Chapter 2 - Chronicle of a Death Untold:

Summary

After 1805, Wordsworth’s ‘breach’ consisted of a turn from autobiographical poetry, and from nature as a recuperative power. Eschewing the personal confessions of grief typified by the Lucy poems, and the recuperations of private loss characteristic of The Prelude, he braced himself by writing poetry that bears with loss by embracing the permanence of art. In the ‘Elegiac Stanzas Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle in a Storm’ (1807), the disruptive power of grief, arising from a disturbingly violent nature, is stilled only by contemplation of the unchanging formal perfection that painting and poetry are capable of realising. This poem was far from Wordsworth’s final word on the matter of loss; if it signalled a turn from autobiographical nature lyrics, that turn led to a further forty years of experimentation with various kinds of elegiac poetry in which the formal order achievable by the reformulation of tradition – epitomizing endurance beyond any single temporal loss – is preferred to exploration of subjectivity in the face of grief. Some of these kinds of elegy are explored in this chapter.