The verse paragraph where Wordsworth recounts taking out someone else’s boat in the First Book of The Prelude is lodged between passages that confidently lay out the manner in which a mind, or minds, grow in harmony with nature. In the passage that precedes the episode (351-371), the “calm existence” that Wordsworth enjoys is configured as the end point of a long process of development through which “Nature” has disciplined his mind and passions. In the second passage, which comes after the boat episode, Wordsworth’s claims expand to include the reader: here, “life and Nature” purify “the elements of feeling and of thought” to generate a “we” who recognize “a grandeur in the beatings of the heart” (441). In these passages, pre-verbal and physiological experiences (“calm existence,” “the beatings of the heart”) make the compensatory structure of the telos convincing. Experiences which evade language become the condition of possibility for it. But if poetry is enabled by Wordsworth’s present state of calm, the writing also produces its own affects, as when the figuration of a “dark / Invisible workmanship” that coheres the self precipitates a spontaneous exclamation of praise and thanks (350-51).
The performance of affect in Wordsworth’s account of his own bilding underlines the way in which, as Cathy Caruth puts it, “memory is a form of rhetorical self-persuasion” (Caruth, 939). Caruth develops this assertion about The Prelude in a careful reading of a passage in Book Four where “wavering motions” on the surface of still water distort the image of a self–a double for the poet–gazing into the deep. These motions make self-reflection “more sweet” and are therefore figures for “e-motions” that connect the self to its reflection, or the poetic speaker to memories of his past. But Caruth points out that the cause of these (e)motions is not straightforward. Emotion “originate[s] in the observer” (939) and presumably also in his power of language, rather than in the motions of the natural world around him. Because of this, there remains a residual uncertainty about the epistemological status of the affects that cohere the self-reflexive process.
If Wordsworth’s affective gain persuades us of a causal relationship between nature’s “dark / invisible workmanship” and the development of his mind in the passage that comes before the shepherd’s boat episode, the episode itself works entirely differently. I want to say that it amplifies the waywardness of autobiographical emotion. If a reciprocal relationship between feeling and language is posited in the verse paragraphs that come before and after the boat episode, the memory itself pinpoints what Caruth terms “a knowledge not only unknowable but also better left unknown, an ominous “no no” (Caruth, 942).
In the ship stealing episode, an imaginative distortion divides the poet’s thoughts from “objects, images of trees, / Of sea or sky” (396-397). Why does the “spectacle” (391) of animism here divide the poet’s thoughts from familiar shapes and images? What is the difference between this distortion, which undermines the connection between the mind and nature, and the figures (e.g. the “dark / invisible workmanship”) that ground that connection? While there is surely a kind of animism in the ongoing personification of “Nature” as a she who acts upon the poet, I understand Wordsworth’s personification of “Nature” as controlled and knowing, at least in the verse paragraphs that precede and follow the boat stealing episode. What I mean by this is that Wordsworth-the-writer implicitly recognizes that nature is not actually a person, but thinks it generative to imagine the material world in such terms. But, in extending agency to the cliff, the boy is squarely in the realm of paranoid delusion.
In its theme of persecution, the episode is very gothic. The editors of the Norton edition include a footnote suggesting that the “sparkling light” (367) trailing the shepherd’s boat alludes to the “tracks of shining white” made by the water snakes that Coleridge’s mariner blesses “unaware.” The short episode bears some obvious similarities to the Rime: both recall a transgression linked to exploration and in both the transgression is caused by nothing and thus might be interpreted as an expression of free will (“No sooner had I sight of this small skiff, / Discovered thus by unexpected chance, / Than I unloosed her tether and embarked” (358-60)). Finally, both dramatize the supernatural effects of a guilt strangely disproportionate to the crime committed.
What actually happens in The Prelude is that Wordsworth steals a shepherd’s boat and, when a distant cliff appears large in his line of vision, he imagines that it is “a living thing” (411) pursuing him. Already guilty about stealing the boat (“It was an act of stealth and troubled pleasure” (361-62)), the boy confuses his own guilty affect with the cliff’s image when it rears up before him. The imaginative distortion happening here looms much larger than the subtly uncanny motions on the surface of still water from the passage that Caruth turns to in Book Four of The Prelude: the “voluntary power” (379) of the cliff is sublime in scale (sublime in Burkean terms) and cannot therefore be ignored or overlooked. I think that it’s enormously important that the cliff is a “thing” to the boy—the sublimity of the experience derives from the scale of the image but also from the unfamiliar, non-human status of the form generated by the boy’s imagination. The “huge and mighty forms that do not live / Like living men” recall the specter of a “thing” that originates in the boy’s imagination but that is also deeply Other.
For me, this episode sets a limit on authorial control and on the self-constituting powers of language. The ambivalent status of the specter–which both does and does not originate with the poet–denaturalizes the link between language, nature and the body that is essential to the autobiographical telos of The Prelude. I’d guess that the memory continues to haunt Wordsworth because he recognizes a continuity between the specter that alienates him from the object world and the tropes, metaphors and personifications of “nature” that elsewhere affirm the growth of his mind in its contact with the external world. The episode reminds Wordsworth and his readers that even the seemingly benign sort of animism that he toys with depends, like any kind of metaphorical thinking, upon an erasure of the undifferentiated Otherness of the phenomenal world (I’m thinking of Nietzsche’s ‘On Truth and Lie’ here).
