| Extract |
| I - Perspective |
| William Wordsworth is, despite well-founded criticism,
the foremost of English Romantic Poets. Leaving aside any prejudice
about ageing, creative decline and the award of the Laureateship
- putting it into perspective - during his later years he actually
wrote such a vast amount of worthless poetry, that the sheer
bulk of it pads out the complete edition of his works unnecessarily,
exhausting the patience of readers wishing to explore his oeuvre
afresh. |
| Having, as a young man, had his thinking heavily
influenced by the events of the French Revolution, William Wordsworth
would, sadly, succumb, like so many middle-aged people to a
loss of faith in social progress and human equality. Also Wordsworth
having consciously broken away from his eighteenth century poet's
Augustan restrictions, his poetry would, in his later years,
regress into precisely the highfaluting artificiality that had
been anathema to him. |
| The poet who had once shocked Dr Charles Burney
with his poem, 'The Convict' (included in the Lyrical Ballads
collection of 1798), with its (in Burney's words) 'misplaced
commiseration' with the squalid circumstances of an imprisoned
criminal, was to write a series of Sonnets Upon The Punishment
of Death (composed 1839-40 - published December, 1841) eulogising
capital punishment as the only tenable method of law enforcement,
for certain offenders, in a Christian country. However, for
a really gaudy example of all the poetic faults that the poet
had condemned as a young man, condensed into one piece of his,
one might (briefly) consult 'On The Power Of Sound', written
in his late fifties. Before moving on to write about Wordsworth
with the reverence that his best poetry emphatically deserves,
it is sobering to quote from stanza ten of the last mentioned
poem. It lends Wordsworth's unintended hilarity to the tuneful
activities of its mythical, and non-mythical, creatures, in
the way it postulates their enslavement to the rhythm of the
music: |
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The pipes of Pan, to shepherds
Couched in the shadow of Maenalian pines,
Was passing sweet; the eyeballs of the leopards [!],
That in high triumph drew the Lord of vines,
How did they sparkle to the cymbal's clang!
While Fauns and Satyrs beat the ground
In cadence, - and Silenus swang
This way and that, with wild flowers crowned. |
| William Wordsworth's earlier years were his best.
Ernest De Selincourt has written, wisely, about 'the obvious
truth that what is great in Wordsworth belongs to a single decade
(1798-1807)'. During this decade, William Wordsworth wrote the
best sections of The Prelude (which would remain, for reasons
nobody has ever satisfactorily explained, unpublished in its
entirety until 1850). This is his long autobiographical poem
which, in books 1 and 2, transfigures his childhood recollections
with brilliant, visionary poetry. Of the thirteen that make
up the complete version, others recount his unhappiness at Cambridge,
his walking tour of the Alps, and his time in France, where
he received his first-hand education in republican idealism
(and, just as tellingly, in republican practicality). |
| Throughout these poetic recollections, collectively
known as The Prelude, the elaboration of William Wordsworth's
style is largely due to his perpetual effort to squeeze something
like an artist's tones and colours out of pen and paper. He
adored the chiaroscurism of Rembrandt. The Dutch painter seemed
somehow able - with his famous handling of light and shade -
to invest worldly scenes with intimations of spiritual reality.
In visual terms, it is as if the recalcitrance of Wordsworth's
recollections was a stimulus to ever-greater feats of creation: |
|
.. The garden lay
Upon a slope surmounted by a plain
Of a small bowling-green; beneath us stood
A grove, with gleams of water through the trees
And over the tree-tops...
.. But, ere nightfall,
When in our pinnace we returned at leisure
Over the shadowy lake, and to the beach
Of some small island steered our course with one,
The Minstrel of the Troop, and left him there,
And rowed off gently, while he blew his flute
Alone upon the rock - oh, then, the calm
And dead still water lay upon my mind
Even with a weight of pleasure, and the sky,
Never before so beautiful, sank down
Into my heart, and held me like a dream! |
| But Wordsworth would, on and off, spend half a
century tinkering technically with The Prelude. He created,
inadvertently, academic employment for generations - what William
James referred to as the Phd Industry - with the patience and
resources to compare and contrast, in detail, the merits of,
say, the 1805 and the 1850 versions. |
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