Weekly Response 3: Dissolution and Representation in the Poetry of Smith and Yearsley
Between Anne Yearsley’s confidence that the slave trade and the evils which it represents will be mitigated by an alternative divinity presented as “social love,” the “[t]rue soul of order,” and Charlotte Smith’s desire for “lovely Freedom in her genuine charms,/Aided by stern but equal Justice” to eradicate the “hell-born fiends/Of Pride, Oppression, Avarice and Revenge,” I encountered the prevalence of certain common anxieties and stated hopes in such poems as “The Emigrants” and “A Poem on the Inhumanity of the Slave-Trade” (Yearsley 168, 389; Smith 430-1, 433-4). Obviously, each poet expresses a preoccupation with the influence of external, yet intrinsically human corruption upon life and experience. Yearsley fluidly expresses the helplessness fostered by these elements in the indictment produced by Luco’s “inward storm” of “[f]ury, grief,/Alternate shame, the sense of insult” for which “words/Were no relief,” and in Luco’s experience, which fosters sympathy as well as outrage and a sense of personal responsibility (Yearsley 165, 249-52). Likewise—though I hesitate to draw a direct correspondence between the subject matter and approach of the respective poets—Smith laments the condition of the social contract of the time while hoping for a state which cannot be realized, which, although not necessarily embodied in a figure symbolic of her topic, produces a highly evocative, comparably helpless state of mind: “[h]ow often do I half abjure society/And sigh for some lone cottage, deep embowered/In the green woods that these steep chalky hills/Guard from the strong south-west” (Smith 103, 42-5). Here, the longing for a movement to a tranquil condition—Luco’s “happy hour” and the sort of innocent state spoken of in “Sonnet XXVII” Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets as a “green path” which “prompts” the “simple mirth” of children, only to be compromised by “thorns that lurking lay/To wound the wretched pilgrims of the earth”—evokes a strong response by sheer virtue of its apparent impossibility (Yearsley 163, 151; Smith 96, 6-8). Luco’s only hope lies in his “soul,” where his beloved “Incilanda stays,/Till both escape together;” accordingly, Smith’s hopes find their locus in the fundamentally insubstantial realms of memory and the imagination: “[o]h could the time return when thoughts like these/Spoiled not that gay delight which vernal suns/Illuminating hills, and woods, and fields,/Gave to my infant spirits” (Yearsley 166, 296-7; Smith 119, 325-8).
Although I was originally committed to exploring the themes emphasizing youth as the most refined state of peace shared in the works of Smith and William Wordsworth, the appearance of a resolving, if illusory agent in Yearsley’s work led me towards a preoccupation with how the problems raised by the latter two poets could be addressed. Yearsley, at least, would have no reason to pose her assault on slavery in so personal and confrontational a way as to note that “the Turk,/Pagan, or wildest Arab” each “frees his slave,” compared to the assumed Christian Briton reader, who must “[a]ct up to this” (Yearsley 167, 319-320, 323, 330). Hers is a poetry of purpose, designed to impress a will to change upon the reader, to permit the “high perfection” of social love to “touch the soul of man”—in effect, concretizing the abstract poetic forms which can threaten the forces which challenge innocence, purity, and order (Yearsley 169, 424, 420). Likewise, Smith does not aimlessly lament the supremacy of “tyrant Passion and corrosive Care;” instead, her poetry functions as a sort of imaginative crucible, capable of envisioning ideal worlds and diluting the struggles of life—in each case, the poetic work serves as a tool capable of manifesting new constructions in opposition to disorder (Smith 85, 11).
Bibliography
Smith, Charlotte. Elegiac Sonnets: the third edition. With twenty additional sonnets. Romanticism: an Anthology Third Edition. Ed. Duncan Wu. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006.
Smith, Charlotte. “The Emigrants: a Poem in Two Books.” Romanticism: an Anthology Third Edition. Ed. Duncan Wu. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006.
Yearsley, Anne. “A Poem on the Inhumanity of the Slave-Trade.” Romanticism: an Anthology Third Edition. Ed. Duncan Wu. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006.
Sympathetic Disconnect and Narrative Construction in Wordsworth’s The Thorn
In Wordsworth’s poem The Thorn, the narrative focuses on a woman, Martha Ray, and the observations made by two conversing character about her. What I find significant about this poem is the fact that the woman’s circumstances are treated more as a curiosity than genuinely felt for and sympathized with by the narrators of the poem.
The first indication that something is amiss comes in the form of the poem’s introductory stanzas. The first five stanzas focus exclusively on the description of a landscape, specifically a thorny growth that the narrator finds significant. There is foreshadowing of certain elements of the poem that are later introduced in much of the imagery in the fourth and fifth stanzas. The repetition of the phrase “infant’s grave” indicates that this image will become one of the primary problems of the poem, but it is significant to note that it is not until the sixth stanza that Martha Ray, the central character, is even introduced in form. Later, it is not until the eleventh stanza that she is given a name and a history to affix to her identity.
Before Martha Ray’s introduction in the sixth stanza, she is heralded as an undesired presence. The speaker of the poem warns the audience against her, suggesting “You must take care and choose your time the mountain when to cross.” (58-59) Her presence is implied to be unwanted and her existence in the space of the landscape to somehow diminish the “pond and beauteous hill of moss” (57) that the speaker has detailed in the first five stanzas. Her cries are not met with sympathy or pity beyond that of superficial language (“wretched woman,” “poor woman” [68, 81]). The language the speaker employs, “And to herself she cries” (64) is indicative of this disconnect. The speaker assumes the woman speaks only to herself, suggesting that the speaker has already placed a distance between himself and the suffering woman and disallows for any genuine sympathetic connection.
Not only is Martha Ray spoken of as an inconvenience to the speakers, but the tragic details of her life are relayed as gossip and sensational conjecture. Hers is obviously as story that has been retold many time (“cruel fire, they say, into her bones was sent” [120-130], “Old Farmer Simpson did maintain…” [149]) and likely added to and exaggerated through its many incarnations. Furthermore, the fate of the infant is transformed into a mystery and numerous speculations are made on the ‘true fate’ of the child, disregarding entirely the emotional state and well-being of Martha Ray.
The only words that come from Martha Ray directly, albeit through the speaker, are the repeated lamentations at the end of a number of stanzas. The entirety of her story is fabricated by the speaker or exists through fabrications made by others and relayed by the speaker to the audience. The speaker creates the narrative in the same way that the speaker visualizes the infant’s face in the landscape in stanza twenty-one.
Because “all and each agree,” (218) a reality is created in the mind, regardless of whether or not the facts are correct. I am deeply concerned with the speaker’s lack of real sympathy and implicit contempt for the unfortunate circumstances of Martha Ray and I cannot help but think that the human impulse to assign causality and connection between perceived events may be partially the reason for this divide.
In his Note to ‘The Thorn’ William Wordsworth describes the speaker of his poem as a character through which the author may, “exhibit some of the general laws by which superstition acts upon the mind” (508). Throughout the poem the reader is invited to explore a movement from the concrete to the figurative, and finally to the formation narrative. This movement seems at first to suggest the psychological of the formation of superstition, in which meaning is inaccurately assigned to the exterior world. However, in Wordsworth’s poem, superstition is created as a result of representing and re-representing. There seems to be an additional worry that the very system of representing inevitably leads to a gap between a signifier and that which is signified.
Section I of The Thorn offers the most concrete description of the thorn in its surroundings:
There is a thorn, it looks so old, In truth you’d find it hard to say How it could ever have been young. It looks so old and grey. (375)
The first four lines are deceptively simple, for though they seem grounded in a direct dialogue with the actual object of the thorn, there is an underlining question as to the actual quality of the representation. The description of the thorn is mediated through a subject to the reader. “It looks” and “you’d find it hard to say” rely on a subjective presence relaying the information of the scene. The reader does not have direct access to the object, but a relatively fixed, subjective representation of it. The regular meter of Section I supports a subjective medium; the reader is not experiencing the thorn, but rather a cultivated organization of someone else’s perceptions.
The phrase “In truth” presents the first sign of worry that a system of representing may not lead to that which has been represented. “In truth” reads as a pretext, asserting that proceeding perceptions, particularly the words “old and grey” are true to both the reader and the speaker of the poem. However, in asserting the truth of the representation, the speaker acknowledges the possibility that the representation may not in fact be true. As a pretext, “In truth” is something to be questioned, not something necessarily evident. It seems the worry may be merited, for the reader is dealing with a rhythmically measured representation of the thorn. The subjective speaker has reorganized his original perceptions, creating a disjuncture between representation and the actual. This disjuncture seems inevitable given a subjective presence, in which case the worry is not simply that superstition may be formed as an act of certain psychological processes, but rather that the system of representing (language in the case of poetry) is somehow incapable of relating to the actual.
Section II moves the reader farther from the thorn. Its opening lines, “Like rock or stone, it is o’ergrown / with lichens to the very top, / And hung with heavy tufts of moss, / a melancholy crop” is not simply a retelling the closing of section II, “It stands erect and, like a stone, / With lichens it is overgrown” but rather a reconsideration (375). The certainty of the stone simile is reconsidered with the addition of the nearly synonymous word, “rock.” However, the movement is extraordinarily significant: the reader is asked to include “rock” into original representation of the thorn. He/She is not simply adding to the original thorn presented in section I, but rather altering the original thorn. In the process the gap between the represented and the actual is increased. The represented becomes something fluid and amendable; it is not in the same fixed state as the actual.
Similarly, Section II begins to move further into the figurative. The lichens are no longer simply overgrowing, but are hung in tufts. The lines:
Up from the earth these mosses creep, And this poor thorn they clasp it round So close, you’d say that they were bent With plain and manifest intent
mythologize the moss on the thorn (375). The moss becomes an agent emerging from the earth, while the thorn becomes a victim of some tragic, “manifest intent.” The subjective presence of the speaker that emerges again in “you’d say,” connects the original representation of Section I to the figurative representation of Section II. As the reader moves farther from the original representation, he/she also travels physically farther from the thorn itself. The speaker’s description moves from thorn to moss to ground, and finally in Section III to the mountain on which the thorn sits. The speaker is not providing a context for the thorn, but rather a figurative submersion. As result, the reader is continually distanced from the thorn by a process of re-representing.
The figurative descriptions of the thorn re-enters the poem as the speaker digresses to the narrative of Martha Ray. Ray emerges in the poem through metaphor. In the description of the moss, “As if by hand of lady fair / The work had woven been” Ray is present as a figurative description, but in the following section she becomes a literal character crying repeating a mournful cry. Descriptions of the thorn as, “not higher than a two year’s child”, and the description of the moss as, “like an infant’s grave in size” similarly become a literal presence in the unknown fate of Ray’s child (375,376). The speaker constructs an entire narrative from an this associative process, taking representations of the thorn and molding them into representations of an event. The gap between signifier and signified allows the speaker to remove the actual thorn from the poem almost entirely; since representations in language are fluid they can actually transfer from one signified to another.
There is a search for the actual in the speakers retelling. Throughout the poem he paraphrases the sentiment, “Oh wherefore, wherefore, tell me why / Does she repeat that doleful cry? / ‘I cannot tell, I wish I could” (377). Both the speaker and Martha Ray find themselves repeating the same representations. Ray’s cries are echoed in the speaker’s discovery that language has a self-referential and fluid quality, in which it can not relate to that which is signified. The reader is left with neither solace nor resignation in the end of the search, but only the refrain of Ray’s cries “Oh misery, Oh misery! / Oh woe is me! Oh misery!” (382).
In Charlotte Smith’s poem The Emigrants, Smith claims, in a time when it was dangerous to do so, that the people and clergy that were cast out from their homes were responsible for the crimes that they committed, but that does not make their punishment just. Two wrongs do not make a right for her. Her poem makes the argument that while the exiled clergy and nobility exiles may have been wrong, the people who took their place afterwards and those that were responsible for taking advantage of the positions they left behind were much worse. The people that were running them out were the ones that took over what they left behind. In the process of blaming them for their wrongs, the accusers became what they were fighting against. She says in Book 1 that while punishing people for their crimes, “man, misguided man,/ Mars the fair work that he was bid enjoy,/ And makes himself the evil he deplores” (Lines 32-35). This poem focuses on the people that may have been guilty, but it also shows sympathy for them and their predicament. Smith has a connection with them and their situation and shows how they might have been wrong, but they also suffer for their crimes. While they suffer, those who were responsible for their situation gain from it and turn into what they were previously arguing against.
It is easy to see the sympathy Smith has for these exiled people. She writes about the people they now walk among, poor people that the once upper class have now become. We get these images and see the pain and suffering that they go through, the hardships that come with being poor, but then she switches her perspective back to the people who were once rich. She argues that they feel the pain and suffering far worse than those that were born into it when she says that “The exiled nobles from their country driven,/ Whose richest luxuries were theirs, must feel/ More poignant anguish than the lowest poor,/ Who, born to indigence, have learned to brave/ Rigid Adversity’s depressing breath!” (lines 310-14). Because they were not used to the life that they have been forced into, they are put in a place of shock and sudden pain. While the naturally poor people have built up a tolerance for pain, made it feel like a sort of dull ache, the once noble people feel it fresh. They lived lives where they were pampered, and now their soft flesh is being torn into by a sharp, hard, sudden stabbing pain. They experience the same things, but they feel them much differently.
Smith does not blame the clergy and nobility who are now suffering and paying for their past crimes, but the people who placed them there in the first place. She says to those that put them there that they are “Giddy with pride, and as ye rise, forgetting/ The dust ye lately left, with scorn look down/ On those beneath ye (though your equals once/ in fortune, and in worth superior still/ They view the eminence on which ye stand/ With wonder, not with envy, for they know/ The means by which ye reached it” (lines 319-325). They blamed the rich for being rich, fighting against them for living a life of nobility, only to jump at the chance to take their place the moment the position opened up. It is the hypocrites she blames the most because they should have known better. They fought so strongly against the people they exiled and everything they stood for, but didn’t hesitate to take over their places. The nobility and clergy have paid, we see the sympathy she has for them. The ones who claimed hatred for the nobility but snatched it at the first chance are the ones that are truly to blame.
So that it will be the wish of the Poet to bring his feelings near to those of the persons whose feelings he describes, nay, for short spaces of time perhaps, to let himself slip into an entire delusion, and even confound and identify his own feelings with theirs; modifying only the language which is thus suggested to him, by a consideration that he describes for a particular purpose, that of giving pleasure. -Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 1802
I apologize in advance for the fact that this will be filled with uncertain quotations or paraphrases which I hope are acceptable because of the informal nature of these responses. BUT, the above quote is interesting to me in that it expresses a sentiment that has been discussed many places and many times before. The two primary examples that come to mind are about weather and soap. Hemingway said (though I again apologize, I’m not sure where) that when one is writing, she must so totally invest herself in her story that she knows the weather of the place. This is exemplified in his work Garden of Eden in which the protagonist, a writer, is writing a story about Africa and Hemingway writes in a way that suggests he is actually in Africa. Though the suggestion that a writer should know the weather of a place seems obvious, a much more intensive approach to this same idea was said by a writer I cannot remember the name of. She said, when discussing her characters, that a writer should know her characters so well she knows what sort of soap the character uses. This is similar to what Wordsworth is suggesting, but he takes it a step further. It is not enough for a writer to be familiar with the facts of an environment; he has to invest himself totally and begin to actually feel what he is describing.
Here, then, he will apply the principle on which I have so much insisted, namely, that of selection; on this he will depend for removing what would otherwise be painful or disgusting in the passion; he will feel that there is no necessity to trick out or to elevate nature: and, the more industriously he applies this principle, the deeper will be his faith that no words, which his fancy or imagination can suggest, will be to be compared with those which are the emanations of reality and truth. -Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 1802
The continuation of the discussion again mirrors a sentiment put forward by Hemingway. First echoed is what Hemingway is strongly associated with within the public –his apparent terseness and desire to tell things simply as they are. This sentiment is expressed in A Moveable Feast when Hemingway, trying to write, tells himself to simply write one true thing and go on from there. However, I take issue with this section because there seems to be a direct contradiction. First, Wordsworth says that a writer should edit what he is portraying, “removing” things that are “painful or disgusting.” Then, he suggests that a writer will see no need to alter nature, but that it can be presented purely. This is a very interesting perspective, because Wordsworth reveals here that he sees the writer and the human mind as a necessary filter to achieve or represent the true nature of the world. Though writers should avoid the “poetic” vernacular he discusses in his appendix On Poetic Diction, and should work to describe things clearly and truly, ultimately, the writer should choose what is displayed and relayed to the reader. So though writers should try to accurately, plainly describe the world and should do it by trying to get as close as possible to the true feeling they are trying to write, Wordsworth is keen to point out that on its own, passion has parts that are “painful or disgusting.” This is to say that a writer, and all people, cannot take nature at its base, but have to filter parts out to get to something true. I’m not totally clear on this and I realize we read only excerpts, but it seems Wordsworth is here not celebrating nature as the greatest elemental force, but humans. I dig it.
Text cited: http://ssad.bowdoin.edu:8668 /space/Preface+to+Lyrical+Ballads, +1802
William Wordsworth’s epic poem The Prelude provides a very interesting reading experience. Book V was very telling as Wordsworth shared a large part of his past and detailed his relationship with nature and literature. This relationship proved to be one that Wordsworth would struggle to keep strong as he ventured into different parts of his own awareness. And because this Book is told from first person, the reader is able to feel more connected to the text and read the Book as though it were a story and not strictly a book or compilation of prose. The beginning starts out with a focus on sadness and the complexities of a life not fully lived. Words like sorrow, weight, deathless, weep and depressed fill the first stanza forcing the reader into a very dark world. It’s also interesting to note that Wordsworth would revise this Book and in 1850 it would be re-released and read very differently (because he spent forty-five years editing it and changing specific passages). The tone will change in future editions, but it’s worth mentioning how they began. This tendency in the beginning to highlight a “soul divine which we participate, a deathless spirit. Thou also, man, hast wrought, for commerce of thy nature with itself, things worthy of unconquerable life; and yet we feel…that these must perish” (Wordsworth 152) is something that causes the reader to pause. The mention of nature automatically makes one question what they are about to read. Is this a work about a man’s relationship with nature and how it inspires him to create? Or is it something altogether different about a lost notion of one’s own self and how the feeling of not knowing is ultimately going to cause discomfort and lead to misery? I enjoy Wordsworth toying with the reader and setting somewhat of an unsettling beginning; this makes the reader want to find out for themselves what is represented and what one will learn after they experience this very personal reading.
Towards the middle of Book V, Wordsworth ventures into an interesting (although not that surprising considering the conditions and time period he was writing in) connection between nature and its relation to God and the supernatural. By claiming “for what we may become, and what we need, than Nature’s self which is the breath of God” (Wordsworth 162). This is catching because Wordsworth could be possibly saying that everything in our lives that mean anything (our futures, especially) are ultimately related to nature and then to God, making everyone connected to each other in harmony. Even the earlier notion of music and memory are all rooted together, flowing together. This creates an alluring idea.
The end of the Book seems to be a little narrower than the beginning as Wordsworth’s voice is slightly more prevalent. His likeness for reading and literature is brought up several times towards the end and he happily concludes that “thus far a scanty record is deduced of what I owed to books in early life” (Wordsworth 184). He is giving homage to the pleasure that he had always gotten out of books. It’s also interesting that it’s only on the page before that he still seems to be struggling with his experience with nature, a topic that I’m sure will come up in the following books.
Brigette Jolene Todt Eng 344 April 18, 2008 Response #3 – Charlotte Smith
Critics of Charlotte Smith both praised and criticized her works, the latter due in large part because of the emotional influence on her writing. This emotional influence is rooted deeply in the female experience or the time and particularly her own, which, in a field and world still dominated by men, was not something critics wanted to take seriously. This emotional factor can especially be seen in the Elegiac Sonnets where Smith uses the sonnet form to write about ideas as the ‘beloved’ and works in some themes of sorrow.
Smith had a fairly good early life but encountered numerous hardships later on. Her father “arranged for his eldest daughter (Smith) to marry a wealthy West India merchant,” which she described as being “sold, a legal prostitute,” (Wu p 78). Her husband turned out to be “a spendthrift,” and “behave abusively and violently,” and ended up spending some time incarcerated. Smith had to provide for her family and so “decided to publish a book in order to raise funds, and began writing sonnets,” (p 78). She spent many unhappy years of her life due to her husband before “He finally announced in early 1788 that he was leaving,” (p 79). Therefore Smith had many distressing experiences from which to draw to create her sonnets.
Instances of this emotional and personal influence can be found throughout the Elegiac Sonnets. The Preface to the First Edition would perhaps leave you expecting as much when she writes, “Some very melancholy moments have been beguiled by expressing in verse the sensations those memories brought,” (Wu, Smith p 84). In Sonnet I she writes of being “doomed to tread,” in line 2 and later in sonnet there are mentions of “mourning,” and “unhappy Love” in line 12 (p 85). The closing line, “If those paint sorrow best who feel in most!” also speaks to such influences (ln 14 p 85).
Sonnet II Written at the Close of Spring also has melancholy themes in it. It speaks of “poor humanity,” “tyrant Passion,” and “corrosive Care,” (Wu, Smith lns 9, 11 p 85). In line 14 it is asked “why has happiness no second spring?” suggesting that though nature’s cycle will always bring spring back and things will flourish once more, but that kind of assured happiness is not possible for humanity (p 85). Sonnet III To a Nightingale also mentions things like “hast thou felt from friends some cruel wrong,” and “martyr of disastrous love,” (lns 11, 12 p 85). Then in Sonnet VI To Hope she casts hope as being troublesome as well.
Critics did not take very kindly to such emotional and depressing content. One reason for this perhaps being that Smith did not seem content with her lot as a woman and instead of playing out her life in the role of the ideal female who writes about things women should write about, she feeds in personal inspiration into her works that critics do not want to hear about. In his introduction to Smith, Wu gives an example of a criticism from Gentleman’s Magazine which wrote,
“We cannot, however, forbear expressing a hope that the misfortunes she so often hints at, are all imaginary. We must have perused her very tender and exquisite effusions with diminished pleasure, could we have supposed her sorrows to be real. It would be hard indeed if a lady, who has so much contributed to the delight of others, should feel any want of happiness herself.” (Wu, Gentleman’s Magazine, p 78).
Later on Wu refers to an article in British Critic which has a similar view of Smith’s work. It makes mention of feeling “compassion at the sad allusion to sorrows, which the writer…tells us she has suffered,” but is critical of this same thing saying that “as critics, we cannot approve of the egotism,” (Wu, British Critic p 80). They admit that Smith is a type of poetic “genius” but that is a waste when not “employed on subjects that become a good and great mind,” and they “lament that, the gifted powers of imagination should be so grossly perverted,” (Wu, British Critic p 80). The critics tend to take a negative opinion of the way that Smith’s “tenderness and sensibility” are incorporated in all her works so well. Instead of writing about pleasant things, Smith wrote about things that she could draw personal inspiration from.
Carolyn Hanig Gina Franco Romantic Literature 18 April 2008 Response to “The Thorn” There seems to be a very close relationship between the thorn and the child of the woman who has died supposedly. The thorn “looks so old and grey” (4) yet it stands “Not higher than a two years’ child” (5). These are two images that give opposite descriptors about the same object. The opposition adds to the ambiguity about whether or not the thorn is what is buried that I find similar to the ambiguity in William Blake’s “First Book of Urizen.” At the end of the second stanza the people the narrator describes “bury this poor thorn for ever” (22), but in the fourth stanza it is “close beside” (34) the grave of the child. It seems that Wordsworth is trying to connect these two things very closely. Perhaps he is suggesting that the woman’s child is closely related to the pain that she feels about not being married. She repeats “Oh misery! Oh misery!” (64) over and over again, as if she were being constantly reminded by the thorn or the grave that she is in disgrace or perhaps that her baby has died. The grief is also ambiguous because one is not sure of whether the woman is grieving for the baby or the thorn. The narrator’s knowledge fails: “No more I know” (155). The reader is left in ignorance of what the thorn actually means to the woman, and has no clue to what the ambiguity actually means. The narrator actually questions this: “but what is the thorn?’” (210). As one follows the poem further, one can see that the narrator is actually questioning what the thorn means to her. It seems as if the narrator is making a big effort to leave the thorn ambiguous. Perhaps it means the pain of the woman or perhaps the child is the thorn he is talking about but I don’t think that Wordsworth wants us to quite be too sure about what it actually is. I thought it was interesting how Wordsworth incorporated the reader into his own work. He says to us “now would you see this aged thorn… you must take care and choose your time” (56-58). Wordsworth is giving the reader advice of what to do were the reader to actually visit the place mentioned. In this way the reader is incorporated into this investigation of the thorn-child phenomenon and we can be engaged somewhat in what is happening within the poem.
Works Cited Wordsworth, William. “The Thorn.” Ed. Wu, Duncan. Romanticism: An Anthology; Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing. 2006. pages 375-382.
Because a new "Response #..." hasn't been posted yet, I'll post my fourth response here. FELLOW STUDENTS: DON'T DO THIS BECAUSE I DID IT. I don't want to start a counterproductive trend or anything. That said:
Response 4: Poetic Formulas on Display in the Works of Wordsworth and Coleridge Scott Offutt/April 25, 2008
Given the substantial number of texts included in the roster for possible explication this week, I was drawn to consider some of the major ideas which appear to be shared by the various poets whose writings and commentaries we have been asked to read with their respective proclivities in mind, rather than generate an overview or broad analysis per se. As such, because I have been fascinated with the implications of some of Wordsworth’s commentaries, especially his affirmations, “words […] ought to be weighed in the balance of feeling,” and “poetry is passion: it is the history or science of feelings,” this response will be oriented toward analyzing the condition of poetry as an emotional science in “The Thorn,” and toward understanding the extensions and permutations of that condition in Coleridge’s poetry, as it appears to be considered to at least some extent in the latter poet’s work (Wordsworth 508).
Although Coleridge professes to be “at all times and in all modes of excellence […] inferior” to Wordsworth, a direct relationship between the ethos of his writing and that of the latter poet should not be inferred—instead, the distinctions between their methods should be illuminated by a comparison of their notions of the poetic consciousness (Coleridge 612). In “The Thorn,” Wordsworth generates emotion by, as the “Note to ‘The Thorn’” indicates, presenting his content in the voice of a “common” rhetorical figure who is “prone to superstition,” and given to “deep feelings,” as well as repeating certain lines, such as the woman in the scarlet cloak’s “‘Oh misery! Oh misery! Oh woe is me!’” in the expression of total loss (Wordsworth 507, 508; 377, 65-66). The tone of the poem and the accompanying severity of its respective agents facilitate the emergence of strong images—the thorn, the “beauteous” hill of moss, the pond in which “[a] baby and a baby’s face” may be seen—which resonate to such an extent as to impress virtually canonical attributes upon the scene and its components (376, 36; 381, 228). “The Thorn” transcends the status of a fable or bleak anecdote, instead testing the limitations of poetry as a way of intensifying emotion, and solidifying vision.
Where Wordsworth appears to be preoccupied with examining the establishment of emotion and thought as solid, describable forms, I encountered a greater interest in the relationship between the world as an artistic construction and the world itself in Coleridge’s poetry, guided by personal engagement with imaginative states and creative ways of viewing the world. In the early version of “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” Coleridge freely perceives the reaches of the “springy heath” and the “great city” despite being immobilized, and even develops a connection between his absent friends and himself in the passing of the “last rook”—and, more importantly, in the realization that “[n]o sound is dissonant which tells of Life,” that is, an association with the vital forces within the purview of the mind on any level is sympathetic with all others, whether immediately sensible or not (Coleridge 614, 5, 13; 616, 55). In the earlier version of “Frost at Midnight,” he again contemplates a rich external scene in isolation from the “inmates of my cottage,” who are “all at rest,” dwelling not on the “curious toys” of the “self-watching subtilizing mind” but on dreamscapes populated by an undefined “stranger,” and distinguished familiarly as “my sweet birthplace” (624, 4; 626, 26, 27, 31, 33). Rather than externalizing the inner reaches of his consciousness, Coleridge experiments with the internalization of the physical world within his mind, and the limitless artistic possibilities afforded by potential success in that effort.
Works Cited
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. “Frost at Midnight (composed February 1798).” Romanticism: an Anthology Third Edition. Ed. Duncan Wu. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006.
——. “Letter from S.T. Coleridge to Robert Southey, 17 July 1797 (including early version of ‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison’).” Romanticism: an Anthology Third Edition. Ed. Duncan Wu. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006.
Wordsworth, William. “Note to ‘The Thorn.’” Romanticism: an Anthology Third Edition. Ed. Duncan Wu. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006.
——. “The Thorn.” Romanticism: an Anthology Third Edition. Ed. Duncan Wu. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006.
Response for 05/02/08. I'm not quite sure where I ended up with this, but I thought the ideas were worth exploring.
Crime, Pleasure and Obsessive Thought
Reading Wordsworth’s “On the Character of Rivers” in such close quarters with Godwin’s ‘Love of Justice’ from “Political Justice” has inevitably caused me to consider the dialogue between the two works. Regardless of how much Wordsworth considered Godwin’s philosophies during the conception of the Rivers character, Wordsworth’s explanation of Rivers’ logical process complicates the ideas of justice and moral relativity brought up by Godwin.
In ‘Love of Justice’ Godwin suggests that the first crime occurred when one person “took advantage of the weakness of his neighbors to secure certain exclusive privileges to himself.” (Godwin 153) By creating an imbalance, it becomes easier for those who have less than others to justify actions that other individuals and society would deem criminal. Wordsworth implies that Rivers is such a character who, after being involved in some manner of crime, loses the privileges he previously possessed. He becomes with obsessed with the idea of good and evil and “to hunt out whatever is bad in actions usually esteemed virtuous and to detect the good in actions which the universal sense of mankind teaches us to reprobate.” (Wordsworth 62) This reinvention of his worldview goes hand-in-hand with his quest to regain the power he lost. Rivers attempts to assuage his guilt, but his guilt is the direct result of self-pity and selfish fixation rather than a genuine repentance for his crimes.
Godwin implies and Wordsworth expounds upon the idea of crime as the result of an obsessive fixation. The creation of the moral relativity, the process of ‘justifying’ the act, is a highly intellectual task. Wordsworth describes Rivers as “a young Man of great intellectual powers, yet without any sold principles of genuine benevolence.” (Wordsworth 62) Godwin also describes the creations of a “sophistry” (Godwin 153) to which the perpetrator attributes his actions. Wordsworth borrows this language to describe Rivers’ actions: “He is perpetually imposing upon himself; he has a sophism for every crime.” (Wordsworth 64) Rivers cannot help but fixate on the crimes he has committed and in fixating he spurs a need to constantly reassure himself of his own justifications. In constructing justification for previous crimes he allows for the enactment of future crimes. Thus, the cycle is perpetuated.
There is an implication made that the obsessive ‘meditations’ that Rivers uses to construct his own morally gray reality is the function of passion and not of reason. Wordsworth states that “[t]he mild effusions of thought, the milk of human reason, are unknown to him.” (Wordsworth 64) Furthermore, Rivers turns more easily to vice than virtue because vice offers a sense of immediate gratification that is rarely present in the doing of good deeds. The exact words used are “immediate, palpable and extensive” to describe the effects of a vicious act. This creates a clear separation of mild, reasonable thought from the impassioned, obsessive act of Rivers’ cycle of criminal acts. Rivers begins with the goal of reestablishing the power that was lost to him, but to fill the void left by his trauma he naturally turns to obsession and repetition. Rivers is also impressed by his own cleverness in that he takes pleasure in the idea that he can justify his crimes. Attaching passion and pleasure to moral ambiguity further complicates the issue of universal human justice and the ability of humans, even those of “great intellectual powers” to uphold those ideals.
10 comments:
Weekly Response 3: Dissolution and Representation in the Poetry of Smith and Yearsley
Between Anne Yearsley’s confidence that the slave trade and the evils which it represents will be mitigated by an alternative divinity presented as “social love,” the “[t]rue soul of order,” and Charlotte Smith’s desire for “lovely Freedom in her genuine charms,/Aided by stern but equal Justice” to eradicate the “hell-born fiends/Of Pride, Oppression, Avarice and Revenge,” I encountered the prevalence of certain common anxieties and stated hopes in such poems as “The Emigrants” and “A Poem on the Inhumanity of the Slave-Trade” (Yearsley 168, 389; Smith 430-1, 433-4). Obviously, each poet expresses a preoccupation with the influence of external, yet intrinsically human corruption upon life and experience. Yearsley fluidly expresses the helplessness fostered by these elements in the indictment produced by Luco’s “inward storm” of “[f]ury, grief,/Alternate shame, the sense of insult” for which “words/Were no relief,” and in Luco’s experience, which fosters sympathy as well as outrage and a sense of personal responsibility (Yearsley 165, 249-52). Likewise—though I hesitate to draw a direct correspondence between the subject matter and approach of the respective poets—Smith laments the condition of the social contract of the time while hoping for a state which cannot be realized, which, although not necessarily embodied in a figure symbolic of her topic, produces a highly evocative, comparably helpless state of mind: “[h]ow often do I half abjure society/And sigh for some lone cottage, deep embowered/In the green woods that these steep chalky hills/Guard from the strong south-west” (Smith 103, 42-5). Here, the longing for a movement to a tranquil condition—Luco’s “happy hour” and the sort of innocent state spoken of in “Sonnet XXVII” Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets as a “green path” which “prompts” the “simple mirth” of children, only to be compromised by “thorns that lurking lay/To wound the wretched pilgrims of the earth”—evokes a strong response by sheer virtue of its apparent impossibility (Yearsley 163, 151; Smith 96, 6-8). Luco’s only hope lies in his “soul,” where his beloved “Incilanda stays,/Till both escape together;” accordingly, Smith’s hopes find their locus in the fundamentally insubstantial realms of memory and the imagination: “[o]h could the time return when thoughts like these/Spoiled not that gay delight which vernal suns/Illuminating hills, and woods, and fields,/Gave to my infant spirits” (Yearsley 166, 296-7; Smith 119, 325-8).
Although I was originally committed to exploring the themes emphasizing youth as the most refined state of peace shared in the works of Smith and William Wordsworth, the appearance of a resolving, if illusory agent in Yearsley’s work led me towards a preoccupation with how the problems raised by the latter two poets could be addressed. Yearsley, at least, would have no reason to pose her assault on slavery in so personal and confrontational a way as to note that “the Turk,/Pagan, or wildest Arab” each “frees his slave,” compared to the assumed Christian Briton reader, who must “[a]ct up to this” (Yearsley 167, 319-320, 323, 330). Hers is a poetry of purpose, designed to impress a will to change upon the reader, to permit the “high perfection” of social love to “touch the soul of man”—in effect, concretizing the abstract poetic forms which can threaten the forces which challenge innocence, purity, and order (Yearsley 169, 424, 420). Likewise, Smith does not aimlessly lament the supremacy of “tyrant Passion and corrosive Care;” instead, her poetry functions as a sort of imaginative crucible, capable of envisioning ideal worlds and diluting the struggles of life—in each case, the poetic work serves as a tool capable of manifesting new constructions in opposition to disorder (Smith 85, 11).
Bibliography
Smith, Charlotte. Elegiac Sonnets: the third edition. With twenty additional sonnets. Romanticism: an Anthology Third Edition. Ed. Duncan Wu. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006.
Smith, Charlotte. “The Emigrants: a Poem in Two Books.” Romanticism: an Anthology Third Edition. Ed. Duncan Wu. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006.
Yearsley, Anne. “A Poem on the Inhumanity of the Slave-Trade.” Romanticism: an Anthology Third Edition. Ed. Duncan Wu. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006.
Sympathetic Disconnect and Narrative Construction in Wordsworth’s The Thorn
In Wordsworth’s poem The Thorn, the narrative focuses on a woman, Martha Ray, and the observations made by two conversing character about her. What I find significant about this poem is the fact that the woman’s circumstances are treated more as a curiosity than genuinely felt for and sympathized with by the narrators of the poem.
The first indication that something is amiss comes in the form of the poem’s introductory stanzas. The first five stanzas focus exclusively on the description of a landscape, specifically a thorny growth that the narrator finds significant. There is foreshadowing of certain elements of the poem that are later introduced in much of the imagery in the fourth and fifth stanzas. The repetition of the phrase “infant’s grave” indicates that this image will become one of the primary problems of the poem, but it is significant to note that it is not until the sixth stanza that Martha Ray, the central character, is even introduced in form. Later, it is not until the eleventh stanza that she is given a name and a history to affix to her identity.
Before Martha Ray’s introduction in the sixth stanza, she is heralded as an undesired presence. The speaker of the poem warns the audience against her, suggesting “You must take care and choose your time the mountain when to cross.” (58-59) Her presence is implied to be unwanted and her existence in the space of the landscape to somehow diminish the “pond and beauteous hill of moss” (57) that the speaker has detailed in the first five stanzas. Her cries are not met with sympathy or pity beyond that of superficial language (“wretched woman,” “poor woman” [68, 81]). The language the speaker employs, “And to herself she cries” (64) is indicative of this disconnect. The speaker assumes the woman speaks only to herself, suggesting that the speaker has already placed a distance between himself and the suffering woman and disallows for any genuine sympathetic connection.
Not only is Martha Ray spoken of as an inconvenience to the speakers, but the tragic details of her life are relayed as gossip and sensational conjecture. Hers is obviously as story that has been retold many time (“cruel fire, they say, into her bones was sent” [120-130], “Old Farmer Simpson did maintain…” [149]) and likely added to and exaggerated through its many incarnations. Furthermore, the fate of the infant is transformed into a mystery and numerous speculations are made on the ‘true fate’ of the child, disregarding entirely the emotional state and well-being of Martha Ray.
The only words that come from Martha Ray directly, albeit through the speaker, are the repeated lamentations at the end of a number of stanzas. The entirety of her story is fabricated by the speaker or exists through fabrications made by others and relayed by the speaker to the audience. The speaker creates the narrative in the same way that the speaker visualizes the infant’s face in the landscape in stanza twenty-one.
Because “all and each agree,” (218) a reality is created in the mind, regardless of whether or not the facts are correct. I am deeply concerned with the speaker’s lack of real sympathy and implicit contempt for the unfortunate circumstances of Martha Ray and I cannot help but think that the human impulse to assign causality and connection between perceived events may be partially the reason for this divide.
Representation in The Thorn
In his Note to ‘The Thorn’ William Wordsworth describes the speaker of his poem as a character through which the author may, “exhibit some of the general laws by which superstition acts upon the mind” (508). Throughout the poem the reader is invited to explore a movement from the concrete to the figurative, and finally to the formation narrative. This movement seems at first to suggest the psychological of the formation of superstition, in which meaning is inaccurately assigned to the exterior world. However, in Wordsworth’s poem, superstition is created as a result of representing and re-representing. There seems to be an additional worry that the very system of representing inevitably leads to a gap between a signifier and that which is signified.
Section I of The Thorn offers the most concrete description of the thorn in its surroundings:
There is a thorn, it looks so old,
In truth you’d find it hard to say
How it could ever have been young.
It looks so old and grey. (375)
The first four lines are deceptively simple, for though they seem grounded in a direct dialogue with the actual object of the thorn, there is an underlining question as to the actual quality of the representation. The description of the thorn is mediated through a subject to the reader. “It looks” and “you’d find it hard to say” rely on a subjective presence relaying the information of the scene. The reader does not have direct access to the object, but a relatively fixed, subjective representation of it. The regular meter of Section I supports a subjective medium; the reader is not experiencing the thorn, but rather a cultivated organization of someone else’s perceptions.
The phrase “In truth” presents the first sign of worry that a system of representing may not lead to that which has been represented. “In truth” reads as a pretext, asserting that proceeding perceptions, particularly the words “old and grey” are true to both the reader and the speaker of the poem. However, in asserting the truth of the representation, the speaker acknowledges the possibility that the representation may not in fact be true. As a pretext, “In truth” is something to be questioned, not something necessarily evident. It seems the worry may be merited, for the reader is dealing with a rhythmically measured representation of the thorn. The subjective speaker has reorganized his original perceptions, creating a disjuncture between representation and the actual. This disjuncture seems inevitable given a subjective presence, in which case the worry is not simply that superstition may be formed as an act of certain psychological processes, but rather that the system of representing (language in the case of poetry) is somehow incapable of relating to the actual.
Section II moves the reader farther from the thorn. Its opening lines, “Like rock or stone, it is o’ergrown / with lichens to the very top, / And hung with heavy tufts of moss, / a melancholy crop” is not simply a retelling the closing of section II, “It stands erect and, like a stone, / With lichens it is overgrown” but rather a reconsideration (375). The certainty of the stone simile is reconsidered with the addition of the nearly synonymous word, “rock.” However, the movement is extraordinarily significant: the reader is asked to include “rock” into original representation of the thorn. He/She is not simply adding to the original thorn presented in section I, but rather altering the original thorn. In the process the gap between the represented and the actual is increased. The represented becomes something fluid and amendable; it is not in the same fixed state as the actual.
Similarly, Section II begins to move further into the figurative. The lichens are no longer simply overgrowing, but are hung in tufts. The lines:
Up from the earth these mosses creep,
And this poor thorn they clasp it round
So close, you’d say that they were bent
With plain and manifest intent
mythologize the moss on the thorn (375). The moss becomes an agent emerging from the earth, while the thorn becomes a victim of some tragic, “manifest intent.” The subjective presence of the speaker that emerges again in “you’d say,” connects the original representation of Section I to the figurative representation of Section II. As the reader moves farther from the original representation, he/she also travels physically farther from the thorn itself. The speaker’s description moves from thorn to moss to ground, and finally in Section III to the mountain on which the thorn sits. The speaker is not providing a context for the thorn, but rather a figurative submersion. As result, the reader is continually distanced from the thorn by a process of re-representing.
The figurative descriptions of the thorn re-enters the poem as the speaker digresses to the narrative of Martha Ray. Ray emerges in the poem through metaphor. In the description of the moss, “As if by hand of lady fair / The work had woven been” Ray is present as a figurative description, but in the following section she becomes a literal character crying repeating a mournful cry. Descriptions of the thorn as, “not higher than a two year’s child”, and the description of the moss as, “like an infant’s grave in size” similarly become a literal presence in the unknown fate of Ray’s child (375,376). The speaker constructs an entire narrative from an this associative process, taking representations of the thorn and molding them into representations of an event. The gap between signifier and signified allows the speaker to remove the actual thorn from the poem almost entirely; since representations in language are fluid they can actually transfer from one signified to another.
There is a search for the actual in the speakers retelling. Throughout the poem he paraphrases the sentiment, “Oh wherefore, wherefore, tell me why / Does she repeat that doleful cry? / ‘I cannot tell, I wish I could” (377). Both the speaker and Martha Ray find themselves repeating the same representations. Ray’s cries are echoed in the speaker’s discovery that language has a self-referential and fluid quality, in which it can not relate to that which is signified. The reader is left with neither solace nor resignation in the end of the search, but only the refrain of Ray’s cries “Oh misery, Oh misery! / Oh woe is me! Oh misery!” (382).
In Charlotte Smith’s poem The Emigrants, Smith claims, in a time when it was dangerous to do so, that the people and clergy that were cast out from their homes were responsible for the crimes that they committed, but that does not make their punishment just. Two wrongs do not make a right for her. Her poem makes the argument that while the exiled clergy and nobility exiles may have been wrong, the people who took their place afterwards and those that were responsible for taking advantage of the positions they left behind were much worse. The people that were running them out were the ones that took over what they left behind. In the process of blaming them for their wrongs, the accusers became what they were fighting against. She says in Book 1 that while punishing people for their crimes, “man, misguided man,/ Mars the fair work that he was bid enjoy,/ And makes himself the evil he deplores” (Lines 32-35). This poem focuses on the people that may have been guilty, but it also shows sympathy for them and their predicament. Smith has a connection with them and their situation and shows how they might have been wrong, but they also suffer for their crimes. While they suffer, those who were responsible for their situation gain from it and turn into what they were previously arguing against.
It is easy to see the sympathy Smith has for these exiled people. She writes about the people they now walk among, poor people that the once upper class have now become. We get these images and see the pain and suffering that they go through, the hardships that come with being poor, but then she switches her perspective back to the people who were once rich. She argues that they feel the pain and suffering far worse than those that were born into it when she says that “The exiled nobles from their country driven,/ Whose richest luxuries were theirs, must feel/ More poignant anguish than the lowest poor,/ Who, born to indigence, have learned to brave/ Rigid Adversity’s depressing breath!” (lines 310-14). Because they were not used to the life that they have been forced into, they are put in a place of shock and sudden pain. While the naturally poor people have built up a tolerance for pain, made it feel like a sort of dull ache, the once noble people feel it fresh. They lived lives where they were pampered, and now their soft flesh is being torn into by a sharp, hard, sudden stabbing pain. They experience the same things, but they feel them much differently.
Smith does not blame the clergy and nobility who are now suffering and paying for their past crimes, but the people who placed them there in the first place. She says to those that put them there that they are “Giddy with pride, and as ye rise, forgetting/ The dust ye lately left, with scorn look down/ On those beneath ye (though your equals once/ in fortune, and in worth superior still/ They view the eminence on which ye stand/ With wonder, not with envy, for they know/ The means by which ye reached it” (lines 319-325). They blamed the rich for being rich, fighting against them for living a life of nobility, only to jump at the chance to take their place the moment the position opened up. It is the hypocrites she blames the most because they should have known better. They fought so strongly against the people they exiled and everything they stood for, but didn’t hesitate to take over their places. The nobility and clergy have paid, we see the sympathy she has for them. The ones who claimed hatred for the nobility but snatched it at the first chance are the ones that are truly to blame.
So that it will be the wish of the Poet to bring his feelings near to those of the persons whose feelings he describes, nay, for short spaces of time perhaps, to let himself slip into an entire delusion, and even confound and identify his own feelings with theirs; modifying only the language which is thus suggested to him, by a consideration that he describes for a particular purpose, that of giving pleasure.
-Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 1802
I apologize in advance for the fact that this will be filled with uncertain quotations or paraphrases which I hope are acceptable because of the informal nature of these responses.
BUT, the above quote is interesting to me in that it expresses a sentiment that has been discussed many places and many times before. The two primary examples that come to mind are about weather and soap. Hemingway said (though I again apologize, I’m not sure where) that when one is writing, she must so totally invest herself in her story that she knows the weather of the place. This is exemplified in his work Garden of Eden in which the protagonist, a writer, is writing a story about Africa and Hemingway writes in a way that suggests he is actually in Africa. Though the suggestion that a writer should know the weather of a place seems obvious, a much more intensive approach to this same idea was said by a writer I cannot remember the name of. She said, when discussing her characters, that a writer should know her characters so well she knows what sort of soap the character uses. This is similar to what Wordsworth is suggesting, but he takes it a step further. It is not enough for a writer to be familiar with the facts of an environment; he has to invest himself totally and begin to actually feel what he is describing.
Here, then, he will apply the principle on which I have so much insisted, namely, that of selection; on this he will depend for removing what would otherwise be painful or disgusting in the passion; he will feel that there is no necessity to trick out or to elevate nature: and, the more industriously he applies this principle, the deeper will be his faith that no words, which his fancy or imagination can suggest, will be to be compared with those which are the emanations of reality and truth.
-Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 1802
The continuation of the discussion again mirrors a sentiment put forward by Hemingway. First echoed is what Hemingway is strongly associated with within the public –his apparent terseness and desire to tell things simply as they are. This sentiment is expressed in A Moveable Feast when Hemingway, trying to write, tells himself to simply write one true thing and go on from there.
However, I take issue with this section because there seems to be a direct contradiction. First, Wordsworth says that a writer should edit what he is portraying, “removing” things that are “painful or disgusting.” Then, he suggests that a writer will see no need to alter nature, but that it can be presented purely. This is a very interesting perspective, because Wordsworth reveals here that he sees the writer and the human mind as a necessary filter to achieve or represent the true nature of the world. Though writers should avoid the “poetic” vernacular he discusses in his appendix On Poetic Diction, and should work to describe things clearly and truly, ultimately, the writer should choose what is displayed and relayed to the reader. So though writers should try to accurately, plainly describe the world and should do it by trying to get as close as possible to the true feeling they are trying to write, Wordsworth is keen to point out that on its own, passion has parts that are “painful or disgusting.” This is to say that a writer, and all people, cannot take nature at its base, but have to filter parts out to get to something true. I’m not totally clear on this and I realize we read only excerpts, but it seems Wordsworth is here not celebrating nature as the greatest elemental force, but humans. I dig it.
Text cited: http://ssad.bowdoin.edu:8668
/space/Preface+to+Lyrical+Ballads,
+1802
Response 3
William Wordsworth’s epic poem The Prelude provides a very interesting reading experience. Book V was very telling as Wordsworth shared a large part of his past and detailed his relationship with nature and literature. This relationship proved to be one that Wordsworth would struggle to keep strong as he ventured into different parts of his own awareness. And because this Book is told from first person, the reader is able to feel more connected to the text and read the Book as though it were a story and not strictly a book or compilation of prose.
The beginning starts out with a focus on sadness and the complexities of a life not fully lived. Words like sorrow, weight, deathless, weep and depressed fill the first stanza forcing the reader into a very dark world. It’s also interesting to note that Wordsworth would revise this Book and in 1850 it would be re-released and read very differently (because he spent forty-five years editing it and changing specific passages). The tone will change in future editions, but it’s worth mentioning how they began. This tendency in the beginning to highlight a “soul divine which we participate, a deathless spirit. Thou also, man, hast wrought, for commerce of thy nature with itself, things worthy of unconquerable life; and yet we feel…that these must perish” (Wordsworth 152) is something that causes the reader to pause. The mention of nature automatically makes one question what they are about to read. Is this a work about a man’s relationship with nature and how it inspires him to create? Or is it something altogether different about a lost notion of one’s own self and how the feeling of not knowing is ultimately going to cause discomfort and lead to misery? I enjoy Wordsworth toying with the reader and setting somewhat of an unsettling beginning; this makes the reader want to find out for themselves what is represented and what one will learn after they experience this very personal reading.
Towards the middle of Book V, Wordsworth ventures into an interesting (although not that surprising considering the conditions and time period he was writing in) connection between nature and its relation to God and the supernatural. By claiming “for what we may become, and what we need, than Nature’s self which is the breath of God” (Wordsworth 162). This is catching because Wordsworth could be possibly saying that everything in our lives that mean anything (our futures, especially) are ultimately related to nature and then to God, making everyone connected to each other in harmony. Even the earlier notion of music and memory are all rooted together, flowing together. This creates an alluring idea.
The end of the Book seems to be a little narrower than the beginning as Wordsworth’s voice is slightly more prevalent. His likeness for reading and literature is brought up several times towards the end and he happily concludes that “thus far a scanty record is deduced of what I owed to books in early life” (Wordsworth 184). He is giving homage to the pleasure that he had always gotten out of books. It’s also interesting that it’s only on the page before that he still seems to be struggling with his experience with nature, a topic that I’m sure will come up in the following books.
Brigette Jolene Todt
Eng 344
April 18, 2008
Response #3 – Charlotte Smith
Critics of Charlotte Smith both praised and criticized her works, the latter due in large part because of the emotional influence on her writing. This emotional influence is rooted deeply in the female experience or the time and particularly her own, which, in a field and world still dominated by men, was not something critics wanted to take seriously. This emotional factor can especially be seen in the Elegiac Sonnets where Smith uses the sonnet form to write about ideas as the ‘beloved’ and works in some themes of sorrow.
Smith had a fairly good early life but encountered numerous hardships later on. Her father “arranged for his eldest daughter (Smith) to marry a wealthy West India merchant,” which she described as being “sold, a legal prostitute,” (Wu p 78). Her husband turned out to be “a spendthrift,” and “behave abusively and violently,” and ended up spending some time incarcerated. Smith had to provide for her family and so “decided to publish a book in order to raise funds, and began writing sonnets,” (p 78). She spent many unhappy years of her life due to her husband before “He finally announced in early 1788 that he was leaving,” (p 79). Therefore Smith had many distressing experiences from which to draw to create her sonnets.
Instances of this emotional and personal influence can be found throughout the Elegiac Sonnets. The Preface to the First Edition would perhaps leave you expecting as much when she writes, “Some very melancholy moments have been beguiled by expressing in verse the sensations those memories brought,” (Wu, Smith p 84). In Sonnet I she writes of being “doomed to tread,” in line 2 and later in sonnet there are mentions of “mourning,” and “unhappy Love” in line 12 (p 85). The closing line, “If those paint sorrow best who feel in most!” also speaks to such influences (ln 14 p 85).
Sonnet II Written at the Close of Spring also has melancholy themes in it. It speaks of “poor humanity,” “tyrant Passion,” and “corrosive Care,” (Wu, Smith lns 9, 11 p 85). In line 14 it is asked “why has happiness no second spring?” suggesting that though nature’s cycle will always bring spring back and things will flourish once more, but that kind of assured happiness is not possible for humanity (p 85). Sonnet III To a Nightingale also mentions things like “hast thou felt from friends some cruel wrong,” and “martyr of disastrous love,” (lns 11, 12 p 85). Then in Sonnet VI To Hope she casts hope as being troublesome as well.
Critics did not take very kindly to such emotional and depressing content. One reason for this perhaps being that Smith did not seem content with her lot as a woman and instead of playing out her life in the role of the ideal female who writes about things women should write about, she feeds in personal inspiration into her works that critics do not want to hear about. In his introduction to Smith, Wu gives an example of a criticism from Gentleman’s Magazine which wrote,
“We cannot, however, forbear expressing a hope that the misfortunes she so often hints at, are all imaginary. We must have perused her very tender and exquisite effusions with diminished pleasure, could we have supposed her sorrows to be real. It would be hard indeed if a lady, who has so much contributed to the delight of others, should feel any want of happiness herself.”
(Wu, Gentleman’s Magazine, p 78).
Later on Wu refers to an article in British Critic which has a similar view of Smith’s work. It makes mention of feeling “compassion at the sad allusion to sorrows, which the writer…tells us she has suffered,” but is critical of this same thing saying that “as critics, we cannot approve of the egotism,” (Wu, British Critic p 80). They admit that Smith is a type of poetic “genius” but that is a waste when not “employed on subjects that become a good and great mind,” and they “lament that, the gifted powers of imagination should be so grossly perverted,” (Wu, British Critic p 80). The critics tend to take a negative opinion of the way that Smith’s “tenderness and sensibility” are incorporated in all her works so well. Instead of writing about pleasant things, Smith wrote about things that she could draw personal inspiration from.
Carolyn Hanig
Gina Franco
Romantic Literature
18 April 2008
Response to “The Thorn”
There seems to be a very close relationship between the thorn and the child of the woman who has died supposedly. The thorn “looks so old and grey” (4) yet it stands “Not higher than a two years’ child” (5). These are two images that give opposite descriptors about the same object. The opposition adds to the ambiguity about whether or not the thorn is what is buried that I find similar to the ambiguity in William Blake’s “First Book of Urizen.” At the end of the second stanza the people the narrator describes “bury this poor thorn for ever” (22), but in the fourth stanza it is “close beside” (34) the grave of the child. It seems that Wordsworth is trying to connect these two things very closely.
Perhaps he is suggesting that the woman’s child is closely related to the pain that she feels about not being married. She repeats “Oh misery! Oh misery!” (64) over and over again, as if she were being constantly reminded by the thorn or the grave that she is in disgrace or perhaps that her baby has died. The grief is also ambiguous because one is not sure of whether the woman is grieving for the baby or the thorn. The narrator’s knowledge fails: “No more I know” (155). The reader is left in ignorance of what the thorn actually means to the woman, and has no clue to what the ambiguity actually means. The narrator actually questions this: “but what is the thorn?’” (210). As one follows the poem further, one can see that the narrator is actually questioning what the thorn means to her. It seems as if the narrator is making a big effort to leave the thorn ambiguous. Perhaps it means the pain of the woman or perhaps the child is the thorn he is talking about but I don’t think that Wordsworth wants us to quite be too sure about what it actually is.
I thought it was interesting how Wordsworth incorporated the reader into his own work. He says to us “now would you see this aged thorn… you must take care and choose your time” (56-58). Wordsworth is giving the reader advice of what to do were the reader to actually visit the place mentioned. In this way the reader is incorporated into this investigation of the thorn-child phenomenon and we can be engaged somewhat in what is happening within the poem.
Works Cited
Wordsworth, William. “The Thorn.” Ed. Wu, Duncan. Romanticism: An Anthology; Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing. 2006. pages 375-382.
Because a new "Response #..." hasn't been posted yet, I'll post my fourth response here. FELLOW STUDENTS: DON'T DO THIS BECAUSE I DID IT. I don't want to start a counterproductive trend or anything. That said:
Response 4: Poetic Formulas on Display in the Works of Wordsworth and Coleridge
Scott Offutt/April 25, 2008
Given the substantial number of texts included in the roster for possible explication this week, I was drawn to consider some of the major ideas which appear to be shared by the various poets whose writings and commentaries we have been asked to read with their respective proclivities in mind, rather than generate an overview or broad analysis per se. As such, because I have been fascinated with the implications of some of Wordsworth’s commentaries, especially his affirmations, “words […] ought to be weighed in the balance of feeling,” and “poetry is passion: it is the history or science of feelings,” this response will be oriented toward analyzing the condition of poetry as an emotional science in “The Thorn,” and toward understanding the extensions and permutations of that condition in Coleridge’s poetry, as it appears to be considered to at least some extent in the latter poet’s work (Wordsworth 508).
Although Coleridge professes to be “at all times and in all modes of excellence […] inferior” to Wordsworth, a direct relationship between the ethos of his writing and that of the latter poet should not be inferred—instead, the distinctions between their methods should be illuminated by a comparison of their notions of the poetic consciousness (Coleridge 612). In “The Thorn,” Wordsworth generates emotion by, as the “Note to ‘The Thorn’” indicates, presenting his content in the voice of a “common” rhetorical figure who is “prone to superstition,” and given to “deep feelings,” as well as repeating certain lines, such as the woman in the scarlet cloak’s “‘Oh misery! Oh misery! Oh woe is me!’” in the expression of total loss (Wordsworth 507, 508; 377, 65-66). The tone of the poem and the accompanying severity of its respective agents facilitate the emergence of strong images—the thorn, the “beauteous” hill of moss, the pond in which “[a] baby and a baby’s face” may be seen—which resonate to such an extent as to impress virtually canonical attributes upon the scene and its components (376, 36; 381, 228). “The Thorn” transcends the status of a fable or bleak anecdote, instead testing the limitations of poetry as a way of intensifying emotion, and solidifying vision.
Where Wordsworth appears to be preoccupied with examining the establishment of emotion and thought as solid, describable forms, I encountered a greater interest in the relationship between the world as an artistic construction and the world itself in Coleridge’s poetry, guided by personal engagement with imaginative states and creative ways of viewing the world. In the early version of “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” Coleridge freely perceives the reaches of the “springy heath” and the “great city” despite being immobilized, and even develops a connection between his absent friends and himself in the passing of the “last rook”—and, more importantly, in the realization that “[n]o sound is dissonant which tells of Life,” that is, an association with the vital forces within the purview of the mind on any level is sympathetic with all others, whether immediately sensible or not (Coleridge 614, 5, 13; 616, 55). In the earlier version of “Frost at Midnight,” he again contemplates a rich external scene in isolation from the “inmates of my cottage,” who are “all at rest,” dwelling not on the “curious toys” of the “self-watching subtilizing mind” but on dreamscapes populated by an undefined “stranger,” and distinguished familiarly as “my sweet birthplace” (624, 4; 626, 26, 27, 31, 33). Rather than externalizing the inner reaches of his consciousness, Coleridge experiments with the internalization of the physical world within his mind, and the limitless artistic possibilities afforded by potential success in that effort.
Works Cited
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. “Frost at Midnight (composed February 1798).” Romanticism: an Anthology Third Edition. Ed. Duncan Wu. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006.
——. “Letter from S.T. Coleridge to Robert Southey, 17 July 1797 (including early version of ‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison’).” Romanticism: an Anthology Third Edition. Ed. Duncan Wu. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006.
Wordsworth, William. “Note to ‘The Thorn.’” Romanticism: an Anthology Third Edition. Ed. Duncan Wu. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006.
——. “The Thorn.” Romanticism: an Anthology Third Edition. Ed. Duncan Wu. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006.
Response for 05/02/08. I'm not quite sure where I ended up with this, but I thought the ideas were worth exploring.
Crime, Pleasure and Obsessive Thought
Reading Wordsworth’s “On the Character of Rivers” in such close quarters with Godwin’s ‘Love of Justice’ from “Political Justice” has inevitably caused me to consider the dialogue between the two works. Regardless of how much Wordsworth considered Godwin’s philosophies during the conception of the Rivers character, Wordsworth’s explanation of Rivers’ logical process complicates the ideas of justice and moral relativity brought up by Godwin.
In ‘Love of Justice’ Godwin suggests that the first crime occurred when one person “took advantage of the weakness of his neighbors to secure certain exclusive privileges to himself.” (Godwin 153) By creating an imbalance, it becomes easier for those who have less than others to justify actions that other individuals and society would deem criminal. Wordsworth implies that Rivers is such a character who, after being involved in some manner of crime, loses the privileges he previously possessed. He becomes with obsessed with the idea of good and evil and “to hunt out whatever is bad in actions usually esteemed virtuous and to detect the good in actions which the universal sense of mankind teaches us to reprobate.” (Wordsworth 62) This reinvention of his worldview goes hand-in-hand with his quest to regain the power he lost. Rivers attempts to assuage his guilt, but his guilt is the direct result of self-pity and selfish fixation rather than a genuine repentance for his crimes.
Godwin implies and Wordsworth expounds upon the idea of crime as the result of an obsessive fixation. The creation of the moral relativity, the process of ‘justifying’ the act, is a highly intellectual task. Wordsworth describes Rivers as “a young Man of great intellectual powers, yet without any sold principles of genuine benevolence.” (Wordsworth 62) Godwin also describes the creations of a “sophistry” (Godwin 153) to which the perpetrator attributes his actions. Wordsworth borrows this language to describe Rivers’ actions: “He is perpetually imposing upon himself; he has a sophism for every crime.” (Wordsworth 64) Rivers cannot help but fixate on the crimes he has committed and in fixating he spurs a need to constantly reassure himself of his own justifications. In constructing justification for previous crimes he allows for the enactment of future crimes. Thus, the cycle is perpetuated.
There is an implication made that the obsessive ‘meditations’ that Rivers uses to construct his own morally gray reality is the function of passion and not of reason. Wordsworth states that “[t]he mild effusions of thought, the milk of human reason, are unknown to him.” (Wordsworth 64) Furthermore, Rivers turns more easily to vice than virtue because vice offers a sense of immediate gratification that is rarely present in the doing of good deeds. The exact words used are “immediate, palpable and extensive” to describe the effects of a vicious act. This creates a clear separation of mild, reasonable thought from the impassioned, obsessive act of Rivers’ cycle of criminal acts. Rivers begins with the goal of reestablishing the power that was lost to him, but to fill the void left by his trauma he naturally turns to obsession and repetition. Rivers is also impressed by his own cleverness in that he takes pleasure in the idea that he can justify his crimes. Attaching passion and pleasure to moral ambiguity further complicates the issue of universal human justice and the ability of humans, even those of “great intellectual powers” to uphold those ideals.
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