SOURCE: Glen, Heather. “Morality through Experience: Lyrical Ballads 1798.” In Vision and Disenchantment: Blake's “Songs” and Wordsworth's “Lyrical Ballads,” pp. 224-59. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

[In the following excerpt, Glen compares selected poems from the 1798 Lyrical Ballads with William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience.]

But since a certain inequality of situation is necessary, and the present inequality, apparently more than that necessity requires, I am only desirous that the shade of distinction should rather be relieved than darkened; that in the picture of human life, the poor should not be ignominiously degraded in the background, merely to render the drawing picturesque, but that they should generously be represented on the canvas, with that dignity and importance to which they are really entitled.

(From The Cabinet, by a Society of Gentlemen, no. 1, October 1794)

However disconcerting their original readers may have found them, the poems of Lyrical Ballads seem much more straightforward in their moral intention than do those of Songs of Innocence and of Experience. They contain none of that mocking play with paradox and ambiguity which marks Blake's collection, and none of his ironic awareness of the double-edgedness of the moral terms they use. Indeed, in the ‘Preface’ to the 1800 edition, Wordsworth claims quite directly that each of ‘the Poems in these volumes … has a worthy purpose’. He does, it is true, go on to distinguish this purpose from simple didacticism:

Not that I mean to say, that I always began to write with a distinct purpose formally conceived; but I believe that my habits of meditation have so formed my feelings, as that my descriptions of such objects as strongly excite those feelings, will be found to carry along with them a purpose.

But his central assumption remains that ‘Poems to which any value can be attached’ will ultimately have an unambiguously moral effect: ‘the understanding of the being of whom we address ourselves, if he be in a healthful state of association, must necessarily be in some degree enlightened, his taste exalted, and his affections ameliorated’.¹ Such an assumption seems the intimate result of that confidence in a like-minded audience manifested in the plans for The Philanthropist, and of an implicit trust—shared with that audience—in the ‘ameliorative’ power of education.² Yet the difference between Lyrical Ballads and the ‘magazine verse’ such readers would have expected seems to bespeak a rather more complex attitude towards contemporary moral certainties than this ‘Preface,’ and the contrast of these poems with Blake's, might at first suggest.

Like children's verse, magazine poetry was a conventionally moralistic genre. The authors of the lyrics and ballads, ‘pastorals’ and meditative effusions which filled the poetry pages of the magazines were just as eager to instruct and improve their readers, to awaken them to the lot of those less fortunate than themselves, and to set them thinking on more general moral subjects, as were those responsible for the simple didacticism of the children's books. In their sentimental depiction of the plight of the poor and their confident appeal to easy moral platitudes, the vast majority of these poems express the same unquestioning acquiescence in the status quo as do those written for children. But some, at least, explicitly aimed to question it. And it is in relation to such verse as this—verse written by men whose social thinking was in many ways close to Wordsworth's, men who saw their poetry as the vehicle for new and subversive ideas—that we might most fruitfully begin to explore the ways in which Lyrical Ballads does question that established ‘Moral Virtue’ to which Blake's Songs seem much more uncompromisingly opposed.

We are peculiarly well placed to do so. For in 1799 Wordsworth's friend Southey published a series of ‘English Eclogues’, some of which were modelled on poems from Lyrical Ballads 1798—an act apparently prompted by his dissatisfaction with the ‘strangeness and aukwardness’ of the earlier collection.³ Mary Jacobus has examined the way in which in these verses

poems from Lyrical Ballads are returned firmly to the level of the magazine poetry from which they had been raised, stripped of their new thematic depth and narrative sophistication. In other cases, what is idiosyncratic or disturbing … is replaced by topical humanitarian interest of a quite straightforward kind; the poems become not simply shallower, but more public.⁴

Southey's poems indeed provide a particularly clear example of the conventionalizing process to which original works of art tend to be subjected, of the way in which such works may be re-moulded (either by readers or ‘imitators’) to conform with established ‘public’ taste. But it is perhaps even more illuminating to look in the other direction, and examine one of the 1798 Lyrical Ballads from the viewpoint afforded by such an imitation. ‘Old Man Travelling’ was, as we have already seen, one of the least acceptable of the 1798 collection: Wordsworth's own later revisions suggest that even he found it in some way disquieting. And it is one of the poems of which Southey wrote his own, very different, version—‘The Sailor's Mother’—a version which begins thus:

WOMAN:
Sir, for the love of God, some small relief
To a poor woman!
TRAVELLER:
                              Whither are you bound?
'Tis a late hour to travel o'er these downs,
No house for miles around us, and the way
Dreary and wild. The evening wind already
Makes one's teeth chatter, and the very sun,
Setting so pale behind those thin white clouds,
Looks cold. 'Twill be a bitter night!
WOMAN:
                                                                                                                        Ay, sir,
'Tis cutting keen! I smart at every breath;
Heaven knows how I shall reach my journey's end,
For the way is long before me, and my feet,
God help me! sore with travelling. I would gladly,
If it pleased God, lie down at once and die.
TRAVELLER:
Nay, nay, cheer up! a little food and rest
Will comfort you; and then your journey's end
Will make amends for all. You shake your head,
And weep. Is it some evil business then
That leads you from your home?
WOMAN:
                                                                                Sir, I am going
To see my son at Plymouth, sadly hurt
In the late action, and in the hospital
Dying, I fear me, now …(5)

The dialogue continues, touching on several very topical problems—the meaning of patriotism, the sufferings caused by war, and the practice of conscripting offenders as an alternative to prison. By counterpointing the old woman's graphic descriptions of her sufferings with his Traveller's banal ‘comfort’, Southey achieves a crude dramatic irony which could hardly leave readers familiar with the sight of destitute veterans of the French wars and their families in any doubt as to the poem's moral point.⁶

                                                                      Well! well! take comfort,
He will be taken care of if he lives;
And should you lose your child, this is a country
Where the brave sailor never leaves a parent
To weep for him in want.

But Wordsworth's ‘Old Man Travelling’ is much more oblique. It is possible to trace an indirect anti-war statement in its juxtaposition of images of natural progression with one of unnatural death. But there is little sociological detail (such as had been prominent in the Salisbury Plain poems),⁷ and no obvious appeal either to pacifist feeling or to more general humanitarian sympathies. Instead, the poem begins with a description of an inscrutable and apparently impervious figure—a figure who is gradually transformed by the implied observer into a symbol of enviable ‘animal tranquillity’. Instead of Southey's heavy-handed dialogue between poor sufferer and complacent interlocutor there is a much more baffling and really dramatic confrontation, which sharply questions the validity of that opening meditation.⁸ For the old man's words disrupt this poem in a way in which Southey's old woman's do not. His feelings about his situation are not, like hers, the conventionalized, sentimentally emphasized feelings of the ‘deserving poor’: they remain unspoken. He simply offers a bald statement of fact—a statement whose opacity is similar to that of the placard fixed to the blind Beggar in London, which tells ‘The story of the Man, and who he was’ (The Prelude, 1805, Bk. vii, l. 614). And the reader expecting, and failing, to find some mediating comment, some authorial direction, is forced into a recognition of the intrasigent otherness of one of those whom even compassionate description, even enlightened protest, tended to see as mere objects of polite moral consciousness.

It is true that many of those to whom Wordsworth was closest in these years—even sometimes Southey himself—had a far more exploratory interest in the psychology of the deprived than that displayed in ‘The Sailor's Mother’.⁹ For educated radicals in the 1790s, a study of such subjects meant a real attempt to move beyond belittling attitudes of concern, and to consider seriously the possible subjective feelings of those who were more likely to be seen simply as ‘the poor’. It was an interest which Wordsworth himself shared: in March 1798 while working on the first volume of Lyrical Ballads, he sent off to Bristol for a copy of Erasmus Darwin's Zoonomia, a lengthy medical treatise whose case-histories of extreme mental states seem to have provided starting-points for several of the poems published in that volume.¹⁰ Yet in ‘Old Man Travelling’, written during the preceding year, the poetic focus is significantly different. The subject of the poem—the apparent stoicism of the suffering poor—is one which had a continuing imaginative fascination for Wordsworth: it had been extensively explored by the great radical Dissenter, Joseph Fawcett, in a sermon published in 1795, and probably attended by the poet in 1793:

We are told of an unhappy creature who, during long periods of time, is not only deprived of the pleasures of corporeal activity, but who is also a stranger to ease; who is condemned to pain, as well as to solitude. He, whose sensations are all gay and pleasurable, whose heart, in the fulness of health, laughs and sings along with surrounding nature; and whose leaping pulses have never known what it is to languish; regards such a situation with an eye, that cannot endure to rest, so much as a moment, upon it; and that represents it as utterly insupportable. Yet he, who has long been in it, is not without his solace. Time has lulled his sense of his pain, though it has not been able to lessen its degree, so as to have made patience under it a much easier task, than at first it was to him, than it would be now to you.¹¹

However complacent this may appear to the modern reader, the impulse behind Fawcett's sermon—and of the series of which it was part—was radically egalitarian: to affirm the dignity of those who were more frequently seen as almost subhuman.¹² Wordsworth in 1793 would have been attracted to them for precisely this reason. But ‘Old Man Travelling’ seems to offer an implicit retort to this kind of psychological analysis. Wordsworth makes no attempt to explore the old man's putative feelings: indeed, much of the force of the poem comes from its silent refusal to do so. And that refusal (seemingly against the grain of that contemporary ‘progressive’ thinking to which Wordsworth himself was attracted) does not merely explain the uneasiness with which its earlier readers received it:¹³ it begins to suggest a reason for the poetic ‘aukwardness’ which marks many of the other poems of the volume.

For in the last six lines of ‘Old Man Travelling’ it is not only the old man's separateness that is exposed. Here, for the first and only time, the implied meditative speaker from whose perspective the opening vision of ‘animal tranquillity and decay’ has been offered explicitly enters the verse—enters it in the very encounter which challenges him:

—I asked him whither he was bound, and what
The object of his journey; he replied …

[my italics]

His position has become the problem about which the poem pivots: no longer—as for Southey and for Fawcett—a position of meditative certainty, but one of silence before difference, a silence which he does not explain. Instead of offering a single, authoritative analysis, the poem simply juxtaposes two divergent and ultimately antithetical points of view. Yet this implicit questioning of polite assurance has none of the accusatory force, the sense of mutual complicity, to be found in Blake's ‘Pity would be no more, / If we did not make somebody Poor.’ Unlike Blake's ‘we’, Wordsworth's ‘I’ is a privileged speaker whose meditation, though questioned, is in no way related to the old man's situation. It is not, like Blake's ‘Pity’, seen as actively creating, acquiescing in and perpetuating the social division which has produced it: the cause of the son's death lies outside the poem, and no interaction between the two speakers—beyond that of question and silencing reply—is imagined. This presentation of two discordant voices, each expressing a contrary sense of the world, is very different from that play upon the disparity between ‘polite’ and ‘impolite’ meanings to be found in such Songs of Innocence and of Experience as ‘The Chimney Sweeper’ and ‘London’. The irreconcilable perspectives which this poem dramatizes are simply opposed: they are not, as in Blake, focussed disconcertingly within the same words. And although it is apparently questioned, that of the reflective polite observer remains primary: even the disquieting speech of the old man is contained within his narrative structure. His silence at the end of the poem is the silence of a bafflement which the reader is called upon to share.

The 1798 version of ‘Old Man Travelling’ thus in one way confronts, in another evades, the dilemma inherent in any attempt—however thoughtful, however consciously egalitarian—to write from a polite point of view about those who in the late eighteenth century were seen as the lower orders of society. It does foreground a problem which even those educated radicals who tried to find an acceptable way of portraying real social conditions, or to imagine the consciousness of the deprived, tended not to consider: the problem of the position of the polite observer, and the assumed authority of his viewpoint. But Wordsworth's containing narrative frame (within which, in his own later revisions, he completely incorporated the old man's speech, finally excluding it altogether),¹⁴ his failure to explore the relation between the polite assumptions which his poem so strikingly exposes and the world of actual human interaction, the baffled silence of his ending, point towards the difficulty he seems to have found in following through the more radical implications of his own insights. It is a difficulty which is manifested in several poems from the 1798 volume: poems whose ‘aukwardness’ seems to bespeak less a consistent, coherent challenge to established attitudes than a confusion of imaginative impulse—a confusion which springs from Wordsworth's deeply felt uncertainty as to his own proper relation to his subject-matter.

Indeed, it is significant that one of the most extraordinary poems of these years—one which explores the problem focussed in ‘Old Man Travelling’ with a nakedness and directness unequalled in any of Wordsworth's other works—is one which he seems to have had some difficulty in composing and finishing, an unnamed fragment which he never published:

                                        I have seen the Baker's horse
As he had been accustomed at your door
Stop with the loaded wain, when o'er his head
Smack went the whip, and you were left, as if
You were not born to live, or there had been
No bread in all the land. Five little ones,
They at the rumbling of the distant wheels
Had all come forth, and, ere the grove of birch
Concealed the wain, into their wretched hut
They all return'd. While in the road I stood
Pursuing with involuntary look
The Wain now seen no longer, to my side
——came, a pitcher in her hand
Filled from the spring; she saw what way my eyes
Were turn'd, and in a low and fearful voice
She said—that wagon does not care for us—
The words were simple, but her look and voice
Made up their meaning, and bespoke a mind
Which being long neglected, and denied
The common food of hope, was now become
Sick and extravagant, by strong access
Of momentary pangs driv'n to that state
In which all past experience melts away,
And the rebellious heart to its own will
Fashions the laws of nature.(15)

These lines were probably written in the spring of 1797, at much the same time as ‘Old Man Travelling’. Here, the speaker is identified in the opening word: the poem begins unambiguously from his point of view. But the stark monosyllables of the fourth line break the meditative movement of the verse, and the comma at its centre signals a dramatic shift of perspective: ‘Smack went the whip, and you were left …’ Suddenly he moves closer to an alignment with those who are ‘left’, those whose right to existence the smacking of the whip has denied. And in the wake of that shocking ‘smack’ they begin to appear in the poetry: ‘Five little ones / They at the rumbling of the distant wheels / Had all come forth’; ‘——came, a pitcher in her hand / Filled from the spring’. The world which they inhabit is a place of fearful malevolence. It is apparently indifferent to the simplest claims of humanity—claims whose necessity is unobtrusively suggested by the involuntary stopping of the horse, the children's automatic appearance at its approach, and the contrast between the ‘smack’ which denies and the ‘pitcher’ which is naturally ‘Filled from the spring’. Its indifference is not even manifested in the direct relation of one man to another, but in unintelligible and dehumanized phenomena, such as the failure of the bread-bearing wagon to stop. And this sense of a perverted and pitiless reality—so immediately and directly presented from the point of view of those who are ‘left’—is exactly encapsulated in the woman's ‘low and fearful’ words ‘that wagon does not care for us’.

Yet it is precisely at this point that the polite speaker moves from alignment to meditation and the disturbing force of the woman's perception is denied. For there is a curious shift in the middle of the fragment from the second to the third person, a shift which seems to signify a real unease in the narrator's stance toward his subject-matter.¹⁶ The ‘you’ of the opening is replaced by a gap in the manuscript—a gap apparently intended to be filled by a name. The woman who speaks is no longer an other to be related to (the present perfect tense of the opening line has, indeed, suggested a continuing relationship) but a ‘she’ whose words are distanced into narrative. And because they are thus distanced they are not seen as calling for response or (like the old man's much less disturbing statement) silencing the central speaker: they can be placed and diminished. Her point of view—a point of view which the opening lines have made imaginatively compelling—becomes simply a symptom of madness. Privation has made her unable to judge correctly: the sense that it might have provided her with an equally—or possibly more—well-founded vision of the world cannot be admitted. The poem has slid from its initial disturbing insight into a study of politely defined derangement.

And this retreat is reflected in the very language with which Wordsworth tries, sympathetically, to analyse the irrationality of the woman's reaction. For it is language which irresistibly evokes exactly those social facts to which hers is a reasonable response. She is ‘neglected’, but not merely in her ‘mind’: the actual Baker's cart is turned away from her door. If she is ‘denied / The common food of hope’, she is also denied ordinary bread. If her ‘state’ is one ‘In which all past experience melts away’, this is no wild aberration, but precisely that which is now demanded of her. Experience has apparently taught her, and her little ones, as it has taught the horse, that the wain will stop at her door; that she will be accorded the ‘common food’ of humanity: the ‘smack’ of the whip now teaches a sterner lesson. Here, concludes the speaker, is a madness in which ‘the rebellious heart to its own will / Fashions the laws of nature.’ Yet the woman's sense of the wagon's hostility—bizarre as it may seem—is not ‘rebelliously’ at odds with ‘the laws of nature’ as Wordsworth presents them here. There is no famine in the land; the wain is loaded. ‘Nature’, indeed, is bountiful: the pitcher is filled from the spring, the horse stops from habit at her door. The ‘laws’ which lead to the cracking of the whip are not ‘the laws of nature’, but human actions—grotesquely, yet from her perspective accurately enough, perceived as a single malevolent impersonal process: ‘That wagon does not care for us.’ Insistently the poetry registers that which the speaker's attempt to see her ‘state’ as mere madness would deny.

The attempt to conflate social fact with natural law, at the same moment as that fact is imaginatively perceived as a violation of ‘nature’, is reminiscent of that meditation upon ‘Animal Tranquillity and Decay’ which is so sharply questioned by a stark account of the human world in ‘Old Man Travelling’. But here, despite—or perhaps because of—the lack of poetic coherence, the significance of that attempt is apparent. For if, unlike the published poem, this fragment offers a powerful imaginative realization of the perspective of those who are ‘left’, their sense of the incomprehensible, inhuman hostility of that which ‘makes them Poor’, the speaker too seems unable to move beyond this sense, except by dismissing it as madness. For despite his indignation—‘as if / You were not born to live, or there had been / No bread in all the land’—he, also, sees the woman as ‘left’, ‘neglected’, ‘denied’ and ‘driv'n’ by a process whose cause is as mysterious and as remote from confrontation in the poetry as the reason for the smacking of the whip, a process which for him seems to have the force of an unquestionable and incomprehensible law. He too is left, ‘Pursuing with involuntary look / The Wain now seen no longer’: by the woman's side, and yet—as his authoritative ‘diagnosis’ in the closing lines suggests—by no means sharing her condition.

And it is the imaginative uncertainty manifest in this fragment, as much as any more coherently subversive ‘purpose’, which disjoints many of the narrative poems of Lyrical Ballads 1798. To some extent—as their early reviews suggest—they were successful in exposing and questioning the conventionally moralistic assumptions of their progressive late eighteenth-century readers. Southey, for instance, puzzled over ‘Goody Blake and Harry Gill’; was it merely a sensationalistic account of a factual incident, or was it meant to teach a lesson? The poem itself seemed to afford him no clue:

The story of a man who suffers the perpetual pain of cold, because an old woman prayed that he might never be warm, is perhaps a good story for a ballad, because it is a well-known tale: but is the author certain that it is ‘well authenticated’? And does not such an assertion promote the popular superstition of witchcraft?¹⁷

Dr Burney, in The Monthly Review, was more naive in his expectation of moral teaching, and more bewildered by the questions left open by the poem:

Distress from poverty and want is admirably described in the true story of ‘Goody Blake and Harry Gill’: but are we to imagine that Harry was bewitched by Goody Blake? The hardest heart must be softened into pity for the poor old woman; and yet, if all the poor are to help themselves, and supply their wants from the possessions of their neighbours, what imaginary wants and real anarchy would it not create? Goody Blake should have been relieved of the two millions annually allowed by the state to the poor of this country, not by the plunder of an individual.¹⁸

Perhaps the contemporary reader who came closest to defining the nature of the difficulty was a reviewer of the 1800 volume, writing in the British Critic for February 1801:

As to the subjects, it must be owned that their worth does not always appear at first sight; but, judging from our own feelings, we must assert, that it generally grows upon the reader by subsequent perusal … Even where the feeling intended to be called forth is of a rich and noble character, such as we may recur to, and feed upon, it may yet be wrought up so gradually, including so many preparatory circumstances of appropriate manners, of local descriptions, of actual events, etc., that the subtle uniting thread will be lost, without a persevering effort towards attention on the part of the reader.¹⁹

For to find the ‘subtle uniting thread’ which will make sense of these poems is by no means easy. To their earliest readers, they were puzzling because they did not seem to fit into any of the categories—of simple sensationalism, of ‘sensibility’, or of more radical protest—to which verse on such subjects might be expected to belong. They offer no clear guide as to what the reader is supposed to make of the situations they present: their speakers' exclamations and explanations are often cryptic, and those speakers frequently seem to be questioned within the poem. Yet if, as Wordsworth's own ‘Advertisement’ to the volume suggests, this is partly a deliberate strategy—an effort to get his readers to ‘struggle’ with the poems in a more energetic way than that which more conventional verse demanded, and to question the assumptions (‘our own pre-established codes of decision’) which it characteristically embodied—there are discords and difficulties in the 1798 volume which cannot be explained entirely in this way. To the modern reader, these poems are disconcerting less because they demand ‘a persevering effort towards attention’ on his part than because of the sometimes embarrassing clarity with which they expose the contradictions implicit in what they attempt.

The poem of which this is most interestingly true is ‘Simon Lee’. Like ‘Old Man Travelling’, this has as its subject one of the victims of an unequal society: like that poem, it refuses to adopt a conventional stance, either of pity or of protest. Indeed, in a series of taunting asides to the reader, it explicitly comments on its own refusal.²⁰ Like the sub-title of ‘Old Man Travelling’ (‘Animal Tranquillity and Decay: a Sketch’) its title (‘Simon Lee, the Old Huntsman, with an incident in which he was concerned’) seems to promise an easily assimilable portrait of its central character; as in the earlier poem, that implicit promise is undermined by what follows. Even in the first stanza, the possibility of a single authoritative viewpoint is lightly but tellingly questioned:

In the sweet shire of Cardigan,
Not far from pleasant Ivor-hall,
An old man dwells, a little man,
I've heard he once was tall.
Of years he has upon his back,
No doubt, a burthen weighty;
He says he is three score and ten,
But others say he's eighty.

[my italics]

And as the poems proceeds, this emphasis continues, in a series of echoes of past conversation and present gossip, of the old man's voice itself:

To say the least, four counties round
Had heard of Simon Lee …
He all the country could outrun,
Could leave both man and horse behind …
Few months of life he has in store,
As he to you will tell,
For still, the more he works, the more
His poor old ancles swell.

The sense is of a whole community—a community in which the facts of life are unsentimentally confronted and acknowledged (‘Yet meet him where you will, you see / At once that he is poor …’; ‘The weakest in the village’)—in which memories and reports join with present perceptions to construct the individual's social identity. The portrait of Simon which emerges is thus very different from anything to be found in more conventional contemporary verse, where such a figure would be presented from a single, polite perspective:

We met an old bare-headed man,
          His locks were few and white,
I ask'd what he did abroad
          In that cold winter's night:
'Twas bitter keen, indeed, he said,
          But at home no fire had he,
And therefore he had come abroad
          To ask for charity.

(Southey: ‘The Complaints of the Poor’)²¹

Simon Lee is a far more complex, less clichéd character than this old man. He is both ludicrous and independent: boastful of and remembered for his past prowess, yet decrepit in ways less lyrically acceptable than ‘His locks were few and white.’ His life is not one of humble acquiescence, but an unremitting struggle which cannot easily be smoothed into the ‘poetical’: ‘For still, the more he works, the more / His poor old ancles swell.’ Southey's poem concludes with a neat quatrain which suggests that ‘the poor’ are somehow disposed of once the right judgment has been made—any sense of implication or responsibility being deftly transferred to the ‘rich’:

I turn'd me to the rich man then,
          For silently stood he,—
‘You ask me why the poor complain,
          And these have answer'd thee!’

But the narrator of ‘Simon Lee’ is left with a tangled, inconclusive and continuing set of feelings: feelings aroused by an other who is not generalized into ‘the poor’, but seen as a unique and irresolvable individual:

The tears into his eyes were brought,
And thanks and praises seemed to run
So fast out of his heart, I thought
They never would have done.
—I've heard of hearts unkind, kind deeds
With coldness still returning.
Alas! the gratitude of men
Has oftner left me mourning.

Some of the ‘aukwardness’ of this poem, then, like that of ‘Old Man Travelling’, stems from its attempt to suggest the intransigent otherness of one of those who were more likely, in late eighteenth-century poetry, to be simplified into objects of meditation or concern. Here, the attempt is more complex than the abrupt confrontation of the earlier poem; and it leads to an unease in face of that favourite virtue of humble life, ‘gratitude’, not dissimilar to that expressed by Wordsworth's friend Thelwall in The Peripatetic five years earlier:

The story was too circumstantial to be doubted; and Philanthropa, putting a half crown into her hand, hurried away to avoid that profusion of gratitude, which how pleasing soever it may be to the mere spectator, is always painful to the ear of the truly generous benefactor.²²

Yet like Thelwall's, it is an unease very different from the sardonic, direct attack of Pigott's Political Dictionary: ‘Grateful—obsolete. It is at present used for great fool.’ Where this definition suggests a perspective radically opposed to that of the polite, for Wordsworth and for Thelwall the disquieting implications of ‘gratitude’ remain a problem within the ‘benefactor’'s consciousness. However challenged they may feel by the situations they present, both end with an implicit affirmation of the primacy of the polite point of view. And this difference points sharply toward another, and more fundamental ‘aukwardness’ in Wordsworth's portrayal of Simon.

For the effect of that portrayal is very odd: much odder, I think, than those critics who praise the poem for its frustration of expected responses have admitted.²³ It is a portrayal never entirely free of condescension: one in which Simon never quite attains serious stature. Despite the attempt to see him in the round, a figure unassimilable to any single viewpoint, he remains contained within the excessively regular rhythms and exact, often feminine rhymes of an undeviating stanza pattern. There is a curious disjunction between form and subject-matter: between the jaunty, almost jocular effect of the former, and the prosaic misery of the latter:

He has no son, he has no child,
His wife, an aged woman,
Lives with him, near the waterfall,
Upon the village common.
And he is lean and he is sick,
His little body's half awry
His ancles they are swoln and thick
His legs are thin and dry.
When he was young he little knew
Of husbandry or tillage;
And now he's forced to work, though weak,
—The weakest in the village.

And the result is an embarrassing tension between that which is of its nature disquieting and irresolvable and that which completes and resolves; a tension which increases as the poem proceeds and which finds its imaginative fulfilment in the penultimate stanza:

‘You're overtasked, good Simon Lee,
Give me your tool’ to him I said;
And at the word right gladly he
Received my proffer'd aid.
I struck, and with a single blow
The tangled root I sever'd,
At which the poor old man so long
And vainly had endeavour'd.

The ‘blow’ which finishes the old man's task makes all of Simon's struggles with it irrelevant: it completes that belittlement of him which has been implicitly present in the tone throughout. If it is a solution, it is one which in its violence seems almost like castration. The effortlessness with which it is delivered makes it an apt and powerful image for the unwitting ease of that paternalistic ‘pity’ which diminishes that which is to the suffering other impossible—an image which, in its incipient brutality, and in the irrational guilt it seems to inspire, comes closer than anything else in Lyrical Ballads 1798 to Blake's ‘Pity would be no more / If we did not make somebody Poor.’

It is far more ambiguous, however, than Blake: in a way which has enabled at least one sensitive modern critic to write of it from a quite opposite point of view:

At the conclusion of a poem in which the only action has been a slow decay of life, this ‘single blow’ becomes more than a particular act of charity. It is a powerful and liberating release of protective energy, a gesture of defense, and even revenge, on behalf of a humanity caught in the inexorable processes of natural law.²⁴

For it is presented by the speaker as an act of natural charity, the instinctive response of a younger, able-bodied man to the struggles of one who is handicapped by age. Just as the first nine stanzas, with an uncertain egalitarianism, have tried to suggest that Simon, like the ‘you’ who is constantly addressed and invoked, is not just ‘Poor’, but ‘somebody’, with a remembered past and a vivid self-image, so this encounter between the obviously ‘gentle’ speaker and one who is almost destitute is seen simply as an encounter between two men, in which a common human fate is acknowledged and lamented. On this level, the narrator's ‘mourning’ is a continuing grief at those ‘inexorable processes of natural law’ which diminish strength and make such ‘gratitude’ as Simon's necessary.

Yet to read the poem simply thus is to discount the disturbing force of that final gesture, and to ignore many of the disquieting implications of that which is presented in the poetry. For Simon's life is portrayed with a realistic detail which makes description of the poem's subject-matter as ‘the slow decay of life’ seem rather less than the whole truth:

Beside their moss-grown hut of clay,
Not twenty paces from the door,
A scrap of land they have, but they
Are poorest of the poor.
This scrap of land he from the heath
Enclosed when he was stronger;
But what avails the land to them,
Which they can till no longer?(25)

This is a world very different from that of the speaker, or of the ‘gentle reader’, with his appetite for edifying tales. The division is registered most intimately in the poem's odd uncertainty of tone; and it finds its ultimate symbolic expression in the quick lopping-off of the root at which the old man labours. In the wake of that sudden ‘blow’, the narrator's unresolved ‘mourning’ takes on other, and guiltier, resonances. This is a strange ‘tale’ for the ‘gentle reader’, a tale which questions his (and the speaker's) gentleness, even as, in another way, it affirms their gentility.

Yet whatever is recognized (or unconsciously registered) in the muted violence of this face-to-face encounter with the man who has been the subject of the greater part of the poem, the closing lines offer an essentially private reflection:

I've heard of hearts unkind, kind deeds
With coldness still returning.
Alas! the gratitude of men
Has oftner left me mourning.

The quatrain begins like a proverbial aphorism, echoing that earlier appeal to the reader's fellow-feeling (‘I hope you'll kindly take it’). But the closing lines turn away from the expected completing moral, away from the simple conclusiveness which has been a feature of the poetry. For the first time in the poem the narrator speaks directly of his feelings—speaks with an intimacy which implicitly addresses itself to that ‘gentle reader’, who might, through ‘silent thought’ about this subject, find his ‘understanding … enlightened, his taste exalted, and his affections ameliorated’.²⁶ Simon, with his embarrassing gushing thanks, has disappeared: the speaker is ‘left’ alone. And the movement from the ‘proverbial wisdom’ of the first two of these lines to this private, almost solipsistic confession is an implicit admission that the only possibility for real mutuality of feeling lies not in a world of ‘common humanity’ which includes both privileged and unprivileged, but between the narrator and his ‘gentle reader’, a man capable of ‘severe thought, and a long continued intercourse with the best models of composition’.²⁷ Simon is not felt as a persistent and unassimilable presence: what we have is an unfinished (and hopefully ‘ameliorative’) disturbance in the speaker's feelings, half distanced and half foregrounded by the present perfect continuous tense.

This ending is very different from the conclusions of those of the Songs of Innocence which deal with similarly disturbing subject matter. There, the barbed ‘morals’ point directly into the world of human interaction—‘So if all do their duty, they need not fear harm’; ‘Then cherish pity; lest you drive an angel from your door.’ Here, there is an introspective ‘mourning’—an emotion felt when the other to whom one has related has disappeared. There, Blake tightly controls the several conflicting possibilities of meaning he has evoked: here all the ambiguities of implication aroused in the poem are left confusedly (rather than ironically) in play. ‘Mourning’ does suggest a more critical attitude towards social inequality than the complacent self-congratulation of conventional ‘benevolence’: its unresolvedness hints at a lurking guilt, springing irrationally but realistically from the ease with which Simon's efforts have been negated, and pointing toward the disquieting sources of that embarrassment which has been present throughout the poem. Yet alongside this hovers another, incoherently contradictory feeling. For ‘mourning’ is men's means of coming to terms with that which is accepted as unalterable: if the word registers disquiet, it also suggests resignation. And if there is egalitarianism in ‘the gratitude of men’ there is also a refusal to recognize those differences between ‘men’ which have been reflected in the poem's uncertain stance towards its subject-matter, a refusal which tries—against the strain of that uncertainty—to assimilate Simon's plight to a universal human predicament.

The interest of ‘Simon Lee’ lies in the imaginative fidelity with which it registers the tensions implicit in Wordsworth's enterprise: tensions unremarked or unconfronted by those radical thinkers to whom he was closest. It is the only one of Lyrical Ballads 1798 in which he shows his easy, egalitarian speaker acting in relation to one of the less privileged classes: and the act is imaginatively disturbing in a way unparalleled in any other explicitly ‘egalitarian’ verse of these years. But the poem finally fails to explore or control that confusion of feeling which its ‘incident’ arouses. And in its implicit moral ‘purpose’, that of ‘placing my Reader in the way of receiving from ordinary moral sensations another and more salutary impression than we are accustomed to receive from them’,²⁸ it points away from the challenging fact of Simon's existence and into the world of essentially private feeling as surely as the villagers in ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’ turn away from the Beggar and from each other in their separate responses. The ending, indeed, seems an admission of isolation:

Alas! the gratitude of men
Has oftner left me mourning.

Here there is no urgent call to an action in which ‘all must’ join: the ‘tale’ which may ‘perhaps’ be made of the incident must be made separately, by each reader. Moral awareness is implicitly seen as something private. And this makes it the less surprising that in other of the Lyrical Ballads of 1798 Wordsworth was able to transpose the insights of ‘Old Man Travelling’ and ‘Simon Lee’ into a minor key, and to purge them of their disturbing implications.

Certainly, ‘Anecdote for Fathers’ has none of the really disconcerting ‘aukwardness’ of the other two poems. Yet its quietly modulated stanzas do dramatize—in the less disconcerting, more assimilable form of an encounter between father and son—that problem which is, very differently, the subject of each. As its title indicates, it belongs to a genre which had a great vogue in the magazines: that of the simple ‘anecdote’ from which a clear moral lesson might be drawn. But even here there were—and are—difficulties. As an early reviewer observed, ‘the object of the child's choice, and the inferences, are not quite obvious’: quietly but stubbornly, the poem refuses to fit the conventional mould. Its ‘moral’ is not so easily abstracted as its subtitle seems to claim, and its ending has an inconclusiveness most unlike the neat summing up appropriate to the ‘anecdotal’ genre. Yet initially it seems like the simplest of stories:

I have a boy of five years old,
His face is fair and fresh to see;
His limbs are cast in beauty's mould,
And dearly he loves me.

So calmly regular is the rhythm that the reader hardly notices that these lines are not transparently descriptive: they dramatize a far from disinterested stance toward the world. The sentence of which the stanza is composed begins with ‘I’ and circles back to ‘me’: for this speaker, the world begins and ends with himself. The child whose ‘lie’ is to be the subject of the poem is introduced as his property: his most important feeling (indeed, the only feeling of his that is mentioned) is that which relates to ‘me’. And as the poem proceeds, the implications of this unobtrusive egocentricity become steadily more apparent.

Instead of approaching the world with open receptivity, this speaker sees all according to his own ‘pre-established codes of decision’.²⁹ He does not respond to the uniqueness of this morning, this child, but fits all that is before him into familiar schemata (‘His limbs are cast in beauty's mould’), comparing everything either explicitly or implicitly to other experiences, past or potential:

One morn we stroll'd on our dry walk,
Our quiet house all full in view,
And held such intermitted talk
As we are wont to do.
My thoughts on former pleasures ran;
I thought of Kilve's delightful shore,
My pleasant home, when spring began,
A long, long year before.
A day it was when I could bear
To think, and think, and think again;
With so much happiness to spare,
I could not feel a pain.

[my italics]

The verse does not analyse or dwell upon these habits of his: its quiet regularity asks the reader to accept them as inevitable. And it is therefore the more devastating when their real nature is revealed in his conversation with the child, where what has been an idle question becomes an increasingly aggressive attempt to get the boy to ‘reason and compare’ in the same way as himself.

Edward's obstinate honesty, his literal inability to fit his different experiences into a common mould, dramatically questions the father's closed pattern of responses and rebukes his lack of openness toward the uniqueness of the particular. Like the Idiot Boy's account of his adventures, his ‘lie’ has the opacity of a description offered in a language foreign to the speaker. And the father's intransigent efforts to ‘find him out’ expose the coerciveness implicit in the latter's clichéd mode of perception. It is not simply that he cannot see the world freshly: he has no respect for the otherness of this other person. His attitude towards ‘his’ child is the logical extension of that domineering reduction of the new to his own categories which has been implicit in his sense of the world from the beginning. Wordsworth makes no attempt—apart from that ‘lie’—to present the child's perspective: like that of the old man in ‘Old Man Travelling’ it remains mysterious. But the father's closing reaction—almost a baffled silence, certainly not a conventional ‘moral’—invites the reader to share a recognition of the unincorporable difference of that perspective.

On one level, ‘Anecdote for Fathers’ can be read as an attack on a particular kind of ‘progressive’ contemporary educational theory, familiar to Wordsworth through his association with Godwin and the Wedgwoods. In a letter to Godwin about an educational project in which Wordsworth was intimately involved, Thomas Wedgwood had written on 31 July 1797: ‘From earliest infancy, children should be questioned about recent and remote impressions; or otherwise induced to repeat all their parts. From this would result a habit of the keenest observation & the most retentive memory.’³⁰ Much, he goes on, will depend on ‘the moment seized for instruction, as after moderate meals & every other occasion of animal vivacity’. It is difficult to believe that this story of a ‘lie’, which is merely a pathetic caricature of adult reasoning, does not in part express Wordsworth's imaginative reaction against this rationalistic project:³¹ a project framed by friends who were in many ways like-minded, and whose intentions were benevolent. Certainly, the poem's effect is the more powerful because of the subtlety with which its speaker is presented, not as a tyrant, but as one who in conventional terms is ‘sensitive’ and cares for his child—and one who is capable of ‘learning’ from him. The inconclusiveness of the ending suggests a confidence in the existence of at least some similarly disposed readers, who will also be led to realize and question their own assumptions about the proper education of children.

Yet the poem is not merely occasional, a contribution to a contemporary debate: it awakens deeper resonances. For it deals with questions which in other of Lyrical Ballads 1798 are a source of real embarrassment or ‘aukwardness’. That which in ‘Old Man Travelling’ was seen as an insoluble problem of a divided society here becomes a difficulty with which familial or educational morality must deal. That tendency to reduce otherness to one's own frame of reference, that failure to recognize difference, which the earlier poem exposed, is implicitly recognized in the father's final words: he has ‘learnt’ from this experience. If the focus on childhood and education allows a less traumatic, more easily integrated realization, it also enables other significances to emerge. The ‘enlightened’ father whose stance is dramatized in the facile rhythms and trite adjectives of the opening stanzas, who tries so insistently to force that stance upon his child, is a figure for that cultural pressure towards a closed view of experience described in the Advertisment to the volume as ‘that most dreadful enemy to our pleasures, our own pre-established codes of decision’: the child, in his confusion and his patently arbitrary ‘lie’, suggests something of the perversion which those ‘pre-established codes of decision’ impose. And the father's almost bullying importunity (‘I said and took him by the arm …’, ‘I said and held him by the arm …’, ‘While still I held him by the arm …’) registers Wordsworth's sense of the submerged violence of this pressure with a directness which is perhaps only possible because the subject-matter of this poem is less socially problematic than that of others in the volume.

Yet here, as in ‘Simon Lee’, the challenging confrontation with otherness is collapsed, in the final stanza, into a question of private morality:

Oh dearest, dearest boy! my heart
For better lore would seldom yearn,
Could I but teach the hundredth part
Of what from thee I learn.

There is a curious mixture of humility and unctuousness in these lines—on the one hand, the admission that it is the adult who ‘learns’ from the child, and that what he ‘learns’ cannot be ‘taught’ in his own rationalistic terms; on the other, his complacent conviction that he does ‘learn’. This ending conveys far more sense of satisfaction and completion, far less of irresolvable guilt, than does that of ‘Simon Lee’. Like that poem, it refuses to offer a clear-cut moral directive to the reader, and the refusal constitutes an implicit criticism of that reductive approach to experience embodied in the characteristic ‘anecdote’ of the magazines, and exemplified in the father's relentless search for reasons. Yet the change from the narrative past tense of the rest of the poem into the present tense of direct apostrophe here has an effect of framing and distancing, like that of the apostrophizing final stanza of ‘Poor Susan’. If the child is one who has not yet succumbed to the pressure of those conventionalizing modes of experience represented by his father, we see only his resistance, only his ‘lie’—and even this is presented from the father's perspective. If the last stanza is addressed to him, the address is rhetorical rather than direct: its emphasis falls on the two final words. Although ‘learn’ is in the present tense, the feeling is less of the continuing challenge of the child's distinctive being than of a now distanced encounter, whose significance for the adult lies in his own moral improvement.

This poem's handling of the adult-child relationship is very different from that of such of the Songs of Innocence as ‘Infant Joy’. Blake's tightly constructed Song—on a beautifully engraved plate which draws attention to itself as a work of art—presents two quite different voices chiming in echoing responsiveness: it is an image of a mutually satisfying state of creative play. Wordsworth's story—far more discursive, an ‘anecdote’ rather than an image, and in its casual intimacy imitating ‘a man speaking to men’—is told from the adult's point of view: the boy's remains impenetrable. Both poems in their different ways question the deep-rooted contemporary assumption that the correct adult stance toward the child should be one of guidance and ‘instruction’. But while in ‘Infant Joy’ that questioning is implied in the presentation of an alternative vision—a vision of reciprocal self-realization, in which parent and child each call forth answering capacities in the other, in ‘Anecdote for Fathers’ it is the dramatized subject of the poem. The conventional roles are merely reversed: the adult asserts that he ‘learns’ from the child, but he is not shown as having his own nurturing strengths. Wordsworth ends with the insight which informs Blake's Song—that what the child needs is love, a recognition of his essential being (‘Oh dearest, dearest boy!’)—but it remains a private insight, a personal ‘admonishment.’³² The recognition thus hinted at is not actualized, as is the relationship between mother and child in ‘Infant Joy’. Here, as in ‘Old Man Travelling’ and in ‘Simon Lee’, there is no imaginative sense of what positive interaction with the other—in all his difference and uniqueness—might be like.

The 1798 collection of Lyrical Ballads, it is beginning to seem, offers an exploration of the relation between morality and social experience very different from that of Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Much more directly than Blake's Songs, these poems engage with the subject-matter of advanced contemporary debate. Like those Songs, they question the unarticulated moral assumptions of the polite reader: most centrally, that paternalistic diminution of the other which insidiously structured late eighteenth-century social thinking, even in its consciously radical manifestations. But unlike the Songs, they do not explore the social implications of those psychic strategies which they question. Figures like the old man of ‘Old Man Travelling’ and Simon Lee are portrayed as isolated victims of processes displaced from any identifiable agency: the speaker's relation to them remains problematic. The interest is not in what has ‘made them Poor’, but in the individual psyche of this implicitly questioned speaker, and in his (also implied) capacities for moral awareness and growth, which the reader is invited to share. If they lead to baffled inconclusiveness, they do not, like Songs of Experience, end in an immobilizing recognition of the way in which mental and social strategies can confirm and perpetuate each other (‘Nor poverty the mind appall’, ‘The mind-forg'd manacles I hear’): they have a potentially ameliorating ‘purpose’. Yet unlike the poems of Songs of Innocence, they do not image the possibility of creative, continuing relationship with those whose individual integrity they recognize. Instead, they dramatize moments of confrontation which are also moments of shock: moments in which an implicit morality is arrived at not in ‘play’, but in admonition.

It might be argued, however, that this is only a partial account of Lyrical Ballads 1798. For the volume contains another group of poems, very different from these poems of confrontation, in which Wordsworth does seem to be trying to trace the springs of morality not in ‘admonishment’ but in more positive experience. It is experience not of man, but of nature. Four of these poems are lyrics—‘It is the first mild day of March’, ‘Lines written in early spring’, ‘Expostulation and Reply’ and ‘The Tables Turned’—lyrics at first sight far closer to the ‘effusions’ on nature which their readers might have expected than those dealing with the rustic poor are to their conventional contemporary counterparts. Certainly, the notion of turning to nature for moral amelioration was not new: it was prominent in those educated radical circles with which Wordsworth was familiar, as in the more conservative sphere of polite ‘sensibility’. Thus, for instance, Thelwall, in The Peripatetic:

I often shudder to reflect on the cruel and selfish dispositions which nature seemed at one time to have planted in my bosom. Nor was it 'till frequent opportunities of contemplating, with enamoured eye, the varied beauties of creation, in my eccentric rambles, and indulging the poetical studies to which they conducted, had soothed and meliorated my heart, that the blossoms of sensibility began to unfold themselves, and I awakened to a sympathetic feeling for every sentient tennant [sic] of this many-peopled sphere.³³

And thus Coleridge, writing to his brother George in March 1798 (and quoting Wordsworth's draft conclusion to ‘The Ruined Cottage’):³⁴

I love fields & woods & mounta[ins] with almost a visionary fondness—and because I have found benevolence and quietness growing within me as that fondness [has] increased, therefore I should wish to be the means of implanting it in others—& to destroy the bad passions not by combating them, but by keeping them in inaction.

                                                                                                    Not useless do I deem
Those shadowy Sympathies with things that hold
An inarticulate Language: for the Man
Once taught to love such objects, as excite
No morbid passions, no disquietude,
No vengeance & no hatred, needs must feel
The Joy of that pure principle of Love
So deeply, that, unsatisfied with aught
Less pure & exquisite, he cannot chuse
But seek for objects of a kindred Love
In fellow natures, & a kindred Joy.
Accordingly, he by degrees perceives
His feelings of aversion softened down,
A holy tenderness pervade his frame!
His sanity of reason not impair'd,
Say rather that his thoughts now flowing clear
From a clear fountain flowing, he looks round—
He seeks for Good & finds the Good he seeks.

Wordsworth

In these lyrics of nature, written between March and May 1798, Wordsworth seems at first to be expressing a similar confidence that joy in the natural world must lead by natural extension to love for one's fellow human beings. This is the faith that the Victorians seem to have found in his poetry.³⁵ But on closer examination, these poems seem more complex and more problematic than this. Wordsworth seems to be less interested in drawing moral strength from woods and fields than in exploring a particular mode of experience, which enables a newly creative relationship with that which is beyond the self: experience in which passivity and activity are paradoxically combined:

‘The eye it cannot chuse but see,
‘We cannot bid the ear be still;
‘Our bodies feel, wher'er they be,
‘Against, or with our will.
‘Nor less I deem that there are powers,
‘Which of themselves our minds impress,
‘That we can feed this mind of ours,
‘In a wise passiveness.’

(‘Expostulation and Reply’)

The state described here is the opposite of that intrusive meditation which is questioned in ‘Old Man Travelling’: one in which the self is realized even as it acknowledges the otherness of that which is before it—a state in some ways very like that of the ‘play’ imaged in Songs of Innocence. Yet this, unlike Blake's Innocence, is a private experience, an individual relation with the natural world: it is not a mode of human interaction. And it is an experience very different from the unease, almost shock, with which the otherness of other men is recognized elsewhere in the volume.

The significance of this difference is perhaps most apparent in ‘Lines written in early spring’, where Wordsworth tries most directly to connect active receptivity towards the natural world with thoughts of ‘what man has made of man’. For the attempted connection introduces a dislocating emphasis on the human observer's separation from nature:

To her fair works did nature link
The human soul that through me ran;
And much it griev'd my heart to think
What man has made of man.

(‘Lines written in early spring’)

It is that separation, rather than a Thelwall- or Coleridge-like influx of ‘sympathetic feeling’ that the poem traces: and it leads to rather more problematic intuitions than that joyful ‘holy tenderness’ of which Wordsworth had written in the lines quoted by Coleridge. It can hardly be said of this speaker that ‘He seeks for Good & finds the Good he seeks.’ This poem's awkward fidelity to fact, its oddly jerky breaks and pauses, register a more uneasy sense both of man's relation to nature and of his relation to other men—and of the disjunction between the two.³⁶ It is a sense which is not explored here: certainly not in a way which takes up the more baffling resonances of relationship with ‘man’ that such poems as ‘Simon Lee’ evoke. Instead, this poem tails off rather limply:

If I these thoughts may not prevent,
If such be of my creed the plan,
Have I not reason to lament
What man has made of man?

It is only the awkwardness of the second line that prevents (and perhaps does not entirely prevent) the stanza sliding into a very familiar trope, a contrast between the innocence of nature and the evils of man in society: the final two lines distance and lyricize that which in other of the 1798 ballads was presented much more directly. Where in ‘Old Man Travelling’ and ‘Simon Lee’ the challenging figure of another occupied the foreground and demanded that the speaker himself ‘make’ something of it, here ‘what man has made of man’ has receded into a general metaphysical problem. The speaker reflects on a world in which other men relate to each other, rather than one within which he himself lives and must act; one which he can sit apart and ‘lament’, not one by which he himself is challenged.

In the four nature lyrics of Lyrical Ballads 1798 Wordsworth seems to be turning to the natural world in order to explore the possibility of a mode of relationship which is not one of unilateral control, which acknowledges and responds to otherness, which grows naturally out of the unwilled areas of the personality, and which might form the basis of more truly moral feeling than any imposed system of morality. But that exploration, separated so entirely as it is from the difficult confrontation with the reality of other men which is the subject of other of the poems, seems more like a withdrawal from the challenging immediacy of problems which were there disturbingly exposed. It is a withdrawal oddly underlined by the fact that in the other three of these lyrics themes which in the earlier 1790s had had much more radical implications are being transposed into the mode of personal pastoralism. In ‘It is the first mild day of March’ the new Jacobin calendar heralding a new dawning for mankind becomes a domestic one:

No joyless forms shall regulate
Our living Calendar:
We from today, my friend, will date
The opening of the year.
Love, now an universal birth,
From heart to heart is stealing,
From earth to man, from man to earth,
—It is the hour of feeling.

And in ‘Expostulation and Reply’ and ‘The Tables Turned’ arguments which had been at the centre of the passionate political debate following the publication of Burke's Reflections are likewise modulated. Where Burke had argued:

We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason; because we suspect that this stock in each man is small and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations, and of ages.³⁷

and Paine had replied:

I am contending for the rights of the living, and against their being willed away, and controlled and contracted for, by the manuscript assumed authority of the dead; and Mr Burke is contending for the authority of the dead over the rights and freedom of the living.³⁸

Wordsworth offers a light-hearted altercation between ‘a friend who was somewhat unreasonably attached to modern books of moral philosophy’ and one who favours spontaneous openness to the natural world:

‘Where are your books? that light bequeath'd
‘To beings else forlorn and blind!
‘Up! Up! and drink the spirit breath'd
‘From dead men to their kind.
‘You look round on your mother earth,
‘As if she for no purpose bore you;
‘As if you were her first-born birth,
‘And none had lived before you!’

(‘Expostulation and Reply’)

One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man;
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.
Enough of science and of art;
Close up these barren leaves;
Come forth, and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.

(‘The Tables Turned’)

These distant echoes of the more radical arguments of the past may be accidental. But the difficulties involved in turning to an individual relationship with nature in order to ‘discover what is really important to men’³⁹ are underlined when it is recalled that one after another those poems in which the challenge of other men is felt most directly undermine the notion that the processes of nature might provide a meaningful analogy for human affairs. In ‘Old Man Travelling’ the vision of a life ‘by nature led / To peace …’ is cut short by an account of a human world in which there is neither ‘animal tranquillity’ nor ‘decay’, but the unpeaceful and untimely destruction of youth. In ‘Simon Lee’, the attempt to see the old man's struggle as merely a struggle against natural law is questioned by that disturbing gap between privileged speaker and unprivileged subject, and the ambiguous ‘blow’ with which their encounter ends. And in ‘The Thorn’, the narrator's dogged quasi-scientific literal-mindedness parodies all attempts to find a human meaning in the facts of nature:

Not five yards from the mountain-path
This thorn you on your left espy;
And to the left, three yards beyond,
You see a little muddy pond
Of water, never dry;
I've measured it from side to side:
'Tis three feet long, and two feet wide.

This ‘nature’ is intransigent in its otherness. It may be seen optimistically, as all-resolving and beautifying:

And close beside this aged thorn,
There is a fresh and lovely sight,
A beauteous heap, a hill of moss,
Just half a foot in height.
All lovely colours there you see,
All colours that were ever seen,
And mossy network too is there,
As if by hand of lady fair
The work had woven been,
And cups, the darlings of the eye
So deep is their vermilion dye.

But it may equally offer a sense of contorting self-destructiveness—

                                                            the thorn is bound
With heavy tufts of moss, that strive
To drag it to the ground.

—or an image of guilt and sorrow:

Some say, if to the pond you go,
And fix on it a steady view,
The shadow of a babe you trace,
A baby and a baby's face,
And that it looks at you.

The thorn, the pond, the hill of moss remain a group of impenetrable objects, into which meanings may be projected, but meanings which depend absolutely upon the perspective of the individual who confronts them:

‘But what's the thorn? and what's the pond?
‘And what's the hill of moss to her?
‘And what's the creeping breeze that comes
‘The little pond to stir?’
I cannot tell.

And the poem ends with a haunting image of unanswered human distress, ‘in the silent night’, with the stars shining indifferently overhead:

And this I know, full many a time,
When she was on the mountain high,
By day, and in the silent night,
When all the stars shone clear and bright,
Then I have heard her cry,
‘Oh misery! oh misery!
‘O woe is me! oh misery!’

Yet it is an attempt which is taken up in the final and most straightforwardly autobiographical of Lyrical Ballads ‘Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey’, added to the volume after it had already gone to press. With a new confidence and excitement—registered in the assured development of the blank verse form—this poem explores that question which was more naively confronted in ‘Lines written in early spring’. What is the connection between those intuitions arrived at in an individual relationship with the world of nature and more general problems of morality? And the exploration is marked by the unresolved ambiguities which the rest of the volume has revealed.

Unlike that of the lyrics written earlier in 1798, the ‘nature’ confronted in ‘Tintern Abbey’ is one which shows signs of human occupation. Contemporary accounts describe the valley of the Wye as a ‘scene of desolation’:

the poverty and wretchedness of the inhabitants are remarkable. They occupy little huts raised among the ruins of the monastery; and seem to have no employment, but begging.⁴⁰

But in Wordsworth's poem such details are distanced enough not to be disturbing. The opening lines of the poem, like those of ‘Lines written in early spring’, focus less upon the scene before him than upon his observing consciousness:

Five years have passed; five summers, with the length
Of five long winters! and again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
With a sweet inland murmur.

And the poetry traces not ‘poverty and wretchedness’, but a perceptual process: the way in which a ‘scene’, a framed and meaningful landscape, is constructed out of the natural wildness which confronts him:⁴¹

                                                                                                    Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,
Which on a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect
The landscape with the quiet of the sky.

[my italics]

It is not, as in earlier eighteenth-century landscape poetry, a process in which a ‘landscape’ is framed by an implicit matching of the actual scene against culturally-determined schemata, but something altogether more intimate. For what enables Wordsworth to see this ‘landscape’ is, literally, his remembrance of it. He does not shape it in accordance with conventional expectations, as the reiterated ‘this’, ‘this’, ‘these’ ‘these’ emphasize, he recognizes what he has seen before. And despite the specificity of the place, the operative memories are not those of distinctive landmarks, but the altogether more instinctive memories of a previous experience of looking. In these lines the inarticulate memories that are latent in all perception are being brought to the surface and made conscious.

Wordsworth's interest in this aspect of the perceptual process is indicated by a phrase at the opening of the second section:

                                                                                Though absent long,
These forms of beauty have not been to me,
As is a landscape to a blind man's eye.

The reference is to the Molyneux problem, that fundamental problem of eighteenth-century perceptual theory:⁴²

a congenitally blind person now adult who is suddenly made to see, upon first ‘seeing’ certain colours, would not think of cats and dogs or any other objects in space although he may know what they are by touch. He would prove quite unable to recognize what they are or to name them. He would get no meaning from the spinning mass of colours before his eyes. That is, he would not be able to see.

Contemporary experiments seemed to have proved this hypothesis: the conclusion was that

Seeing is not a simple and direct sensing of physical objects, it is rather a complex conceptual act. It is like making an assertion that something is the case.⁴³

And it is this ‘assertion that something is the case’ and its delighted confirmation in experience that the opening lines of ‘Tintern Abbey’ dramatize. Without that implicit assertion—one of the most fundamental and instinctive acts of trust—‘these forms of beauty’ would not take shape: that which confronts the speaker would be like ‘a landscape to a blind man's eye’, a meaningless chaos of sense-impressions. But previous experience makes possible that perceptual process of forming recollection which is the subject of these lines. The landscape itself reflects the nature of this activity: for it is one in which apparently unorganized wildness and luxuriant growth in fact bear the unobtrusive marks of human occupation. Similarly Wordsworth, bringing with him the shaping expectations derived from memory, is able to find a humanly meaningful pattern in the almost undifferentiated greenness before him. Orchards and hedgerows, farms and woods would, it seems, merge into one another, did he not distinguish and identify each:

These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard-tufts,
Which, at this season, with their unripe fruits,
Among the woods and copses lose themselves,
Nor, with their green and simple hue, disturb
The wild green landscape. Once again I see
These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines
Of sportive wood run wild; these pastoral farms
Green to the very door; and wreathes of smoke
Sent up, in silence, from among the trees,
With some uncertain notice.

(ll. 11-20).

The process is not one of imposition, but of recognition: one in which that which is subjectively conceived of meets and is answered by—indeed, enables—that which is objectively perceived.

In the earlier nature lyrics of the volume, Wordsworth had begun to explore a state of ‘wise passiveness’: an uncontrolling receptivity which is also, paradoxically, activity. Here, much more fully, he dramatizes how, in one area of human experience—the simple act of looking at a landscape—such a satisfying mode of relationship with that which is other is possible. And it is this mode of relationship, whose dynamics are so carefully recreated in the opening lines, that becomes in the rest of the poem the pattern for the structuring of more complex later experience:

                                                                                Though absent long,
These forms of beauty have not been to me,
As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart,
And passing even into my purer mind
With tranquil restoration:—feelings too
Of unremembered pleasure; such, perhaps,
As may have had no trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man's life;
His little, nameless, unremembered acts
Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust,
To them I may have owed another gift,
Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world
Is lighten'd:—that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on,
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame,
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.

(ll. 23-49)

Here, as in ‘The Tables Turned’, ‘sensations sweet’ derived from that sense of the natural world available to ‘a heart / That watches and receives’ are seen as the source of truly moral—and ultimately religious—feeling. But here, the connections which in the earlier poem were simply asserted are more clearly traced in the more sophisticated language of associationist psychology.⁴⁴ And as it does this the poetry registers tensions and difficulties which are not to be found in eighteenth-century associationist accounts of the genesis of the moral sense:

And thus we may perceive, that all the pleasures and pains of sensation, imagination, ambition, self-interest, sympathy, and theopathy, so far as they are consistent with one another, with the frame of our natures, and with the course of the world, beget in us a moral sense, and lead us to the love and approbation of virtue, and to the fear, hatred and abhorrence of vice … It appears also that the moral sense carries us perpetually to the pure love of God, as our highest and ultimate perfection, our end, centre, and only resting-place to which we can ever attain.⁴⁵

What for Hartley was a smooth and inevitable process is for Wordsworth altogether more tentative: ‘such, perhaps, / As may have had no trivial influence’; ‘Nor less, I trust, / To them I may have owed another gift …’. Such doubts are explicitly acknowledged. But the imaginative difficulty involved in the transition from private ‘sensation’ to more generally applicable moral and religious feeling—a difficulty which seems to be inherent in the essentially individualistic nature of the associationist model—is reflected less intentionally in the curiously uncertain position of the speaking voice throughout this section. The opening, autobiographical ‘I’ recedes as the attempt is made to connect his particular remembered experience with the world of interpersonal morality: the locus of moral feeling and action is distanced and ‘objectified’ into the third person:

                                                                                          such, perhaps,
As may have had no trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man's life,
His little, nameless, unremembered acts …

And although the verse slides back into the autobiographical mode, there is a similar uneasy shift in the final lines of the section. Once again the initial ‘I’ is abandoned: instead, there is an indefinite first person plural, which attempts to affirm some kind of universal truth for its experience:

                                        that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on
We see into the life of things.

By the last section of the poem, the curious blend of underlying doubt and assumed confidence which these shifts of person bespeak has become more disturbingly apparent. Here, what had been a tentatively dramatized chain of associations becomes, on the surface at least, more assertive:

Knowing that Nature never did betray
The heart that loved her; 'tis her privilege
Through all the years of this our life, to lead
From joy to joy …

(ll. 123-6)

But the sense of Nature's possible ‘betrayal’ is there even as it is denied and it is underlined by the echo from ‘Old Man Travelling’. ‘He is by nature led / To peace …’ that poem had confidently affirmed, only to have its ‘chearful faith’ severely questioned. Here, it is true, Nature's ‘leading’ is more subtly presented, not as a process to be passively endured, but as the consequence of that active relationship dramatized in the opening lines:

                                                            for she can so inform
The mind that is within us, so impress
With quietness and beauty, and so feed
With lofty thoughts …

(ll. 126-9)

The metaphoric force of these verbs is reactivated by experiences presented earlier in the poem. ‘Inform’ recalls that process in which the features of the natural scene became ‘forms of beauty’, in which the eye shaped the contours of a landscape which was itself sensed as shaping, and the personality was felt to be ‘informed’ by them. The second echo of that opening—‘Which on a wild secluded scene impress / Thoughts of more deep seclusion’—reanimates its sense of the paradoxical force with which apparently passive qualities such as ‘quietness’ and ‘beauty’ can act on and in the experiencing mind. And ‘feed’ recalls the description of the speaker's boyhood—

                                                                                                                                            the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colours and their forms, were then to me
An appetite …

(ll. 78-81)

—with its similar suggestion of an appetite which is fulfilled by the very things which create it. These are not, then, simply pious platitudes, but affirmations which have their imaginative basis in experiences recreated earlier in the poem. Yet as the passage continues, and these experiences are declared to be the source of a security which ‘all / The dreary intercourse of daily life’ and its attendant evils cannot disturb, the tone becomes more assertive and more uncertain. For what is being held at bay is insistently present in the poetry:

                                                                                          neither evil tongues,
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,
Nor greetings where no kindness is, not all
The dreary intercourse of daily life,
Shall e'er prevail against us.

(ll. 129-33)

Once again the poem has slid into the first person plural: not, as before, the first person plural of would-be confident generalization, but that of an égoisme-à-deux.⁴⁶ ‘Our’ integrity is not seen as something to be defined in the interpersonal world, but a privately-held bulwark against it: ‘we’ occupy a privileged position, separate from and superior to ‘evil tongues’, ‘rash judgments’, ‘the sneers of selfish men’, and ‘all / The dreary intercourse of daily life’. This is a sense of self which has been implicit from the opening section, with its distancing of those human presences which might call forth ‘kindness’ and ‘love’ into the features of a landscape, its seemingly inevitable movement towards a telling final image:

Or of some hermit's cave, where by his fire
The hermit sits alone.

But here it has become the subject of the poetry in a way which reveals the contradictions it entails. For if self is best realized not in interaction with other men, but in isolation from them, if security consists in an unassailable individuality, then the other—unless in some sense (as Dorothy is here) identified with the self—can only be seen as a threat. And such a position is a curious basis for the affirmation of a ‘chearful faith that all which we behold / Is full of blessings’. What these lines in fact affirm is a beleaguered subjective individualism: a position which was to find its ultimate expression in such later poems of Wordsworth's as the complacent sonnet-sequence of 1802-4, ‘Personal Talk’:

Nor can I not believe but that hereby
Great gains are mine; for thus I live remote
From evil-speaking; rancour, never sought,
Comes to me not; malignant truth, or lie.
Hence have I genial seasons, hence have I
Smooth passions, smooth discourse, and joyous thought:
And thus from day to day my little boat
Rocks in its harbour, lodging peaceably.

‘Tintern Abbey’ extends and develops that attempt to transcend the easy moralizing of the magazine verse, to portray an active yet unintrusive relation to that which is other, which was begun in the simpler nature lyrics of Lyrical Ballads 1798. The movement from this to an exploration of how ‘we’ actually arrive at moral feeling must have been entirely natural to one familiar with and in many ways sympathetic to the thinking of such men as Thelwall and Coleridge, as must the framing of that exploration (however tentatively) in the language of associationist psychology. The direction the poem takes is clearly in part determined by the fact that it is framed within that language—a language which embodies deeply individualist assumptions.⁴⁷ Yet Wordsworth's poem registers the contradictions implicit in its own position in a most revealing way. When it is read in its original context, amongst those ‘aukward’ Lyrical Ballads of 1798, its uncertainties and its unevennesses can be seen as the inevitable result of the confusion of purpose which is manifested in the volume as a whole.

For the poems of Lyrical Ballads 1798 do not merely attempt to move beyond ‘our own pre-established codes of decision’, and to find a more honest basis for moral feeling in experiences of a pre-rational kind. In many of them, the recognition of the otherness of other people comes as an unassimilable shock. And the sense of morality which emerges from the volume as a whole is thus more complex and less coherent than the confident closing ‘exhortation’ of ‘Tintern Abbey’ might suggest. For it is complicated by the disturbing intuition that moral feeling might not develop unproblematically from a certain kind of positive experience, that it might involve a traumatic questioning of that self whose integrity is the basis of associationist psychology. That which in ‘Tintern Abbey’ is meditatively distanced—

                                                            For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth, but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue …

(ll. 89-94)

—is in other of the poems ‘aukwardly’ foregrounded, in the ‘harsh’ and ‘grating’ presences of such as the ‘Old Man Travelling’ and ‘Simon Lee’. After such poems, this attempt to conclude the volume seems less than conclusive. For in face of what they present, the relatively peaceful, socially unproblematic experience of looking at a beautiful landscape—an experience of delighted recognition, in which perception and creation seem to be fused—hardly seems an adequate paradigm for all intercourse with that which is external to the self: certainly not for those exchanges in the interpersonal world in which others may prove less amenable than ‘These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard tufts’. And Wordsworth's attempt to see this experience both as exercising ‘no trivial influence’ in that interpersonal world, and also as a kind of psychic retreat from or shield against it, in its very confusion points toward questions which cannot confidently or optimistically be resolved. Yet they are questions which he was to confront in the eighteen months which followed, in an extraordinarily creative way: questions which were to be articulated and explored in the poetry of an entirely different order which was published as Lyrical Ballads 1800.

Notes

1. 1800 Preface, Brett and Jones, pp. 246-7.

2. See above, pp. 50-1.

3. The phrase is Wordsworth's, from his Advertisement to the volume, Brett and Jones, p. 7. Southey's views were expressed in a review in The Critical Review, xxiv (October 1798).

4. Mary Jacobus, ‘Southey's Debt to Lyrical Ballads (1798)’, RES [Review of English Studies], new ser., xxii (1971), pp. 20-36.

5. Robert Southey, Ballads, Metrical Tales and other poems (London, 1854) p. 118.

6. Cf. John Thelwall, The Peripatetic; or Sketches of the Heart, of Nature and Society; in a series of Politico-Sentimental Journals in Verse and Prose (London, 1793), vol. iii, pp. 141-6: ‘at a time when poor fellows are wheedled into the naval service by such pompous pretences of provisions for their wives and families, it is important to shew what kind of relief is afforded to the wants of those who seem most entitled to our compassion …

   The poor husband was a weaver, but that as he had been to sea in the former part of his life, he had been pressed at the breaking out of the war, and had left her no other means to support her two infants and provide for the season of pain and perplexity that was approaching, but the labour of her own hands. “… In this distress I applied to the overseers of the parish; but they only gave me a shilling, and bade me call again a fortnight, and I should have another”. Such was the tale of the poor creature whom these British Slave merchants, these wholesale dealers in their brethren's blood, had left to rot in the cold embraces of Want and Misery, that the stay and comfort of her life, the father and protector of her infants, might lavish his limbs and life for them in a struggle, in which (to say the least of it) neither he nor his family, had the slightest interest or concern: and, alas! how many thousands are there at this time languishing for the same cause, in situations of equal misery. The story was too circumstantial to be doubted.’

7. See Stephen Gill, ‘“Adventures on Salisbury Plain” and Wordsworth's Poetry of Protest 1795-97’, Studies in Romanticism xi (1972), pp. 48-65, and Mary Jacobus, Tradition and Experiment in Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads (1798) (Oxford, 1976), pp. 148ff.

8. See above, pp. 6-7.

9. For a discussion of this, see Jonathan Wordsworth, The Music of Humanity (New York, 1969), pp. 62-5.

10. See above, p. 104. For a fuller discussion of Wordsworth's use of Zoonomia, and interest in extreme psychological states, see James H. Averill, Wordsworth and the Poetry of Human Suffering, pp. 152-68.

11. Joseph Fawcett, ‘On the comparative Sum of Happiness and Misery in Human Life’, Sermons, vol. ii, pp. 89-90.

12. See above, p. 53.

13. And its contemporary ones. Cf. John Jones, The Egotistical Sublime (London, 1954), p. 63, who argues that the concluding lines ‘do violence to the nature of the old man’ and Mary Jacobus, Tradition and Experiment, pp. 180-1, who finds it ‘incongruous … that … he should emerge from his animal tranquillity to tell a human story’.

14. Brett and Jones, p. 295.

15. Poetical Works, ed. E. de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire (5 vols., Oxford, 1940-9), vol. i, pp. 315-16. Jonathan Wordsworth, The Music of Humanity, pp. 5-6 suggests that these lines were probably written ‘in the period immediately following the completion of The Borderers in spring 1797’.

16. Cf. the longer poem on which Wordsworth now began to work, ‘The Ruined Cottage’, where a complex narrative structure is used to distance the urgency of the story.

17. Critical Review, xxiv (October 1798).

18. Monthly Review, xxix (June 1799).

19. British Critic, xvii (February 1801).

20. See above, p. 44.

21. Southey, Minor Poems (London, 1854), pp. 166-7.

22. Part of the story of the sailor's widow, quoted above, n. 6.

23. Paul D. Sheats, The Making of Wordsworth's Poetry 1785-1798 (Cambridge, Mass., 1973), pp. 188-93; Andrew L. Griffin, ‘Wordsworth and the Problem of Imaginative Story: the Case of “Simon Lee”’, PMLA [Publications of the Modern Language Association of America], 92 (1977), pp. 392-409.

24. Sheats. Making of Wordsworth's Poetry, p. 192.

25. See Kenneth Maclean, Agrarian Age: a Background for Wordsworth (New Haven, 1950), pp. 20-1 for a discussion of the particular detail of these lines.

26. 1800 Preface, Brett and Jones, p. 247.

27. 1798 Advertisement, Brett and Jones, p. 8.

28. 1800 Preface, Brett and Jones, p. 248.

29. 1798 Advertisement, Brett and Jones, p. 7.

30. David Erdman, ‘Coleridge, Wordsworth and the Wedgwood Fund’, Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 60 (September and October, 1956).

31. Cf. the project of another of this circle, Thomas Beddoes (in a letter quoted in Memoirs of the Life of Thomas Beddoes M.D. by John Edmonds Stock, M.D. (London, 1811) p. 129):

    ‘to establish a manufacture of Rational Toys. I believe parents are become sufficiently attentive to education, to give such a scheme support; and fortunately it cannot alarm any prejudice … The particulars of the design are too numerous to be given here. It comprehends engravings and a good deal of letter-press. I have in view not merely information in mechanics, chemistry, and technology, but the improvement of the senses, by presenting in a certain order and upon principle, objects of touch along with objects of sight. In this important business, we have hitherto trusted to chance. But there is every reason to suppose that Intelligent Art will produce a much quicker and greater effect. Should instruction addressed to sense, be made in any country the principle of education; should the best method of cultivating the senses be studied, and should proper exercises be devised for reproducing ideas (originally well defined,) sometimes with rapidity, at others in diversified trains, the consequence is to me obvious. The inhabitants of that country would speedily become … far superior to the rest of mankind in intellect and efficiency.’

32. A favourite word of Wordsworth's, often used of his encounters with baffling otherness: cf. ‘Resolution and Independence’, stanza xvi:

    Or like a man from some far region sent,
    To give me human strength, by apt admonishment.

    and The Prelude (1805), Book vii, ll. 620-2:

    And on the shape of the unmoving man,
    His fixed face, and sightless eyes, I look'd
    As if admonish'd from another world.

33. Thelwall, The Peripatetic, vol. i, p. 101.

34. Collected Letters, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs (2 vols., Oxford 1956), pp. 397-8.

35. See Humphrey House, ‘Wordsworth's Fame’ (BBC Third Programme, 1947), repr. English Critical Essays, Second Series, ed. Derek Hudson (London, 1958).

36. See above, p. 40-2.

37. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Conor Cruise O'Brien (London, 1968), p. 183.

38. Rights of Man, ed. Henry Collins (London, 1969) p. 64.

39. 1800 Preface, Brett and Jones, p. 246.

40. Extract from Gilpin's Observations on the River Wye, quoted in Charles Heath, Descriptive Account of Tintern Abbey (Monmouth, 1793). This is a recurring theme in the accounts extracted by Heath.

41. For a discussion of the word ‘scene’ in the context of such eighteenth-century approaches to landscape, see John Barrell, The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place 1730-1840: An Approach to the Poetry of John Clare (Cambridge, 1972), p. 24.

42. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. F. C. A. Koelln and J. P. Pettegrove (Princeton, 1951), pp. 108-20 and Colin M. Turbayne, The Myth of Metaphor (rev. edn, Columbia, S.C., 1970), pp. 106-12, offer accounts of this problem and its importance.

43. Turbayne, The Myth of Metaphor, pp. 108-9.

44. On Wordsworth's debt to associationist psychology, see ch. 7, n. 16.

45. David Hartley, Observations on Man (2 vols, London, 1749), vol. i, p. 497.

46. See Richard J. Onorato, The Character of the Poet: Wordsworth in The Prelude (Princeton, 1971), p. 82, for an interesting close discussion of the lines addressed to Dorothy, in which, he suggests, Dorothy is not seen as particular and other but is confused with Wordsworth's former self.

47. For a discussion of this feature of associationist psychology, see Leslie Stephen, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1876), pp. 69-70 and Basil Willey, The Eighteenth-Century Background (Harmondsworth, 1962), p. 139.