'Michael' and the Anxiety of Entropy

I haven’t done much outside reading on the Romantics, but I was recently recommended Harold Bloom’s survey of the poets entitled A Visionary Company as a good introductory text to the “major” writers. In reading “Michael,” which reads as the longest text we’ve seen so far, I considered some of Bloom’s thoughts in order to begin organizing my own.

In a general discussion of Wordsworth, Bloom describes:

“This fear of visual appearance is at one with Wordsworth’s worship of the outward world, though it presents itself as paradox. For the visual surfaces of natural reality are mutable and Wordsworth desperately quests for a natural reality that can never pass away” (Bloom, 154).

Although Bloom is not specifically talking about “Michael” (but is instead gesturing toward his own reading of “Tintern Abbey”), I feel like the “paradox” he defines can apply to Wordsworth’s pastoral poem.  This worship of the natural world for its universal totality, in which old mountains rise and winds speak again and again, is misguided in that it attempts to overlook the entropic decay and order of the universe, in which everything is always passing away and never eternal.

Bloom dedicates barely two pages in A Visionary Company to his discussion of “Michael.” He opens by stating that the poem “is the most directly Biblical of Wordsworth’s poems. It turns upon the symbol of a covenant between father and son” (Bloom, 178). This is a fair assessment; however, I was more interested in using Bloom’s depiction of natural paradox in reading the poem. This paradox (one could even call it a binary between urban/pastoral and dying/eternal) also figures into Bloom’s characterization of Wordsworth’s “Biblical” father and son covenant, wherein the prodigal fails to return and reinstate an age-old order. The father passes away; the son is subsumed by the city. Yet the rocks remain – and this is the “simple object” Wordsworth’s speaker marks as “appeartain[ing] / A story – unenriched with strange events” (18-19). These rocks, although they will decay, do not decay within the timeline of the poem, within the lives of the characters. They are the keys to the narrative of Michael the shepherd and his son, like the thorn’s many signifieds. The heap of rocks – “natural” and “simple” objects (18 and 30) – leads the speaker to “feel / For passions that were not my own, and think / (At random and imperfectly indeed) / On man, the heart of man, and human life” (30-33). The “unhewn stones” at once become what they represent (the covenant between father and son) and, by remaining what they are (retaining their “stone-ness”) show how the story persists, despite the broken bond of what they represent. The mark is made where the figurative becomes literal and thus lasting. The symbol becomes literally real and eternal where the thing it symbolized (relationship between father and son) faded – the figurative successor outlives its literal father. The rocks are like the “second self” of the narrative, existing even after the narrative and its figures are “gone” (39).

I think Bloom is right in defining Wordsworth’s anxiety as desiring to dwell in what is lasting and yet never finding what lasts except in the natural world, which itself only faces entropic decay at a much slower rate than human beings themselves. The rocks are “lasting” because they outlast Michael and his son. But these stones too, like the covenant they represent, will break.

Wordsworth’s narrator seems to desperately to depict Michael himself as long-lasting in body. He is, when introduced, “an old man” but “stout of heart, and strong of limb,” since “his bodily frame had been from youth to age / Of an unusual strength” (42-44). Michael is the object he uses to represent the covenant; his own body is the covenant (this builds nicely off of Bloom’s analysis that the poem is primarily Biblical in influence and tone – Michael is both an Old Testament patriarch and a kind of Christ). He survives the storm and exists alone “amid the heart of many thousand mists” (59). Even his mind is “stern” and “unbending” (161). But he is only able to lay “the first stone of the Sheep-fold” – the sheep-fold being a covenant for the sheep, a hard structure that binds them and prevents chaos – before his own body finally breaks and is represented by “the unfinished Sheep-fold … / Beside the boisterous brook of Green-head Ghyll” (420, 481 and 482).

The physical objects are so crucial to Michael because the bodies in the poem (the body of Michael, of his wife, and of his son) ultimately cannot last forever and change (note how often we are informed of Luke’s physical changes). What ultimately works in this poem is that Wordsworth does not land on the “simple natural object” as the final image of the poem. Unlike his other works we have considered (especially the Lucy poems), the grave is not the final image. Instead, we begin and end the poem by the boisterous brook, which is described as very active, even beside the “remains’ of the sheepfold (2, 480 and 482). The brook, although it alters, does not decay like the static object. Its fluidity somehow is not only more lasting, but continuously active, not unlike the poem that persists in moving even on the still page.