The ‘Boy of Winander’ episode is situated in book the fifth of ‘The Prelude,’ amidst a meditation about the instructive value of a child’s early contact with Nature and imaginative literature. Introducing the “boy,” Wordsworth addresses nature: “ye knew him well, ye cliffs / And islands of Winander” (389-390). If we backtrack a few verse paragraphs, we find a description of a child (“no child, / But a dwarf man” (294-295)) whose education has excluded contact with the natural world. Sheltered from “Grandame Earth,” (347) this child knows not how to play, to love (348), or to “fear” (315-318). Sheltered too from imaginative literature, he has never “forget[ten] himself” in a story.

If the description of the prodigy child enables Wordsworth to imagine the deleterious effects of the sort of education described in Rousseau’s Emile, the boy of Winander passage treats the effects that early contact with poetry and nature have on a child raised much like Wordsworth himself. In his 1815 note on the episode, Wordsworth wrote that a “commutation and transfer of internal feelings” occurs in the passage. I’m interested in thinking about the transfer as from an engagement with the natural world as an imaginative text to an experience of the natural world as wordless and Other, or as merely material.

The boy’s “mimic hootings” are ironic in the sense that irony, as influentially defined by Paul de Man, figures a consciousness divided between empirical and fictional selves. The boy brings a fictional self into being with the act of mimicry that makes his human voice sound like an owl’s. The owl’s response confirms the boy’s power to engage the non-human world in fictional terms. However, when the audible responses to the boy’s hootings redouble upon themselves, amplifying and blending discrete sonic elements, the ironic fiction is reversed and the birds begin to sound like people. The boy’s description of the owls’ shouts as a “concourse wild / Of mirth and jocund din” (403-4) seems to be an unintended effect of his “skill.” That is to say, the boy’s anthropomorphism exists at a degree of remove from his initial act and may be a bit delusional.

I want to return to my suspicion that this passage is in part about the effects of poetry on a boy’s mind. So far, I’ve drawn an analogy between the boy’s trick and the rhetorical conceits of literature. Where else but from poetry could the boy have learned irony and anthropomorphism? Humans do not sound like owls, nor do owls sound like people: these are impressions one might find in a book. If imaginative literature has taught the boy to align poetry with nature, the “pauses of deep silence” () disarticulate poetry and nature.

When the boy’s trick fails to elicit a response from the owls, he becomes responsive to sounds and sights indifferent to his artifices. The reciprocal relation between human art and non-human nature established by the call-and-response pattern is broken. I’d argue that this is not an episode that follows the course of Hartman’s “via naturaliter negativa.” Instead of Nature guiding the poet “to a height whence he must find his own way” (220) using imagination alone, an imaginative view of nature leads the poet to a point whence Nature, in all of its indifference to human desire, is all that there is.

Thomas De Quincey reads the “gentle shock of mild surprise” that the boy carries “far into his heart” as an internal echoing of “the sublimities of nature.” I’d add to this that the boy’s traumatic internalization of the “voice / Of Mountain torrents or the visible scene” (409) is an especially radical version of sublime experience. The boy does not experience the sublime of Kantian aesthetics, where the sensation of magnitude precedes the mind’s elevating apprehension of its own intellectual powers. Here, the sensation of magnitude destabilizes the boy’s poetic understanding of nature. In the “pauses of deepest silence,” the boy experiences the precariousness of his aesthetic powers and the permanence, or priority, of the object world.

What is the ontological status of this “object world”? I think that it’s really important that the torrents and the “solemn imagery” of “uncertain heaven, received / Into the bosom of the steady lake” do not speak back to the poet, but “enter unawares into his mind” (). To make the leap from a mediated to an unmediated experience of nature’s being, the boy must occupy a suspended mental state. Intimacy with the “wiser spirit” at work in the “unreasoning progress of the world” () is to be found at the outer-limits of human consciousness, where means and rational ends are obscure. The “spirit of nature” is thus co-extensive with a really basic, or primitive, capacity for responsiveness.

I want to end this response by briefly addressing the graveside passage that Wordsworth added in the 1805 version of ‘The Prelude.’ In class, Josh drew attention to the recurrence of certain features of the boy’s experience with those of the man (Wordsworth) who visits his gravesite. In both passages, the time is evening and the subject is situated along the banks of a lake. The “churchyard hangs” as the boy once “hung listening” to those pauses of deep silence. Wordsworth stands “mute” looking at the boy’s grave just as the boy stood silently listening to the sound of mountain torrents.

The graveside passage completes a rupture between Wordsworth and his remembrance that begins with his decision to change the “I” describing the boy of Winander to a “he.” In the essay ‘Past Recognition: Narrative Origins in Wordsworth and Freud’, Cathy Caruth explores the empirical elisions (of the mother’s body, for instance) that underpin the relation to memory that ‘The Prelude’ models. This is a relation in which the poet’s present and past selves become contiguous with the “e-motions” produced in the writing process. In this graveside passage, there is no intercourse between the man and the memory—the boy’s grave is just a grave. That is to say: as the grown man stands looking upon the grave of a boy who he no longer recognizes as himself, there is no “crossing” between present and past selves. The boy’s memory does not speak but is “forgotten” by an indifferent landscape. If the boy of Winander comes to experience Nature as an ontological force indifferent to his poetic play, the speaker of the subsequent passage comes to experience Nature as an ontological force indifferent to memory. In this passage, Wordsworth represents what it is to let one’s past “remain / Where it lies hidden in its endless home / Among the depths of time” (196-97).

In a fascinating psychological reading of Wordsworth’s Intimations Ode, Stanley Cavell suggests that speaker’s recollection of childhood serves as a means to the relinquishment of a “grudge” connected with the trauma of birth. Cavell writes: “I suppose that all our feelings for childhood lost are feelings to be found intimated in childhood itself…angers as well as griefs” (74). The graveside passage added to the Boy of Winander episode shares with the ‘Intimations Ode’ a concern with what it means to recollect and let go of one’s childhood. The boy’s experience does not explicitly include with the loss of a “past setting that was home” (Cavell, 74) that figures prominently in Wordsworth’s portrayal of birth and Childhood in his famous Ode. The boy does, however, experience the precariousness of human beings’ creative powers. Psychologically, then, it seems apt to think of Wordsworth’s burial of the memory of this traumatic experience as what Cavell describes as a “forgetting that constitutes a birth” (). At the very least, this is a forgetting that enables Wordsworth to proceed with the creation of a “literary work that might live.”