After spending some time with Wordsworth's and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads, we turn our attentions to each poet individually. The coming week we will devote to Wordsworth, and in our poems for Monday I've tried to include representative works from several periods of his writing. "There was a boy" (484) and "Crossing the Alps" (565) come from the long, meditative, autobiographical work The Prelude (though "Boy" was first published as a stand-alone piece in LB). "Strange fits of passion" (487) and "Three years she grew" (488) belong to what are known as the "Lucy poems," a series of short lyrics about a mysterious beloved. Finally, "Daffodils" (558), "The Solitary Reaper" (560), and "Stepping Westward" (559) are examples of "encounter poems," in which the speaker is somehow altered after a meaningful encounter with a person or thing.
As ever, choose one poem that moves you and post your response by Monday noon.
To connect our discussion of laboring poets from Thursday and our Wordsworthian discussion, please enjoy the following solitary reaper:
Or, to be proper about it, Jules Breton's The Song of the Lark.
Happy reading and reaping,
Prof. M.
I happened to not like this selection of Wordsworth’s poetry as much as the previous excerpts from Lyrical Ballads. Perhaps it’s just my mood. Oh well.
ReplyDeleteI think I liked “The Solitary Reaper” best from the selection. To me, it reads a bit like the way a van Gogh poem looks (if that makes any sense). The character and the scene described strike me as something that he’d paint. For all the structure in this poem, unlike the more free-verse ones in the selection for this week, there is a sort of a roundness to it, much like the sweeping swirls of his brushstrokes; long rhyming “Oh”, “Ay” and “Ee” sounds, and the easily rhymed “ing”s and “-es”s. These sounds also lend toward the singing nature of the character described. Ascribing her voice to being like those of Arabia is a bit misplaced, as it’s likely that she will never visit that section of the world, and yet the image does fit.
The speaker views the reaper (or rather, her song) as a work of art, albeit an auditory one and not a physical painting. Ironically, though, he cannot even hear what she is singing-- he’s asking the reader to tell him instead-- in reality, he can really only see her, while the reader nearly sees nor hears. Unlike Southey, he is not romanticizing her provinciality, but the possibility that she is bigger than the peasant’s role she plays.
Words like “melancholy”, “plaintive”, along with “unhappy” “sorrow, loss and pain” and the title of the poem, “Reaper”, are all death-related words (as are sickles, which resemble scythes, but I think that’s just a coincidence of circumstances). I don’t think that’s unintentional. I happened to have read the Lucy-poems before this one, so I’m in the frame of mind in which Wordsworth’s poems about girls that are sad somehow allude to the deceased lover (fabricated or not), but that is assuming on my part, and as there’s no mention of love here, I’m going to stick with the idea that Wordsworth is being melancholy and contemplative for contemplation’s sake.
There was a boy could be called affecting, powerful, deep, but those words feel almost meaningless in its light. The strength of this piece blew my mind right out. “A boy,” such an incredibly rudimentary subject, is here elevated to the level of epic; within 32 lines we receive the narrative of a life. One only realizes in retrospect that the past tense of “ye knew him well, ye cliffs/And islands on Winander!” bears such significance; this is a eulogy, an ode to a gorgeous life, to a connection to nature and God.
ReplyDeleteThe exacting syntax and word choice provides a rhythm that captures the movement of nature, like in the the calm, steady beat of “Rising or setting,” or the repetition of “and long halloos, and screams, and echoes/Redoubled and redoubled” (in the repeated use of the word “and,” as well as in the multiple iterations of a loud noise); in the former, one not only sees, but feels, the movements of the sun, in the latter, one is in the midst of that “wild scene.”
Placing much of the stronger punctuation - the exclamation points, the dashes - in the middle of lines allows, almost counterintuitively, for a freer read, as an enjambment is able to take over and push one flow from line to line.
“Then sometimes in that silence while he hung/Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise/Has carried far into his heart the voice/Of mountain torrents,” is a line so majestically perfect. The use of “hung,” the comma after “Listening,” followed by the words “gentle shock” and “mild surprise” - these keep the reader surprised, eager for the next syllable, the next word. The journey is too fleeting, and one wants to grab hold of each delicious morsel.
“The vale where he was born.,” with its sudden reassertion of the boy in such a direct way, with the discussion of his birth (literal? spiritual?); that period demands we stop, take notice, and burns the boy into our notice - only to have him taken away. “Mute - for he died when he was ten years old.” The shock is cutting.
One must read and reread this piece. It demands attention. It protects and celebrates the most simple of human life experience, and begs us to study to it.
"Daffodils" may be Wordsworth's most famous poem (Google, at least, thinks so). Its first line is familiar to most people, even if they don't know exactly where they're from: "I wandered lonely as a cloud..." This poem encompasses everything a Romantic poem should--pathetic fallacy ("dancing daffodils"), nature inspiring introspection and then joy ("In vacant or in pensive mood, / They flash... / And then my heart with pleasure fills, / And dances with the daffodils"), and sadness ("I wandered lonely...").
ReplyDeleteAnd yet, some quality makes Wordsworth's words stand out from the other blandly typical Romantic poems. Perhaps it is his quixotic similes, such as "I wandered lonely as a cloud." A cloud? How is a cloud lonely? The answers are not just handed to the reader. When I see that phrase, I have to think in order to picture a lonely cloud, and then a person kind of floating alone in a wide-open space, like a cloud, thinking lonely thoughts and feeling lonely... He's being very introspective, but not in a negative way, because the next phrase, "That floats on high o'er vales and hills" has a positive or neutral connotation. It's not really sadness, it's melancholy.
I also think that when Wordsworth acknowledges that he is a poet, creating meta-poetry, it raises his poems above others. He says, "A poet could not be but gay / In such a laughing company," and does away with "the speaker." It's really Wordsworth saying these things! It's really him! He incorporates within the core of the poem the ideas we have in our minds about how a poet thinks --we know how poets, during this period, relate to nature etc. The poem is now about how a poet relates to his world, how scenes which affected him in the past return to him later as a poem.
Surprisingly, I've come to appreciate Wordsworth's poetry - separate from it's significance in literary history. Wordsworth's later poems become less rambling, more complex, less self-indulgent... or perhaps simply the right amount of self-indulgent - that's the key. I think that's why his 'encounter poems' appealed most to me. The 'encounter' grounds the poem in reality, so Wordsworth's flighty, romantic, self-indulgent reflections can be justified. Wordsworth's encounter poems are, in my opinion, his best work. They are the best expression for what Wordsworth originally set out to do - "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings," brought out by nature.
ReplyDeleteNo encounter poem is more successful, in my opinion, than Stepping Westward, which is now certainly one of my favorite poems of all time. In the exposition written in prose, two "well-dressed Women" ask if (or why) Wordsworth and his companion are traveling. There's already a divide between the women and Wordsworth as he (as we find out quickly) is immersed in nature, and they are immersed in society, civilization. (It also seems possible there are sexist implications here....?) Wordsworth answers in a poem - as if it that were only way to express a true answer.
The first line of the poem includes both the question, but also the immediate answer: '"What you are stepping westward?'--'Yea.'". It's separate from the first stanza - drawing attention to the rushed "yea" - establishing the premise of the poem - that stepping westward is an irresistible compulsion. There's a break after the first line, as if Wordsworth pauses to ponder the question.... and then he philosophizes about heavenly destiny versus wild chance. He ultimately 'sides' (to put it way too simplistically) with spirituality over chance (though it never really was a debate, forgive me) - and them so perfectly describes "the heavenly destiny" found in traveling, as well as the privilege, the thrill, "the human sweetness" of being able to become part of it all.
This response is already too long, so I won't delve deeper into the poem - but nearly every line is insanely beautiful and deserves attention. But then again, a close reading isn't necessary. The poem is complex, and multi-layered, but also incredibly accessible. On a basic level, it just does what a good encounter poem is supposed to do: convey an identifiable, yet hard-to-convey emotion, through a highly specific encounter with nature.