POETRY IN LOCKDOWN:5


from The Prelude (Book X)
by William Wordsworth

I’m posting this on Wordsworth’s 250thbirthday. He enjoyed a monumental reputation in the Victorian age and for years afterwards, but isn’t particularly fashionable now. We all know his greatest anthology hit Daffodils but I suspect there are few readers who venture beyond and find very much superficially to enjoy. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the great friend of Wordsworth’s youth, seems vastly preferable. The author of Kubla Khan and The Ancient Mariner presents as a wildly imaginative, unpredictable, opium-addicted water-spout of ideas whilst in Wordsworth, by comparison, there’s something of the crashing bore — his stately solemnity, his archaisms, his humourless self-regard, his addiction to litotes and other stylistic pomposities.

Yet Wordswoth’s poems are worth persevering with, and especially The Prelude, the memoir of his childhood and youth. It is a very long and often surprising poem, especially in its first 1805 version. The blank verse jogs along for line after line feeling rather banal and factual, until every now and then you get a moment of real challenge and power — "Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive,/ But to be young was very heaven." This is what happens in the last dozen lines of the passage I’m posting here, when his imagery of wheeling horses and fustrated earthquakes becomes almost Coleridgeanly weird.

Here William is a Cambridge student, 20 years old, making a walking tour of France. When he gets to Paris he finds the city still traumatized by the bloody revolutionary Terror that had been unleashed just a few weeks earlier.  All is quiet again now, and he finds it hard at first to relate to these so-recent terrible events. Until one night he does...

 

I crossed (a black and empty area then)
The square of the Carrousel, a few weeks back
Heaped up with dead and dying, upon these
And other sights looking, as doth a man
Upon a volume whose contents he knows
Are memorable, but from him locked up,
Being written in a tongue he cannot read,
So that he questions the mute leaves with pain,
And half upbraids their silence. But that night
When on my bed I lay, I was most moved
And felt most deeply in what world I was.
My room was high and lonely, near the roof
Of a large mansion or hotel, a spot
That would have please me in more quiet times,
Nor was it wholly without pleasure then.
With unextinguished taper I kept watch,
Reading at intervals; the fear gone by
Pressed on me almost like a fear to come.
I thought of those September massacres,
Divided from me by a little month,
And felt and touched them, a substantial dread:
The rest was conjured up from tragic fictions,
And mournful calendars of true history,
Remembrances and dim admonishments.
The horse is taught his manage, and the wind
Of heaven wheels round and treads in his own steps;
Year follows year, the tide returns again,
Day follows day, all things have second birth;
The earthquake is not satisfied at once;
And in such way I wrought upon myself,
Until I seemed to hear a voice that cried,
To the whole city, ‘Sleep no more.’ To this
Add comments of a calmer mind, from which
I could not gather full security,
But at the best it seemed a place of fear
Unfit for the repose of night
Defenceless as a wood where tigers roam.

Posted on April 7th, 2020

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