We must have belief and meaning, but language cannot necessarily explain itself on these matters. This way of thinking follows Wittgenstein’s decision that the Tractatus Logico-Philisophicus was a failure and his discovery that the grammatical foundations for propositions are not logically certain. What we get in the Philosophical Investigations is fragmented remarks, which read like the philosopher’s unresolved conversation with himself. Wittgenstein aims to figure out what is meant by propositions about (among other things) understanding, seeing, feeling pain. He rejects the idea that such words ought to refer to some mysterious process of mind, preferring to understand them as they are used in particular “language games,” as he calls them. Language games are highly contingent—they are governed by potentially changeable rules—and the job of the philosopher is to give a good account of the empirical contexts that make these language games meaningful forms of communication.

Philosophy should speak about what it is possible to think and disabuse us of illusions–the deformities in our understanding–that language traditions themselves create. When one does philosophy this way, transcendental essences dissolve, as do static and uniform meanings for particular words. Words function differently in different contexts—sometimes words suggest to us a vivid picture, but other times they do not. Sometimes we think before we speak, and other times we do not. Expressive statements, like a cry of pain, do not necessarily call up a picture in our minds. A statement like “I’ve figured it out!” should be understood as a dynamic signal and not as a representation in the mind.

As Wittgenstein positions the signifier prior to the signified, he discovers that language’s relation to its outside (the empirical world of material objects, affects, sensations) is tenuous. The text deals with the strangeness of language, its epistemological ambiguities. Wittgenstein thematizes this point like a true skeptic by returning to the feasibility of simulation. Grown ups are trained to lie, to say what they do not mean, and it is sometimes hard to ascertain pretense from authenticity.

Wittgenstein rejects the idea that we have ‘special senses’ that produce their own special feelings. (Contrast this with the pleasurable free play of the faculties in Kant’s ‘Analytic of the Beautiful’) Because the concept of observation implies a pre-existent object, it cannot bring its own object into being. We may give a descriptive account of our observations about how our present sense of self differs from a sense of self in a past, but we cannot spontaneously constitute a sense of self by observation. This is because observation—like language itself–imposes a temporal frame.

Wittgenstein suggests that observations about the self are grounded in difference and, because of this, language is limited in its ability to describe the feeling of self-sameness. He continuously runs up against the difficulty of giving a description in language of the now, of the present moment, of the experience of simultaneity and presence. This difficulty recurs in his commentary on spontaneous motion. Here, he notes that, in most cases, we do not think, or form a picture, of our arm rising when we move our arm. It is difficult for us to describe this spontaneous process without inviting misconceptions (like about human ‘free will’). The instability of the ‘self’ is further underlined in the parts of PI where Wittgenstein obsessively returns to the fantasy of the ‘private language.’ The idea that we might all have access to our own idiosyncratic language of sensation–a way of knowing this feeling from that one yesterday–falls apart upon investigation. All this may explain the fragmented form of the remarks as well as Josh’s conviction that the text is one about ‘thinking in pieces.’

Wittgenstein’s insistence that language and thought do their work inside of time and space also informs his commentary on what it means to “see something” in a painting. Here, Wittgenstein dissolves the illusion that we can spontaneously grasp the whole of a painting. We can only observe one aspect of a picture at a time. There is no singly valid way of ‘seeing’ a picture—no authoritative model from which false ways of seeing would fall away. Instead, we see only pieces and sometimes become newly aware of some aspect of the picture, of it’s spatial organization. Compare this to Cubism in painting.

Joan’s suggestive comment is that we add aspects to our account of language games just as we add aspects to our visual interpretations of paintings. This implies that the space of freedom  and flexibility that seems to disappear as Wittgenstein disrupts fantasies of mental processes and private feelings lies with our collective power to add aspects to the language games–to play with the rules.

I asked no other thing,

No other was denied.

I offered Being for it;

The mighty merchant smiled.

 

Brazil? He twirled a button

Without a glance my way:

But, madam, is there nothing else

That we can show today?

The allegory of spiritual conversion as a commercial exchange with a “mighty merchant” highlights and vulgarizes the role of interest in an imagination of God as one who confers things upon the subject who seeks him. But Dickinson does not by any means discount the speaker’s sincerity. The “I” of the first four lines introduces the allegory of exchange between the self and God after the possibility of mutuality has been denied. The poem is about a knowledge that comes in the wake of an imagination of conversion as mercantile transaction; a trade of “Being” for some obscure, yet all-important “thing.”

The “thing” that the speaker asks for remains unnamed.The speaker’s account of the request–“I asked no other thing / no other was denied” takes the form of two negative statements; the “thing” cannot be substituted for any other thing. Itself denied, it seems to negate the value and singularity of everything else on offer–the “no other.” Perhaps, then, the “thing” is anti-conceptual and pre-linguistic; an affective state—“happiness,” “joy,” “pleasure” “love”—or a spiritual one—“blessedness,” “grace.”

The merchant’s question “Brazil?”  is a condescending translation of the indeterminate “thing” that was asked for. Brazil is an absurd “thing” to ask for in the context of an empirical, or even a more abstract, commercial exchange. If we were to imaginatively entertain the notion of “buying a nation,” we might observe that nations are not bought and sold in one fell swoop, but built through violent and ongoing political struggles. If we were to think about a more concrete and everyday instance of exchange over a counter, we might ask: how would a merchant empirically “show” a thing that is so vast and over-determined as “Brazil”?

The merchant’s smiling attempt to conceptualize the speaker’s request hints at the impossibility of its realization. The merchant himself is indifferent, aloof;–an impersonal God who is an agent of disappointment rather than a positive presence. Dickinson here presents us with the scenario of a subject who is, to borrow from Pascal, seeking a knowledge of the heart but who is denied. Dickinson shows us how the idea of a God who has what we need corresponds to a deeply felt human desire–the speaker is not unsympathetically represented. Narrating this poem in the past tense, however, Dickinson opens the way for a more challenging spiritual optics, one where ethical action begins with an awareness of the asymmetrical relation between the God and the self. In the now of the speaker’s present, “Being” may be offered for some other reason than the hope of reward.

Wittgenstein writes, ““It’s as if we could grasp the whole use of a word at a stroke.” — Well, that is just what we say we do” (§191). Can the mind actually summon all of the uses to which a word might be put at a stroke? When do we imagine that this is so? Pivoting from the question of how “a word” could contain all its possible uses to how “a machine” could contain all of its possible motions, Wittgenstein insists that we talk this way when we are “doing philosophy” (§194).

While it’s unclear to me whether Wittgenstein has particular philosophies in mind, I find it interesting to think about the “possibility of a machine’s  motion” as an idea of metaphysics—the discourse of philosophy concerned with the first causes of “machines” like physical systems and human bodies. If we accept the premise that the “machine seems already to contain its own mode of operation,” (§193) then the initial picture of the machine that the philosopher gives becomes the basis of “a series of pictures.” Hobbes’ picture of the human driven by means-ends logic contains within it the possibility of a whole series of pictures of humans acting out of self-interest. Alternatively, we can derive from the theological picture of a machine run by a God given moral sense a whole series of pictures of humans acting benevolently.

Wittgenstein insists that this kind of talk is figurative—“the movement of the machine qua symbol is predetermined in a different way from how the movement of any given actual machine is” (§193). We would not insist that the motions of a human being that we have some actual experience with are pre-determined, because we know that, however predictable that person may be, s/he is liable to move in all sorts of unforeseeable ways. To present a picture of human nature as a machine that contains all of its possible motions ahead of time (as was common in the Enlightenment) is to present a symbol that bears no necessary relation to our everyday experience of others. Wittgenstein carves out a space here for poetic thinking, but insists that the use of symbols in philosophy leads to “misinterpretations.” Philosophical discourses that aspire to holistically describe how the world works fail to understand their own grounding in the potentially wayward imagination. 

When Wittgenstein indulges his own imagination that “infinitely long rails correspond to the unlimited application of a rule” (§218), he notes, “I should say: This is how it strikes me.” The image giving expression to this infinite process may only “strike” the “I” who offers it. In this philosophy, one cannot assume that symbols are shared. If the modern discourse of metaphysics is grounded in symbolical propositions guised as truth claims, then who is to say that it does what it says that it does; that is, speak objectively about the world? When we adequately account for symbolic status of metaphysical claims, they may come to look like the arbitrary conjectures that happen to strike the philosopher as he sits alone in his study. Or, alternatively, the “false interpretation[s]” and “odd conclusions” of “primitive people” about civilized talk (§194). By turning attention to “language-games” observable in everyday life, Wittgenstein seeks to write a philosophy grounded in shared rules, rather than in symbols and false interpretations imposed from an ‘outside.’

David Hume shares Wittgenstein’s conviction that philosophy must speak of customary rules. There are very obvious differences between them: for Hume, the passions are what people share; for Wittgenstein, it’s language. But Hume’s thinking on promises converges with Wittgenstein’s on intention. Hume argues that it makes no sense to say that the obligation to keep a promise originates with a self-constituted intention. Instead, promises entail a sense of duty because of “the conventions of men”—our shared institution of “symbols and signs, by which we might give each other security of our conduct in any particular incident.” When Wittgenstein asks, “what kind of super-rigid connection obtains between the act of intending and the thing intended?” he turns to the example of a kind of promise—the statement “Let’s play a game of chess”—and insists that the connection between these words and the act can only lie “in the list of rules of the game, in the teaching of it, in the everyday practice of playing” (§197).

I bring up Hume because I think he makes a good foil for Wittgenstein. Whereas Hume and Wittgenstein share a weariness of certain solipsistic tendencies in Western philosophy, Hume’s turn to social convention involves an extensive delineation of the rules governing the occupation, prescription, accession and succession of property. Wittgenstein, on the other hand, turns to seemingly trivial practices of everyday life—to the game of chess, for example—and thus presents a philosophical optics is finer grained and less interested in serving the interests of power. Last class, Josh noted that the contingency of language games opens up the possibility that they can be other. By avoiding the kinds of generalities that Hume falls into, Wittgenstein seems also to avoid placing a stake in the conservation of any particular institution–like that of property, the family, or the state. Is this an evasion on Wittgenstein’s part?

In § 119 in the “Philisophical Investigations,” Wittegnstein writes,

“The results of philosophy are the discovery of some piece of plain nonsense and the bumps that the understanding has got by running up against the limits of language. They–these bumps–make us see the value of the discovery.”

In class, Josh noted something to the effect that the “limits of language” for Wittgenstein may be marked by practices that are not totally explainable. I find this impetus of the “Philisophical Investigations” interesting as well as mysterious. What are the practices that trip us up where we believe we can explain them? What ontological status do such a practices have if they are “plain nonsense” that nonetheless have force in the world?

Wittgenstein appeals to an idea of bump-as-collision or as “a running up against” something inert. It would seem that limits of language reveal themselves only after we’ve been too reckless. Wittgenstein also seems to be saying that philosophy renders results for those who undertake it only because the understanding will unavoidably fail to look out. In this sense, the philosophic discovery lies in “seeing” for the first time the “bump” we’ve already gotten by a careless use of language. Or, to put it another way, the discovery is in seeing that what we’ve been doing with language has been “some piece of plain nonsense.” Here, it seems that Wittgenstein may be reflecting on his own earlier work in the Tractus and what Josh calls the “Western scientific-Mathmatical culture” that he has turned away from.

Wittgenstien’s “piece of plain nonsense” has powerful effects. This for me is communicated in the strange conjunction of the “bumps” with the “understanding.” Wittgenstein goes on in the Investigations to suggest that, though one is tempted to define “understanding” as a particular mental process, this is an error. Perhaps he says that the “understanding” gets “bumps”  to emphasize that what we are tempted to think of as a cognitive faculty operating in the invisible world of mind has spatial dimensions in the physical world. According to my internet German-English dictionary, “Beulen” means “swelling from a blow,” “slight hollow,” “bruise,” “boil,” “bulge.” The understanding that gets “bumps” is a potentially monstrous agency, one that, taking a certain shape, leaves traces of deformity on itself.

Perhaps Wittgenstein chose the word “bump,” which suggests a physical deformity and an aberration from the ‘norm’, because he wanted to suggest that philosophy becomes valuable where it allows us to acknowledge the ineffability of certain signs—the disjunction between an appearance and the original ‘experience’ or ‘mental process’ to which we might take it to refer. One might recognize a bruise and not be sure how one got it or, more seriously, one might recognize a cancerous bump and be told that no one knows for certain how to cure it. Recognizing it, one does not necessarily get rid of it. However, one is now aware that it is there and can assess, depending on how bad it is, how it may change one’s way of doing things.

What fascinates me is Wittgenstein’s interest in engaging the propositions (about understanding, reading, influence) that, upon investigation, prove to be “plain nonsense”—as if he wishes to measure the force that such propositions have by qualifying them again and again. He returns with interest, for instance, to the idea that, while reading, we are tempted to claim that we feel that there is a metal connection between seeing a sign and uttering a word. In § 169, he writes “I’d like to say: when I read, I feel a certain influence of the letters on me.” Wittgenstein goes on to suggest that the word “influence,” as with the word “guidance,” has no essential meaning, but can only be understood in the difference between particular forms and practices of influence. In § 172, he lists “cases”: “You’re in a playground with your eyes blindfolded, and someone leads you by the hand, sometimes left, sometimes right” or “someone leads you by the hand where you are unwilling to go, by force” or “someone leads you along a footpath; you’re having a conversation; you go wherever he does” etc.

On my reading of the Investigations, it’s not that internal feelings of, say, ‘influence’ are not phenomenally palpable, but rather that we invite misunderstanding (we deform our own understanding) by assuming that language provides us with the tools to define influence as an essential inward experience that we all share in common. So what do we do about this problem? In §184, Wittgenstein writes that, “definitions usually aren’t enough” to resolve philosophical paradoxes, but “even less so the statement that a word is ‘indefinable.’” Wittgenstein’s procedure is to describe more clearly the particular criteria among a diverse set that make it meaningful for someone to assert, in a particular circumstance or community, that he or she has been “influenced.” This way we as language users avoid falling into the trap of presuming to know what influence feels like, on the one hand, and casually discrediting the connection between the word and the feeling on the other. I guess I’m wondering: is there room for awe here in the discovery that the language processes that we may take for granted as essential and knowable (like the “influence” the sight of a word has on sensations)  aren’t actually so?

I’ll turn finally to a passage in Pascal that appeals to awe in a way that Wittgenstein does not. It’s in XV.199, where Pascal writes “I believe that with his curiosity changing into wonder he will be more disposed to contemplate them [the marvels of nature’s infinite immensity and nothingness] in silence than investigate them with presumption” (61). Here, Pascal warns against the presumptions of knowledge (perhaps scientific knowledge in particular?) and recommends a different attitude of silent contemplation. Is Wittgenstein not also, in showing how little we know about the connection between words and mental processes, warning against presumption and recommending a different relation to knowledge, one where we learn through contemplation to silence the nonsensical assertions we are always already tempted to make?

In this post, I will turn to a Journal entry for Thursday 29^th 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 22^nd 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 22^nd 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.

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.

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).