: The end is sudden and abrupt, Abrupt - as without preconceived design Was the beginning. (W. P., Ill, p. 279) The Italian journey itself is more of a curving trajectory than a circle, beginning in the Italian heartland and ending across the frontier looking back into a politically troubled land whose history has occupied the poet's mind for a lifetime through the pages of Milton and Tasso. This final itinerary has features of finality, a sense of an 'envoi' to journeys. It has another level of meaning in terms of ageing, for it reinforces a predominant association between ageing and peace. Wordsworth, the ageing poet, may be powerful in his denunciation of tyranny, trenchant in the way he



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draws attention to the transience of political power, and prophetic in his warning about the neglect of custom and order, but by the time of the Italian journey he is the senatorial poet counselling restraint and the abandonment of armed insurrection. The aged poet takes on the role of wise peace-maker. Once more the sequence is sealed by a sonnet recollecting in tranquillity, 'Composed at Rydal, May Morning, 1835'. The combination of both modes of wisdom - the prophetic, with its castigation of evil and duplicity, the wise with its cautionary message urging social stability and public order - is not only a further demonstration of Wordsworth as guide or leader, it is also a statement of a task for a senior poet in his last years. Cole (1992) argues that: 'The Romantics articulated no social obligation or usefulness for the aged ... they assumed that preparing for old age was equivalent to preparing for death - the spiritual and social significance of both now hidden in a private, powerless, secure transition to the next world' (p. 138). Cole may be correct in identifying a major aspect of Victorian Romanticism, but less on target in the case of Wordsworth whose life spanned many phases of change. The idea of retired obscurity hardly matches the experience of reading the 'Memorial' and later travel poems of Wordsworth. He wished to speak with the weight of years and with the burden of leadership, and did not assume the silence of retirement.

THE WAYFARER'S GRAND DESIGN One important enquiry remains which may be more fully pursued through the sets of all Wordsworth's publications in the years after 1819, for this study is partial, considering only the sequences which arise from travel and excursions, substantial and consistent though they were. The towering question of the final half of Wordsworth's life is about The Recluse and why it was never achieved. The fact that only one component of the grand scheme, one 'ante-chapel' of the great Gothic cathedral, to use Wordsworth's own image, was published in his lifetime, is usually read as a staggering fact of the artistic failure of his later life and a confirmation of the traditional division between young creativity and aged decline. The traditional acceptance of this failure of achievement leads to some variant of two explanations for it. Either Wordsworth's grand design was beyond his reach (and ability?) or public literary life




Wordszuorth's Poems of Travel, 1819-42

after 1810 had progressed beyond the fashion of large philosophical works in verse. Neither explanation is wholly acceptable if we view the years from The Excursion onwards as productive writing years, but such a perspective depends upon not dismissing the poems of those years as the misfiring of an outworn weapon. Understanding of Wordsworth's grand design and its relevance to the poetry of his older years has been set before us by Hill (1986) and by Galperin's work on Wordsworth's career (1989). It is now possible to consider whether the corpus (or continuing canon, as Galperin would have it) of these years was itself, in all its diversity, the grand edifice that the poet had prepared for in the Preface to The Excursion of 1815. The Ecclesiastical Sketches provided Galperin with the material to support his argument. My own contention is that the poems of travel form a significant component of the edifice. There is explicit justification for taking such a view in Wordsworth's own judgement of his production, although here he refers to work before 1815: ... his minor pieces, which have been so long before the public, when they shall be properly arranged, will be found by the attentive Reader to have such connections with the main Work as may give them claims to be likened to the little cells, oratories, and sepulchral recesses, ordinarily included in those edifices (the Gothic Cathedrals). (W. Prose, III, p. 6) Note first, that there is a firm indication that these verses are directed at 'an attentive Reader', an educated follower of Wordsworth's poetic design. The other point directly relevant to the subject of this study is the conditional 'when they shall be properly arranged'. If we had to identify one of Wordsworth's major creative activities after 1819, it would be 'properly arranging'. The poet's task in the construction of the great literary Gothic cathedral is to search among the masonry which he himself has collected and to reassemble the pieces to produce a new poetic building. Continuing with the analogy presented to us by Wordsworth himself, I am reminded of the aesthetic problem posed by the building, or, strictly speaking, part building of the Cathedral of Sagrada Familia by Gaudi in Barcelona. That huge design is not completed; its style changed as it progressed and so it is possible to see a consistent but shifting conception of decoration and



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architecture from the early foundation to the bizarre and arresting pinnacles of the later phases of design. 4 A debate can begin on the question of whether an unfinished object of art can ever be regarded, for aesthetic critical purposes, as comparable with the standard, and therefore canonical, forms of buildings. In the case of architecture there would be the European cathedrals of medieval times. A comparison of past perfection and modern imperfection is based on false notions of past building practices. Very few cathedrals as we know them were ever completed in the form we now see them. Their histories, their interiors and exteriors, witnessed shifting change through the centuries. Gaudi's project is as viable as a critical object as the completed Chartres. The Recluse can be similarly considered as a construction of many components, some half assembled, some complete and certainly available in design terms as a unity. I have found one other analogy with Gaudi's works fruitful. Gaudi's buildings and their decoration with thousands of pieces of coloured tile and glass, with detailed and multi-coloured decoration, are highly individual in the history of architecture. They do not form part of a 'school', although we 'feel' that contemporary artists such as Picasso, Braque and Miro abide in the same artistic world. The highly individual art form requires a specific form of assessment and criticism. Wordsworth also deserves an individual approach. To argue that no one else was presenting such a grand scheme because fashion had shifted or because a grand scheme was out of all proportion to the ability of the poet is to assume that all writers operate with the same rules. Significantly, Wordsworth knew his own rules. The Excursion had been one verse form; he called it 'dramatic form' in his scheme of poetic types. In the Preface to that work, Wordsworth envisaged that he would return after The Excursion to a form he had used before. It would, he said, 'consist chiefly of meditations in the Author's own person' (W. Prose, III, p. 6). Wordsworth's individuality was to present his 'own personal meditations' available to a nurtured, prepared readership. The 'egotistical' (sublime or hortatory, political or religious) was essential to his poetic mission. The itinerary and travel-based poems where the Author acts as a Senior Guide are an appropriate vehicle for this rare and individual tradition. The Wayfarer proceeded on his wanderings with deliberation during his years of seniority.




CHAPTER 1 I N T R O D U C T I O N 1.

2.

3.

4.

Gill comments on the difficulty of tracing what is a Wordsworth text: 'Problems of text, however, face anyone reading Wordsworth, from scholar-critic to essay-writing student, and it is essential that all should understand what the issues are and what the significance is of decisions editors have made 7 (Gill, 1983, p. 173). A. G. Hill asks, 'How many readers today have actually studied the poems in the order in which the author intended them to be read? 7 (1986, p. 204). Attention to the 'reader' and to the complexities of that apparently simple term has come from linguistic studies. Jauss's explicit or historically differentiated reader (1982) is one such source. Iser (1974) introduced the idea of the 'unified reader', which Galperin (1989) extends and amends with the notion of the 'inferred reader'. A good study of the Marshalls of Leeds and their circle of friends has been written by Rimmer (1960). The networks associated with the Marshalls and with Trinity College, Cambridge, particularly in the context of scientific interests, are elaborated in Wyatt (1995). Critical attention to The Excursion has not been lacking recently although the key to modern interest more often lies in the earlier versions of what became Book One of the poem, that is to say 'The Pedlar', rather than in a continuous reading of the whole work. Meyer Abrams' Natural Supernaturalism (1971) is an example of interest in the prospectus to The Excursion linked witn 'Home at Grasmere'. Essential to read alongside that distinguis-hed text is Geoffrey Hartman's The Unmediated Vision (1954). A very useful gathering of criticism of The Excursion was the 1979 volume of the journal, The Wordsworth Circle. Peter Manning (1990) continued the rediscovery of this major text. Galperin (1989 and 1993) and Rajan (1980) are essential to understanding new approaches to The Excursion. The crucially new perspective of Hill's re-examination of The Grand Design' (1986) as acknowledged in this chapter has been an inspiration to my own study. Curran (1986) is also valuable for its context of Romanticism and because he urges the worth of reading the sonnets as whole series.

CHAPTER 2 PETER BELL'S C O M P A N Y 1.

Dorothy Wordsworth's admiration has to be tempered by the context. She was simultaneously disappointed and concerned that 'The Recluse' project showed no signs of being reactivated. 158 10.1057/9780230286214 - Wordsworth's Poems of Travel 1819-1842, John F. Wyatt


Notes and References

Notes and references In later editions the location became 'Lemming Lane'. The solitary in The Excursion condemns: He who with pocket-hammer smites the edge Of luckless rock or prominent stone disguised In weather-stains or crusted o'er by Nature With her first growths, detaching by the stroke A chip or splinter - to resolve his doubts. (W. P., V(iii), 178-82) 4.

Galperin (1993) elaborates the idea of what he describes as 'the return of the visible' in Romantic literature. My observation, not only in respect of the four sonnets under consideration but over the range of Wordsworth's poetry is that, far from returning, the connections between painting and poetry had never disappeared. Galperin's thesis is that 'the return of the visible' was a form of release from repression. I believe that rather than seek a psychological explanation, we should look for artistic and cultural contexts; the two arts connected intertextually.

CHAPTER 3 CERULEAN D U D D O N A N D ITS TRIBUTARIES 1.

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Sonnet XXVII in the de Selincourt and Darbishire edition of Poetical Works, 'Fallen and diffused into a shapeless heap', was added to the series when it was republished in 1827. It had been published in another volume of collected poems by 1820. Sonnet XIV, 'Oh Mountain Stream! the shepherd and his Cof, was first published in 1807. Sonnet XXVI, 'Return, Content! for fondly I pursued', was composed in 1803 or 1804. Sonnet XXVII was composed closer to the main body of the sequence, probably before 1818. Two critics who have written about the sonnet sequence as a sequence are Wilcox (1954) and Johnson (1973). Both present a structure for the sonnets. Willcox suggests three divisions relating to what he sees as the three chief themes of the sequence. Johnson has a fivefold division with the varying relationship of the poet to the stream as the markers of the segments of the structure. Hartman (1964) does not attempt such detailed analysis of structure but does give an interpretation of Wordsworth's own mood of ageing at the time of writing, related to the moods of the river. As well as the first sonnet's direct references to Horace ('Sabine bard', 'Latian shades'), the following sonnets have a classical reference: Sonnet IV - 'A protean change'; Sonnet X - 'The frolic Loves' who watch the lovers crossing the stepping stones; Sonnet XI - 'Naiads' of the shore; Sonnet XIX - 'The old inventive poets', 'a Bacchanal'; Sonnet XXII - the myth of Diana and a reflection in a pool. The 1819 text is confident of the permanence of the stars. Subsequent



2. 3.

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Notes and references editions are more agnostic. In the 1832 / 1836 emendations even the stars may be subject to decay. However, though even they may die, the Almighty's plan is to use them now to pour out nightly 'on human kind / That image of endurance and repose' (Ketcham, p. 238). Whether the amended immortality of the stars indicates wider reading in new theories of astronomy is not easy to tell. Reverend Christopher Wordsworth in 1819 was Chaplain to the Archbishop of Canterbury at the Palace of Lambeth; a year later by royal appointment he was made Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. See also W. Prose, II, pp. 127-8. The panoramic view which Wordsworth remembers in the opening passages of his Topographical Description was at Lucerne. Coxe's Travels in Switzerland (Coxe, 1789 and 1802), or Ramond's version of it, Wordsworth's main sources of geographical information about Switzerland before 1820, contained a very full description of the model and of its maker, General Pfiffer. Otley's work (1823) was widely distributed and available to academic geologists such as Sedgwick as well as to poets such as Wordsworth. Kelley (1988) and Wyatt (1995) give further details of Otley's Guide and its influence. More detailed study of Wordsworth's knowledge of geology can be found in Sheats (1973), Dean (1968) and Wyatt (1995).

CHAPTER 4 MEMORIALS OF A TOUR, THE LESSONS O F EUROPE 1.

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1820:

'Recollections on the Heights of Hockheim' was separated from its actual place between poems X and XI, and placed in Poems dedicated, to National Independence (II, xxxvii). 'The Jungfrau and the Rhine at Schaffhausen' was placed in 1822 between poems XI and XII and, in later editions, included in Ecclesiastical Sonnets (II, x(iii)). Similarly, 'The Author's Voyage down the Rhine (thirty years ago)' appeared in the sequence of poems about the Rhine but was never republished. Finally, a longer ode 'Ode to Enterprise' was later published in Poems of the Imagination, whereas it had originally been linked with a semi-narrative poem in Memorials associated with the Italian Alps. The MSS version of the Ode is even more explicitly scientific. The rejected lines refer to the ascent of the Jungfrau: For secrets older than the flood, Unquarried the surviving bones Of monstrous fossil Skeletons, Or tempted later Confidant Of time and nature to disclose



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Notes and references

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The corse of uncorrupted Elephant Enshrined amid Siberian snows

3.

The research of Cuvier on mammoth remains from Russia and from the Ohio valley were widely known in England as early as 1816. Dr Buckland's studies of fossil remains in Paviland and in Kirkdale caves were, again, well published and there is evidence that Wordsworth knew of them (see Chapter 2). The sensation of horror is that of Dorothy Wordsworth's Journal: '... There was little to be seen; but much to be felt; - sorrow and sadness, and even something like horror breathed out of the ground as we stood upon if (D. W. J., II, p. 29).

CHAPTER 5 T O THE SPRINGS O F ROMANTICISM: YARROW REVISITED 1.

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Gill (1989) notes a letter of a slightly later period (1839) to Ticknor from Wordsworth reflecting on travel and composition: 'One enjoys objects while they are present but they are never truly endeared, 'til they have been lodged some time in the memory' and he uses the memorable phase 'the ghost or surviving spirit of travelling' (Gill, 1989, p. 403). Owen and Smyser (W. Prose, III, pp. 231-7) describe the processes that led to publication of 'The Postscript'. It may have been started in the Lake District before Wordsworth travelled to London, but in the later winter and early spring of 1835 it was shaped for publication with Henry Crabb Robinson as amanuensis. The origins of the sonnet on the exterior of the Highland Hut are to be found in Dorothy Wordsworth's account of the 1803 journey. Dorothy's account is an interior description; her brother's one of external description and imports an artistic hesitation before entering. The idyllic scene of the poem is recreated by the poet nearly thirty years after the initial experience, transforming his sister's description and embedding it in the sequence of sonnets praising surviving ancient ways of life. Public appreciation of the collection was gratifying to the poet. Even in this century, there have been respectful comments on the quality of the verse: Moorman writes about the sonnets which were written while Wordsworth and his daughter travelled (Sonnets II, III, V, VI, VIII and X): '[They] are much more than guide-book poetry ... [they are] masterpieces of craftsmanship' (Moorman, 1968, II, p. 464).



(W. P., II, p. 283).

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In the 1835 edition the sonnet 'To a friend' occurs as the ninth sonnet immediately before the sonnet about Mary Queen of Scots landing at Workington. Twentieth-century editions have added a note, 'composed probably January 1834'. The Fenwick notes to this sonnet recount that William Wordsworth, the poet's son, rescued a young man from drowning in this place. The modern editors assume that this must have occurred in 1828 when William was accompanying his aunt, Dorothy to the Isle of Man. Keats's sonnet, 'Ailsa Rock', like Wordsworth's later sonnet, uses contemporary notions of geology to explain the marine origin of the great rock (Keats, 1908, p. 325). The Marshalls of Hallstead and Leeds (see also Chapter 1) were initially known to the Wordsworth family through Dorothy's girlhood friendship with Jane Pollard of Halifax who became the wife of John Marshall. Cordelia, the subject of this poem, married William Whewell, the Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, who had succeeded Wordsworth's brother in that post. Whewell was a friend of Wordsworth (see Rimmer, and Wyatt, 1995). Charlotte Smith (1749-1806) was a poet and novelist of some distinction. Both Coleridge and Wordsworth admired her work, particularly her Elegaic Sonnets which were dedicated to William Hayley. At Hayley's house in Eartham, Sussex, she met William Cowper. In Brighton she met the young Wordsworth on his embarkation for France in 1791. A. G. Hill (1992) has written very persuasively on the role that Wordsworth and his family played in establishing an ecumenical working practice within the Church of England. Wordsworth's own objections to Parliamentary Ecclesiastical Reform and his outspoken resistance to changes in the denominational restrictions on Oxford and Cambridge have been normally accepted as signs of his reactionary social philosophy. The balance of view is usefully redressed by Hill's careful examination of members of the Wordsworth family and their involvement in reconciliation between the churches.

CHAPTER 7 THE ITALIAN T O U R O F 1837 1.

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Moxon, the publisher, played a direct role in the itinerary, accompanying Wordsworth and Crabb Robinson for the first part of their journey. Fenwick's note to the poems suggest that Wordsworth was only able to undertake this journey because Moxon had paid fees due to the poet. The order of the poems in the 1842 volume is: the 'Prelude', 'Guilt and Sorrow', 19 short poems (some as published previously),



CHAPTER 6 U N F I N I S H E D BUSINESS: THE S E C O N D SCOTTISH J O U R N E Y

3.

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Memorials, a translation from Chaucer, the Sonnets on Capital Punishment and finally, Miscellaneous Sonnets, short poems and 'The Borderers'. Venice and the Italian lakes did not generate poems either on location or out of the poet's reflection after the journey. In the prose dedication, Wordsworth reminds the reader T have touched upon them elsewhere' (W. P., Ill, p. 202). The Sonnet 'The Pillar of Trajan' had an unusual history not at all related to the itinerary. It was composed to encourage his son, John, to enter for a poetry competition at Oxford. The example did not encourage John Wordsworth, but it was probably thought too good to waste. Niebuhr (1776-1831) was born in Copenhagen, but worked mainly in Prussia and, for a time, as ambassador to the Papal Court. He lectured at the University of Berlin, establishing his reputation on the careful study of authenticated records and the eradication of fables and legend from history. The device of a flying vision is once more to be noted as a recurring image of the later poems. There is no apparent denominational significance in this ending, but Wordsworth was not deaf to the dangers of reading between the lines. In a note added to the poems he wrote: It would be ungenerous not to advert to the religious movement that, since the composition of these verses in 1837, has made itself felt, more or less strongly, throughout the English Church; - a movement that takes, for its first principles a devout deference to the voice of Christian antiquity. (W. P., Ill, p. 493). The note ends with a generous acknowledgement that, despite his own repugnance to the spirit and systems of Romanism, there are 'cheerful auguries' for the English Church in this movement. The note was addressed to Frederick Faber.

CHAPTER 8 CONCLUSION: SUCH SWEET WAYFARING? 1

2.

The Reader as a constituent group in society is, of course, not a creature of Wordsworth's middle age. The 'Preface' to The Lyrical Ballads addresses 'the Reader' but makes no distinction between young and old readers. At that time, Wordsworth also relies on 'the approbation of the Public' and, again, does not distinguish 'People' from 'Public'. Coleridge asserted that the distinction between People and Public was entirely Wordsworth's creation and he identified it as emerging in discussion as early as 1808 (see Cruttwell, 1956). As the category of the aged becomes firmly established in western society, so a new term for studies of ageing has naturally emerged,




3.

4.

Notes and references 'Gerontology'. Cole (1992) explores the meaning of the category 'old age' in the United States and the way in which 'existential questions' are raised by categorization of different periods of life history. Simone de Beauvoir (1977) also examined the concept of ageing from the Greeks to modern Western Europe, with particularly valuable comments to make on the transition from regretted judgement of old age in late eighteenth-century European society into a social context where older people gained a respected position in the middle class at least. She proposed that early nineteenth-century associationist psychology underpinned a contemporary respect for experience over youth, and added that a bourgeois family culture approved of qualities such as acceptance of fate combined with the happy necessity of freedom from disturbing desires. These qualities the nineteenthcentury middle classes looked for and found in old age. I am grateful to Stephen Prickett, Regius Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Glasgow, for pointing out to me that Wordsworth had his own clear definition of a tour. In his published letter to the Morning Post on the Kendal and Windermere Railway he defines a tour as a circular excursion. See Prickett (1986). The Church of England Cathedral in Liverpool, England, gives a simpler analogy. For many years, this was a church designed largely by one architect, Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, over a long period. The changes in the architect's concept from the first traditionally Gothic building (the Lady Chapel) to the great wide spaces below the central tower over the nave are visible signs of a changing scheme, yet a unified creation.



164

TEXTS A N D ABBREVIATIONS Wordsworth's texts used are: W. L. followed by volume number: The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. Hill, A. G., 8 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967, 1969,1970,1978,1979,1982,1988,1990). W. P. followed by volume number: Wordsworth Poetical Works, eds de Selincourt, E and Darbishire, H., 5 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1940,1944,1946,1947,1949). W. Prose, followed by volume number: The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, eds Owen, W. J. B. and Smyser, J. W., 3 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974). Prelude: William Wordsworth: Prelude, 1799, 1805, 1850, eds Wordsworth, J., Abrams, M. and Gill, S. (New York: Norton, 1979). W., 1820: Wordsworth, W. The River Duddon, Vaudracour and Julia, and other Poems and a Topographical Description etc. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, 1820). W., 1822: Wordsworth, W. Memorials of a Tour on the Continent (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, 1822). W., 1835: Wordsworth, W. Yarrow Revisited and Other Poems (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green and Edward Moxon, 1835). W., 1842: Wordsworth, W. Poems, Chiefly of Early and Late Years including the Borderers, a Tragedy (London: Edward Moxon, 1842). D. W. /., Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. de Selincourt, E., 2 vols (London: Macmillan, 1941). Cornell University texts and facsimiles referred to by editor's name, all Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press: Jordan, J. E. (ed.) (1985) Peter Bell by William Wordsworth. Ketcham, C. J. (ed.) (1989) Shorter Poems 1807-1820.

REFERENCES Abrams, M. H. Natural Supernaturalism, Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1973 (1971)). Anderson, E. 'The chain of friendship, amiable bard, afflicted pilgrim and wondrous potentate', The Wordsworth Circle, XXVIII: 1 (1997) 11-18. Aubin, R. A. Topographical Poetry in XVIII-Century England (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1936). Bate, J. Romantic Ecology, Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition 165 10.1057/9780230286214 - Wordsworth's Poems of Travel 1819-1842, John F. Wyatt


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Galperin, W. Revision and Authority in Wordsworth (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989). Galperin, W. The Return of the Visible in British Romanticism (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins UP, 1993). Garrod, H. W. Lectures and Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1923). Gill, S. 'Wordsworth's poems: the question of text', Review of English Studies, new series, 34 (1983) 172-90. Gill, S. William Wordsworth: A Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). Gill, S. Wordsworth and the Victorians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). Graves, R. P. The Life of Sir William Rowan Hamilton, 3 vols (Dublin: Hodge & Figgis, 1882). Greaves, M. Regency Patron: Sir George Beaumont (London: Methuen, 1966). Hamilton, P. Wordsworth (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1986). Hartman, G. H. (1985) - see Bloom, (1985). Hartman, G. H. The Unmediated Vision (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1954). Hartman, G. H. Wordsworth's 1787-1814 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1964). Hartman, G. H. The Unremarkable Wordsworth (London: Methuen, 1987). Hill, A. G. 'Wordsworth's Grand Design', Proceedings of the British Academy LXXII (1986) 187-204. Hill, A. G. 'Poetry and Ecumenism: the legacy of the Wordsworths', Lambeth Palace Library, Annual Review (1992). Holmes, R. Coleridge: Darker Reflections (London: Harper Collins, 1998). Iser, W. The Implied Reader (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins UP, 1974). Jauss, H. R. Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics, trans. Shaw, M. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982). Johnson, L. M. Wordsworth and the Sonnet (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde & Bagger, 1973). Keats, J. The Poetical Works, ed. Forman, H. B. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1908). Kelley, T. M. Wordsworth's Revisionary Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Ketcham, C. H. (ed.) The Letters of John Wordsworth (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1969). McGann, J. The Romantic Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). Manning, P. J. Reading Romantics, Texts and Contents (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). Moorman, M. William Wordsworth, a Biography, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968 (1957 and 1965)). Ousby, I. The Englishman's England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Pratt, M. L. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturalisation (London: Routledge, 1992). Prickett, S. Romanticism and Religion: the Tradition of Coleridge and Wordsworth in the Victorian Church (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976).



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Prickett, S. 'Macaulay's vision of 1930', Essays and Studies (1986) 113-34. Rajan, T. Dark Interpreter (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980). Rajan, T. 'The Supplement of Reading', New Literary History, XVII:3 (1986) 573-94. Rimmer, W. G. The Marshalls of Leeds: Flax Spinners 1788-1886 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960). Robinson, H. C. The Diaries of Henry Crabb Robinson, 2 vols, ed. Sadler, T. (London: Macmillan, 1872). Rupke, N. A. The Great Chain of History: William Buckland and the EnglishSchool of Geology 1814-1849 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983). Rupke, N. A. 'Caves, fossils and the history of the earth', in Cunningham, and Jardine (1990), pp. 241-59. Secord, J. A. 'Corresponding interests of artists and gentlemen in nineteenth-century natural history', British Journal of the History of Science, 27 (1994) 282-408. Shaver, C. L. and A. C. Wordsworth's Library, a Catalogue (New York and London: Garland, 1979). Sheats, P. D. The Making of Wordsworth's Poetry, 1785-1799 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973). Trickett, R. 'The language of Wordsworth's later poems', Wordsworth Circle, 21:1 (1990) 46-51. Trott, N. 'Wordsworth making amends', Wordsworth Circle, 21:1 (1990) 27-33. Ward, J. C. 'Jonathan Otley, the geologist and guide', Cumberland Association for the Advancement of Literature and Science, 2 (1877) 125-69. Westall, W. Views of the Caves near Ingleton, Gordale Scar and Malham Cave in Yorkshire (London: John Murray, 1818). Wilcox, S. C. 'Wordsworth's River Duddon sonnets', Proceedings of the Modern Language Association, 69 (1954) 136-8. Wolfson, S. 'Individual in community, Dorothy Wordsworth in conversation with William', in Mellor, A. K. (ed.), Romanticism and Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1988), pp. 139-45. Woof, P. 'Dorothy Wordsworth and the pleasures of recognition', Wordsworth Circle, 21:3 (1991) 150-60. Wordsworth, J. William Wordsworth: the Borders of Vision (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982). Wyatt, J. F. Wordsworth and the Geologists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).



168

Abbotsford (home of Sir Walter Scott), 81, 83, 97 Abrams, Meyer, 158n ageing, 2,152-5 Ailsa Craig or Crag, Ch. 5,147 Aix-la-Chapelle, 63 Arnold Matthew, 1, 9,138,141 Sohrab and Rustum, 138 Arnold, Thomas, 7 art and its influence on poems, 21-3, 39-40 Bate, Jonathon, 44, 53 Batho, Edith, 2 Beddoes, Thomas, 23 Beaumont, Sir George, 22,122 Birks Brig (Duddon valley), 37 Blackstone, Bernard, 11, 141 Bohls, Elizabeth A., 11, 65-6 Boulogne, 62 Bridgewater Treatises, 114 Browning, Robert, 2, 138, 141,149 Bruges, 70, 74,181 Buckland, William (geologist), 61 Burns, Robert (home in Ayrshire), 109 Byatt, Antonia S., 54 Byron, Lord, Poems of Switzerland, 138,141 Cannon, Walter, 19 Carbonniere, Rammond de (see Coxe, William) carbonari (charcoal burners), 132 caves, images of, 23-5 Chamonix/Chamouny, 1, 77, 141-147 Charlemagne in Aix, 63, 66 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 43, 153 Chillon, Castle of, 141 Clough, Arthur H., 139,141 Cole, Thomas R., 152, 155, 164n Coleorton (home of Sir G. Beaumont), 22 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 13, 23, 34, 53, 81, 83,146, 162n Biographia Literaria, 28 Collins, William, 101, 139 Cologne, 70, 73

Cowper, William, 101, 139, 162n Coxe, Archdeacon William, 63 Craven District (Yorkshire), 19 Crowe, William, 34 Curran, Stuart, 61,158 Cuvier, Baron G., 161n Dante, 124,149 Darbishire, Helen, 6, 15,101, 159n Darlington, Beth, 10 Davy, Sir Humphry, 132 Dean, Dennis, 160n Douglas (Isle of Man), 105,106 Dover (Kent), 62 Dunollie or Dunolly Castle, 92,107 Dyer, John, 34 Easthope, Antony, 27 Ecclesiastical Revenues, report on, 83, 86, 162n Edinburgh, 83 Edinburgh Review, 13, 43 Emerson, Ralph W., 139 Faber, Frederick, (life of St Bega), 111, 163n Fenwick, Isabella, 34, 81, 92,126, 33, 162n Fingal's Cave (Scotland), 108, 147 Fish, Stanley E., 4 Flinders, Captain Matthew, 20 flying above (vision from a height), 28-9, 51, 71-2,148-9,163n Galperin, William, 4, 8,138,146,149, 156,158n, 159n Garrod, Heathcote W., 2 Gaudi (architect, compared with the Recluse), 156-7 Gill, Stephen, 3, 5, 6, 80, 84,130,158n, 161n Goldsmith, Oliver (poem resemblance to Revd Walker), 36 Gordale Scar, 18 Goslar (Germany), 23 Gottingen University, 23 Gray, Thomas, 18, 51,101

169 10.1057/9780230286214 - Wordsworth's Poems of Travel 1819-1842, John F. Wyatt


Index

Index

Great Gable (Cumbria), 51 Green, William, 31, 51 Greenough, George B. (geologist), 33 Hamilton, Paul, 24 Hamilton, Sir W. Rowan, 11, 23, 81 Hamilton, William (The Braes of Yarrow'), 87 Hardknott Pass (Cumbria), 31 Hartman, Geoffrey, 3, 33, 77-8, 120, 158n Haydn, Benjamin Robert (painter), 22 Herbert, George, (compared with Revd Walker), 36 Herschel, John, 7 Hill, Alan G., 2,12, 156, 158n, 162n Hillary, Sir William (Isle of Man), 105 Horace, 25, 103,149,159 Housman, A.E. (on W's sonnet, 'The Venetian Republic'), 137 Humboldt, Alexander von, 36, 37 Hutchinson, Henry (brother of Mrs Wordsworth), 106 Hutchinson, Sara (Sister of Mrs Wordsworth), 14,18, 20, 31 lona (Scotland), 82 Iser, Wolfgang, 158n Isle of Man, Ch. 6 Jauss, Hans R., 158n Johnson, L.M., 50 Jones, John, 3 Jungfrau (Switzerland), 72, 141 Keats, John (visit to Staffa 1818), 108 Kendal (Cumbria), 18 Keswick (Cumbria), 20 Lemming Lane or Leeming Street, 17, 159n limestone scenery, 19 loco-descriptive verse, 30 Logan, John ('The Braes of Yarrow'), 87 Long Meg standing stones, 110 Longman (publisher), 119 Lonsdale, Lord, 2 Looking down, view from above, see flying Lucerne (Switzerland), 74 Lugano, (Switzerland), 57 Malham Cove (Yorkshire), 15 Manning, Peter, 3, 4, 5, 158n

Marshall, John and family, of Hallsteads, 7, 81, 110-1, 158n, 162n Mary Queen of Scots, 104, 162n Mazzini, Giuseppe, 131 McGann, Jeremy, 4 Milan, 61, 67, 78,118,149 Milton, John, at Vallombrosa, 122, 124, 154 Monkhouse, Thomas, 56 Mont Blanc, 141 Montague, Basil, 118 Monte Rosa (Switzerland), 72 Moorman, Mary, 3, 55, 80, 161n Moxon, Edward (publisher), 119,126, 162n Mull, Sound of, 92 Namur, 78 Napoleon, 59, 65, 66, 67 Newark Castle (River Yarrow), 87, 98 Niebuhr, Berthold (historian), 109, 122, 163n Nolleken's Monument (Cumbria), 109 Ossian, 16, 28, 82, 96,102, 108 Otley, Jonathan (guide and geologist), 51 Ousby, Ian, 22 People contrasted with 'Public', 151 Pen Crag (Duddon Valley) Pfiffer, general and cartogropher, 16 Pisa (Italy), 129 Playfair, John, 33 Pollard, Jane (see Marshall) Poor Law Amendment Act 1834, 83, 84-5, 98 Pratt, Mary L., 11 Prickett, Stephen, 164n Quillinan, Edward (son-in-law of Wordsworth), 18 Rajan, Tilottama, 9,158 readers, changing views of, 8 Reading, Aloys, 66 Reform Act 1832, 83, 116 Rhine, river, Ch. 4; 81 Rhone, river, 72 Robinson, Henry Crabb, 6, 8, 56, 74, 82, 100, 118, 119, 121, 161n, 162n Roman Catholicism, 136,163n Rupke, Nicholas, 23 Rushen Abbey (Isle of Man), 106



170

Saint Bee's Head (Cumbria), 111-13 Saint Kilda (Scotland), 108,116 Scafell (Cumbria), 51 Schaffhausen, Falls of, 147 Scott, Sir Giles (architect, compared with Gaudi), 164n Scott, Sir Walter, 81-4, 87, 89, 91, 96, 99, 100, 128 Seathwaite (Cumbria), 35, 36, 51 Secord, James, 20 Sedgwick, Professor Adam (geologist), 7, 20, 52 Settle (Yorkshire), 18 Shelley, Percy B., 1,129,138 'Mont Blanc', 141 Simplon Pass, 61, 67 Smith, Charlotte (poem 'Saint Monica'), 112,162n Snaefell (Isle of Man), 106 Southey, Robert, 14, 20, 53 Staffa (Scotland), 82, 108 Swaledale (Yorkshire), 17, 19, 26 Swinburne, Algernon C , (Housman's comparison with Wordsworth), 137 Tasso, 154 Tell, William, 64, 76 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 134, 149 'Idylls of the King', 138 Thomson, James, 101 Thoreau, Henry, 139 travel writing in a tradition, 140-1 Trickett, Rachel, 4, 49, 150 Trott, Nicola, 142 Tyndrum (Scotland), 92 Tynwald (Isle of Man), 109 Ulpha and Ulpha Kirk (Cumbria), 37 Vallombrosa (Italy), 122 Vallon, Annette, 56 Virgil, 25,149 Watt, James junior, 23 Watts, Alaric, 80 Weathercote Cave (Yorkshire), 18, 20 West, Thomas, 18, 23, 51 Westall, William, 13,15,17,18,19-21, 149 Whewell, William, 23,162n Wilkinson, Revd Joseph, 31, 50 Whitman, Walt (as philosophical poet), 139 Winkelried, Arnold, 76

171

Woof, Pamela, 147 Wordsworth, Catherine (daughter of W, deceased), 104 Wordsworth, Christopher (Senior), 6, 49, 86,160n, 162n Wordsworth, Dora (W's daughter), 7, 81, 82, 83 Wordsworth, Dorothy, 15, 23, 51, 56, 82, 158,162 'The Journal', 1, 6,18, 22, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 60, 61, 64, 68-9, 73-4, 79, 83, 102-4, 113,126,134, 147-8,154 Wordsworth, John (W's brother), 14 Wordsworth, John (Wordsworth's son), 82,100,103,126,163n Wordsworth, Jonathon, 4 Wordsworth, Mary, 18, 31, 37, 56, 57, U7 Wordsworth, Thomas (W's son, deceased), 104 Wordsworth, William (W's son), 162n Wordsworth, William Poetry and Prose: An Evening Walk, 139 Borderers, 140 'Brownie's Cell', 33, 43 Descriptive Sketches, 139,142-3 Ecclesiastical Sketches or Sonnets, 12, 55, 62, 63, 113,117 156 Essay Supplementary to Preface of 1815, 11,12,150-5 'Evening Voluntaries', Ch. 6 Excursion, 4,11,19, 27, 28, 44,113, 140, 149,150,153, 156,157,159 Guide to the Lakes, see Topographical Description Guilt and Sorrow (or Salisbury Plain), 120 'Idiot Boy', 133 Lyrical Ballads, 6,13, 27, 57,127,138, 140,150 Memorials of a Tour in Scotland, 1814, 87 Memorials of a Tour, 1820, Ch. 4, and 113,125; includes: sonnets at 'Calais', 'Bruges', 'Falls of Schaffhausen', 'On being stranded at Boulogne', 'Dover', 'Cologne', 'Before Charlemagne's tomb', 'Schwyz', 'After visiting Waterloo', 'Between Namur and Liege', 'Column intended by Bonaparte', 'In a carriage upon the banks of the Rhine', 'Source



Index

Index

Memorials of a Tour, 1820, continued of Danube', 'The Straub Bach', Poems: 'Author's Voyage down the Rhine', 'Catholic Cantons', 'Corsican with cap and bells', 'Church of San Salvador', 'Eclipse of the sun', 'Engleberg Hill of Angels', 'Hymn for Boatmen at Heidelberg', 'Fort Fuentes', 'Ode to Enterprise', 'Our Lady of Sorrows, Procession in the Vale of Chamouny', 'Ranz des Vaches', 'Scene on Lake Brienz', 'Stanzas composed in the Simplon Pass', 'To Aloys Reading', 'Three cottage girls' Memorials of a Tour 1833, Ch. 6 includes: sonnets numbered I-X 'Stanzas suggested in a Steamboat off St Bee's Head' sonnets numbered XXII-XXVI 'Written on a blank leaf of Macpherson's Ossian' sonnets numbered XXVIII-XLV and XLVII-XLVIII Memorials of a Tour 1837, Ch. 7 includes: 'Musings near Aquapendente', sonnets numbered II—XIII, 'Cuckoo at Laverna', sonnets XV-XVII, 'At Vallombrosa', sonnets XIX-XXII, 'Among the Ruins of a Convent', sonnets XXIV-XXVII, The Pillar of Trajan 'On Westminster Bridge', 62 Peter Bell: A Tale in Verse, Ch. 2, and 153 includes: 'Peter Bell', 'Three sonnets suggested by Mr Westall's Views' 'Sonnet composed during one of

the most awful storms, February 1819' Poems of Youth and Age, 101 Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 18, 163n Prelude, 5, 25, 45, 75, 130, 133, 138, 139, 143-5 Recluse, 80,155-7, 158n River Duddon, a series of sonnets etc., Ch. 3 includes: 'The Duddon Sonnets', also 72, 84, 90, 121, 148, 149, 153, 'Vaudracour and Julia', 'Chaucer's Prioress' Tale', 'Dion', 'Artegal and Elidure', 'Cora Lynn', 'Brownie's Cell', 'Hint from the Mountains', Sonnet, Lady I rifled a Parnassian Cave', sonnet, 'The Stars are Built by Nature's Hand', 'A Little Onward Lead', 'To Lycoris' and 'To the Same', 'The haunted tree', 'Lament of Mary Queen of Scots', 'Ode the Pass of Kirkstone', 'Ode 1817 (Vernal Ode)', 'Ode Composed on an Evening', 'Descriptions near a hermit's cell', 'To — on her last ascent' The Topographical Description 'Simon Lee', 138 'Solitary Reaper', 27 'Thorn', 22, 138 'Tintern Abbey', 87, 128, 130, 140 Topographical Description, 18,19, 23, Ch. 3, 78 'Upon the Punishment of Death', sonnet sequence, 120 'White Doe of Rylstone' Workington (Cumbria), 162 Wyatt, John F., 19, 160n Yarrow River, Ch. 5 Yordas cave (Yorkshire), 18, 20, 24



172

Wordsworth's Poems of Travel 1819-42: Such Sweet Wayfaring (Romanticism in Perspective)

Such Sweet Poison (Favourites)

Such Sweet Poison (Harlequin Presents)

Sweet Machine: Poems

Romantic Dynamics: The Poetics of Physicality (Romanticism in Perspective)

The Wayfaring Stranger

Keats, Hunt and the Aesthetics of Pleasure (Romanticism in Perspective)

Seducing Their Wayfaring Souls

Byron and Romanticism (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

Seducing Their Wayfaring Souls

Byron and Romanticism (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

Romanticism

Revolutionary Histories: Transatlantic Cultural Nationalism 1775-1815 (Romanticism in Perspective)

Thomas De Quincey: Knowledge and Power (Romanticism in Perspective)

Fatal Women of Romanticism (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

Such Pain

The Politics of Romantic Poetry: In Search of the Pure Commonwealth (Romanticism in Perspective)

Such Pain

Dialectic of Romanticism

The Emergence of Romanticism

The Ethics of Romanticism

Poems Of

The Ethics of Romanticism

The Rhetoric of Romanticism

Romanticism and Male Fantasy in Byron's '' Don Juan '' : A Marketable Voice (Romanticism in Perspective: Texts, Cultures, Histories)

Anger, Revolution, and Romanticism (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

Early Romanticism and Religious Dissent (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

Romanticism, Aesthetics, and Nationalism (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

Romanticism and the Visual (Routledge Studies in Romanticism)

Poems

Poems

Wordsworth's Poems of Travel 1819-42: Such Sweet Wayfaring (Romanticism in Perspective)

Such Sweet Poison (Favourites)

Such Sweet Poison (Harlequin Presents)

Sweet Machine: Poems

Romantic Dynamics: The Poetics of Physicality (Romanticism in Perspective)

The Wayfaring Stranger

Keats, Hunt and the Aesthetics of Pleasure (Romanticism in Perspective)

Seducing Their Wayfaring Souls

Byron and Romanticism (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

Seducing Their Wayfaring Souls

Byron and Romanticism (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

Romanticism

Revolutionary Histories: Transatlantic Cultural Nationalism 1775-1815 (Romanticism in Perspective)

Thomas De Quincey: Knowledge and Power (Romanticism in Perspective)

Fatal Women of Romanticism (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

Such Pain

The Politics of Romantic Poetry: In Search of the Pure Commonwealth (Romanticism in Perspective)

Such Pain

Dialectic of Romanticism

The Emergence of Romanticism

The Ethics of Romanticism

Poems Of

The Ethics of Romanticism

The Rhetoric of Romanticism

Romanticism and Male Fantasy in Byron's '' Don Juan '' : A Marketable Voice (Romanticism in Perspective: Texts, Cultures, Histories)

Anger, Revolution, and Romanticism (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

Early Romanticism and Religious Dissent (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

Romanticism, Aesthetics, and Nationalism (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

Romanticism and the Visual (Routledge Studies in Romanticism)

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