[In the following excerpt, Murray explores Wordsworth's use of illusory imagery in the Lyrical Ballads of 1800, emphasizing that the poet employs this technique to make a connection between the real and supernatural realms.]

Every student of the English Romantic poets knows that Wordsworth's task in the Lyrical Ballads was “to give the charm of novelty to things of every day,” as Coleridge puts it,¹ and he also knows of Wordsworth's predilection for exact description.² Cleanth Brooks is one of the few critics since Coleridge who have explored in any detail, however, the matter of how Wordsworth pressed beyond the descriptive exactitude he cherished and attained a novelty that precise description alone cannot be depended on to supply.³ Because of the gentleness with which Wordsworth shocks us out of our habitual ways of seeing things, it is certainly possible to take many of his images not for what they are, but for earnest efforts at exact description. The secret of such images, however, where they succeed, is not in their exact description, but in the way they evince a “charm of novelty,” as in the lines

With many a wanton stroke
Her feet disperse the powd'ry snow
That rises up like smoke.

(“Lucy Gray,” ll. 26-28)⁴

Wordsworth's careful glance tells him that under certain circumstances the eye might for a fleeting moment take snow to be smoke; one senses that were this not possible, he would reject the image. But its value in the poem clearly hinges on the likelihood that under ordinary circumstances no careful observer of nature would confuse the two, for it is the extraordinary quality of the snow, thus likened to smoke, that gives rise to our sense of nature's participation in Lucy Gray's blithe and wanton mood. The image seems, upon reflection, less a created than a discovered paradox, one that has been come upon by accident and then exploited for thematic purposes, and not one simply invented for effect. The exactness of the description lends it a quality of “truth to nature”; its force, however, is in the applicability of its suggestion of life-in-death to Lucy's circumstances (the snow, which is dead, “rises up,” anticipating the broad transformation that Lucy undergoes in the poem from being a real but misled bearer of light, to being a legendary figure in the neighborhood, an effectual bearer of light, a [truly] “living child”).

Wordsworth's use of visual paradox, of momentary illusion, can be observed even more closely in the following passage, which introduces, in place of a simile, the sharper novelty of a more overt personification:

The hare is running races in her mirth;
And with her feet she from the plashy earth
Raises a mist; that, glittering in the sun,
Runs with her all the way, wherever she doth run.

(“Resolution and Independence,” ll. 11-14)

Again he appears to discover rather than invest his paradox, though in this case he heightens it through a double use of the verb “runs,” which is, one will notice, a personifying verb so idiomatic and timeworn as to have become literal. Wordsworth revitalizes it in his application of it to his exactly rendered anomaly, once in connection with the hare (an animate thing) and once in connection with the mist (an inanimate thing). The first “runs” borrows some of its force from the second, that of the hare, and thus heightens our sense that the mist is something alive and volitional. The hare, like the poet in his youth or in the meadow (the ascent in the poem is a progress-through-life metaphor), is the unwitting or blind recipient of nature's blessings (hence the strong personification of the double “runs”), visual blessings which the aging poet now sees, but no longer enjoys; higher up yet, where he encounters the leech-gatherer, however, he will receive a more valuable gift, an eloquent apparition of Independent Man, a gift offered to him not through a visual, but through an auditory anomaly (the illusion that the old man's voice is the voice of the waters, a voice that echoes down to us from the creation).

Another type of surface paradox frequently to be encountered in Wordsworth is what might be called the inappropriate modifier. While it is less dramatic than the figures based on anomalies of appearance, Wordsworth uses it more often, and it therefore brings us closer to the verbal texture of his poetry. Three instances of this figure are underlined in the following excerpts from “It Was an April morning”:

                                                                                                                                  … the voice
Of waters which the winter had supplied
Was soften'd down into a vernal tone.
                    … beast and bird, the lamb,
The Shepherd's dog, the linnet and the thrush
Vied with this waterfall, and made a song
Which, while I listen'd seem'd like the wild growth
Or like some natural produce of the air
That could not cease to be. Green leaves were here,
But 'twas the foliage of the rocks, the birch,
The yew, the holly, and the bright green thorn,
With hanging islands of resplendent furze.

(ll. 3-5 and 25-33)

The three modifiers are “vernal,” “of the air,” and “of the rocks,” “Vernal” refers of course to spring and to foliation, but what a “vernal tone” is, the reader must infer from his own experience of hearing the sound of water in the spring, or when it is muffled by surrounding growth. The “appropriate” verbalization of the idea would be “the sound of water in the spring”; the expression “vernal tone,” with its crossover between the visual and the auditory, strikes the modern reader especially as much to be preferred, for we tend to be highly tolerant of all means of poetic compression. In this tolerance, however, we are at somewhat of a disadvantage in reading Wordsworth, for only if the figure “vernal tone” stands out for us does it serve to perfigure the two other crossovers cited above, and only in the latter event does it support the poem's theme of continual change as opposed to abrupt cessation. The term “vernal” has a wide currency in the nature poetry of the eighteenth century, but Wordsworth's application of it is novel; thus, while it must have rung familiar to his immediate audience, its use must have seemed strange. Here, as in all his figurative usages, it is the slightly off-key element that he exploits.

That strangeness is still fresh for us in the lines “like the wild growth / Or like some natural produce of the air,” both because it is an unusual comparison, even to our jaded ears, and because its diction is less dated than that of the first crossover. We can thus perhaps gauge more accurately its probable effect on Wordsworth's contemporaries, for whom it must have seemed striking, conveying as it does even to us a sense of the quietly fantastic. The effect is muffled somewhat by Wordsworth's use of a simile instead of a metaphor, but it is deepened by the earlier “vernal tone,” which involves the same terms, the same harmony of opposites. The poem as a whole affords a clear picture of how Wordsworth went about assimilating the strange and at the same time sharpening the familiar. For a contrasting method, one could turn to Yeats's poem “A Coat,”⁵ in which Yeats, introducing a wide rupture between his tenor and his vehicle, builds upon a comparison of song or poem and coat and achieves his purpose with a much imitated mixture of defiance and bathos. That he drew his metaphoric technique directly or indirectly from Byron suggests that the unifying principle in the poem is the self, not the external world, and that its metaphor dramatizes an ironic awareness, an apartness from nature, not a discovered affinity between human nature and the external world. Wordsworth appropriately closes the rupture in his comparison by only briefly describing an audible fact as though it were a visual fact and then quickly retreating into the literal. Yet he never lets go of the correspondences he reveals.

The last and possibly the most subtle inappropriate modifier of the group—the phrase “of the rocks” in “foliage of the rocks”—would pass for straight literal usage were it not for the motif of permanence in the passage where it occurs. It has a fairly strong literal sense, namely that the plants referred to as “foliage” are all indigenous to their rocky terrain. We are told, however, that the rocky glen in which they are come upon is a “continuous” glen (line 21), and that the sounds Wordsworth hears there seem to him a song “that could not cease to be” (line 30). In this context, the phrase “foliage of the rocks” suggests, at least momentarily, that the foliage is either made from rock and thus cannot wither, or that it is in some other way miraculously permanent. The immutability that one discovers in connection with these natural objects remains associated with the objects, yet the quality is all the while appropriate not to them, but to the image of the place as it exists in Wordsworth's mind; the dell is one of those places so beautiful that if one were but to spend some time there—

He would so love it that in his death-hour
Its image would survive among his thoughts.

(“To M. H.”)

In what I have called the “inappropriate” modifier, one begins to notice a tipping of the scales with regard to the “conferred” as distinct from “inherent” values Wordsworth speaks of in the 1815 “Preface,” a moving toward “conferred” values. That is, in creating such images as “foliage of the rocks,” Wordsworth did not so much abstract from objects “some of those [properties] which [they] actually possess” as “confer additional properties” upon them.⁶ “The Intimations Ode” contains several “inappropriate” or “conferred” modifiers, notably “fields of sleep” (line 28), “a place of thought” (line 124), and “the being of the eternal Silence” (lines 159-160). Each phrase functions in a unique way, depending upon its content and context, but all of them involve unexpected shifts from one realm of experience to another; by slightly disordering our vision, they bring us close to the central concerns of their respective poems.

The equivocal term in Wordsworth does not always at first strike one as being equivocal, because he takes great care in most instances to keep his expression closely literal on at least one plane of meaning. However, in the ostensibly descriptive poem “To Joanna,” the expression “the living stone” (line 83) emerges finally as more than just descriptive. The word “living” in this instance has a literal meaning, if one takes it as denoting a quality lent to the rock by its “intermixture of delicious hues” (line 47), hues supplied by the shrubs, trees, and flowers that grow on its face; in this reading, “living stone” involves merely a harmless compression. Yet is it, in context, really harmless, really literal? Or does it not echo lines 54-55?

The rock, like something starting from a sleep
Took up the Lady's voice, and laughed again.

In terms of the broader structure of the poem, the description of the rock's “delicious hues” might be thought to advance the notion of a visual, “self-connecting” life early in the poem, if one takes the word “life” in the sense of “vivid” and therefore “animated.” Then, of course, the rock springs to life in Wordsworth's fancy (lines 54-55), and is finally called a “living stone” in the later and more declarative, settled passage which appears to affirm the argument of the opening of the poem that one may “look upon the hills with tenderness, / And make dear friendships with the streams and groves” (lines 7-8).

In other instances of such terms, one's immediate reaction to the term may be, not that it is equivocal, but that it is simply supererogatory. A few such terms are italicized in the following lines from “Michael”:

                                                                                I will relate the same
          For the delight of a few natural hearts.

(ll. 35-36)

Fields, where with chearful spirits he had breath'd
The common air.

(ll. 65-66)

                                                                      thou hast been bound to me
Only by links of love.

(ll. 411-412)

It might be argued that only the first of these terms, “natural,” is equivocal, and yet they all raise questions, if not regarding their meaning, then regarding the reason for their inclusion in passages that make quite good sense without them. “Common” and “natural” are terms that Wordsworth seems to have a special fondness for, and both can take surprising turns in meaning. Their ostensible meanings (and we are seldom quite without an ostensible meaning in Wordsworth) are, in the case of “natural,” free of debasing influences or soul-destroying restraints, and, for “common,” ordinary or everyday. In spite of their acceptability in context given these meanings, they seem to beg some deeper meaning, for with only their ordinary meanings they add very little to the sense of their passages—too little, really, to justify their presence. The term “natural” would prove too involved for use as an example here, because of the historical concepts of nature it opens onto; yet what holds true for “common” in this connection holds true for “natural” as well.

The word “common” in “Michael” should lead us quickly from the thought of something ordinary to the thought of something shared, and ultimately to the poem's theme of love. In the course of the poem, we see Michael's love drawn from the hills and fields and redirected toward Luke, at first that in Luke which seems most to epitomize nature—Luke's cheeks, described as “two steady roses,” and those emanations from Luke described as “light to the sun and music to the wind” (line 212). One is tempted to view these manifestations of Michael's affection for Luke as merely expressive figurative heightenings justified by his passion, which of course they are; but the images do more: if we had not sensed it in Michael's wish to have the sheepfold be a covenant and memorial linking Luke and himself, we sense here that Michael needs outward support for his love, that he stands in need of the mediation of natural objects or images in order to love any other human being, even his own son, throughout most of the poem. The quality of his relationship with Luke is of course more fluid than can be indicated here, for there is also implicitly a sense in which Michael's love of nature depends upon his love for Luke (“Why should I relate / That objects which the Shepherd loved before / Were dearer now?” [lines 208-210]). The mere fact, however, that the air is called “common,” this time in the sense of communal or shared, indicates in just one small way the kind of nurture Michael had received from the hills and fields, for he had observed the principle of sharing, the “common” qualities, in all the objects of nature that had surrounded him. Michael's love for Luke is a love shared by Luke and nature, and in that it tends to shift from nature to Luke, Luke has nature to thank for Michael's kind feelings toward him, bound up as Michael's affections are with nature.

Closely related to the ideas that the word “common” touches upon is the word “blind,” which is used to describe Michael's feeling toward nature and, later, his feeling toward Luke as well. We first meet it in lines 74-79, in which Wordsworth summarizes Michael's relationship with nature at the opening of the poem:

                                                                                          these fields, these hills
Which were his living Being, even more
Than his own Blood—what could they less? had laid
Strong hold on his affections, were to him
A pleasurable feeling of blind love,
The pleasure which there is in life itself.

The next time we meet it is in lines 149-153, in which Wordsworth summarizes Michael's relationship with Luke:

                                                                                          but to Michael's heart
This Son of his old age was yet more dear—
Effect which might perhaps have been produc'd
By that instinctive tenderness, the same
Blind Spirit, which is in the blood of all.

The term “Blind Spirit” may be read as “instinct,” but the recurrence both of “blind” and “blood” makes the echo clear and affirms that Michael's love for Luke is indeed the same love he had felt for nature, transferred to Luke. The “common” or shared quality of Michael's love is thus prefigured by the phrase “the common air” and by the image of the hills that “link” his acts of kindness to his certainty of gain. The mere word “common” conveys in itself little of all this, and yet once one grasps and reflects upon the broad theme of “Michael,” subsequent readings tell one how few such word choices in Wordsworth are based on circumstantial considerations.

What has been said so far about the theme of love in “Michael” may have made it already plain what function is performed by the initially puzzling expression “links of love,” for if natural objects (and in Wordsworth certain man-made objects blessed by time and the elements may be called such) mediate between man and man, then natural objects may be called literally “links of love.” The sheepfold is one such link; through it the power of nature works quietly to join Michael and Luke and gives promise of an enduring quality in their love that will enable it to outlast separation, and perhaps death itself. The principle of mediation involved here is no different from that whereby nature is said at the outset of the poem to have led Wordsworth to esteem the dwellers in the valleys,

                                                                                                                                  men
Whom I already lov'd, not verily
For their own sakes, but for the fields and hills
Where was their occupation and abode.

(ll. 23-26)

Human love thus appears to originate from, and to be reposited in, natural objects. In a sense, such objects, considered as “links,” may be thought of not as repositories of love in a merely figurative way, but in a literal way as well. That Dorothy considered the heartlike shape of the sheepfold worth noting⁷ suggests a habit of free identification that would allow for a considering of the stones as a kind of corporeal residuum or condensation of love.

Thus, once more, the single word that at first glance seems hardly necessary, upon further consideration offers the reader a choice of whether to take it literally or figuratively; and the making of a choice, the penetration of the questions it raises, often entails the making of a choice as to the meaning of the entire experience it forms a part of, and ultimately of course the meaning of the entire poem.

The present discussion has deviated somewhat from the subject of style in the limited sense, but only to demonstrate that in Wordsworth style is deeply rooted in the theme and substance of the poem. That Wordsworth very seldom puns, but very often equivocates in such a way as to lead us up to a place from which we can discern the common vanishing point of two experiences, provides elementary evidence of the deep bond in Wordsworth between the word and the quality of the experience it records. To use the term “ambiguity” instead of the unfortunately pejorative term “equivocation” would only obscure an important fact: Wordsworth characteristically imposes rather strict limitations on his language through his contexts; his themes are profound, but few, and when we cast about for “chance” networks of meaning, we meet, coming and going, the same themes. The magic alternatives of the Wordsworthian term appear to be to explore, on the one hand, its ties with the realm of literal and scrupulous fact, and, on the other hand, its ties with a realm in which the soul of man and the soul of nature commune.⁸ The key words, like his key natural objects, are media that communicate between these realms and acquire their fullest significance for us only when examined in the light of both. The initial difficulty with Wordsworth's paradoxes, in particular, is that they can seldom be verified or construed on both of their planes of meaning by pointing to an incontrovertible structure of events or meanings, as in the allegory; this difficulty is attested to by long disputes such as that over the phrase “fields of sleep.”⁹ The only way in which such problems of interpretation are finally to be resolved, in the absence of conclusive evidence, is through a broad knowledge of Wordsworth's themes and a habit of letting each word and phrase work on us “like a new existence.”¹⁰

Notes

1. S. T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, with his Aesthetical Essays ed. J. Shawcross (2 vols.; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907), II, 6.

2. See “Essay, Supplementary to the Preface” (1815), in Poetical Works, II, 423; “… I have felt,” writes Wordsworth, “the falsehood that pervades the volumes imposed upon the world under the name of Ossian. From what I saw with my own eyes, I knew that the imagery was spurious. In nature everything is distinct, yet nothing defined into absolute independent singleness.”

3. Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1947), pp. 3-7.

4. The text used for the poems of 1800 is William Wordsworth and S. T. Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, 1798 and 1800, ed. R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1963).

5. W. B. Yeats, Collected Poems (New York: Macmillan, 1951), p. 125.

6. 1815 Preface, in Poetical Works, II, 438.

7. See Dorothy's journal entry in the note on “Michael,” in ibid., II, 479; see also William's comments on the poem in the same note.

8. See Émile Legouis, The Early Life of William Wordsworth, 1770-1798, trans. J. W. Matthews (London: J. W. Dent & Sons, 1921), p. 454: “Every sensation,” writes Legouis, “ought to bring us, and actually does bring us, into touch, not with the object which gives it birth, but with the soul which that object conceals,—with absolute truth. It is a dialogue between the soul of man and the soul of external things.”

9. See J. V. Logan, Wordsworthian Criticism: A Guide and Bibliography (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1947), entries 69 and 270; and E. F. Henley and D. H. Stam (comps.), Wordsworthian Criticism, 1945-1959: An Annotated Bibliography (New York: New York Public Library, 1960), entries 26 and 304.

10. 1815 Preface, in Poetical Works, II, 438.