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 20th 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 12th 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.
