A month ago, I wrote a blog post on the boy of Winander episode in book five of The Prelude. I’m not fully satisfied with my attempt at interpretation and want to use this blog post to return to that book. I am particularly interested in the way in which moments of contact or anticipated contact between the human mind and inhuman forces configure an alien relationship between nature on the one hand and representation on the other.
‘There Was a Boy’ was written in the early winter months of 1798 and first published in the Lyrical Ballads of 1800. Eventually, the episode would be incorporated into the 1805 and 1850 versions of The Prelude. Wordsworth’s decision to place the poem in Book five suggests that he considered the text to be central to his thinking about the relationship between books and nature. My supposition here will be that the content of the episode problematizes Wordsworth’s view that poetic language mirrors “nature.”
In book five, Wordsworth suggests that a good education ought to teach children to love both books and nature. Wordsworth’s implicit goal in this book is to configure a model of development aimed at the maturation of a poet like him. That is to say, a poet capable of writing verse that establishes a continuity between feeling and discourse. The developmental apparatus of book five lends plausibility to Wordsworth’s claim that his mind has been selected and framed by nature. It lends plausibility, too, to his claim to possess a “more than usual organic sensibility” that can distill words that simply are feelings (see the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads).
At the end of the book on books, Wordsworth’s speaker writes that,
Nature…exists in works / Of mighty poets. Visionary power / Attends upon the motions of the winds / Embodied in the mystery of words; / There darkness makes abode, and all the host / Of shadowy things do work their changes there / As in a mansion like their proper home” (619-25).
In book I of The Prelude, Wordsworth identifies a “dark invisible workmanship” in the mind of man. Here, Wordsworth returns to this idea, this time drawing an analogy between “darkness” and “nature.” The analogy suggests that no one—not even the visionary poet–can say what exactly nature is, or where it comes from. Nature nonetheless exists in the works of “mighty poets.” Wordsworth’s formulation resonates with a claim that Kant makes in the Critique of the Aesthetic Power of Judgement–namely, that “Beautiful art is an art to the extent that it seems at the same time to be nature” (§45). Kant’s subsequent claim that only a “natural genius” can give the “rule as nature” to art completes the circuit between nature-as-spirit and nature-as-art. The “spirit given to a person at birth” (§46) gets transferred to an aesthetic form without anyone (including the artist) being able to delineate fixed ‘rules’ about how this transfer should happen, or how an art that seems to contain nature should be put together. Rather magically, “nature” retains its mystery as it is made durable in aesthetic form.
Kant’s proposal that “nature” can be transferred directly from the artist to his/her work of art runs parallel to Wordsworth’s claim that poetry is “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” However, both the philosopher and the poet describe alternative forms of aesthetic experience in which the mind becomes divided from nature. Aesthetic feeling is in Kant’s analytic of the sublime is premised on a failure of the imagination, or the faculty of sense. Here, aesthetic experience has its source outside of the phenomenal world where nature resides. Sublime experiences, according to Kant, cannot lead to or be the measure of beautiful art. In book five of The Prelude, the experience of getting lost in a book presages a more radical vision in which the poetic voice may be wiped out by an alien nature. Aesthetic experience, in other words, leads to the discovery of art’s separation from nature. The wayward emotions Wordsworth associates with the reading of Romances throughout the book open up a relatively non-threatening gap between feelings derived from nature and feelings derived from texts. However, this gap returns in altered form in the terrific deluge in the dream of the Arab.
When the speaker’s admiration for books drives him far “to seek disquietude,” his friend, a fellow reader, admits to his own wayward imaginings. He recalls reading Cervantes by the sea. Upon closing the pages of the book, this friend dreams about the forthcoming destruction of monumental texts that are also, within the dream logic, concrete natural forms. A shell that speaks the language of an Ode “in passion uttered” foretells “destruction to the children of the earth by deluge now at hand.” What the dreamer discovers here is a poetry that speaks of a nature that it cannot contain–the “fleet waters of a drowning world” cannot be appropriated or contained by the language of books. But what is perhaps more disconcerting here is the discovery that these waters exist as ontologically prior to the shell that represents the encapsulation of nature in culture. They will, the dreamer fears, destroy the shell. What we discover in this dream scenario is a fear that books are divided from, and vulnerable to destruction by, natural forces vaster and more powerful than the one they contain or seek to describe.
The boy of Winander episode bears several similarities to the dream of the Arab. Both figure a voice that resembles the voice of nature. The sound of air resonating through the shell is the sound of passionate poetic language and the boy’s mimic hootings resemble the hootings of owls. There is something distinctly musical in both the boy’s hootings and the “blast of harmony” that the shell emits. But in both episodes, it becomes clear that the musical voice that is or is like a voice of nature will not survive for long.
Most modern critics understand the “gentle shock of mild surprise” (19) through which the boy of Winander carries “far into his heart the voice / of mountain torrents” (20-21) to be a presentiment of death. The boy’s reception of nature as an Other prefigures the tragic destruction of the poetic potential manifested in his “mimic hootings.” While the total destruction presaged by the voice of the shell in the dream of the Arab may seem quite different from the announcement of death that follows the boy’s “mimic hootings,” the anxieties contained in both episodes center upon a recognition that the human utterance that takes its origins in nature will soon be muted once and for all. This recognition happens in both episodes in a moment of “shock” or “terror” in which the human subject receives, or anticipates being swallowed up by, a nature unmediated by poetry. On this reading, the “deluge” may be a hyperbolic version of the “voice / Of mountain torrents.” It is important, however, that the “visible scene” of rocks, woods and “uncertain heaven” is “received / Into the bosom of the steady lake” just as the voice of mountain torrents is carried far into the child’s “heart.” The fleet waters of the drowning world are not gently “received” by the dreamer or the Arab. The boy’s unmediated contact with a natural world stripped of his imaginative projections becomes the basis of a milder poetics of trauma.
Though the boy of Winander episode is about the premature loss of a poetic voice, it can nonetheless be written. What gets written is a poetry that has given up its claim to contain, or to be continuous with the natural world. Where does reading come in? The boy’s muteness as he “hangs listening” to the now silent landscape is of course paralleled by the speaker’s muteness as he stands looking at the boy’s grave. If we can read this scene, as Josh Wilner and Paul de Man do, as a figure of reading, then it would seem that reading now involves a movement of negation. That is to say, the speaker’s imaginative relation to the boy (which involves, as de man points out, an impossible knowledge of death) is distinct from what the speaker actually sees in the phenomenal world before him–a grave, a village church and green hill where the boy’s corpse lies forgotten.
