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.

In this response, I read Dorothy’s Grasmere Journal alongside a passage in William’s poem ‘Home at Grasmere.’ The aim is to highlight Dorothy’s and William’s parallel, if differently articulated, attempts to fix in language a shared, or sharable, sense of pleasure in the perception of natural phenomena. Kenneth R. Johnston remarks that ‘Home at Grasmere’ is “full of images of reflection and circularity, tautological arguments, and redundant syntax” (81). These rhetorical features underline the non-teleological structure of the feelings that are the poem’s raison d’etre. “Joy,” “an overflowing Love,” a “pleasing rest,” and a unifying “sensation,” alike derive from the poet’s reflective meditations on natural objects he beholds in the concrete “here” of Grasmere. Curiously, these feelings become the basis of Wordsworth’s faith that Grasmere is a place where a harmonious balance may be struck between the rights of the individual and the good of the community. He asserts,

The best, and these, remember, most abound, / Are fit associates of the joy, / Joy of the highest and the purest minds. / They blend with it congenially: meanwhile, / Calmly they breathe their own undying life, / Lowly and unassuming as it is (678-684).

This “joy” is ecstatically transpersonal. It is of “the highest and purest minds” but is not confined to any discrete empirical content. A few lines before the ones quoted above, Wordsworth describes “Joy” as a sensation immanent throughout the landscape: “Joy spreads and sorrow spreads; and this whole Vale, / Home of untutored Shepherds as it is, / Swarms with sensation” (664-666). Joy functions as a leveling force: it connects the self with “the best” of human beings, which for Wordsworth, includes the “untutored Shepherd,” and all “lowly and unassuming” lives. All dwellers of the vale are capable of feeling this Joy. All share in a single mood of “delight” and, in so doing, “delight” the poet.  This is a poem where “the quietness / Of this sublime retirement” is impressed upon Wordsworth in his liking for “the small grey Horse that bears / They paralytic Man; I know the Ass / On which the Cripple, in the Quarry maimed, / Rides to and fro: I know them and their ways” (723-28).The moods both of ecstatic Joy and of a calmer quietness seem to blur the distinction between insides and outsides. However, it’s important to Wordsworth that one can “blend with” Joy and yet retain an integral sense of self-possession. “The best” partake of the shared Joy and yet calmly “breathe their own undying life.” The sense of pleasure serves as the basis of a social imaginary but does not threaten the integrity of the individual in his or her separateness.

As Wordsworth points to various levels of pleasurable intensity in ‘Home at Grasmere,’ we come to recognize what Paul Fry identifies as the “inclusive unity” that is his subject par excellence. Dorothy’s writing tends to stop short of speculative thought. But as her brother’s editor and copywriter, she would have been thoroughly familiar with his efforts to capture in rhetorical form the suspended states that they both experienced as they communed with the sights and sounds in the material world around them. Like William, Dorothy believed that these experiences were not hers alone, but were shared and sharable–related to the imagination of a community. In a journal entry on Friday the 20^th of June 1800, Dorothy describes her felt response to the landscape:

“The evening cold & clear & frosty, but the wind was falling as I returned. I staid at home about an hour & then walked up the hill to Rydale lake. Grasmere looked so beautiful that my heart was almost melted away. It was quite calm only spotted with sparkles of light. The church visible. On our return all distant objects had faded away—all but the hills. The reflection of the light bright sky above Black quarter was very solemn” (12).

The verb “to melt” here functions kind of like the verb “to blend” that William uses to describe the feeling of Joy in ‘Home at Grasmere.’ Both imply the combination or dispersal of one substance into another. For Dorothy, the act of looking involves a sense of the self’s pleasurable entanglement with that which is perceived. If talk of the “heart” suggests a language of sensibility and shared affect, the word “melt” captures the materiality of a sensory experience that is semi-conscious. Dorothy’s heart was “almost melted away”–the adverb “almost” provides a sense of the heart’s expansion while at the same time guarding against its complete dissolution. If this is a sublime experience, it is not a violent one—Dorothy may be filled with her sense of the landscape’s beauty, but she is not overwhelmed, or belittled before it. The “calm” and then “solemn” moods that pervade the external scene in the description that follows this sensory experience are implicitly awakened within Dorothy at the scene of writing. It is interesting that Dorothy punctuates the composition with the passing observation, “The church visible.” The comment suggests that this emblem of communal life is an essential part of the holistic experience that the entry captures. If the church can be read as an emblem of community, then its presence in the picture connects the perceptions here, which expand to include William upon the return, to a larger (Protestant) social whole.

Dorothy’s journal entries were not, like William’s lyrics, written to be shared with the middle-class reading public. While the passage quoted above is exemplary as an accounts of the landscape that stands alone as a literary composition unto itself, many of Dorothy’s entries are made up of fragmented observations about quotidian about life in Grasmere. Her journal is filled with empirical descriptions of the plants, animals, friends and passing strangers who she comes into contact with. It would make sense to read the journal as an ethnographic study of the vale. It is surely a text that is filled with individual “case-studies.” That is to say, it is filled with careful, minute accounts of the look, dialect and personal histories of the people to be found in Grasmere. I’d argue that the Wordsworthian faith that a spiritually sustaining feeling of pleasure is accessible to all stands or falls upon such accounts in the Journal. On Friday 12^th 1802, Dorothy recalls,

“The Sun shone while it rained, & the Stones of the walls & the pebbles on the Road glittered like silver. When William was at Keswick I saw Jane Ashburner driving the Cow along the high road from the well where she had been watering it she had a stick in her hand & came tripping along in the Jig step, as if she were dancing—Her presence was bold & graceful, her cheeks flushed with heath & her countenance was free & gay” (77).

In this passage, we see Dorothy looking outside of herself for evidence that Grasmere is a “blessed place” (93) for all who inhabit it. I want to say that in this journal entry, the “Joy” that William invests with so much value in ‘Home at Grasmere’ is made palpable in the tripping gait, “bold & graceful” presence and “free & gay” countenance of Jane Ashburner. Dorothy makes no transcendent claims here, but her empirical account of Jane Ashburner’s appearance affirms that others do indeed partake in the kinds of joyful experiences essential to the Wordsworth’s shared vision of nature. Jane Ashburner emerges as the substitute, or double, for Dorothy’s minimally present ‘I.’ Before Jane’s “free & gay” attitude emerges before us, Dorothy gives a minute impression of “the Stones of the walls & the pebbles on the Road [that] glittered like silver.” Positioned on the “high road,” Jane seems to be at an elevation to appreciate an expansive view of the landscape. But her placement on this road also implies that she has benefitted from the very of impression–of pebbles glittering in the rain–that precedes Dorothy’s account of their encounter. Jane’s perceptions are, in a manner, continuous with Dorothy’s own and the grace and freedom of her figure affirms the fit between the human mind and the empirical world.