Oxford Lectures on Poetry Part 9

The Being, that is in the clouds and air, That is in the green leaves among the groves, Maintains a deep and reverential care For the unoffending creatures whom he loves.

_Hartleap Well_ is a beautiful poem, but whether it is entirely successful is, perhaps, doubtful. There can be no sort of doubt as to _Resolution and Independence_, probably, if we must choose, the most Wordsworthian of Wordsworth's poems, and the best test of ability to understand him. The story, if given in a brief argument, would sound far from promising. We should expect for it, too, a ballad form somewhat like that of _Simon Lee_. When we read it, we find instead lines of extraordinary grandeur, but, mingled with them, lines more pedestrian than could be found in an impressive poem from any other hand,--for instance,

And, drawing to his side, to him did say, 'This morning gives us promise of a glorious day.'

or,

'How is it that you live, and what is it you do?'

We meet also with that perplexed persistence, and that helpless reiteration of a question (in this case one already clearly answered), which in other poems threatens to become ludicrous, and on which a writer with a keener sense of the ludicrous would hardly have ventured.

Yet with all this, and by dint of all this, we read with bated breath, almost as if we were in the presence of that 'majestical' Spirit in _Hamlet_, come to 'admonish' from another world, though not this time by terror. And one source of this effect is the confusion, the almost hypnotic obliteration of the habitual reasoning mind, that falls on the poet as he gazes at the leech-gatherer, and hears, without understanding, his plain reply to the enquiry about himself and the prosaic 'occupation' he 'pursues':

The old man still stood talking by my side; But now his voice to me was like a stream Scarce heard; nor word from word could I divide; And the whole body of the man did seem Like one whom I had met with in a dream; Or like a man from some far region sent, To give me human strength, by apt admonishment.

The same question was asked again, and the answer was repeated. But

While he was talking thus, the lonely place, The old man's shape, and speech, all troubled me.

'Trouble' is a word not seldom employed by the poet to denote the confusion caused by some visionary experience. Here are, again, the fallings from us, vanishings, blank misgivings, dim fore-feelings of the soul's infinity.

Out of many ill.u.s.trations I will choose three more. There is in the _Prelude_, iv., the pa.s.sage (so strongly resembling _Resolution and Independence_ that I merely refer to it) where Wordsworth describes an old soldier suddenly seen, leaning against a milestone on the moon-lit road, all alone:

No living thing appeared in earth or air; And, save the flowing water's peaceful voice, Sound there was none ...

... still his form Kept the same awful steadiness--at his feet His shadow lay, and moved not.

His shadow proves he was no ghost; but a ghost was never ghostlier than he. And by him we may place the London beggar of _Prelude_, vii.:

How oft, amid those overflowing streets, Have I gone forward with the crowd, and said Unto myself, 'The face of every one That pa.s.ses by me is a mystery!'

Thus have I looked, nor ceased to look, oppressed By thoughts of what and whither, when and how, Until the shapes before my eyes became A second-sight procession, such as glides Over still mountains, or appears in dreams; And once, far-travelled in such mood, beyond The reach of common indication, lost Amid the moving pageant, I was smitten Abruptly, with the view (a sight not rare) Of a blind Beggar, who, with upright face, Stood, propped against a wall, upon his chest Wearing a written paper, to explain His story, whence he came, and who he was.

Caught by the spectacle my mind turned round As with the might of waters; an apt type This label seemed of the utmost we can know, Both of ourselves and of the universe; And, on the shape of that unmoving man, His steadfast face and sightless eyes, I gazed, As if admonished from another world.

Still more curious psychologically is the pa.s.sage, in the preceding book of the _Prelude_, which tells us of a similar shock and leads to the description of its effects. The more prosaically I introduce the pa.s.sage, the better. Wordsworth and Jones ('Jones, as from Calais southward you and I') set out to walk over the Simplon, then traversed only by a rough mule-track. They wandered out of the way, and, meeting a peasant, discovered from his answers to their questions that, without knowing it, they '_had crossed the Alps_.' This may not sound important, and the italics are Wordsworth's, not mine. But the next words are these:

Imagination--here the Power so called Through sad incompetence of human speech, That awful Power rose from the mind's abyss Like an unfathered vapour that enwraps, At once, some lonely traveller. I was lost; Halted without an effort to break through; But to my conscious soul I now can say-- 'I recognise thy glory': in such strength Of usurpation, when the light of sense Goes out, but with a flash that has revealed The invisible world, doth greatness make abode, There harbours; whether we be young or old, Our destiny, our being's heart and home, Is with infinitude, and only there; With hope it is, hope that can never die, Effort, and expectation, and desire, And something evermore about to be.

And what was the result of this shock? The poet may answer for himself in some of the greatest lines in English poetry. The travellers proceeded on their way down the Defile of Gondo.

Downwards we hurried fast, And, with the half-shaped road which we had missed, Entered a narrow chasm. The brook and road Were fellow-travellers in this gloomy strait, And with them did we journey several hours At a slow pace. The immeasurable height Of woods decaying, never to be decayed, The stationary blasts of waterfalls, And in the narrow rent at every turn Winds thwarting winds, bewildered and forlorn, The torrents shooting from the clear blue sky, The rocks that muttered close upon our ears, Black drizzling crags that spake by the way-side As if a voice were in them, the sick sight And giddy prospect of the raving stream, The unfettered clouds and region of the Heavens, Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light-- Were all like workings of one mind, the features Of the same face, blossoms upon one tree; Characters of the great Apocalypse, The types and symbols of Eternity, Of first, and last, and midst, and without end.[18]

I hardly think that 'the poet of Surrey, say, and the prophet of its life' could have written thus. And of all the poems to which I have lately referred, and all the pa.s.sages I have quoted, there are but two or three which do not cry aloud that their birth-place was the moor or the mountain, and that severed from their birth-place they would perish.

The more sublime they are, or the nearer they approach sublimity, the more is this true. The cry of the cuckoo in _O blithe new-comer_, though visionary, is not sublime; but, echoed by the mountain, it is

Like--but oh, how different![19]

It was among the mountains that Wordsworth, as he says of his Wanderer, _felt_ his faith. It was there that all things

Breathed immortality, revolving life, And greatness still revolving; infinite.

There littleness was not; the least of things Seemed infinite; and there his spirit shaped Her prospects, nor did he believe,--he _saw_.

And even if we count his vision a mere dream, still he put into words, as no other poet has, the spirit of the mountains.

Two voices are there; one is of the sea, One of the mountains; each a mighty voice.

And of the second of these we may say that 'few or none hears it right'

now he is gone.

Partly because he is the poet of mountains he is, even more pre-eminently, the poet of solitude. For there are tones in the mountain voice scarcely audible except in solitude, and the reader whom Wordsworth's greatest poetry baffles could have no better advice offered him than to do what he has probably never done in his life--to be on a mountain alone. But for Wordsworth not this solitude only, but all solitude and all things solitary had an extraordinary fascination.

The outward shows of sky and earth, Of hill and valley, he has viewed; And impulses _of deeper birth_ Have come to him in solitude.

The sense of solitude, it will readily be found, is essential to nearly all the poems and pa.s.sages we have been considering, and to some of quite a different character, such as the Daffodil stanzas. And it is not merely that the poet is alone; what he sees is so too. If the leech-gatherer and the soldier on the moon-lit road had not been solitary figures, they would not have awaked 'the visionary power'; and it is scarcely fanciful to add that if the boy who was watching for his father's ponies had had beside him any more than

The _single_ sheep and the _one_ blasted tree,

the mist would not have advanced along the roads 'in such indisputable shapes.' With Wordsworth that power seems to have sprung into life at once on the perception of loneliness. What is lonely is a spirit. To call a thing lonely or solitary is, with him, to say that it opens a bright or solemn vista into infinity. He himself 'wanders lonely as a cloud': he seeks the 'souls of lonely places': he listens in awe to

One voice, the solitary raven ...

An iron knell, with echoes from afar:

against the distant sky he descries the shepherd,

A solitary object and sublime, Above all height! like an aerial cross Stationed alone upon a spiry rock Of the Chartreuse, for worship.

But this theme might be pursued for hours, and I will refer only to two poems more. The editor of the _Golden Treasury_, a book never to be thought of without grat.i.tude, changed the t.i.tle _The Solitary_ _Reaper_ into _The Highland Reaper_. He may have had his reasons. Perhaps he had met some one who thought that the Reaper belonged to Surrey. Still the change was a mistake: the 'solitary' in Wordsworth's t.i.tle gave the keynote. The other poem is _Lucy Gray_. 'When I was little,' a lover of Wordsworth once said, 'I could hardly bear to read _Lucy Gray_, it made me feel so lonely.' Wordsworth called it _Lucy Gray, or Solitude_, and this young reader understood him. But there is too much, reason to fear that for half his readers his 'solitary child' is generalised into a mere 'little girl,' and that they never receive the main impression he wished to produce. Yet his intention is announced in the opening lines, and as clearly shown in the lovely final stanzas, which give even to this ballad the visionary touch which distinguishes it from _Alice Fell_:

Yet some maintain that to this day She is a living child; That you may see sweet Lucy Gray Upon the lonesome wild.

O'er rough and smooth she trips along, And never looks behind; And sings a solitary song That whistles in the wind.

The solitariness which exerted so potent a spell on Wordsworth had in it nothing 'Byronic.' He preached in the _Excursion_ against the solitude of 'self-indulging spleen.' He was even aware that he himself, though free from that weakness, had felt

perhaps too much The self-sufficing power of Solitude.[20]

No poet is more emphatically the poet of community. A great part of his verse--a part as characteristic and as precious as the part on which I have been dwelling--is dedicated to the affections of home and neighbourhood and country, and to that soul of joy and love which links together all Nature's children, and 'steals from earth to man, from man to earth.' And this soul is for him as truly the presence of 'the Being that is in the clouds and air' and in the mind of man as are the power, the darkness, the silence, the strange gleams and mysterious visitations which startle and confuse with intimations of infinity. But solitude and solitariness were to him, in the main, one of these intimations. They had not for him merely the 'eeriness' which they have at times for everyone, though that was essential to some of the poems we have reviewed. They were the symbol of power to stand alone, to be 'self-sufficing,' to dispense with custom and surroundings and aid and sympathy--a self-dependence at once the image and the communication of 'the soul of all the worlds.' Even when they were full of 'sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not,' the solitude of the Reaper or of Lucy, they so appealed to him. But they appealed also to that austerer strain which led him to love 'bare trees and mountains bare,'

and lonely places, and the bleak music of the old stone wall, and to dwell with awe, and yet with exultation, on the majesty of that 'unconquerable mind' which through long years holds its solitary purpose, sustains its solitary pa.s.sion, feeds upon its solitary anguish.

For this mind, as for the blind beggar or the leech-gatherer, the 'light of sense' and the sweetness of life have faded or 'gone out'; but in it 'greatness makes abode,' and it 'retains its station proud,' 'by form or image unprofaned.' Thus, in whatever guise it might present itself, solitariness 'carried far into his heart' the haunting sense of an 'invisible world'; of some Life beyond this 'transitory being' and 'unapproachable by death';

Of Life continuous, Being unimpaired; That hath been, is, and where it was and is There shall endure,--existence unexposed To the blind walk of mortal accident; From diminution safe and weakening age; While man grows old, and dwindles, and decays; And countless generations of mankind Depart; and leave no vestige where they trod.

For me, I confess, all this is far from being 'mere poetry'--partly because I do not believe that any such thing as 'mere poetry' exists.

But whatever kind or degree of truth we may find in all this, everything in Wordsworth that is sublime or approaches sublimity has, directly or more remotely, to do with it. And without this part of his poetry Wordsworth would be 'shorn of his strength,' and would no longer stand, as he does stand, nearer than any other poet of the Nineteenth Century to Milton.

NOTE.

I take this opportunity of airing a heresy about _We are Seven_.

Wordsworth's friend, James Tobin, who saw the _Lyrical Ballads_ while they were going through the press, told him that this poem would make him everlastingly ridiculous, and entreated him in vain to cancel it. I have forgotten how it was received in 1798, but it has long been one of the most popular of the ballad poems, and I do not think I have ever heard it ridiculed. I wonder, however, what its readers take to be the 'moral' of it, for I have never been able to convince myself that the 'moral' given in the poem itself truly represents the imaginative impression from which the poem arose.

The 'moral' is in this instance put at the beginning, in the mutilated opening stanza: