In this post, I will turn to a Journal entry for Thursday 29th April 1802, a day in which Dorothy details two distinct impressions that she has lying in the fields around Dove cottage. I will focus only on the first. The journal entry accounts for an afternoon during which Dorothy and William both seek to become passively receptive to the material world. The short, notational form of sentences that readers of the Grasmere Journals quickly learn to associate with the mundane and unremarkable aspects of Dorothy’s everyday life disappear in this entry as Dorothy dilates two distinct spots of time that stand as a literary compositions unto themselves. The precision and self-sufficient quality of the passages suggest that Dorothy must have regarded these moments as valuable, worthy of retaining for subsequent recollection. The impression I will focus on here is one that Dorothy partakes in through her identification with William. The two position themselves inside of a trench in the landscape. With particular attention to William’s experience, Dorothy writes:
William lay, & I lay in the trench under the fence—he with his eyes shut & listening to the waterfalls & the Birds. There was no one waterfall above another—it was a sound of waters in the air—the voice of the air. William heard me breathing & rustling now & then but we both lay still, & unseen by one another—he thought that it would be as sweet thus to lie so in the grave, to hear the peaceful sounds of the earth & just to know that ones dear friends were near (92).
This passage exposes a connection, paradigmatic for William, between the presence of non-human being—here made audible by the “sound of waters in the air”—and an anticipation, or impossible knowledge, of death. Needless to say, the experience Dorothy is recalling is an intimate one. The relative hiddenness of the trench must have made lying in it even more pleasurable for the siblings. Because they both lay “unseen by one another,” it seems unclear where Dorothy’s experience ends and where William’s begins. She describes what he “heard” and “thought” and it is almost as if she has intuited his thoughts. It’s possible that William shared his imagination of what it would feel like to “lie so in the grave” with Dorothy verbally. But Dorothy’s decision to account for what William “thought” rather than what he “said” highlights the importance of their mutual silence.
The silence of the siblings here strengthens a link that Pamela Woof, the editor of the Grasmere Journals, draws between this moment and an entry for seven days earlier [the 22nd of April], in which Dorothy recalls William repeating the lines of an unpublished poem that “had been called to his mind by the dying away of the stunning of the waterfall when he came behind a stone” (89). Eventually titled “These chairs they have no words to utter,” the poem that William was repeating to Coleridge on the 22nd of April links the muteness of a speaker’s cozy domestic surroundings—chairs, fire, ceiling and floor—to a peaceful solitude that, in the final stanza of the poem, gets articulated as a “sweetness and breath with the quiet of death” (). It makes sense that the abrupt silencing of the waterfall would have called to mind the lines of this poem about muteness. The poem’s structure, which links a mute restfulness to a claim for peace beyond the grave, mirrors the structure of Dorothy’s account of the siblings’ experience in John’s Grove. The parallel suggests that, while Dorothy is likely sympathetic with William’s response to the “voice of the air,” the sound of waters prompts him, not her, to anticipate a time when he and, perhaps she too, will lie dead, buried in the ground.
In this period, William had clearly come to associate stillness and silence with death. I want to suggest that the pattern of association was deeply entangled with his poetic ambitions. The Journals are written under the stress of William’s desire to make his name during this period. The William represented in the Journals is nearly always absorbed in the creative process, even while he is not writing. Poetry is all consuming and writing seems to be as frequently a source of pain as of pleasure. I don’t think that it’s too much of a stretch to suggest that, in such a context, silence became weighted in William’s mind with feelings of ambivalence about his poetic vocation. William’s disquieting anticipation of death in John’s Grove may be related to his fears that the world will be inhospitable to his poetic plans. The inarticulate noise that fills William’s consciousness seems to stand for a non-teleological impulse in nature that disorients the poet who would express, as William put it in his great Prospectus,
“How exquisitely the individual Mind / (And the progressive powers perhaps no less / Of the whole species) to the external World / Is fitted:–and how exquisitely, too– /Theme this but little heard of among men– / The external World is fitted to the Mind.”
Kenneth Cervelli comes to a similar conclusion about Dorothy’s Journal entry. But he suggests a link between William’s imagination of death in John’s Grove and the traumatic history of the Revolution that shaped the public sphere into which William wished to participate: “William’s fantasy of experiencing a solitary, meaningful death in John’s Grove could not really have occurred had he not been actively pursuing a career in poetry” (78). The connection between William’s perception of “the sound of waters in the air” and his authorial anxieties amidst a time of war and violent upheaval is further reinforced by Alan Bewell’s suggestion that William drew upon “primitive landscapes”—“sublime and desolate worlds, of sands, naked rocks, rugged land formations, unchanneled waters and headlong torrents” (272) as he struggled to define a role for the poet in the wake of the French Revolution and the mass violence that followed.
Kenneth Cervelli reads William’s morbid response the disparate “sound of the air” as a typical example of the “subjective—even sopilsistic—territories William so clearly enjoyed visiting” (). But it seems important that William’s thought experiment makes death seem less solitary—William proposes that one may in death know that “ones dear friends are near.” Significantly, it is mood that makes this poetic thought possible. More specifically, the “sweet” mood awakened by “the peaceful sounds of the earth” prompts William’s impossible attribution of knowledge and sensory experience to the corpse that he, and perhaps Dorothy too, will become. Thomas Pfau has argued that Romantic moods establish “a quasi-cognitive relation to the world in the specific modality of emotion, that is, as an intrinsically evaluative experience” (12). The Kantian analytic of the beautiful becomes essential to Pfau’s claim that emotion transpires in and as a “comprehensively determined, holistic disposition vis-à-vis the world” that is not “transparent to individuals or communities; it cannot be experienced in the same ways as ordinary propositional object knowledge” (12-13). This disposition finds its intellectual articulation in “the aesthetic overall, and literature and poetry more particularly.” We can trace the basic link that Pfau draws between mood, evaluation and rhetoric in Dorothy’s description of what transpires as William opens himself up to the “voice of the air.” William’s evaluation of the sibling’s experience as a “sweet” one allays without wholly diffusing the sublime mood awakened by the “voice of the air,” a reminder of death in the landscape. That is to say, William’s description of the experience as “peaceful” lends a placid surface to what remains a traumatic mood. William’s judgment is an aesthetic one and his complex perception, wrought as it is with ambivalence, has to be articulated as a poetic fiction–one that could not reasonably be put forth in propositional language.
