SOURCE: Prickett, Stephen. “Unity and Diversity.” In Wordsworth and Coleridge: The “Lyrical Ballads,” pp. 22-50. London: Edward Arnold, 1975.

[In the following excerpt, Prickett highlights several key poems of the Lyrical Ballads as contributing to the unity of this collection.]

So much for the barebones story of the Lyrical Ballads. But what of the poems themselves? We have already seen how hard it was for contemporary readers and reviewers to grapple with the central paradox of this immodest collection of verses: that this diversity of themes and styles had a life and unity which depended on the very tensions of a tight-rope act in which the safety-net was first removed. If their point was to be made at all, ‘The Idiot Boy’, ‘The Mad Mother’, or ‘Simon Lee’ had to be about people or incidents that were trivial, trite, or grotesque. Moreover, they had to be part of the same grand design that included The Ancyent Marinere as its starting point, and ‘Tintern Abbey’ as its conclusion. It is my argument in this book that there is such a ‘life’ and ‘grand design’ to the Lyrical Ballads even while it can be shown that it was never fully present in either of its authors' heads at the same time—if at all. To show this unity with diversity it would not be possible (nor even desirable) to discuss every one of the shifting group of poems which appeared at some time in the various editions. What I intend to do, therefore, is to look in some detail at a relatively small number of what I consider to be the most important poems, in particular of the first edition, to see how they relate to the overall unity that Wordsworth and Coleridge themselves only half-glimpsed, and which nevertheless, by some miracle, gives life to the whole.

THE ANCIENT MARINER

The Ancient Mariner has suffered from familiarity in two ways. The first is that it no longer has for us the shock of instant peculiarity that it held for its first readers in 1798. The second is that we read it in isolation, and no longer encounter it as the starting-point (in both senses) of the Lyrical Ballads. We must begin by trying to perform the impossible task of seeing what those early critics and readers found when they opened their copies of the first edition and were confronted not by our familiar Ancient Mariner, but by the much more exotic Rime of the Ancyent Marinere—a text boldly studded with the most extraordinary bogus spellings and archaisms. The marginal gloss which we now take for granted was absent: that was not added until Coleridge's final version of the poem in 1817. There were some extra verses. For instance, the spectre bark has a crew of gothick horror far more graphic and grotesque than in the later version. Death is a skeleton:

His bones were black with many a crack,
All black and bare, I ween;
Jet black and bare, save where with rust
Of mouldy damps and charnel crust
They're patch'd with purple and green …

(ll. 181-5)

A gust of wind sterte up behind
And whistled thro' his bones;
Thro' the holes of his eyes and the hole of his mouth,
Half-whistles and half groans.

(ll. 195-8)

In the 1800 text all this superfluous bone-rattling was omitted. At the same point some of the best-known and most beautiful stanzas were added. This, for instance, near the beginning:

With sloping masts and dipping prow,
As who pursued with yell and blow
Still treads the shadow of his foe,
And forward bends his head,
The ship drove fast, loud roared the blast,
And southward aye we fled.

(ll. 45-50)

or this, in Part III:

We listened and looked sideways up!
Fear at my heart, as at a cup,
My life-blood seemed to sip!
The stars were dim, and thick the night,
The steersman's face by his lamp gleamed white;
From the sails the dew did drip—

(ll. 203-8)

We must bear these changes in mind when we read of the critics' incomprehension and dislike of The Ancient Mariner, and remember that they were confronted in 1798 with what was, in many superficial ways, a startlingly different poem. Yet even had these puzzled critics from the Monthly, Critical, or Analytical Reviews been faced with the revised and improved text of 1800, instead of that of 1798, we should not underestimate their difficulties. What, after all, is the poem all about? Is it simply a tale of mystery and imagination, or is there a meaning and a purpose to it that links it—however tenuously—to the didactic moralizing of so many of the other poems? The Ancient Mariner certainly has a perfectly good moral in the proper place—at the end of the poem:

O sweeter than the Marriage-feast
'Tis sweeter far to me,
To walk together to the Kirk
With a goodly company!—
To walk together to the Kirk
And all together pray,
While each to his great Father bends,
Old men, and babes, and loving friends
And Youths and Maidens gay!
Farewel, farewell! but this I tell
To thee, thou Wedding Guest!
He prayeth well, who loveth well
Both man and bird and beast.
He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.

(ll. 634-50)

These lines are reprinted with unaltered words in the 1800 edition. Unity with Nature and living things is also unity with God. There is a surprising similarity of tone between these sentiments and some of the simpler of Wordsworth's morals in the Ballads. At the most superficial level, therefore, it can be argued that The Ancient Mariner fulfils Coleridge's part of the original design: the marvellous and supernatural takes its place beside the incidents of everyday life to uphold a single universal morality.

But how sure can we be that this is the ‘moral’ of the poem? As an old man in 1830 Coleridge made a very curious remark to Mrs Barbauld—a celebrated, and now forgotten, lady poetess. She had said to him that the poem had no moral. He replied that, on the contrary, it had too much of a moral!

… and that the only, or chief fault, if I might say so, was the obtrusion of the moral sentiment so openly on the reader as a principle or cause of action in a work of such pure imagination. It ought to have had no more moral than the Arabian Nights tale of the merchant's sitting down to eat dates by the side of a well, and throwing the shells aside, and lo! a genie starts up, and says he must kill the aforesaid merchant, because one of the date shells had, it seems, put out the eye of the genie's son.¹

Poets' comments thirty years afterwards are not always to be trusted, but Coleridge's remark must at least be taken seriously. Certainly, if that passage at the end of The Ancient Mariner is the moral, then it must be acknowledged that it is a very curious one. It seems to raise more moral problems than it satisfies. It is surely not self-evident from the story that God loves us all. For instance, what about the other sailors who, because they condone the Mariner's crime, are condemned to die horribly of thirst? If we follow the logic of the poem, then the only clear unequivocal message is that it is unwise to shoot albatrosses.

Some critics have indeed found the poem profoundly pessimistic. D. W. Harding, for example, sees the Mariner as a ruined man: ‘Creeping back defeated into the social convoy, the mariner is obviously not represented as having advanced through his sufferings to a fuller life; and he no more achieves a full rebirth than Coleridge ever could.’² Clearly, in the light of the whole poem, that great religious affirmation of love and unity at the end is much more ambiguous than it would appear. Is the Mariner's final state really one of irreparable damage—as Harding argues? If so, then the ending must be not a statement of what he has found, but what he has lost for ever by his guilt. Alternatively, can we say that he achieves through his suffering such insight as leaves him ‘no longer at ease here in the old dispensation’? Or again, is the Mariner now able to rejoin his fellows at the church just because of his new and terrible knowledge? In T. S. Eliot's words:

the end of all our exploring,
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

The ideal that is celebrated in those final stanzas—‘to walk together to the kirk’—seems to be one of organic communal harmony. It is a resolution at once psychological and religious: the Mariner shows he is both healed and forgiven by worshipping at peace and harmony with his fellows. Yet if what we are witnessing is some kind of spiritual growth towards personal integration, the logic of this development is, to say the least, obscure. The events of the narrative are arbitrary and magical rather than ‘moral’. The Mariner shoots the albatross for no reason whatsoever. His fellow sailors are at first horrified, and then, when the weather improves, praise him for his action. For this inconstancy or error of judgement they are condemned to die a lingering death. We meet the spectre bark with its nightmare crew of Death and Life-in-Death. Are these external figures or symbolic hallucinations? Do they have any moral significance? If so, what? Most important of all, the Mariner's release comes with apparent arbitrariness when he is least expecting it:

Beyond the shadow of the ship,
I watch'd the water-snakes:
They mov'd in tracks of shining white;
And when they rear'd, the elfish light
Fell off in hoary flakes.
Within the shadow of the ship
I watch'd their rich attire:
Blue, glossy green, and velvet black
They coil'd and swam; and every track
Was a flash of golden fire.
O happy living things! no tongue
Their beauty might declare;
A spring of love gusht from my heart,
And I bless'd them unaware!
Sure my kind saint took pity on me,
And I bless'd them unaware.
The self-same moment I could pray;
And from my neck so free
The Albatross fell off, and sank
Like lead into the sea.

(ll. 269-83)

This is one of those climaxes in which great Romantic art seems to specialize. One thinks of the last movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony when, after themes and variations from earlier parts have been tried and found wanting, the amazing final theme that is to be taken up by the choir a few moments later bursts up, as it were, through those fragments of earlier and discarded efforts. All that conscious effort that went before turns out to have been futile—and yet in some mysterious way necessary, since it is only in failure that this sudden uprush of inspiration occurs. So here in The Ancient Mariner this moment of liberation is proceded by complete despair: ‘Seven days, seven nights, I saw that curse, / And yet I could not die!’ (ll. 253-4). Yet, unexpectedly, at this point the Mariner through despair begins to forget himself, and begins to look around him at Nature. Previously even the sea had seemed to mirror the horror of his situation, but now, in the beauty of the moonlight, and when he least expects it, he notices the water-snakes (apparently those same ‘slimy’ things that he had first reacted to with such loathing) and finds them beautiful. Something in his unconscious is liberated—‘a spring of love’ gushes from him and he finds he has blessed them ‘unaware’.

Clearly, what we are watching here is in some sense a psychological crisis. It is as if, in ‘blessing’ the water-snakes, the Mariner is accepting and even rejoicing in elements of himself which had previously disgusted and repelled him. If we follow this kind of ‘psychological’ interpretation, as many critics have done, it is not difficult to see the mysterious spirit ‘nine fathom deep’ as something in his own unconscious which he has offended against or denied—in other words a neurosis. Such an explanation helps us to make sense of the killing of the albatross: we can regard it, for instance, as some kind of compulsive neurotic act—the mark of a psychotic whose conscious and unconscious are deeply at odds. The Ancient Mariner is a happy stamping-ground for psychological symbol-hunters, whether of Freudian or Jungian persuasions.

This ‘psychological’ approach to the poem is greatly strengthened by the work of John Livingstone Lowes, one of the finest Coleridge scholars of all time. His book, The Road to Xanadu, is a classic of detective brilliance, and any one who really wishes to study The Ancient Mariner or ‘Kubla Khan’ should read it in full. From Coleridge's notebooks Lowes has patiently followed his reading through the winter and spring of 1797-8 when he was at work on the poem, and demonstrates how much of what he was reading finds its way into it. Coleridge, for instance, had been making notes from Priestley's Opticks (a contemporary scientific textbook); he had been reading the letters of a Jesuit missionary from the Pacific, Father Bourzes; as well as the Voyages of Captain Cook, and Bartram's Travels. Words and phrases from these, and scores of other books, re-emerge in new settings in the poem. Bourzes, for instance, describes fish in the Pacific that leave behind them ‘a luminous track … which have made a kind of artificial fire’, and Lowes is able to show that Coleridge was making notes from this very page while writing The Ancient Mariner.³ Line after line of the poem is painstakingly broken down by Lowes' researches into a kind of mosaic of Coleridge's reading—reassembled and transformed by his poetic creativity. Even the strange and blatantly impossible ‘hornéd Moon, with one bright star / Within the nether tip’ is run to earth in the Transactions of the Royal Society. What we have already seen was going on at one level in the creation of the narrative of the poem by Wordsworth and Coleridge was repeated at another level by Coleridge in the detailed construction of nearly every line and phrase.

We owe Lowes an enormous debt for showing us how Coleridge's mind worked as he created a poem. But revealing as this kind of research is, it does not help us much in trying to unravel the meaning of the poem. Is the poem, perhaps, no more than its sources: Wordsworth's reading of Shelvock, Priestley, Bourzes, Cook, Bartram, and all the rest? Were Southey and those other first reviewers right in concluding that it has no meaning—that it is just an undigested metaphysical mess? This kind of ‘psychological’ explanation is reductionism run wild: it seeks to explain a work of art in terms of the artist's materials. It ignores the fascination which the poem has exerted on millions of readers over the past two centuries. Are the critics I have been describing earlier right in seeing the poem as about the interpretation of the personality? As the reader may have guessed, I am sceptical. For one thing, it is not clear, as we have seen, that the Mariner is healed. Why does the Wedding Guest go like ‘one that hath been stunned’ and rise ‘a sadder and a wiser man’ if the message of the poem is psychic integration? Moreover, the blessing of the watersnakes is described in language that is unequivocally religious:

Sure my kind saint took pity on me
And I bless'd them unawares.
The self-same moment I could pray. …

(ll. 278-80)

This is not the language of psychic growth, but of Christian Grace. The whole framework is that of good and evil, guilt and expiation: ‘the man hath penance done / And penance more will do.’ And here we come back full circle. The simple Christian message that God loves all his creatures does not satisfy a reading of the poem either.

We seem to be left with a very strange story: one that can be accounted for neither as a Christian parable of sin and redemption, nor as a drama of psychological breakdown and recovery. Indeed, the more we start to look at the psychological level the more it seems to demand some kind of religious explanation, but the more we look at the religious level the more we seem to be forced back again towards some kind of psychological one. Neither seems to be satisfactory without the other—yet they remain, to some degree, mutually exclusive. It seems to move in the borderlands where psychology and religion touch, but where the normal rules, as we understand them, no longer hold good. Yet this challenge to simple clear-cut notions of morality, for all its ambiguity, can be seen as profoundly ‘realistic’. Christianity has never claimed that we live in a ‘just’ universe. The Mariner's motiveless malignancy has, it seems to me, the same quality of psychological realism that we find in Wordsworth's ‘Nutting’—and the incident of the shooting was, we recall, originally suggested by Wordsworth. Such a ‘realism’ is not inconsistent with a symbolic landscape. The spectre bark, with its nightmare crew of Death and Life-in-Death actually has its origins in the dream of a friend of Coleridge's, John Cruikshank, who lived in Nether Stowey. If we compare the world of The Ancient Mariner to that of a dream, it is not in the sense the Victorian critics were quick to use it, that of an ‘escapist’ or unreal world, but with our modern recognition of the reality and significance of dreams as a clue to our own deepest experiences. Clearly the vision of the ghostly ship is part of the Mariner's punishment, but it merely describes his condition without any attempt at justice or morality. As in our own deepest fantasies, we cannot separate choice from arbitrary event—and it is significant that neither do the basic Christian myths, such as the story of the Fall itself. We do not live in a world that is governed by our choice, just as we do not live in a world that is without choice. Coleridge and Wordsworth had originally planned to write a poem about another figure beloved of Romantic mythology, the Wandering Jew. It is as if the Mariner at the Wedding Feast is the Jew. At the moment of festivity and thanksgiving, the unthinking guest is suddenly and irresistibly confronted with a story of mysterious guilt and suffering—a reminder that the cosy world of rationality that we insist is ‘normal’ stands perched on the edge of an abyss.

If the balance is a precarious one, we need to remind ourselves that that is, in part, the meaning of the poem. We also need to remind ourselves that this is an echo, at another level, of what the Lyrical Ballads are attempting as a whole. I said at the beginning that the sheer familiarity of The Ancient Mariner can prevent us from seeing its continuity with the other 1798 Ballads. Wordsworth's poetry, superficially very different in kind, spans a range from the simple and magical tale of ‘Goody Blake and Harry Gill’ to the much deeper visionary and psychological explorations of ‘Tintern Abbey’, but in its totality it encompasses a comparable moral complexity. We need to see the ‘realism’ of The Ancient Mariner in this context of joint creation by Wordsworth and Coleridge. As the opening poem of the first edition of the Ballads it is, in two senses, the way into their unique achievement of 1798.

“SIMON LEE,” “ANECDOTE FOR FATHERS,” “WE ARE SEVEN”

One of the reasons why Wordsworth is so demanding on the attention of the reader is his apparent simplicity. Over and over again in the Lyrical Ballads we find him attempting to capture a point of the most complex psychology within a form that is simple almost to the point of naïvety. Nor are we going to come to grips with the difficulty of Wordsworth as a poet unless we see how essential to his purposes this superficial simplicity is.

Perhaps his throw-away technique reaches its epitome in ‘Simon Lee’.

O reader! had you in your mind
Such stores as silent thought can bring,
O gentle reader! you would find
A tale in every thing.
What more I have to say is short,
I hope you'll kindly take it;
It is no tale; but should you think,
Perhaps a tale you'll make it.

(ll. 73-80)

Poetically, this is Wordsworth at his worst. But it is at moments like this, when his technique is at its most threadbare, that we can often see most clearly what he is trying to do. He is deliberately turning his back on the ‘story’ in favour of the single incident—what in The Prelude (where he does it successfully) he called a ‘spot of time’. The single moment of insight carries a significance far wider than itself, giving meaning and shape to whole areas of human experience. Wordsworth saw his own growth in terms of a succession of such ‘spots of time’. As the last lines tell us, ‘Simon Lee’, of course, is about gratitude. Godwin, the philosopher from whose theories Wordsworth had only just succeeded in extricating himself with the help of Coleridge and Dorothy, argued that ‘if by gratitude we understand a sentiment of preference which I entertain towards another, upon the ground of my having been the subject of his benefits, it is no part of justice or virtue’.⁴ Wordsworth is determined to show this up for the over-sophisticated nonsense he believed it to be. His reply is not a story, but simply the description of a moment of gratitude. Rural life depended not merely on reciprocity of services rendered by neighbours, but on the spirit that goes beyond any calculation of advantages. Generosity and gratitude are a part of the proper dignity of human life; they are not conventions of society for the smooth-running of its machinery but ends and values in themselves. Urban life may make this sometimes hard to see, but in simple rural life it is still unmistakable. Wordsworth in his poetry conducts a constant fight against ‘reductionism’ in all its forms. ‘Gratitude’ is not ‘nothing but’ a ‘preference’ for those who have helped us. Human feeling is not an extra—a way of making the boredom of the rich interesting and the toil of the poor tolerable—but what gives meaning to social relationships.

But emotions are not simple or easy to explain rationally. Godwin's ‘behaviourism’, Wordsworth believed, was also wrong on this point. Like Wordsworth, Godwin believed in the fundamental innocence of childhood, and he argued from this that lying is not natural to children but is the product of an evil social system. In an ‘Anecdote for Fathers’ Wordsworth outflanks Godwin by means of a simple parable. With nice irony, the child in question, ‘little Edward’, is the son of Basil Montague, an old friend of Wordsworth, who was himself an enthusiastic Godwinian. The little boy had gone to live with the Wordsworths at Racedown after his mother had died, and, according to Wordsworth, he used to lie ‘like a little devil’.⁵ As he so often does in the geography of his poems, Wordsworth has invented a fictional landscape by taking names from different parts of the country: Kilve is on the coast only a short distance from Alfoxden, but Liswyn Farm is probably ‘Lyswen’, the Brecknockshire home of their revolutionary friend Thelwall, who was also an ardent Godwinian.

Every word of the deceptively casual setting is important. The natural instinctive (Godwinian) innocence of the boy is given visual form with his ‘fair and fresh’ complexion, and the pastoral scenery and ‘rustic dress’ reinforce with literary convention the picture of simple virtue. The conversation that ensues is, to begin with, quite unforced. He talks to the little boy ‘in very idleness’ and the boy replies ‘in careless mood’. The gap between the child's view of the world and his elder's is not apparent until, suddenly, the adult tries to press him to give a reason for his preference.

Now, little Edward, say why so;
My little Edward, tell me why;

(ll. 37-8)

The point is worthy of Piaget or Spock. His intention, said Wordsworth afterwards, was ‘to point out the injurious effects of putting inconsiderate questions to Children, and urging them to give answers upon matters either uninteresting to them, or upon which they have no decided opinion’.⁶ It is a source of never-failing fascination to see how often a small child, when asked, ‘What did you do in school today?’ will reply ‘nothing’—when later he is found to be bursting to tell his parents about some event of great importance in his life. Below a certain age, it is as if the insistent questioning of an adult dries up a child's powers of reply. A child speaks in his own time, and cannot be forced to another's. So here, the ingenious Edward fastens upon an obvious lie to silence the grown-up intruder.

The simplicity of the poem. with its four-line rhyming stanzas and insistent repetition of key phrases is not the simplicity of the ballad—where a similar technique is used to a quite different end. ‘Anecdote for Fathers’ is a parable. Its structure is more like that of a modern short story where the key is hinted at, but left unsaid—a What Maisie Knew in verse. The motives and reasoning may be complicated and obscure, but these are best explored by giving us only the bare bones and demanding our response to flesh them out. The technique depends upon the contrast between the naïvety of the narration and the unspoken complexity it implies. The effect is in many ways the direct opposite of Coleridge's, and it is one that Wordsworth was repeatedly to strive for in the Lyrical Ballads, using it in some of his most successful poems—perhaps most notably in ‘We Are Seven’, a poem to which Coleridge contributed the opening stanza.

Though ‘We Are Seven’ again depends on the contrast and even tension between the ‘naïve’ vision of the child and the unspoken sophistication of the adult reader, whereas in an ‘Anecdote for Fathers’ the understanding of the adult is necessary in the poem to interpret the ‘lies’ of the child and so lead to a moment of sudden revelation, here the irony is directed against the adult—who remains unenlightened. It is the simple childish vision which is valuable, and the adult's superior ‘wisdom’ which inhibits insight. The point of course is not that the child is instinctively ‘religious’ in the conventional sense: it is the adult who insists piously that ‘Their spirits are in Heaven’. For the child, there is no division. The adult can only recapture this vision of unity through the kind of complex sophistication we find Wordsworth exploring in the ‘Lucy’ poems which appeared in the second volume of the Ballads in 1800.

A slumber did my spirit seal,
I had no human fears:
She seem'd a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.
No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Roll'd round in earth's diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.

Here the unity of the living and the dead is presented in a much more disturbing and ambiguous light. A. P. Rossiter has called attention to the change of tense between the two stanzas.⁷ The effect of this is to enable us to read the poem in two quite different ways. If the first stanza describes the period in the past when ‘Lucy’ was alive, what he seems to be saying is that during that time he was caught up in an almost trance-like state of bliss when his loved one seemed immune from the touch and change of time. In contrast, the second stanza recalls him to the present when she is dead—her one-time vitality absorbed into the cold inanimate earth. Read in this way, the poem seems to reflect a physical horror of death. If, on the other hand, we take the first stanza to be describing not a period of time but a single visionary instant after the death of his beloved, then the second stanza is what he saw then—and believes to be permanently true. In her grave she has become united with Nature as never before, and has even achieved a kind of mute but peaceful immortality. Clearly, read in this way the poem is resigned, or even hopeful in tone. Which interpretation are we to take? Wordsworth gives us no clue—perhaps for the very good reason that he himself was not sure. In other words, the poem is not about the resolution of the problem of death for Wordsworth, but is about the problem itself. For all the apparent contradiction between the two readings, once we have seen them both we cannot then completely obliterate either—leaving us in a condition of what Empson calls ‘radical indecision’.⁸ Wordsworth is a poet, not a metaphysician, and the advantage of poetry is that it enables the writer to put side by side two opposite and contradictory states of mind and hold them, as it were, in suspension. His poetry, as the Lyrical Ballads illustrate, has a constant tendency to move from its ostensible object to a consideration of his own state of mind. Writing a poem was, for Wordsworth, an act of self-exploration.

“THE FEMALE VAGRANT,” “THE LAST OF THE FLOCK”

But the unity of life that is one of the insistent themes of the Lyrical Ballads cannot be confined to parables on psychology—whether of the poet's own state of mind, or of others'. Wordsworth and Coleridge's poetical radicalism could only go hand-in-hand with political radicalism. Coleridge, with The Watchman, had been for a time an effective political journalist; Wordsworth's commitment to the ideals of the French Revolution had been total, and in 1794 he had written a powerful attack on the institution of the monarchy, the aristocracy, and the prevalent economic system in his ‘Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff’.⁹ In his own day Wordsworth was as often picked out as the poet of the poor as he was the poet of Nature.¹⁰ It is in this tradition of uncompromising political radicalism that we must see two of Wordsworth's best poems of the Lyrical Ballads, ‘The Female Vagrant’ and ‘The Last of the Flock’.

The history of the text of ‘The Female Vagrant’ is the story of the decline and fall of Wordsworth's revolutionary ideals. As the poem appears in the first edition of the Lyrical Ballads it is an outspoken attack on wealthy landowners, war, and the whole fabric of a social system that used the poor to fight for the privileges of the rich. Later it was incorporated, with numerous revisions, into a much larger poem called Salisbury Plain, and later still its title was changed to ‘Guilt and Sorrow.’¹¹ Each revision progressively tones down the note of social protest, so central to this first version:

The suns of twenty summers danced along,—
Ah! little marked, how fast they rolled away:
Then rose a mansion proud our woods among,
And cottage after cottage owned its sway,
No joy to see a neighbouring house, or stray
Through pastures not his own, the master took;
My Father dared his greedy wish gainsay;
He loved his old hereditary nook,
And ill could I the thought of such sad parting brook.
But, when he had refused the proffered gold,
To cruel injuries he became a prey,
Sore traversed in whate'er he bought and sold.
His troubles grew upon him day by day,
Till all his substance fell into decay.
His little range of water was denied;
All but the bed where his old body lay,
All, all was seized, and weeping, side by side,
We sought a home where we uninjured might abide.

(ll. 37-54)

Wordsworth is not merely protesting against the effects of the enclosure movement—which strengthened the rich and often, as here, deprived the small man of what little he possessed—he is also attacking the attitude of mind of the new landowners. The owner of the mansion takes ‘no joy to see a neighbouring house’. As we have seen in the case of ‘Simon Lee’, Wordsworth's experience of rural society (and especially his native Cumberland people) had led him to feel how all-important were the basic communal virtues of generosity, honesty, dignity and respect for individuals. A man who was ‘un-neighbourly’ cut against the very foundations of society. The pride of the rich who wished to have an uninterrupted view was a crime equivalent to the Mariner's against the order of Nature.

In the final version of ‘The Female Vagrant’, however, all this is omitted, and we find merely the vague statement: ‘But through severe mischance and cruel wrong / My father's substance fell into decay.’

There is a parallel retreat in the description of the soldiers. In the 1798 version their misery is seen as yet another form of the all-pervading political oppression of the poor by the rich:

Oh! dreadful price of being to resign
All that is dear in being! better far …
… in the streets and walks where proud men are,
Better our dying bodies to obtrude,
Than dog-like, wading at the heels of war,
Protract a curst existence, with the brood
That lap (their very nourishment!) their brother's blood.

(ll. 118-26)

As early as the 1802 edition of the Lyrical Ballads these lines had been excised, yet without them much of the irony of what follows is lost on the reader.

The pains and plagues that on our heads came down,
Disease and famine, agony and fear,
In wood or wilderness, in camp or town,
It would thy brain unsettle even to hear.
All perished—all, in one remorseless year,
Husband and children! one by one, by sword
And ravenous plague, all perished; every tear
Dried up, despairing, desolate, on board
A British ship I waked, as from a trance restored.

(ll. 127-35)

It is patriotism that gives Wordsworth's sense of outraged justice such a biting edge. He is angry not simply at the ‘pity of war’, but at the pity that the families and dependants of British soldiers should be so cast aside by their own countrymen. Dorothy's Journal, kept as a day-to-day record of the Wordsworths' life at Grasmere where they moved in 1800, is full of reference to vagrants—the flotsam and jetsam of the continuing wars with France who had served their purpose and were now abandoned to wander the roads of the mother country who had no longer any use for the crippled or bereaved.

Outraged patriotism is similarly the keynote to the even more outspokenly political ‘The Last of the Flock’:

In distant countries I have been,
And yet I have not often seen
A healthy man, a man full grown
Weep in the public roads alone.
But such a one, on English ground,
And in the broad high-way, I met;
Along the broad high-way he came,
His cheeks with tears were wet.
Sturdy he seemed, though he was sad;
And in his arms a lamb he had.

The poem is based upon an incident that had happened in Holford, close by Wordsworth's Quantock home at Alfoxden, and it is important for him that the story is actually true. The female vagrant's downfall is representative of many who had lost their place in society, but as a representative story the details, even in the earliest version, remain vague. But this tragedy, is a factual narrative ‘on English ground’ (however representative of other cases) and the shame of its being English and that it could happen so publicly on an English high-road strengthens Wordsworth's patriotic disgust. The particular story is, nevertheless, peculiarly representative of two evils Wordsworth had come to abhor. At a social level it epitomized a system of poor relief that denied assistance to the small man until it was too late, forcing him to sell all his property before he could receive temporary assistance.

‘I of the parish ask'd relief.
They said I was a wealthy man;
My sheep upon the mountain fed,
And it was fit that thence I took
Whereof to buy us bread;’
‘Do this; how can we give to you,’
They cried, ‘what to the poor is due?’

Thus the thrifty and hardworking were pauperized to the same degree as the idle and shiftless. Assistance came in such a form as to prevent him from ever recovering independence. Wordsworth again takes up the cudgels for the small man—the independent poor who were squeezed between the upper and the nether millstones of a society in rapid and painful economic change. The rich, when beset by temporary difficulty—what we now call ‘liquidity problems’—could always borrow; the poor could not. Thus the apparently iron laws of Malthus, that the population expanded to the point where it was checked by misery, were invisibly upheld by a system which made his gloomiest predictions certain to be true. On the face of it, this story appears to be a Malthusian parable—illustrating the evils of too many children—but Wordsworth was not worried about the dangers of over-population. Malthus published his Essay on Population in 1798, the same year as the Lyrical Ballads, and both he and Wordsworth are responding to one of the greatest social questions of the day: what to do about the growing numbers of destitute and poor who were becoming an impossible burden on the parish rates. Needless to say, Wordsworth would have no truck with the view that poverty and misery were necessary and inevitable. But behind his attack on the prevalent system of outdoor parish relief, which in the long run actually cost more by its pauperizing tactics, Wordsworth is making a more important philosophical point. Godwin had argued that private property was the root of all evil. Growing up in the Lake District Wordsworth had experienced an upbringing of peculiar egalitarianism, and his strong boyhood sense of the dignity of ‘Cumberland democracy’ never deserted him:

          … born in a poor district, and which yet
Retaineth more of ancient homeliness,
Manners erect, and frank simplicity,
Than any other nook of English land,
It was my fortune scarcely to have seen
Through the whole tenor of my school-day time
The face of one, who, whether boy or man,
Was vested with attention or respect
Through claims of wealth or blood; …

(Prelude 1805, IX, ll. 217-25)

But if property conferred no status in the eyes of the sturdy Cumberland ‘statesmen’, as the small farmers were called, it did confer the financial independence that made this freedom of the spirit possible. As Legouis comments, ‘The man who holds with Godwin that property is the cause of every vice and the source of all the misery of the poor is naturally astonished to find that this so-called evil, the offspring of human institutions, is a vigorous instinct closely interwoven with the noblest feelings. It represents familiar and dearly-loved fields, a hereditary cottage, and flocks every animal of which has its own name.’¹²

“THE BROTHERS,” “MICHAEL”

This interaction of feeling for place, for land, and for people as indivisible aspects of a single unity is presented by Wordsworth at its strongest in two poems that he included in the second volume of the 1800 Ballads—‘The Brothers’ and ‘Michael’. Neither is an easy poem for modern readers, in that passive endurance and stoicism are not qualities instantly commanding respect today. We who are reared on newspaper ‘tragedies’ are not as deeply moved as Wordsworth's own age by ‘affecting’ tales of sentiment. Wordsworth is using a popular genre for his own purposes, but the genre itself has fallen victim to a shift in sensibility. Yet both poems are essential for understanding Wordsworth's sense of the dignity of stoical suffering, and of the depth of feeling concealed by the restraint of those living and working in contact with the elemental forms of Nature. We recall his lines in The Borderers:

Action is transitory …
Suffering is permanent, obscure and dark,
And shares the nature of infinity.

Two of Wordsworth's own children were to be buried in Grasmere churchyard in the next few years.

“EXPOSTULATION AND REPLY”; “THE TABLES TURNED”

For Wordsworth, the poet was concerned with the whole man, in all his social and economic relationships, and not with fragments, disfigured and dismembered by literary convention, social system, or a priori political philosophy. It is for this reason that Wordsworth attacks Godwin over and over again with all the vehemence of an ex-disciple, even while remaining on relatively good terms with him personally. As a thinker, Godwin often seems to epitomize for Wordsworth all the harshness, the shallowness, and reductionism of an intelligence that has become severed from feeling. Wordsworth came to distrust the rootless intellect as one of the most dangerous and potentially destructive of all human perversions. This is the underlying assumption behind two of his best—but most difficult—poems in the Lyrical Ballads—‘Expostulation and Reply’ and ‘The Tables Turned’. The philosopher forgets the unity of human experience at his peril:

The eye it cannot chuse but see,
We cannot bid the ear be still;
Our bodies feel, where'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.

(‘E. & R.’ [‘Expostulation and Reply’], ll. 17-24)

Wordsworth's psychology, at this period, like Coleridge's follows Hartley. The great strength of his system in their eyes was that it was able to suggest a physical and therefore ‘scientific’ basis for this unity of the personality. For Hartley, the mind itself is nothing more than a totally passive ‘sensorium’ which contains ‘ideas’ in the form of a mass of minute vibrations in the nervous system (or, as he calls them, ‘vibratiuncles’). New sensations of sight, sound, etc., ‘which of themselves our minds impress’, come as vibrations to a mind which is itself the legacy of all past sensations. Each individual has therefore his own personal and unique pattern of vibrations which will modify succeeding ones in its own unique way—just as the infinitely variable ground-swell of the ocean will affect the ripple-pattern of a pebble thrown into it. Thus the way in which each person perceives the world will be conditioned by the total previous history of his mind up to that point. For Hartley, the growth of the mind was accomplished in a series of seven inevitable stages of increasing complexity, beginning with simple sensation and ending with Moral Sense.¹³ It is easy to see why, at first sight, Hartley seemed to provide the very theory of development that Wordsworth and Coleridge needed: so great was Coleridge's admiration for the philosopher at this time that he named his eldest son after him. By the early 1800s, however, he had turned violently against Hartley as he came to realize that a passive and mechanical system of psychology negated the very powers that he so passionately believed in. Wordsworth's Hartleian phase seems to have outlasted Coleridge's, and it is likely that this philosophical disagreement was yet another reason for Wordsworth assuming greater responsibility for the ‘manifesto’ aspects of the Lyrical Ballads.

Here, in ‘Expostulation and Reply’, the ‘wise passiveness’ of a heart that ‘watches and receives’ is that which receives from Nature the sensations for a healthy moral and spiritual development. ‘Passivity’ and contemplation are in line with the very physical processes of Nature herself:

Sweet is the lore which nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
Mishapes the beauteous forms of things;
—We murder to dissect.
Enough of science and of Art;
Close up these barren leaves;
Come forth, and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.

(‘T. T.’, [‘The Tables Turned’], ll. 25-8)

To understand what Wordsworth means by this we cannot do better than turn to an account he wrote of the development of a boy's mind, nearly ten years later, in his excellent and little-read ‘Letter to Mathetes’. It was published as a contribution to Coleridge's periodical, The Friend, in January 1810. Two Scots, John Wilson and Alexander Blair had written to Coleridge under the pen-name of ‘Mathetes’ to ask whether he thought that any child of genius could survive the educational system of the day. Coleridge gave the job of replying to Wordsworth, who answers by arguing that we underrate the strength and resilience of youth (whether genius or not) under even the most difficult conditions.

Significantly, Wordsworth sees the development of manhood beginning in the boy's willingness to come to terms with past failures. Their memory must not be suppressed, but rather accepted and understood.

… he cannot recall past time; he cannot begin his journey afresh; he cannot untwist the links by which, in no undelightful harmony, images and sentiments are wedded in his mind. Granted that the sacred light of Childhood is and must be for him no more than a remembrance. He may, notwithstanding, be remanded to Nature; and with trust-worthy hopes; founded less upon his sentient than upon his intellectual Being—to Nature, not as leading on insensibly to the Society of Reason; but to Reason and Will as leading back to the wisdom of Nature … the two powers of Reason and Nature, thus reciprocally teacher and taught, may advance together in a track to which there is no limit.¹⁴

‘Nature’ and ‘Reason’ are not opposed to each other, but go properly hand in hand. Wordsworth's beliefs have not changed in the ten years since the Lyrical Ballads. The key is what he elsewhere calls ‘Feeling’—not a matter of primitive passion, or blind irrational emotion, but something which grows only very slowly with the whole person, and which includes the intellectual capacities. The ‘wise passiveness’ of the heart ‘that watches and receives’ is not a vegetable complacency, but rather the activity of ‘Reason’ which is the very antithesis of the deracinated ‘meddling intellect’; it involves a consciousness of self as a unity, and a consciousness of man's interdependence with the natural world. Wordsworth goes on to illustrate his argument with a very revealing image:

There never perhaps existed a School-boy who, having when he retired to rest, carelessly blown out his candle, and having chanced to notice as he lay upon his bed in the ensuing darkness, the sullen light which had survived the extinguished flame, did not, at some time or other, watch that light as if his mind were bound to it by a spell. It fades and revives—gathers to a point—seems as if it would go out in a moment—again recovers its strength, nay becomes brighter than before: it continues to shine with an endurance, which in its apparent weakness is a mystery—it protracts its existence so long, clinging to the power which supports it, that the Observer, who had laid down in his bed so easy-minded, becomes sad and melancholy: his sympathies are touched—it is to him an intimation and an image of departing human life. … This is Nature teaching seriously and sweetly through the affections—melting the heart, and, through that instinct of tenderness, developing the understanding. …¹⁵

The passage is an important one, and worth quoting at some length since it makes explicit the attitude to ‘Nature’ that runs throughout his work. There is no intrinsic importance in the event or object itself in this illustration—it is merely the dying spark on a wick. The significance lies in its symbolic value to the mind that contemplates it. Nature's ‘teaching’, we notice, is not to be found in the glowing candle-end alone but in the imaginative response of the boy as well. It consists of an interaction of external stimulus (in itself trivial) and internal response. Its value is to be found not merely in the reflections it triggers off at the time, but, even more, in the memory of those reflections afterwards—the ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’. What was essentially a slight incident has become a point of growth and spiritual nourishment:

… the image of the dying taper may be recalled and contemplated, though with no sadness in the nerves, no disposition to tears, no unconquerable sighs. … Let then the Youth go back, as occasion will permit, to Nature and to Solitude, thus admonished by Reason, and relying upon this newly-acquired support. A world of fresh sensations will gradually open upon him as his mind puts off its infirmities, and … he makes it his prime business to understand himself.¹⁶

Wordsworth's account of the growing boy is clearly autobiographical—though he believes his own experiences are of wider significance, his starting-point is the poet's mind. The development of the artist is the development of Everyman, as it were, writ large. It is this balance of emotion and intellect that Wordsworth finds in Nature's teaching through the imagination that he finds so lacking in ordinary so-called education. ‘One impulse from a vernal wood’ is of such importance precisely because it is not an impulse in isolation, but is part of a process of growth and imaginative development. To see this process at work more fully, in a heart ‘that watches and receives’, we must turn now to Wordsworth's greatest single contribution to the Lyrical Ballads. By another of those happy accidents that characterize the first edition, ‘Tintern Abbey’ concludes the volume, and completes what The Ancient Mariner began.

“TINTERN ABBEY”

‘Tintern Abbey’ was not intended to be part of the Lyrical Ballads at all. The other poems were already at the printers when William and Dorothy went on a walking-tour of the Wye valley in July 1798. It was written at great speed, and, unlike most of Wordsworth's poems, it was not revised or altered afterwards. ‘No poem of mine,’ wrote Wordsworth afterwards, ‘was composed under circumstances more pleasant for me to remember than this. I began it upon leaving Tintern, after crossing the Wye, and concluded it just as I was entering Bristol in the evening, after a ramble of four or five days, with my sister. Not a line of it was altered, and not any part of it was written down till I reached Bristol.’¹⁷

It is a poem about an anniversary. Though one might not guess so from the deceptive peace of the opening lines, Wordsworth is revisiting the scene of the greatest crisis of his life. The very peace of the scene is part of the contrast between then, five years before, and now, when he stands again beneath the same dark sycamore tree. Five years takes us back to the summer of 1793 when Wordsworth came on his own to Tintern. He had originally set out with his friend Raisley Calvert for a ‘Tour of the West’, but while crossing Salisbury Plain they had suffered an accident and their ‘whiskey’ (a kind of one-horse trap) was overturned and smashed. Calvert took his horse and went home, leaving Wordsworth to push on towards Wales on foot. Probably there was more than the accident behind the separation. Wordsworth was in a state of deep depression—perhaps even feeling suicidal. His whole life seemed to be in ruins. His early enthusiasm for the ideals of the French Revolution had been dashed by its inexorable movement towards tyranny and terror. With many of his friends dead or in exile, he had returned to England penniless and disillusioned. To his patriotic shame, England was now at war with the revolutionary France. Moreover, he had other, personal, reasons for despair. While in France he had fallen in love with a French girl of a good family called Annette Vallon. Her parents, Catholic and royalist, opposed the idea of marriage with this Protestant English revolutionary sympathizer—and there is no doubt that his family, had they known, would also have opposed the match. In a deliberate effort to force the family's consent, Annette became pregnant. The plan went dramatically awry. Annette was removed by her furious family, and Wordsworth was prevented from seeing her—and the child that was born in December 1792. Returning to England in 1793 Wordsworth was leaving not merely his hopes for the regeneration of mankind, but the girl he loved and an illegitimate child he had never seen.

This, then, is the background to the peace and serenity of the opening of ‘Tintern Abbey’. What had happened in the intervening five years to work the transformation of mood? The description of the valley (much of it, incidentally, paraphrased from their guide-book, Gilpin's Tour of the Wye) is the setting for the description of Wordsworth's inner life that follows. ‘These forms of beauty’ have been to him a comfort and a solace, and, more, the key to a joy that has given meaning to the darkest points in his life.

                                                  —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. 42-50)

It is clear that Wordsworth is describing something much more than a mere feeling of happiness connected with his memories of Nature and their healing powers. Is this a description of some kind of mystical experience—was Wordsworth a ‘mystic’? It all depends, of course, on what we mean by the word. Coleridge, much later in his life, defined it like this:

When a man refers to inward feelings and experiences, of which mankind at large are not conscious, as evidences of the truth of any opinion—such as Man I call a Mystic: and the grounding of any theory or belief on accidents and anomalies of individual sensations or fancies, and the use of peculiar terms invented or perverted from their ordinary signification, for the purposes of expressing these idiosyncrasies, and pretended facts of interior consciousness, I name Mysticism. …¹⁸

Clearly Wordsworth was not a ‘mystic’ in this kind of sense. Though he sometimes describes unusual experiences, they are never claimed as exclusive—things of which mankind in general is not conscious. Wordsworth always believed that potentially, at any rate, these experiences were open to anyone. The poet, as we have said, was in his view not a different kind of man, but a representative man.

‘The blessed mood’ seems to be the product of these memories of beauty on his poetic creativity: the process of ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’. But here it seems to have achieved a new and special status of peculiar intensity. The important word is ‘joy’:

                                        … with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy
We see into the life of things.

When Wordsworth talks of ‘joy’ in this way we find, very often, that it is associated with two other kinds of experience. The first is that of failure, fear, and despair—moments that are apparently the very antithesis of joy. Near the end of The Prelude, for example, he tells us how as a child he came upon a place where there had once been a gibbet where a murderer had been hanged. On the turf someone had cut the murderer's name. The young Wordsworth was terrified—and the memory of it haunted him for years. When, years later, he became engaged to Mary Hutchinson one of his first acts was to take her to see the spot where he had been so frightened. This is what he says:

When in the blessed time of early love,
Long afterwards, I roamed about
In daily presence of this very scene
Upon the naked pool and dreary crags,
And on the melancholy beacon, fell
The spirit of pleasure and youth's golden gleam;
And think ye not with radiance more divine
From these remembrances, and from the power
They left behind?

(1805, XI, ll. 316-26)

It is a very curious notion at first sight. Why should the memory of past fears be such an important element of present happiness, leaving a ‘radiance more divine’? Wordsworth believed in facing his problems. He never ran away from himself. What gives him joy here, as in ‘Tintern Abbey’, is the knowledge that he has confronted and overcome his fears, his doubts, and despair. Present strength is based on the memory of past failures. As he argues in the ‘Letter to Mathetes’, so in ‘Tintern Abbey’ it is not just any ‘beauteous forms’ that have provided Wordsworth with ‘tranquil restoration’, but specifically the memory of his despair on that first visit and the knowledge that he has faced and overcome it. The ‘joy’ in this landscape is the supreme example of ‘Nature's teaching’.

But it is no accident that he uses the word ‘blessed’ to describe his condition in ‘Tintern Abbey’, or that the parallel passage in The Prelude talks of ‘radiance divine’. ‘Joy’ for Wordsworth has specifically religious associations. The Church of England of Wordsworth's own day was lax and corrupt. When the Wordsworths moved to Grasmere in 1800 they very rarely went to church since the curate was usually drunk. It was no place for powerful feelings of any kind. ‘Enthusiasm’ was a dirty word. Joy was no part of religious experience—and indeed religious experience itself was deeply suspect if it involved violent emotions. But in the middle of the eighteenth century, some fifty years earlier, we find in the poetry of the Methodist revival a new idea appearing: that joy is a part of creativity. For John and Charles Wesley ‘joy’ was not primarily an attribute of man's at all, but of God—it is the emotion of God in creation. Man's joy came from sharing in his Master's. At the Creation, the Bible tells us, ‘the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy.’ From the text in John's Gospel, ‘The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us’ (John 1.14) Charles Wesley writes this:

Transform'd by the ecstatic sight,
Our souls o'erflow with pure delight,
          And every moment own
The Lord our whole perfection is,
The Lord is our immortal bliss,
And Christ and heaven are one.(19)

In joy, ‘transform'd’ man was partaking in an essentially divine activity—and touching the very mystery of creation. Joy overflows as it were into creativity. Wordsworth, though he had no Methodist leanings, was probably familiar with this fervent minority tradition of religious experience: his friend and fellow-poet Southey was later to write a biography of Wesley. As for Coleridge in ‘Kubla Khan’, creation was a holy thing.

Thus when Wordsworth in ‘Tintern Abbey’ turns again to contemplation of the scene before him, he is thinking simultaneously about the process of growth and of poetic creativity: ‘That in this moment there is life and food / For future years. …’ He takes us through his changing and developing attitude to Nature:

                                                                                                    I cannot paint
What then I was. The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colours and their forms, were then to me
An appetite: a feeling and a love,
That had no need of a remoter charm,
By thought supplied, or any interest
Unborrowed from the eye.—That time is past,
And all its aching joys are now no more,
And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this
Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur: other gifts
Have followed, for such loss, I would believe,
Abundant recompense. 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. …

(ll. 76-92)

Wordsworth is contrasting two stages of development—then and now. From the way in which he talks of what then he was it is clear that he is thinking of a much wider span of his youth than just his previous visit to Tintern in 1793—even if the description of himself as more like a man ‘Flying from something that he dreads than one / Who sought the thing he loved’ is applicable to that first visit. If we want a portrait of the instinctive youth with his ‘glad animal movements’, we can find it in the first two books of The Prelude. All this seems to refer back to his boyhood in the Lake District when he was at school in Hawkshead rather than to 1793, when he could certainly not be described as having ‘no need of a remoter charm unborrowed from the eye.’ If we want a reference to the terrible crisis of 1793, it is more to be found in the ‘still, sad music of humanity’—words which are sometimes quoted as a cliché, but which were certainly no cliché for Wordsworth who had come to it the hard way, and for whom the ‘sense sublime / Of something far more deeply interfused’ was dependent on the more sombre vision of the adult who had come through the experience of breakdown and recovery:

                                                                                                    And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man,
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.

(ll. 94-103)

One distinguished critic, William Empson, has scornfully dismissed these lines as ‘non-denominational uplift’—a Wordsworthian blur of hurrah-words cloaking some ill-defined, if intensely-felt pantheism, where God is hopefully felt to be present in all beautiful things. Yet Wordsworth is more specific than this gibe suggests. The ‘light of setting suns’ is certainly beautiful—and we are less than human if we do not value beauty—but for Wordsworth this is only part of the picture. It is not necessary to prove God from Nature in order for the believer to see God in Nature. What we are talking about are not matters of proof, but powers of response. The influence of various philosophers, like Newton and Berkeley, and even Spinoza have been detected in the passage.²⁰ But Wordsworth was not primarily a philosopher—though, like Coleridge, he was well-read in philosophy. He was a poet. The influence of Berkeley, for instance, is to make him feel even more intensely the reality of his sense-perceptions: the round ocean, and the living air, and the blue sky are not just things to be passively looked at; they are to be felt, with wonder and excitement. It takes great art to make us see Nature in a new way. Wordsworth had read Newton's Opticks. He knew that sense-perception is itself a ‘deeply-interfused’ relationship between man and his surroundings. Colour is not a property of objects—it is a wavelength of light, focused by the eye and interpreted by the brain. As we have seen, what Wordsworth means by the word ‘Nature’ is not something ‘out there’ separate from man, it is an interaction of external stimuli and the perceiving mind. We are, in a most literal and scientific sense, a part of Nature. It is our half-creation. The ‘motion and a spirit’ that ‘rolls through all things’ is interfused with both the world of natural beauty, and the ‘mind of man’ that recognizes that beauty. ‘Tintern Abbey’ takes the two worlds, inner and outer, at their point of intersection: for Wordsworth the ‘language of the sense’ is not just a matter of aesthetics, or optics, or philosophy, or psychology, but poetry—which involves them all: we perceive not merely scenes, we perceive values:

                                                                                Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods,
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye and ear, both what they half-create,
And what perceive; well pleased to recognize
In nature and the language of the sense,
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.

(ll. 103-12)

But for Wordsworth the central problem of ‘Tintern Abbey’ is that these moments of visionary union with Nature, when the poet becomes specifically conscious of the unity of which he is always a part, are never lasting. They come and go, and we are left only with the memory to sustain us. Hence the importance of these ‘spots of time’, and the recollection of them in tranquillity when their memory seems to feed and nourish the mind.

There is a terrible irony in the last part of the poem as Wordsworth turns from the contemplation of his own past failure and recovery to pay loving tribute to his sister Dorothy. Without her, as he recognizes, he would probably never have been a poet. In particular, she was perhaps the vital catalyst in the creation of the Lyrical Ballads. Without her presence that gloomy November evening in 1797 the The Ancient Mariner, and perhaps the whole volume might never have existed—and certainly not in the form in which it did. Wordsworth's great tribute to her and prayer for her future which occupy that last 50 lines of the poem are fully deserved:

                                                            Oh! yet a little while
May I behold in thee what I was once,
My dear, dear Sister! And this prayer I make,
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 …
                                                                                                                        Oh! then,
If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief,
Should be thy portion, with what healing thoughts
Of tender joy wilt thou remember me,
And these my exhortations!

(ll. 120-6; 143-7)

Everyone who knew Dorothy as she was in 1798 mentions, not her looks—she was never a beauty—but her sparkling vitality, and above all the bright ‘wild’ eyes her brother picks out in line 152. In 1829 she, who had done so much to help William's recovery, had an even more serious breakdown herself. The last twenty-six years of her life until her death in 1855 were spent in the grip of a nervous or neurotic illness so severe as to make her partially or completely insane. Whether or not, as Wordsworth's biographer argues,²¹ Nature was indeed a comfort to her in her affliction, for him the irony must have been hard to bear.

It is often dangerous to draw too heavily on biographical background to understand poetry, yet Wordsworth is so deliberately a poet of his own life that we can scarcely avoid it in ‘Tintern Abbey’. For all the bitter irony of the ending there is a sense in which his own life did prove him right. If we see ‘Tintern Abbey’ not as a promise of security for the future (something we can never have) but as a poem about Wordsworth's recovery and growth, then I think we see it in its proper perspective. The love of Nature is not an insurance policy; it was for Wordsworth the making of a poet from a disappointed and broken idealist—but to be a poet is to live dangerously, and by brief and passing achievements. ‘Tintern Abbey’ is not about a lifetime, but a moment of vision on an anniversary. It brings past and future into a single focus: a moment of intense awareness that made an anniversary in one man's life of universal significance. In this sense it shows us what the entire Lyrical Ballads were striving to do. When the Romantic poets or critics described a work of art as possessing ‘organic unity’ they were borrowing an image from a living body. The parts, however complex they might be individually, were only to be understood finally in terms of the ‘life’ of the whole. The whole body is, therefore greater than the sum of its parts. ‘We murder to dissect.’ Conversely, each part changes the nature of the whole, and therefore of all the other parts. ‘Tintern Abbey’, for instance, shows us the vision of Nature that lies behind ‘Expostulation and Reply’; it provides an answer and a reassurance to the metaphysical terror of The Ancient Mariner. In one sense it was apparently an afterthought, yet with hindsight we can see how it helped on the one hand to reshape the entire structure of the Lyrical Ballads in 1798, and, on the other, how its stress on ‘spots of time’ points forward to Wordsworth's next and greatest poetic achievement, The Prelude.

Notes

1. 31 May 1830, in Table Talk, ed. H. N. Coleridge (London 1852), 86.

2. ‘The Theme of “The Ancient Mariner”’, Scrutiny, 9 (1941), 341.

3. Lowes, The Road to Xanadu, 40.

4. Lyrical Ballads, 284.

5. Wordsworth to Francis Wrangham, 7 March 1796, in Letters, Early Years (2nd edn), 168.

6. Letters, Later Years (1st edn), I, 253.

7. This brief outline cannot do justice to Rossiter's subtle discussion of ambiguity in this poem. See ‘Ambivalence: The Dialectic of the Histories’, in Angel with Horns (London 1961), 48.

8. Seven Types of Ambiguity (2nd edn, Peregrine, Harmondsworth 1961).

9. Moorman, I, 225-9.

10. Strikingly noticeable, for instance, in Keble's Crewian Oration to Wordsworth when he was given an honorary degree by Oxford University in 1839.

11. For a fuller account of this complicated textual history see Poetical Works, ed. E. de Selincourt, I, 330-4, I, xvi, 292-5.

12. Emile Legouis, The Early Life of Wordsworth, 310.

13. For a fuller account of the influence of Hartley on Wordsworth and Coleridge, see my Coleridge and Wordsworth: The Poetry of Growth, 46-70.

14. The Friend, ed. B. E. Rooke, (London 1969), II, 263.

15. Ibid., 264.

16. Ibid., 264.

17. Lyrical Ballads, 296.

18. Aids to Reflection, Edinburgh 1905, 349.

19. Charles Wesley, Short Hymns on Select Passages of the Holy Scriptures, 1796, II, 202.

20. See M. Rader, Wordsworth: A Philosophical Approach, 41-8.

21. Moorman I, 407.

Bibliography

All references to the Lyrical Ballads or to Wordsworth's Preface are given to the edition edited by R. L. Brett and A. E. Jones (London 1963, revised 1965).

The number of critical works about Wordsworth and Coleridge is legion. For convenience I am listing below a few that seem to me to be of help to the ordinary student, and refer substantially to the poems or background of the Lyrical Ballads in particular rather than to Wordsworth and Coleridge in general. Most, but not all, will have been mentioned in my text. Some books mentioned in the text do not appear below since they are only of interest in the limited context where they are cited (e.g. Charles Wesley's Hymns). Also for convenience, if contemporary documents are easily available through secondary sources I have not bothered to give the primary (e.g. reviews of the Lyrical Ballads are referred to appendix C of Brett's edition).

Abrams, M. H., The Mirror and the Lamp (New York 1953).

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, Biographia Literaria, ed. J. Shawcross (London 1907).

———The Friend, ed. B. E. Rooke (London 1969).

———Table Talk, ed. H. N. Coleridge (London 1852).

———The Critical Heritage, ed. R. R. de J. Jackson (London 1972).

Hanson, Lawrence, Life of S. T. Coleridge (London 1938).

Fruman, Norman, Coleridge, the Damaged Archangel (London 1972).

Harding, D. W., ‘The Theme of “The Ancient Mariner”’, Scrutiny, IX, 1941.

House, Humphry, Coleridge (London 1953).

Legouis, Emile, The Early Life of Wordsworth, trans.—Matthews (London 1897).

Lowes, J. Livingstone, The Road to Xanadu (Boston 1927).

Moorman, Mary, William Wordsworth: The Early Years (London 1957).

———William Wordsworth: The Later Years (London 1965).

Prickett, Stephen, Coleridge and Wordsworth: The Poetry of Growth (London 1970).

Rader, Melvin, Wordsworth, A Philosophical Approach (London 1967).

Warren, Robert Penn, ‘A Poem of Pure Imagination’, Selected Essays (London 1964).

Wordsworth, Dorothy, Journals, ed. E. de Selincourt (London 1941).

Wordsworth, William, Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, The Early Years, 1787-1805, 2nd edn. eds. E. de Selincourt and C. L. Shaver (London 1967).

———Poetical Works, ed. E. de Selincourt, 5 vols. (London 1940-49).