[In the following essay, Green discusses the tension in La Guma's short stories between social determinism and humane idealism.]

A gang of burglars is planning a robbery in a pub in District Six, Cape Town. One of them, Harry, is captivated by the music coming from a nearby house, in particular by a Chopin nocturne, and he goes to listen for a while before rejoining his criminal colleagues. He is momentarily touched by Chopin, but not reformed; the music overpowers him, but ordinary life, crime as an escape from poverty and racial discrimination, soon reasserts itself.

This episode from one of the short stories of Alex La Guma, the coloured South African writer now in exile in London, illustrates the two most common themes in his stories: the brutalizing effect of apartheid and of poverty on people and places, and man's ability to survive the resulting impoverishment and indeed to erect some monument, however slight or evanescent, to his stamina. Thus in “Nocturne” the world of the pub and streets is demeaning, crippling and corrupting, yet at the same time, a young girl is there playing beautiful, dignified music. This combination of brutality and humanity might seem incompatible in some writers, but it causes no tension in La Guma's stories. The pessimist, determinist or Social Darwinist might claim that environment is all powerful, bending and fracturing the naked individual. The optimist or idealist, on the other hand, might assert that human nature is capable of rising above all onslaughts upon its integrity. As a humane socialist—he was a member of the Communist party until it was banned in 1950—La Guma provides a third account of the relations between the individual and a harsh, totalitarian world. In La Guma's stories such relations are, in effect, dialectical: the noxious power of the environment is rendered in full, unsparing detail, yet within the crevices of that cruel world love, charity, affection, and humanity still bloom. Like Bruno Bettelheim, another writer uncrushed by genocide, La Guma believes in man's power of “surviving” in the “abyss.”¹ As a result of their intermingling of defeat and resistance, horrors inflicted and victories won, La Guma's stories show the dark without sensationalism, the bright without sentimentality. The convent girl playing the Chopin nocturne in the ghetto wins our credence because the bleak surroundings are so fully drawn; yet the latter's power is acknowledged when the burglar forsakes the girl's music to return to his friends in the pub.

The final effect of “Nocturne” is a delicate equilibrium between culture and crime, decency and depravity. The sordid streets are drawn briefly and economically:

Drab and haunted-looking people sat in doorways looking like scarred saints among the ruins of abandoned churches, half listening, gossiping idly, while the pinched children shot at each other with wooden guns from behind over-flowing dustbins in the dusk.²

At the same time the young girl playing her piano is an entirely believable creation. La Guma's choice of music to stand for the survival of culture within such poverty is itself of interest, for no music could perhaps be less “relevant” than a nocturne from the world of nineteenth-century European romanticism. Other voices have lately been arguing that European culture is of limited utility in Africa; La Guma's story implies that exploited people can find human sustenance in very unlikely places. There is no trace of betrayal or dilettantism in the young pianist's choosing to play European rather than South African music. Her rendering of Liszt, Tchaikowsky, Beethoven and Schubert is quite simply and unironically a monument to her ability to transcend her surroundings.

Like “A Glass of Wine” and “Out of Darkness,” “Nocturne” indicates that La Guma is not afraid of approaching sentimentality. In “Nocturne” he avoids this through the ending, in which the burglar pulls himself away from the music to rejoin his mates, and in the materialistic comment given Harry in the final sentence. Walking down the street with his associates, “he thought, sentimentally, that it would be real smart to have a goose [girl] that played the piano like that.” In one sense “sentimentally” is the right word here, for Harry's notion is unreal, impractical. Yet, paradoxically, the effect of this last sentence is in fact to jerk the whole story away from sentimentality, since the episode between Harry and the girl is now seen clearly for what it is—an intermission, a relaxation from the world of petty crime. The word “sentimentally,” then, only serves to confirm that this indeed is not the emotion generated by “Nocturne.”

This story is told by a spectator uninvolved in the action, and its only flaw is one brief, unnecessary and clumsy intervention: “It was the Nocturne No. 2, in E flat major, by Chopin, but Harry did not know that.” Perhaps we don't need to be told that a man who cannot pronounce “nocturne” would be unable to identify the piece the girl is playing. This awkward authorial intervention—found occasionally, too, in Hardy's fiction—is rare in La Guma, for one of his strengths is the displacement of himself from the text, the selfless management of the narrator's persona, the creation of an authentic voice for each story. Thus “The Gladiators” is narrated by one of a coloured boxer's “seconds,” and the language of the first few sentences establishes the persona of that tough, uneducated man:

You know mos how it feel when you waiting for your boy to go in and you don't know how he's going to come out. Well, we was feeling the same way that night. We had the bandages on and wait around for the preliminaries to make finish, smoking nervous like and looking at Kenny. He just sit on the table with his legs hanging down, waiting like us, but not nervous like, only full up to his ears with his brag. He's a good juba awright.³

The shady, sadistic world of professional boxing is authenticated by the voice of the narrator, his sporting idioms and grammatical errors.

Though this environment is perhaps almost as rough as the prison of “Out of Darkness,” the latter story is narrated by a quite different personality—an educated man, sensitive, alert to nuance and others' feelings, perhaps a political prisoner like George Adams of The Stone Country:

I could make out the dim shapeless bulge of his body curled up on the mat. He had entered the seventh year of his ten-year sentence for culpable homicide, and being shut up so long had unhinged him somewhat. He was neither staring mad nor violent. His insanity was of a gentle quality that came in spells. It was then that he would talk. Otherwise he was clamped up tight and retired, like a snail withdrawn into its shell. He was friendly enough, but it was the friendliness of a man on the other side of a peephole.⁴

The narrator's early description here of one of his fellow prisoners, Old Cockroach, evinces a sensitivity to feeling and environment not possessed by the earthy narrator of the boxing story. The narrator becomes curious about the older man and the story is climaxed by Old Cockroach's revelatory account of his enduring love for the worthless Cora. This story again is constructed around the contrast between the brutality of prison life and the survival of a gentle, idealistic, hopeless passion. The nameless narrator refrains from offering any kind of cynical comment on Old Cockroach's misdirected love, and his respectful, sensitive narration is further proof of man's ability to retain his decency despite all the external pressures in the prison.

Many years earlier Cora, a coloured girl light enough to pass as white, had rejected the adoring schoolmaster, who then killed a man who had criticized Cora as “a damn play-white bitch.”⁵ “Out of Darkness,” the title of this story, alludes to Cora's passage from the coloured to the white world. Like Morris in Athol Fugard's The Blood-Knot, Cora is fatally drawn, as a moth at night, towards the “light” of white society. The tragedy of this story, the schoolmaster's killing of Cora's critic, is generated by the tensions implicit in a racially divided country, for Cora's rejection of her lover had been motivated solely by the higher social and economic status attached to membership of white society. Many of La Guma's stories are similarly built around the human losses that attend apartheid, for, although this word is nowhere mentioned in his fiction, racial segregation is its keystone, determining all human responses in patterns of limitation, restriction, impoverishment and frustration. Man's separation from man on grounds of pigmentation alone is as central to La Guma's fictional world as is, say, the class stratification in Jane Austen. Furthermore, if apartheid determines human behaviour in these stories, it is also a shaping, controlling force on their form. In “A Glass of Wine,” for instance, a white boy is in love with a coloured shebeen-girl, their relationship virginal and innocent despite its sordid setting. An intoxicated customer teases the two lovers about their approaching wedding, too drunk or too insensitive to perceive the impossibility of the white boy's marrying the coloured girl. The story ends abruptly, as their love must, the conclusion reflecting the inability of the young lovers to marry and raise a family “across the colour bar.” The story cannot proceed because the lovers' relationship, too, is terminal. The fondness of black South African writers for the short-story form has been linked with the physical pressures on the writer himself, but the form of “A Glass of Wine” suggests that there is also a powerful analogy between the ellipses and discontinuities of the short-story form and the disruptions imposed by apartheid. “A Glass of Wine” must be a short story because the story of the two young people can only, in the context of the Immorality Act, be short.

There is a powerful impression of inevitability, too, in “Coffee for the Road,” in which an Indian woman, rich and sophisticated, strikes a crude white cafe owner before continuing with her car journey towards Cape Town. Under the petty restrictions of apartheid, the woman is unable to stop for rest or refreshment; tired and harassed by her children, she loses patience with the cafe owner's refusal to refill her thermos. At the inevitable road-block which awaits them the Indian driver and her children are turned back and escorted for trial. Again, as in “A Glass of Wine,” the story cannot continue past the police check. La Guma is careful to generate no trace of suspense in the remaining few paragraphs, the decelerating rhythm of the story being powerfully suggestive of the inevitability of arrest.

Similarly, several other stories deal with aspects of apartheid's effect on private life in South Africa. In “Slipper Satin” Myra, a coloured girl, has just been released from a jail sentence under the Immorality Act. Her white lover had committed suicide upon their discovery by the police. (This story indicates the potentially tragic outcome of the situation sketched in “A Glass of Wine.”) Her home and neighbourhood appear unchanged but Myra herself has altered, having become harder, tougher, coarser as a result of her stay in prison:

The bitterness inside her [was] like a new part of her being. She had finished with crying, and crying had left the bitterness behind her like the layer of salt found in a pan after the water had evaporated.⁶

The female neighbours and Myra's own mother, accepting the definitions implied by racist laws, call the girl, whose only crime has been to love the wrong man, a “whore.” Myra's sister requires eight guineas for a new wedding dress, and Myra promises to raise this money through, it is implied, prostitution. “Slipper Satin,” then, shows how a person's whole personality can be changed by the experience of arrest and imprisonment. In this story the environment has succeeded in shaping an individual into a quite new mould. The effect of the Immorality Act has been to transform a decent girl into a potential whore. The irony of this transformation is both mordant and implicit.

Racism is equally deforming in “The Gladiators,” in which the coloured boxer, Kenny, who was “sorry he wasn't white and glad he wasn't black,” is so contemptuous of his black opponent that in a few moments of overconfidence he allows himself to lose the fight.⁷ Once more an individual's racist perceptions, his acceptance of the state's stratification of value by colour, pervert his natural reactions. La Guma is indeed honest enough to accept that some coloured people effectively support the very system that decrees their inferiority. The attractions of whiteness are too strong for Kenny here, as for Cora in “Out of Darkness.” The final irony is that the crowd at the boxing hall don't care who wins, black or coloured, so long as they see blood spilled.

“A Matter of Taste” is a metaphor about freedom in South Africa. A white man, assisted by a couple of coloured railway workers, jumps a goods train bound for Cape Town, where he hopes to secure his passage to the United States. The white, though dirty and ragged, is able to leave South Africa; the two coloureds are left behind on the embankment. Earlier, discussing the kind of food they liked, the white had claimed this was all “a matter of taste,” to which one of the coloured men replied that what one ate was rather “a matter of money.”⁸ The story's dénouement, the white's departure into the night, only confirms the coloured's view that human behaviour is limited by economic pressures. The two coloured workers don't choose to remain as labourers in South Africa; their poverty imposes this life upon them, and this limitation is, in its turn, the consequence of racist laws about employment, education and trade unionism in South Africa. In this story, as in all La Guma's fiction, the balance between racio-economic determinism and individual resistance, between victimization and survival, has swung away from the individual's power of assertion. The long powerful goods train to which the white leaps seems to embody the monstrous juggernaut of apartheid, thundering through the night, hospitable to the white's ambition but deaf to any black aspirations.

“At The Portagee's,” a slighter story, makes a similarly deterministic point: two boys able to afford to buy soft drinks and feed the jukebox can stay in the restaurant as long as they wish; a poor man who merely wants sixpennyworth of fish is kicked out of the cafe. The violence meted out here to a man whose only crime is poverty is indeed endemic to most of La Guma's fiction. Key scenes in his novels—the human bonfire at the end of And A Threefold Cord, the internecine brutality of The Stone Country, the torturing of Elias, the political prisoner of In The Fog of the Seasons' End—describe murder and physical confrontation. However there is no evidence that such scenes are included by La Guma from base, sensationalist motives; no savouring, such as is evident in Western pulp fiction or in lesser Kenyan novelists, Mangua and Ruheni for instance, of violence for its own sake. The sobriety of La Guma's fiction attests, rather, to the fearful ordinariness of brutality in South Africa, whether that licensed by the state or the kind that erupts spontaneously from frustration and impotence.

“The Lemon Orchard” is a good illustration of La Guma's partiality towards the understatement of the harsh and the atrocious. Here a vigilante group of rich Afrikaner farmers is frog-marching a coloured school teacher to an isolated location in order to sjambok him for his “impudence” to two pillars of the white community. The racist contempt of the farmers for the educated coloured man is well conveyed, but the story stops short of the beating itself, ending when the group reaches the rural “amphitheatre” selected for the assault. La Guma chooses not to describe the lacerating blows of the sjambok or the psychological humiliation borne by the cultured, sensitive teacher. Instead, he emphasizes the beauties of the landscape, the bracing winter air and the perfume of the lemon bushes. “The Lemon Orchard” is the only evocation in La Guma's fiction of a rural setting:

They had come into a wide gap in the orchard, a small amphitheatre surrounded by fragrant growth, and they all stopped within it. The moonlight clung for a while to the leaves and the angled branches, so that along their tips and edges the moisture gleamed with the quivering shine of scattered quicksilver.⁹

This, the final paragraph, illustrates the basic dislocation within the story, and indeed within South Africa itself: the contrast between a magnificent physical environment and the bestiality of the inhabitants.

Shortly before this paragraph La Guma had accorded the night an immense organic presence:

The blackness of the night crouched over the orchard and the leaves rustled with a harsh whispering that was inconsistent with the pleasant scent of the lemon.¹⁰

The crouching night, like a leopard about to spring, may evoke the celebrated passage in Book I of The Prelude (1805/1806), where Wordsworth recalls the awesome physical presence of Black Crag, a peak overlooking Ullswater, and its effect on the young rower. The lemon orchard has something of the magisterial power of Wordsworth's lakeland landscape, but La Guma uses this not as a romantic embodiment of the power of nature, but as an implicit commentary upon the tawdriness of the human beings who besmirch the grove. The criticism of Afrikaner racism is thus implicit, the irony achieved by the disjunction felt between the romantic imagery and the human squalor.

A similar implicit, understated irony is at work in another story, “Blankets.” Here Choker has been wounded in a fight and is being transported to hospital in a non-white ambulance. He is unconscious but the “thick and new and warm” ambulance blanket evokes in him images of earlier scenes in his life—his first day in prison, childhood with his elder brother, married life with his wife. All these brief memories merge imperceptibly into each other, but are linked by the sensuous impression of the blanket that is a part of each image. The ambulance blanket—Choker's last, since the story implies that he is mortally wounded—is, ironically, the cleanest and warmest, for all the earlier blankets, in childhood, prison and at home, had been dirty and thin. Such is the degradation of Choker's life that even the facilities provided in the segregated ambulance are superior to those experienced before. In its manipulation of the chronology of Choker's memory and its mordant, buried irony “Blankets” is one of the most effective of La Guma's stories.

Most of these stories are spare, just a few pages long, their brevity contributing to their power. The writer himself never enters into the stories to inveigh directly against apartheid. Instead he allows his invented characters and episodes in the bars, prisons and homes of South Africa to speak for him. “A Walk in the Night,” the longest story in the volume of that title, is unique as La Guma's only attempt at the novella. A fiction that is, in a sense, an amalgam of the short story and the more leisurely novel, “A Walk in the Night” raises certain problems of interpretation. The short stories, on the one hand, are not difficult to read, for their form permits La Guma, if he wishes, to leave an ending open—as, for example, in “Tattoo Marks and Nails,” in which the identity of Ahmed's tattoo remains unresolved, or in “Blankets,” where the point of the story is unaffected by the reader's ignorance of whether Choker lives or dies. La Guma's three novels, on the other hand, arouse quite different expectations: that the fiction will embrace some kind of resolution and completeness, tying up all the loose ends and clarifying relationships established across the spokes of the text. Hence in The Fog [In The Fog of the Seasons' End] the development of the narrative finally links the two characters, Elias and Beukes, who at the outset had appeared disconnected. “A Walk in the Night” is more difficult to read than either the stories or the novels, because it doesn't quite satisfy either of the reader's two expectations—for brevity and the episodic, or for amplitude and coherence. It is worth examining this in more detail, for the problem of how it is to be read is central to the achieved meaning of “A Walk in the Night.”

At the beginning “A Walk” implies that Michael Adonis is its hero, situated in the same dominant place in the text as Adams in The Stone Country or Beukes in The Fog. The novella's first five sections—there are nineteen altogether—narrate the movements of Adonis soon after he has been dismissed from a sheet-metal factory for cheek to the white foreman. His “feeling of rage, frustration and violence, swelled like a boil, knotted with pain,” is powerfully conveyed and the reader's initial expectation is that the novella will attend to the development of this emotion until it is finally released at the end.¹¹ The three criminals Adonis meets in the restaurant (section 1) are looking out for someone to make up a foursome in that night's robbery, and La Guma invites the reader to believe that the novella may well be concerned with this crime as its dénouement, as a catharsis for Adonis' legitimate anger and as the fiction's point of conclusion. Adonis' accidental killing of Doughty, the alcoholic Irish actor (section 4) provides, apparently, a digression to what the reader assumes at this point will be the central narrative line, the relationship between Adonis and the three burglars. These early sections, then, suggest that “A Walk in the Night” will tell a story of which Adonis will be the hero. The epigraph, from Hamlet, confirms such an expectation, linking, as it does, Adonis with the Ghost and hinting that the “foul crimes,” his unjust dismissal from the factory, will be “burnt and purged away.” The Hamlet quotation, so prominently displayed at the beginning of the text, implies that La Guma's story, too, will be an individual tragedy.

The progress of the narrative, though, frustrates this expectation, for it turns out that “A Walk in the Night” is more concerned with Denmark than with Hamlet; that the story is focussed on the community of District Six—itinerant white policemen, stranded white flotsam, struggling coloureds, streets, shops and apartments—than on any single individual. From section 6 onwards the primacy of Adonis in the story withers and the text becomes less and less centripetal, seemingly fragmented into a series of unrelated cameos, a group of embryonic short stories bereft of the centralizing narrative thrust of a novel. The formal principles of its construction seem less and less obvious as the novella proceeds.

This fragmentation of the narrative begins in section 6, with the sudden shift from Adonis to the white policemen cruising around District Six in their patrol car. Of the following twelve sections (7 to 18), five are narrated from Willieboy's point of view, one through Franky Lorenzo, three more through the white policemen, and only three (10, 13 and 15) from Adonis' point of view. The latter, the assumed hero of the first five sections, has been relegated to the status of simply being another stone in the mosaic, one of the many characters of all races whose lives momentarily touch one evening in Cape Town's District Six. By the end of “A Walk in the Night” the reader sees that the novella is about a community, the people of one particular place, more than about any single individual. This is confirmed in the final phase, section 19, which tersely summarizes the activities of the various characters after the death of Willieboy, shot for a murder he has not committed. Adonis, it is true, appears briefly in this section, when he and the gangsters set off for the break-in, but our earlier anticipation that La Guma will indicate the outcome of the robbery remains unsatisfied.

Most of La Guma's short stories are driven, as we have seen, by the narrative impulse to tell a story. Most end at a point different from where they begin yet anticipated at the outset. “A Matter of Taste,” for example, is bounded at the beginning by the white joining the two coloured plate layers and at the end by the former's departure as he jumps the goods train. The shape of this story, with its introduction, development and conclusion, satisfies conventional expectations for a short story. “A Walk in the Night,” though, is patterned quite differently, not lineally but spatially, as the story itself seems to move through the streets and bars of District Six, stopping to create characters who have no role to play in the plot—the cab-driver of section 3 who tells a story of a local crime passionnel before disappearing from the novella, or young Joe, “a wreck of a youth,” the beachcomber whose appearances in the story seem quite as random, as undirected as his own profession.

Randomness, the good (or, more usually, bad) fortune that brings together isolated lives and then quickly spins them apart, is really the subject of “A Walk in the Night.” The story's only, and slight, narrative thread is a collection of accidents and mistaken identities: Adonis accidentally murders an Irishman, Willieboy is mistaken for the murderer and then shot by a white policeman in irrelevant revenge on his troublesome wife. The fortuitous, the random and the contingent lie at the heart of the novella's content just as these same qualities define the tale's form, its circularity and jerkiness. La Guma, though, does not suggest that these mishaps result from the working of any supernatural or metaphysical force: there is no malignant extraterrestrial destiny at the back of “A Walk in the Night,” no President of the Immortals to sport with Adonis or Willieboy in the manner of Hardy's Tess.

Instead La Guma's story suggests that life's randomness directly results from the urban environment. The first few paragraphs of “A Walk” evoke the impersonal, anonymous feeling of the streets of Cape Town as Adonis alights from the train which has brought him in from his suburban factory:

The young man dropped from the trackless tram just before it stopped at Castle Bridge. He dropped off, ignoring the stream of late-afternoon traffic rolling in from the suburbs, bobbed and ducked the cars and buses, the big, rumbling delivery trucks, deaf to the shouts and curses of the drivers, and reached the pavement.

Standing there, near the green railings around the public convenience, he lighted a cigarette, jostled by the lines of workers going home, the first trickle of a stream that would soon be flowing towards Hanover Street. He looked right through them, refusing to see them, nursing a little growth of anger the way one caresses the beginnings of a toothache with the tip of the tongue.

Around him the buzz and hum of voices and the growl of traffic blended into one solid mutter of sound which he only half-heard, his thoughts concentrated upon the pustule of rage and humiliation that was continuing to ripen deep down within him.¹²

These early sentences feel more like New York of Saul Bellow or the London of Angus Wilson than any African environment. Or, to recall an earlier parallel, they aim at evoking an impression similar to the celebrated descriptions of London in Book VII of The Prelude. Part of the “great city” yet also alienated from it, Wordsworth there recorded how often amid the unnumbered throng had he said “Unto myself, ‘The face of every one / That passes by me is a mystery.’”¹³ These two lines might have stood alongside the Hamlet quotation as an epigraph to “A Walk in the Night,” which, in both content and form, establishes the vast, un-African, antlike quality of life in one of Africa's larger cities.

La Guma's Cape Town reads as if it were an American or European city, save in one notable respect. Although Wordsworth, in The Prelude, is as hard pressed to find verbal forms for the outlandishness of London as Dickens in Bleak House, a turbulent energy pulses through the London of Dickens or Wordsworth as through the Western cities of much twentieth-century literature. In “A Walk” La Guma's environment, oddly, mixes anonymity with the regimented inertia of people under a totalitarian regime. Cape Town is a Western city without the driving energy. Individuality, ambition, hope, optimism have all been throttled in La Guma's city. Here everyone, irrespective of race, is a victim: even the white policeman is the harried, frustrated victim of his own wife. La Guma's poor come in many shapes, sizes and colours, their defeated status defined by class, not race alone. In these circumstances the rolling of a joint, a dagga cigarette, is described in minute detail (p. 76), because it is only through such private, ritual acts that the external world may briefly be stilled.

“A Walk in the Night” is La Guma's fullest, harshest picture of the miseries of urban life, the grim marriage of urban impersonality with totalitarian repression, for the poor in South Africa. As such it is rightly placed at the head of his volume of short stories for it does establish the context in which the lives of urban blacks are played out. But the rest of his stories hint that perhaps “A Walk in the Night” wasn't intended to portray the whole truth. The Hamlet epigraph suggests that all the novella's characters inhabit some bleak limbo, condemned to “walk the night” until apartheid has been “burnt and purged away,” yet several of the short stories testify to the survival of human dignity despite hideous external pressures. Notable here are the insouciance of Ahmed in “Tattoo Marks and Nails,” the brave dignity of the schoolmaster in “The Lemon Orchard,” the tender affection of the lovers in “A Glass of Wine,” or the delicacy of the pianist of “Nocturne.” La Guma's shorter fiction generates an admiring respect for his survivors, and a feeling of helpless despair for his victims. Perhaps it is no surprise that this mixture also characterized one of the classic Victorian statements about urban and race victimization—Engels' Conditions of the Working Class in England, 1844.

Notes

1. Bruno Bettelheim, Surviving and Other Essays (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1979).

2. “Nocturne,” in Quartet: New Voices from South Africa, ed. Richard Rive (London: Heinemann, 1965), p. 113.

3. “The Gladiators,” in A Walk in the Night and Other Stories” (London: Heinemann, 1974), p. 114.

4. “Out of Darkness,” in Quartet, p. 33.

5. “Out of Darkness,” p. 38.

6. “Slipper Satin,” in Quartet, p. 68.

7. “The Gladiators,” p. 114.

8. “A Matter of Taste,” in A Walk in the Night, p. 128.

9. “The Lemon Orchard,” in A Walk in the Night, p. 136.

10. “The Lemon Orchard,” p. 135.

11. “A Walk in the Night,” in A Walk in the Night, p. 12.

12. “A Walk in the Night,” p. 1.

13. William Wordsworth, The Prelude, ed. J.C. Maxwell (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), Book VII, 11. 628-29 (1805 version).