Wordsworth’s Transgressions

Last week I read William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience in light of Roland Barthes’ S/Z and discussed “transgressions of the binary.” With this idea still fresh in my mind, I ended up reading William Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads and the four poems from Lyrical Ballads in light of binaries and opposites interacting. I’m fascinated by Wordsworth’s presentation of opposites in a manner that ultimately avoids the Blakean bifurcation of enabling innocence and experience to co-mingle and, at the same time, maintain separate houses. Creating this sort of discursive force between opposites, in my reading of Wordsworth, depends on the action of the reader “who would find / A tale in every thing” (7-68).  The reader must act discursively; Wordsworth, the “man talking to men,” will not (299).

Wordsworth seems to anticipate the dictum of William Carlos William’s Paterson – “no ideas but in things” – when, in his Preface, Wordsworth states that poetry should involve moments, “whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual way” (295). Wordsworth concerns himself with “common life…in a selection of language really used by men” while also “throw[ing] over them a certain colouring of imagination” (294-295). Rather than the common, Blake’s enterprise depends on the mythic, mystic, and supernatural; Wordsworth demands a thing-quality on the sensory level followed by a poetic patina that indicates the poet’s subtle guiding hand. In Blake, we are always aware of the poem’s Blakeness; in Wordsworth, the thing or subject typically takes center stage and it is only the magnificent mind of the speaker acting as a poetic lens which makes its presence known at the start and finish. Ironically, Blake’s speakers are not always Blake, whereas Wordsworth’s speakers, as he shows in his footnotes, are almost always Wordsworth, and his subjects are often based on real-life parallels or experiences (see footnote 1 of “Simon Lee” on 275 and footnote 1 of “We Are Seven” on 278 – “The Thorn,” via footnote 1 on 282, was born out of Wordsworth’s personal observation, but depends on a speaking ‘character’ – I’ll speak on this later).

Instead, Wordsworth sets up necessary opposites in “Simon Lee,” “We Are Seven,” and “Anecdote For Fathers.” I’ll go through some of these opposites to create a more specific elaboration of how he’s working the binary. The opposites are typically between speaker and subject. In “We Are Seven” and “Anecdote For Fathers,” the opposites are an adult speaker and a child subject, while in “Simon Lee” we read of a man who has become “old,” “little” and “lean” (3 and 33). Simon Lee has crossed the threshold of adulthood to become a child again (almost) in old age – childlike in the sense that he cannot perform the outward physical actions of grown men – yet he has, unlike the child subjects of “We Are Seven” and “Anecdote For Fathers,” become regretful for a life that cannot be regained, whereas the child subjects of the latter two poems still, with their lives ahead of them, brush aside complications of adulthood with straightforward answers – where the dead and the living are counted the same, or “at Kilve there was no weather-cock.”

Simon Lee, who is “sick,” has only a “few months of life has he in store / As he to you will tell” (33, 57 and 58). Simon Lee, unlike the child subjects, ends his poem in “tears” that the speaker interprets as a greater “mourning” for “gratitude of men” than that which comes from “hearts unkind” (89 and 93-96). While the speaker relates this feeling, he stands opposite to “this old Man doing all he could / To unearth the root of an old tree” (74-75). The action of uprooting comes easy to the speaker: “with a single blow / the tangled root I severed” (85-86). Able-bodied and full of life, the speaker makes a claim about Simon Lee toward the end of the poem but demands the reader (another binary here between speaker or writer and reader) to bring forth the tale, or, as he says makes a tale out of what, to the speaker, “is no tale” (72-73). While there is an interaction between opposites, the speaker demands that his other opposite – the reader – find the true tale, the true empathetic underpinning, in Simon Lee’s story, which to him (the speaker) is anything but apparent.

The child subjects turn this writer/reader interpretive relationship on the speaker himself, putting the speaker in the seat of the interpretive reader. In “We Are Seven,” the young girl insists on repeating the number of her siblings, although two “in the church-yard lie, / Beneath the church-yard tree” (31-32). The child, like the speaker of “Simon Lee,” sees nothing interesting or complicated about the content she’s presenting, and continues answering the speaker with her mantra “we are seven” (17, 30, 64, 69). Unlike the speaker of “Simon Lee,” the child appears to undergo no empathetic connection with the speaker, replying to him quickly both initially and at the end with the same answer (17 and 64). The speaker of “Simon Lee” arrives at some kind of understanding, though I wouldn’t say a transgression, with his subject. The speaker at the end of “We Are Seven” feels he is “throwing words away” in speaking to “the little Maid” (67-68). Just as the reader is put into the position of finding “a tale” or meaning at the end of “Simon Lee,” the speakers of “We Are Seven” and “Anecdote for Fathers” are required to interpret their subjects; yet the speaker of “We Are Seven” ultimately throws up his hands and stops his discourse with the child subject when his interpretative powers fail him.

In “Anecdote for Fathers,” the speakers claims “this is strange,” when his son is unable to explain why “at Kilve I'd rather be.” Yet, the speaker, in the poem’s ending, relates, “Could I but teach the hundredth part / Of what from thee I learn,” in an empathetic reading and interpretative of his child subject, the son. Even if the reader doesn’t understand why the speaker finds himself so enraptured by the boy’s imagining, the idea that the speaker himself feels overjoyed with his five-year-old son’s musings completes the poem. The reader (in this case, the speaker) begins to interpretatively understand the mysterious (dare I say poetic) response of the child subject, and thus completes the contract between reader and writer without collapsing the two or transgressing the binary. In “We Are Seven,” the reader (in this case, you or I, the real-life readers) can perhaps grasp the child’s misunderstanding or simplification of death, but the speaker (in this case, the poet or the speaker) cannot understand the child, and even begins the poem by asking “What should it [a child] know of death?” (4). The opposites do not touch and the interaction between the two only serves to justify difference.

Again, the tension of these poems come from discourses between binaries, speaker/subject and reader/writer, though not, as Blake might have it, a combination of these forces or a transgression of the binary. The two poles stay separate, although they interact.

Wordworth’s Preface operates in a similar mindset, where the reader and the writer (poet) share “common” humanity but the poet remains distinct from the reader in his unique ability to cast the “colouring” of imagination. The poet distinctly understands the Proustian metonymic process “in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement” (295) and can fulfill this process through writing in an amplified manner, which the common person, despite his fierce, constant and close connection to “the real,” is unable to complete. Wordsworth avoids “poetic diction” to keep the company of “flesh and blood” (297), but claims the poet (therefore himself, William Wordsworth) as capable of the production of passions bearing “infinite complexity” (301). The Wordsworthian poet, while dwelling in the “real world” (real meaning rustic) “has added a disposition to be affected more than other men by absent things as if they were present” (299). Absence becomes presence to the poet, where the present thing (in all of its thing-ness) can be conjured up in absence, and then presented to the reader, as in “Simon Lee,” as a thing to be co-created by reader and writer, or taken by the reader and interpreted. The Wordsworthian poet’s work involves conjuring on the empty deep of the blank page, the absence becoming present through imagination.

I won’t discuss “The Thorn” for too long, although I like it because, in its difference, it throws a wrench into some of the ideas and analyses I posit above (or, at the very least, complicates them considerably). We have another binary, but our speaker is not Wordsworth, or at least he claims outright that this speaker is a “sufficiently common” character (282). The ghostly supernatural – both in terms of “the infant grave” and “the Woman in a scarlet cloak,” – seems contrary to the common, or the thingness so heavily emphasized in the other three poems (55 and 63). Yet the central subject is “The Thorn,” which is real, and Wordsworth marks his poem as an imaginative process to make this thorn a “more impressive object” – so the supernatural and hyper-imaginative and gothic are in service, ultimately, of the real (282). Of the pieces, “The Thorn” reads as the most Ballad-esque – the ambiguities and enigmas of the text narrative are somewhat resolvable (does Martha kill her child? What does the thorn represent?) – and the reader isn’t called upon for any great interpretative leaps, and no tale needs to be imagined to justify the story, unlike “Simon Lee.” Therefore, the poem becomes a distancing act between the speaker and the woman, or the speaker and the fantastical (which, in service of the real, functions then as a distancing between the speaker himself and the thorn). “Her face,” he says “was enough for me” (189). “I cannot tell;” he relates. “I wish I could” (89). The speaker is bound up in his subject and yet fails to approach it. The poem then ends, unlike the other three poems, with the subject speaking and not the speaker commenting on the subject (“We Are Seven” can be read this way, but by the end of “We Are Seven” the speaker seems so fed up with the poor child that her repetitive phrase is almost sillier or sadder than Martha’s haunting “misery” in “The Thorn). The subject is left isolated and the speaker subsumed in his inability to tell the story (or rather unwillingness to tell it). I still don’t know what to make of “The Thorn” but I think it would be sort of cheap to chalk it up to the structural reading I’ve given of the other three poems when it is, in structure, content, and voice, so different than them.

All this is to say that neither Blake nor Wordsworth are (or should be) reducible to these readings or questions of the binary: numerous examples exist even within similar poems of how these questions are complicated, and even if in Wordsworth’s Preface he seems to present a clearer, more singular notion of how his own poems function, their ambiguities and strangeness make them interesting; there are not interesting as pieces of evidence to support his poetic argument or as logical outpourings of his own polemic. Therefore the Preface makes for strange reading: here the poet seems to directly tell us what to anticipate in his poems and what philosophy the poems are exercising while referencing them throughout. He also affirms: “I do not doubt that it may be safely affirmed, that there neither is, nor can be, any essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition” (299). I understand and empathize with the breaking down of this barrier (as a poet who also views prose and poetry in an unsuited oppositional binary) but it seems to undermine the essential quality of his lyrics, which is that of song. Prose cannot be sung, and most of these poems are billed as ballads. Why does Wordsworth spend so much time in his Preface on this question of prose and of poems? He is wrestling with the idea of getting away from “poetic diction,” but does this mean rushing into the arms of prose as a polis of common speech? These poems, with their repetitions, strict metres, stanzaic formations, and rhymes, do not seem opposed to prose, though they do retain the quality of song that most prose fails to find. Perhaps Wordsworth, like the subjects and speakers of these four poems, could not move from one side of the binary to another: he remained the writer, unable to fulfill the role of reader even when considering his own work.