Oxford Lectures on Poetry

His steadfast face and sightless eyes, I gazed,
As if admonished from another world.

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

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

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

Downwards we hurried fast,
And, with the half-shaped road which we had missed,
Entered a narrow chasm. The brook and road
Were fellow-travellers in this gloomy strait,
And with them did we journey several hours
At a slow pace. The immeasurable height
Of woods decaying, never to be decayed,
The stationary blasts of waterfalls,
And in the narrow rent at every turn
Winds thwarting winds, bewildered and forlorn,
The torrents shooting from the clear blue sky,
The rocks that muttered close upon our ears,
Black drizzling crags that spake by the way-side
As if a voice were in them, the sick sight
And giddy prospect of the raving stream,
The unfettered clouds and region of the Heavens,
Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light —
Were all like workings of one mind, the features
Of the same face, blossoms upon one tree;
Characters of the great Apocalypse,
The types and symbols of Eternity,
Of first, and last, and midst, and without end.[55 - I add here some notes which would have disturbed the lecture, but may be of use to the student of Wordsworth’s mind who cares to return to them.The collocation of the last two quotations shows how, for Wordsworth, ‘the visionary power’ arises from, and testifies to, the mind’s infinity, and how the feeling of this is, or involves, or is united with, a feeling or idea of the infinite or ‘one mind,’ and of union with it. This connection of ideas (as to which I purposely use vague alternative terms, because I do not want to theorise the poet’s experience), is frequent or constant in Wordsworth, and it ought always to be borne in mind in regard to his language about ‘immortality’ or ‘eternity.’ His sense or consciousness of ‘immortality,’ that is to say, is at once a consciousness that he (in some sense of that word) is potentially infinite, and a consciousness that ‘he’ belongs to, is part of, is the home of, or is, an ‘active principle’ which is eternal, indivisible, and the ‘soul of all the worlds’ (cf. opening of Excursion, ix.). Whatever we may make of this connection of ideas, unless we realise it we shall remain entirely outside Wordsworth’s mind in passages like that just referred to, and in passages where he talks of ‘acts of immortality in Nature’s course,’ or says that to the Wanderer ‘all things among the mountains breathed immortality,’ or says that he has been unfolding ‘far-stretching views of immortality,’ though he may not appear to us to have touched in any way on the subject. Nature and Man (in one sense) are for Wordsworth ‘transitory,’ but Nature always and everywhere reveals ‘immortality,’ and Man (in another sense) is ‘immortal.’ Unquestionably for Wordsworth he is so. In what precise sense he is so for Wordsworth may not be discoverable, but the only chance of discovering it is to forget what we or anybody else, except Wordsworth, may mean by ‘man’ and ‘immortal,’ and to try to get into his mind.There is an illuminating passage on ‘the visionary power’ and the mind’s infinity or immortality, in Prelude, ii.:and hence, from the same source,Sublimer joy; for I would walk alone,Under the quiet stars, and at that timeHave felt whate’er there is of power in soundTo breathe an elevated mood, by formOr image unprofaned; and I would stand,If the night blackened with a coming storm,Beneath some rock, listening to notes that areThe ghostly language of the ancient earth,Or make their dim abode in distant winds.Thence did I drink the visionary power;And deem not profitless those fleeting moodsOf shadowy exultation: not for this,That they are kindred to our purer mindAnd intellectual life; but that the soul,Remembering how she felt, but what she feltRemembering not, retains an obscure senseOf possible sublimity, wheretoWith growing faculties she doth aspire,With faculties still growing, feeling stillThat whatsoever point they gain, they yetHave something to pursue.An interesting point, worth fuller treatment, is the connection of this feeling of infinity and the endless passing of limits with Wordsworth’s love of wandering, wanderers, and high roads. See, for instance, Prelude, xiii., ‘Who doth not love to follow with his eye The windings of a public way?’ And compare the enchantment of the question, What, are you stepping westward?’twas a soundOf something without place or bound.]

I hardly think that ‘the poet of Surrey, say, and the prophet of its life’ could have written thus. And of all the poems to which I have lately referred, and all the passages I have quoted, there are but two or three which do not cry aloud that their birth-place was the moor or the mountain, and that severed from their birth-place they would perish. The more sublime they are, or the nearer they approach sublimity, the more is this true. The cry of the cuckoo in O blithe new-comer, though visionary, is not sublime; but, echoed by the mountain, it is

Like – but oh, how different![56 - Yes, it was the mountain echo, placed in Arnold’s selection, with his usual taste, next to the earlier poem To the Cuckoo.]

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

Breathed immortality, revolving life,
And greatness still revolving; infinite.
There littleness was not; the least of things
Seemed infinite; and there his spirit shaped
Her prospects, nor did he believe, – he saw.

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

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

And of the second of these we may say that ‘few or none hears it right’ now he is gone.

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

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

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

The single sheep and the one blasted tree,

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

One voice, the solitary raven …
An iron knell, with echoes from afar:

against the distant sky he descries the shepherd,

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

But this theme might be pursued for hours, and I will refer only to two poems more. The editor of the Golden Treasury, a book never to be thought of without gratitude, changed the title The SolitaryReaper into The Highland Reaper. He may have had his reasons. Perhaps he had met some one who thought that the Reaper belonged to Surrey. Still the change was a mistake: the ‘solitary’ in Wordsworth’s title gave the keynote. The other poem is Lucy Gray. ‘When I was little,’ a lover of Wordsworth once said, ‘I could hardly bear to read Lucy Gray, it made me feel so lonely.’ Wordsworth called it Lucy Gray, or Solitude, and this young reader understood him. But there is too much, reason to fear that for half his readers his ‘solitary child’ is generalised into a mere ‘little girl,’ and that they never receive the main impression he wished to produce. Yet his intention is announced in the opening lines, and as clearly shown in the lovely final stanzas, which give even to this ballad the visionary touch which distinguishes it from Alice Fell:

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

O’er rough and smooth she trips along,
And never looks behind;
And sings a solitary song