Elegy and Line Break in Shelley’s “To Wordsworth”

I think this post builds off of Addie and Jared's thoughts on "To Wordsworth." Like Addie, I too was surprised at the different readings this seemingly simplistic short poem presented.

On first reading Shelley’s pseudo-elegy of Wordsworth, which is not about Wordsworth’s passing from life into death but rather his passing from a younger frame of thinking to a more conservative mode (according to the first footnote), I was disappointed by what seemed like a rather straightforward and un-strange poem in its description of the subject. The figurative language Shelley uses to compliment Wordsworth’s old viewpoint, composed of “sweet dreams,” a “lone star,” and a “rock-built refuge” (4, 7, and 9) seemed rather tired and cliché. Bloom suggests that this is Shelley mocking Wordsworth; I wouldn’t read the poem the same way and was far more interested in looking beyond the content of the poem and trying to figure out other, more subtle methods of reading the poem.

The content of the poem is obviously important: but what is more striking to me is the first point I made, which is that this reads elegiacally, despite its subject still being alive at the time of Shelley writing the poem. Bloom argues that Shelley is presenting himself as the new Romantic poet, a successor to Wordsworth’s mantle; however, Shelley’s comment seems not championing the downfall of poor William, but instead genuinely grieve-felt “that thou shouldst cease to be” (15). What’s more interesting is that Wordsworth’s very existence, this “having been” (15), is bound up in his old poetic mode and beliefs. To Shelley, Wordsworth is only alive in the verse that believes in “childhood and youth, friendship and love’s first glow” (3). The “loss is mine,” admits Shelley, because to Wordsworth this loss is perhaps not deplorable (6) and Wordsworth himself literally keeps on living without self-mourning. But to Shelley, the poet having “desert[ed] these” provides the space to mourn Wordsworth, who is, perhaps, now deceased in spirit (14).  

The other interesting facet of the work seemed to hinge on the structure of the poem. Although the content wasn’t too gripping in my reading, I was fascinated by how Shelley played with the line break. Five of the fifteen lines run into the next without pause except by their existence as a line’s end. I especially enjoyed the playfulness of line 1, where the “Poet of Nature, though has wept to know” as if knowledge itself were a cause to weep. The followup – “that things depart” – is not much more specific in its complaint, but Shelley allows a kind of epistemological tragedy to dangle in front of the reader at the very start of the poem. That knowing could itself be an occasion for weeping seems to build off Milton’s Paradise Lost and the Edenic narrative that Wordsworth takes so much pride in re-building among crags and rivers. The other moment I thought this worked especially well was when Shelley comments that Wordsworth’s light, like a lone star shined (brilliantly!) but then, following the break from line 7 to line 8, we discover that the light shined on some frail bark. I wouldn’t read this, like Bloom does, as a criticism of Wordsworth. Instead, it seems to segregate Wordsworth further from every other poet and member of the throng and shows a greater tragedy: the first line simply displays his light, even as a lone star, and then we discover that it only shines on something frail, later described as “the blind and battling multitude” (10).