WORDSWORTH: PLAY AND POLITICS

Transcription

1 WORDSWORTH: PLAY AND POLITICS

2 Wordsworth: Play and Politics... 4 Study of Wordsworth's Poetry, John Turner Palgrave Macmillan

3 ISBN ISBN (ebook) DOI / John F. Turner 1986 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1986 All rights reserved. For information, write: St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY Published in the United Kingdom by The Macmillan Press Ltd. First published in the United States of America in 1986 ISBN Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Turner,John Uohn F.) Wordsworth: play and politics. Bibliography: p. Includes index. l. Wordsworth, William, O-Criticism and interpretation. 2. Play in literature. 3. Politics in literature. I. Title. PR5888. T ' ISBN

4 For Sue

5 Contents Preface List of Abbreviations and Texts PART I AN EVENING WALK: THE POET IN HIDING 1 An Evening Walk (1 787?-92) IX XU 3 PART II THE POLITICAL WRITINGS OF : THE POET AND POLITICS 2 Descriptive Sketches (1791-2) 3 A Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff (1 793) 4 Salisbury Plain (1793-4) 5 Adventures on Salisbury Plain ( ?) PART III THE BORDERERS: THE POET AND JUSTICE 6 The Borderers ( ) (a) The playas imitation (b) Herbert and Matilda (c) Rivers (d) Mortimer PART IV THE RUINED COTTAGE: THE POET IN MOURNING 7 The Ruined Cottage (1797-8) (a) The mighty debt of grief (b) Margaret (c) The pedlar's meditation (d) The pedlar Vll

6 Vlll Contents PART V THE BALLAD POETRY OF 1798: THE POET AT PLAY 8 Lyrical Ballads (1798) 117 (a) The credallyrics 119 (b) We are seven; Anecdotefor Fathers; Simon Lee 122 (c) The Last of the Flock; Goody Blake, and Harry Gill; The Complaint of a forsaken Indian Woman; The Mad Mother; The Thorn 128 (d) The Idiot Boy Peter Bell: A Tale (1798) 140 PART VI THE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL POETRY OF : THE POET AND THE CHILD 10 Tintern Abbey, Nutting and 'There was a Boy' (1798) 155 (a) Tintern Abbey 156 (b) Nutting and 'There was a Boy' The two-part Prelude (1798-9) 170 PART VII THE GRAS MERE POETRY OF : THE POET AT HOME 12 Home at Grasmere (1800) 13 The Grasmere Pastorals (a) The Old Cumberland Beggar (1797-8) (b) The Brothers ( ) (c) Michael (1800) Conclusion Notes and References Index

7 Preface When Wordsworth wrote in The Prelude of the radical philosophy that had formerly tempted him 'to abstract the hopes of man / Out of his feelings' (x:808-9), he was picturing human reason as an alchemist promising to transform the mixed elements of the present into the purer element of the future. The hope of his youth was to see 'the man to come parted as by a gulph, / From him who had been' (xi:59-60); and the anxiety involved in this magical thinking makes itself clearly felt in the isolated journeying consciousness of his early political poems. Longing for the future, he had no home in the present. The history I have followed in this book is that of a man who came to find himself in time and place, and who eventually came home, to Grasmere, in the winter of I t is the history of a man's struggle to come to grips with the mixed elements of the present without surrendering his radical hope for the future. It is a struggle, too, in which Wordsworth found poetry. The early poems are descriptive in manner, the mind observing the world. But from 1793 onwards, as he measured first the evil and then the good that he found in the world, Wordsworth came increasingly to find in poetry an intermediate area between that which was perceived as objective and that which was perceived as subjective. It provided an area with real existence in time and space, in which the minds of author and reader alike could both relax and concentrate, finding themselves recomposed by composing the world. The poet, that is, discovered he had a contribution to make. Wordsworth later spoke of this contribution in terms of a faculty, the imagination; but in these years the emphasis seems rather to fall upon it as a kind of doing - and I have accordingly spoken of it as play, an activity deriving from the young child's re-creation of the real world in order to feel really at home in it. The importance of Wordsworth, it seems to me, lies here in the attention he paid to the discipline of subjectivity in that intermediate area where self and other interplay; for he saw that it was upon this area that our common capacity to form lx

8 x Preface relationships, values and ideals depended. He saw indeed that perception itself was relationship, the mind participating in its world; and his poetry became a conscious attempt to resite the radicalism of his youth, to ground it not in the seemingly objective abstractions of reason but in an imagery that would appeal to passion, feeling and reason alike, with power (in the words of his Essay on Morals) 'to incorporate itselfwith the blood & vitaljuices of our minds' and thus to amend the relationships they enjoy. His thinking led him in two directions: towards psychology, and the processes of development of that play-area where poetry worked, and towards politics, and the circumstances in which that development might most favourably occur. It is this balance between play and politics that I have tried to keep in my book, as I trace Wordsworth's attempts to structure his hope for the future upon feelings he had proved good in the past, both of his own life and the life of his country as he found it in Grasmere. I have written the book in the form of a commentary partly in response to the exploratory nature of the poetry. It seems to me that Wordsworth is often misrepresented because passages are isolated from their place in the particular meditative adventure upon which he has embarked; for the poems, like all relationships, are experiments in faith. They invite us to trust ourselves to play; and that is also why I have written in commentary form. For that is what interests me about literature - the meanings it brings into play. In an age when radicalism in academic circles is predominantly mistrustful and sceptical of the literature of the past, Wordsworth's poetry may serve to remind us of the value that might be found in play, not just of the intellect but of the whole sensibility. In what I have written I have drawn upon the language and work of the object-relations tradition in British psychology and in particular upon the work ofd. W. Winnicott. I first came across his book Playing and Reality in my attempt to think about the playing of the little cottage girl in We are seven and the playing of Wordsworth himself in The Prelude; I then found a whole tradition which in its interest in the development of the mind, its concept of the good, its capacity (at best) to observe feelingly and write poetically with its eye on the object seemed to me engaged in a modern form of the same exploratory, tactful inquiry into mental health and creativity that had preoccupied Wordsworth. It is right that I should acknowledge that debt here.

9 Preface Xl I should like finally to acknowledge my more personal debts: first and foremost to my wife, Sue Gagg, whose understanding and liking of Wordsworth's poetry has long been a pleasure and a challenge; second, to Peter Shoen berg, whose wisdom in guiding my reading was matched by his hospitality during the composition of this book; third, to Wynn Thomas, for the scrupulous quality of his teaching in the days when we taught Romantic literature together; and fourth, to Nick Potter and Ken Watkins, with whom Wordsworth was always one of the interesting subjects of conversation on Friday nights. My thanks are also due to Liz Watkins for preparing the typescript. JOHN TURNER

10 List of Abbreviations and Texts ABBREVIATIONS PW The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. E. de Selincourt and H. Darbishire, 5 vols (Oxford University Press, ). EL The Letters oj William and Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. E. de Selincourt, 2nd edition, The Early Years, , rev. Chester L. Shaver (Oxford University Press, 1967). TEXTS All quotations from The Prelude, except those in Part VI (Chapters 10 and 11), are from the 1805 edition, ed. E. de Selincourt, 2nd edition, revised by H. Darbishire (Oxford University Press, 1959). All quotations from Wordsworth's prose works are from The Prose Works oj William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, 3 vols (Oxford University Press, 1974). All quotations from Lyrical Ballads are from the edition by R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones (Methuen, 1968). I have not given line references for the shorter poems to avoid encumbering my text. Part I Part II An Evening Walk, 1793 version, in PW I. Descriptive Sketches, 1793 version, and Imitation of Juvenal - Satire VIII, in PWI. A Letter to the Bishop oj Llandaff, in Prose Works, vol. I. Salisbury Plain and Adventures on Salisbury Plain, in The Salisbury Plain Poems of William Wordsworth, ed. Stephen Gill, Cornell Wordsworth (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1975). xu

11 List of Abbreviations and Texts xiii Part III The Borderers, The Early Version, in The Borderers, ed. Robert Osborn, Cornell Wordsworth (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1982). Part IV The Ruined Cottage, Ms.B, in PW v:379ff. All manuscript references, and references to Incipient Madness and 'The Baker's Cart', are to The Ruined Cottage and The Pedlar, ed. James Butler, Cornell Wordsworth (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1979). Lines lift upon a seat in a Yew-tree, in Lyrical Ballads. Part V All references here to Lyrical Ballads, as above. Peter Bell, in PW II. Part VI Tintem Abbey, Nutting and 'There was a Boy' in Lyrical Ballads. The two-part Prelude, in The Prelude, , ed. Stephen Parrish, Cornell Wordsworth (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1977). Part VII Home at Grasmere, Ms.B, in Home at Grasmere, ed. Beth Darlington, Cornell Wordsworth (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1977). The Old Cumberland Beggar, The Brothers and Michael, in Lyrical Ballads.