Having just read quickly through the first part of Book the tenth for the first time, I’m going to make this week’s response short. If I had to sum up the theme or subject of the first part of the book, I’d say something like this: Wordsworth, who believes that freedom is necessary to moral action, struggles to retain hope in the possibility of human liberation after the politicized struggle for the cause has devolved into mass violence in France, a turning against the principles of liberty in England and war between the two nations.

If Wordsworth attempts to work out his place in nature in the early books, he seeks to locate himself inside of a history shaped by human action in this book. One of the things that I find fascinating about the chapter is the way in which we see Wordsworth’s body and mind getting entangled with the temperament of his historical moment–a time when “a reservoir of guilt / And ignorance, filled up from age to age…burst and spread in deluge through the land” (436-39). Although Wordsworth expresses the hope that a “faith, / an elevation and a sanctity” (426-27) may survive the afflictions of “evil times,” this “faith” is under serious threat. Wordsworth does not look upon the violence in France as an outsider or observer: he understands the most private aspects of his “soul” (380) to be implicated in the shameful perpetuation of violence happening around him, first in France and then in England.  The “enormities” of the Great Terror leave him haunted by “ghastly visions” (374) that recur “through months, through years” in his dreams and waking thoughts.

Recalling Britain’s preparation for war with France in the summer of 1793, Wordsworth describes a “shock” felt among the “ingenious youth” of England that “might be termed” a “revolution.” In no uncertain terms, Wordsworth likens this psychic “revolution” happening in England to the revolution that had precipitated so much violence in France. Wordsworth captures this shock in a set of territorial figures: the news of war throws him into a “another region” alien to the teleological, or spiritual “path” he had been traveling up to this point. Another set o figures follow: that of Wordsworth as a “green leaf” “cut off” from his “beloved country” and “tossed about in whirlwinds” (258).

It is as if Wordsworth has been violently thrust from an order of being familiar to him into one that is unfathomable. Where he was once able to experience “enjoyment” in his felt connection to the natural world, he now experiences “a conflict of sensations without a name.” I’d suggest that the sensations “without a name” chart a severing of affect from cognition. The harmonious links between mind and world confirmed by feelings of “enjoyment” are no where to be found in an affective situation where Wordsworth cannot put words to feelings. Of course, Wordsworth is writing about all this, which suggests that the disorientation can be recalled without completely impeding the discursive process. Though the memory of this “revolution” can be written, it is nonetheless upsetting, and the proliferation of figures that follows Wordsworth’s identification of the “shock” suggests that the poet’s mind at the scene of writing is turning, unable to pin this experience down in ordinary language.

I’m interested in the way in which the “shock” in England puts Wordsworth out of synch with what is happening in the empirical world around him. The sense of spatial displacement evoked in the metaphor of the whirlwind is matched by a correlated sense of temporal displacement, which gets expressed on the level of narrative. As I end this response, I want to look at a moment where we see Wordsworth thinking and feeling out of time with what is going on around him. The example I’ve chosen happens while Wordsworth is still in France, but I think that it illuminates a temporal problem that Wordsworth experiences even as he is back in England.

At the beginning of book ten, Wordsworth recalls seeing a public square in France “Heaped up with dead and dying” corpses. The immediate experience is one that Wordsworth cannot make meaning of.The sight of slaughtered corpses is not awful or fearsome in this moment of witnessing, but meaningless—there exists a gulf between the autobiographical writer, the observer in the memory and the significance of what the observer is looking at. He retrospectively figures his incomprehension in this moment as a hermeneutic failure, or as a failure to make present a voice known to be immanent in the words of a book. The alignment of Wordsworth’s present and past selves comes into view if we can posit a parallel between Wordsworth as a reader of his past and the figure of the reader baffled by a book that has been reduced to the sheer physicality of ‘mute leaves.’

It is not until later in the evening when Wordsworth is “felt and touched” by what he terms “the fear gone by.” The temporality at work here is very strange. Wordsworth belatedly experiences a fear that he suggests would have been fit to atrocities already witnessed through a virtual, or imaginary, anticipation of a sequence of violent returns. The feeling of anticipatory “dread” has to do with the witnessed scene but only indirectly: Wordsworth explicitly describes the dread as an effect of “tragic fictions / And mournful calendars of true history, / Remembrances and dim admonishments” (67-69). Wordsworth’s failure to read and thereby process the manifestations of mass violence when they are directly before him is followed up by a moment where reading takes its effects, precipitating a “voice that cried / To the whole city, ‘Sleep no more!'” (76-77). I suspect that this whole episode might be understood as an allegory for Wordsworth’s autobiographical project, which aspires to situate the self in relation to ‘nature’ or history but which frequently ends up locating the self where nature and history are not. In other words, the autobiographical subject finds himself in places that he didn’t expect to find himself and the very activity of writing produces affects (here fear) that are related to those experienced in response to sense data but epistemologically distinct.

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.”

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).