Hello, Romanticists.
On Thursday we will continue our study of William Wordsworth by expanding on the theme of absence in his works. We have an eclectic array of readings on the table that address various forms of absence: death, disappearance, erasure, illegibility, etc.
First, you’ll find a mountain-sized whole at the center of “Crossing the Alps,” a passage from Wordsworth’s autobiographical epic, The Prelude. The speaker and his friend realize that their anticipation of the Alpine summit was far greater than the reality. Yet amazingly, their disappointment becomes a way to access the sublime.
 |
| Caspar David Friedrich's iconic depiction of the Romantic sublime, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, 1818. |
Moving on from missed mountains, “Strange fits of passion”
and “Song [She dwelt among th’untrodden ways]” mourn the loss of a mysterious
woman known only as Lucy. Though readers
and critics have debated extensively over her identity, there is no clear
biographical precedent for Lucy. More to
the point, in the poems themselves, she is a complete cypher: all we know of
her is that we do not know her.
The two sonnets, “It is a beauteous evening” and “Surprised
by joy” also center on women, but these women are very real. “Surprised by joy” mourns the loss of
Wordsworth’s daughter Catherine or, more precisely, mourns the fact that he
could have forgotten her loss. “It is a
beauteous evening” is cheery enough in tone, but it also represents an absent
daughter: the illegitimate daughter Wordsworth fathered and did not raise. The poem recounts the first time they met:
Caroline was nine and Wordsworth had travelled to France to tell her mother
than he would be marrying another woman.
Finally, in the extracts from The Grasmere Journal, we fill in an absence by meeting Dorothy
Wordsworth, sister and confidant of William.
She has been simultaneously present and absent in much of her brother’s
poetry (she is addressed in “Tintern Abbey” but does not speak; her account
inspired “Daffodils”).
 |
| Pages of Dorothy Wordsworth's journal |
Choose one text and consider both what is absent and how that absent thing is defined or made palpable. What formal techniques does the poem use to convey the sense of something that isn’t there? Or, choose one of the passages from The Grasmere Journal and consider how it is similar to or different from William’s poetry.
Happy reading,
Prof. M.
In the selection “Crossing the Alps”, Wordsworth and a friend are in middle of a summer tour and join a “band of travelers”, but soon enough they lose them and their way. Disoriented, they follow a path until they meet a peasant who informs them that they have crossed the Alps.
ReplyDeletePerhaps the “absence” portrayed in this poem is a lack of awareness and anticipation. Wordsworth and his friend did not realize they were crossing the Alps at the time. Similar to the old if-a-tree-falls-and-no-one-hears-it conundrum, if you’re not aware that you crossed the Alps, did you? I believe Wordsworth would give an emphatic yes, opining that lack of awareness does not in any way mitigate experience. We encountered a similar idea in Coleridge’s disapproval of assigning personal emotions to natural phenomena. These poets believed that imposing our own ideas and thoughts upon encounters with nature taints the experience. Therefore, in a sense Wordsworth’s unwitting crossing of the Alps allowed him to experience it at the ultimate level.
In a technical sense, there are elements of the poem which contribute to the sense that the poet “lacks awareness”. For instance, Wordsworth and his friend are wandering around, unsure of their whereabouts. Additionally, their repeated questioning of the peasant displays their unawareness.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteFirst of all, I have to say, I really liked these poems, even the sonnets. (I have a thing against sonnets). I couldn’t decide which one to write about.
ReplyDelete“Surprised by Joy” was incredible in the way it expressed the pain of someone’s absence. In particular, I liked the way it opens joyously, with a surprise, impatience, boisterous as the Wind, and he turns – and then it hits him. As the reader, you are thrown off course as much as the speaker is – I thought this was going to be about joy? What’s going on? And then the sadness smacks you in the face. It’s an incredible portrayal of how an absence can be a palpable presence. His lost daughter is like a missing limb – there are phantom pains. And it’s interesting how he cherishes that painful sense of absence, because it itself is almost like a presence – in a sad, but important way, it’s like she’s there, just as long as he’s hurting. Hence, the tremendous guilt he feels when the joy shocks him out of his pain – “But how could I forget thee?”. Joy, forgetting, feels like a betrayal. “Faithful love” ensures that she is “recalled to…mind”. Forgetting her is “the worst pang that sorrow ever bore” aside from her actual death, because forgetting, losing that last grip on her, is almost as bad as having her die a second time.
I also found it powerful that the poem is written in the form of a sonnet. Sonnets are love poems, but traditionally they are romantic love poems. Normally, the lover (male) yearns for his beloved (female), alternating between gorgeous, outrageous descriptions of her beauty and despair because she is unattainable. In this version, the female is also lovely and amazing – she is his “heart’s best treasure” and is described as “heavenly”. Here, too, the male in the relationship pines for her; he cannot have her. Yet the context here is entirely different – he is the father, she is his daughter, and she has died. Suddenly it no longer seems cliché. The love here is not that of a moping young man – it’s that of a father, expressing real, intense grief. In my opinion, it’s the best use of a sonnet form ever.
Oddly, in She Dwelt Among th’ Untrodden Paths and Strange Fits of Passion I Have Known, the reader never hears from Lucy. In other encounter poems, Wordsworth engages directly with the object of his poem. However, Lucy is neither seen nor heard. She is the enigma in the background, who can be anyone but is absent from the narrative of the poem.
ReplyDeleteImmediately, the poem shields Lucy from the reader. She is identified as She and as Lover. In Strange Fits she is named in stanza four and in She Dwelt in the last stanza. The reader becomes the very world that doesn’t see Lucy and instead focuses on the speaker’s reaction to her. They too, perhaps no by choice, ignore Lucy for the richer more vibrant Lover figure.
In fact, Strange Fits ends with a death that the speaker is imagining. The reader has no closure because the poem ends in the speaker’s head, without ever meeting Lucy. The passion that seizes the speaker is not a passion between lovers, but the deep fear of losing a loved one. The reader expects the poem to follow along the path and end with lovers united, and instead, Lucy remains hidden, and the reader is stuck in the conscious of the lover.
The second poem employs the same mechanisms to hide Lucy from the reader. She is among “the springs of Dover” (which could be one of three different springs according to the footnotes), she is a violet and a lone star, unknown yet bright. However, there are no details about who she is exactly. Given Wordsworth penchant for character detail, how little specificity Lucy gets seems very odd.
Perhaps the reason Lucy is so absent is because she has become a stand-in for the lover. The enigmatic lover who, no matter how close you get to her, she is still her own identity. She must still be part of an encounter poem, and her absence is felt because she is separate from her lover.
When I first read "It is a Beauteous Evening", I thought it was about Wordsworth's dead daughter, Catherine. I was surprised to find out that this poem is about his live-but-absent illegitamate daughter, Caroline. Wordsworth manages to make his daughter sound dead even as she walks next to him. Her presence in the poem entirely is a bit of a surprise - the first half of the poem focuses on the beauty of the beauteous evening and the beach, with no mention of Wordsworth's companion. When he finally turns to her ("Dear Child!") just over halfway through the text, the reveal of her presence is almost jarring. It's as if she wasn't really there, or at least had been forgotten, and Wordsworth is recalling her with a guilty jolt. I think this might have been Wordsworth's general feeling towards his daughter when he met her for the first time, already nine years old.
ReplyDeleteAlthough Wordsworth does tell us that his daughter walks next to him, his choice of phrasing made me so sure she was dead and walked with him in spirit. Wordsworth refers almost exclusively to Caroline's "nature" rather than her physical presence, making her seem more like a "divine" creature than a little girl. In particular, his choice of words, "thou lies in Abraham's bosom" seems much more appropriate for the dead Catherine than the live Caroline. The note in our book says that this phrase refers to a biblical term for the death of the righteous. Did Wordsworth see his absent daughter (who he was planning to leave permanently by not marrying her mother) as somehow dead to him?
He ends the poem by remarking that his daughter is with God even when we (adults? her family?) are unaware of it. To me, this seemed like a thought he might have reassured himself with as his daughter grew up without him. This "out of sight" concept fits Caroline, who grew up apart from her father. In this whole poem, there is only one acknowledgement of Caroline's physical presence ("that walkest with me here"). The rest of it only alludes to her as a sort of ethereal figure, even though the poem is about her lack of "solemn thought". Wordsworth might have viewed his daughter as somewhat unreal, even when confronted with her.
When reading Crossing the Alps, I came to a similiar conclusion as Chana's (though I did not make that awesome connection between the lack of awareness and Coleridge's views). To me, the absence seems to be a lack of awareness - Wordsworth and his friend did not realize that they had "crossed the Alps". At first, they are dissappointed, upset that the missed the realization of such a moment - they had reached the summit and they didn't know! Wordsworth describes the emotion he experienced at that moment as "dejection... a deep and genuine sadness." He had missed his chance to look at that summit with the eye of a poet.
ReplyDeleteAfterwards, upon looking back, he realized that while his immagination had been "thwarted" at the time, that did not mean it would forever be thwarted. Though he missed it at the moment, he could look back and replace that absence with his own imagination. In fact, he does this in the beginnin of the section. He could not describe the actual summit, so instead he describes its absence - "a soulless image on the eye." Towards the end of our section, he continues the thouht: "The invisible world, doth greatness make abode...Our destiny, our nature, and our home, is with infinitude...hope that can never die." Awareness can be absent, but the imagination is everpresent, filling in the blanks in our lives. Wordsworth imagined the anticipation of reaching the summit but the reality of meeing the anticipation was taken from him... yet he was able to use his imagination afterwards to make up for it. In this sense, it almost seems as if the imagination itself is the "sublime".
First, I would like to start off saying that the Wordsworth family have an incredible talent for viewing the world in a beautiful poetic way. Now, onto the analysis:
ReplyDeleteDorothy clearly sees value in observing nature, and becoming close to it, much like WW does in his own poetry; the first aspect of any setting that she notices is the nature surrounding her, with a special focus on the greenery. Dorothy observes the “beautiful yellow, palish yellow flower” and a white flower, strawberries etc. around her. Dorothy also sees nature in a different way depending on what mental state she is in. She says the lake looked “dull and melancholy” and that the waves made a “heavy sound”. This idea is reflected in Tinturn Abbey very much so, when he talks about his perceptions of the place, and how they have changed overtime. Both time and mood can change a person’s view of a setting. Along with observing the nature, she automatically creates metaphors for what she observes, such as when writing about the daffodils, she writes that they seemed as if they "verily laughed with the wind". She also creates beautiful imagery such as "some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness". She also uses repetition when she said "and the rest tossed and reeled and danced and seemed as if...".
One aspect that I also noticed is Dorothy’s sort of comfort, or peace with death, that I feel also is preset in William’s writing. Many of WW’s poems have a character who dies, such as We are Seven and There was a boy. Especially in We are Seven, WW seems to plays devil’s advocate to his protagonist, proving to him that even in death you can have a connection with someone. In There was a Boy as well, WW visits his grave and kind of enjoys the boy’s company. Dorothy writes what William says when she describes when she and William laid next to each other, (which shows it resonated with her as well) about how peaceful it would be to lie in the grave next to a dear friend, listening to the sounds of the earth.