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Blessing the Torrent: On Wordsworth's Later Style

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Geoffrey H. Hartman
Geoffrey H. Hartman*
Affiliation:
Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut
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Abstract

Wordsworth is forcibly reminded in Wales of Alpine impressions dating back thirty-four years. The resulting sonnet is of interest because of its neartraumatic conflation of times and places, and because this kind of experience, associated with feelings of sublimity, is conveyed in a style alternating between the grand opening and such clichés as “in life’s mom.” Wordsworth questions the possibility of localizing the sublime by means of referential language (names or place names). “Devil’s Bridge” and “Viamala,” the conflated places, connect naming with speech-acts of blessing and cursing, while “How art thou named?” is ultimately addressed to a “luciferic” imagination that reveals “the sad incompetence of human speech.” Wordsworth’s later style is, correspondingly, sad and sublime, subdued yet charged.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 93 , Issue 2 , March 1978 , pp. 196 - 204
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1978

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References

Notes

1 The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. E. de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire (Oxford: Clarendon, 1946), iii, 43. The “1824” in the title is not found till 1836.

2 See 1850 Prelude vii.643–44, the encounter with the blind beggar in London.

3 The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Later Years, ed. E. de Selincourt (Oxford: Clarendon, 1939) i, 155.

4 “Composed among the Ruins of a Castle in North Wales” and “To the Lady E. B. and the Hon. Miss P.” The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, iii, 42–43.

5 See “Nuns fret not at their convent's narrow room” (published 1807) and 1805 Prelude vi.553. A further interesting use of “narrow room,” referring this time to “ancient Manners,” occurs in prefatory stanzas that were addressed to his brother and that accompanied the River Duddon sonnets: “Remnants of love whose modest sense / Thus into narrow room withdraws.” See, for perhaps the first use of the phrase, The Early Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth (1787–1805), ed. E. de Selincourt (Oxford: Clarendon, 1935), p. 312.

6 The allusions are to the Greek mountain chain of Pindus, sacred to the Muses, and to the Greek War of Independence, where Byron had lost his life the year before. Since, moreover, the analogy of poetic inspiration to a stream is very old (Horace uses it of Pindar, e.g.), Wordsworth may be insinuating a question about the dignity of the vernacular muse (cf. “I seek the birthplace of a native stream,” in the first of the River Duddon sonnets). This nativity quest is related to the Alpheus myth: here simply a feeling, not a myth, that wherever poetry appears it is the same river that has surfaced after running underground to reach its desired place.

7 I refer to the combined topoi of asking a god or angel his name and of finding it inexpressible. A third topos, more appropriate to this natural setting, is the address to an unknown god or spirit, or one variously named. As in Thomas Gray's “Alcaic Ode” (1741), inscribed in the Album of the Grande Chartreuse Monastery: “O Tu, severi religio loci, / Quocunque gaudes nomine (non levé / Nativa nam certe fluenta / Numen habet, veteresque silvas ...).” Basically the form is that of the hymnos kletikos invoking a deity by name—here, asking for the name. Adjuration and apostrophe are classified by Longinus as sublime figures in his famous discussion of them: Peri Hypsous, Sees. 16 and 18.

8 First published as Fourteen Sonnets, Elegiac and Descriptive, in 1789. I am indebted to Walter Schindler for this reference.

9 “All streights, and none but streights, are wayes to them.” John Donne, “Hymne to God my God, in my sicknesse.” It is not certain that the scene from the chasm is precisely that described in 1805 Prelude vi.553–72 though there does seem to be some conflation of the Ravine of Gondo and Viamala. But compared to that description in the Prelude the sonnet stresses the “peace” without the “tumult.” “Woods above woods” leaves a different impression from “the immeasurable height / Of woods decaying, never to be decayed” or “winds thwarting winds”; it may even recall Milton's depiction of the approach to Eden as “Shade above shade, a woody Theatre” (Paradise Lost iv.141).

10 “Essays on Epitaphs” (1810) in The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and J. W. Smyser (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974), ii, 51. Naming a torrent created by the confluence of two streams (the one in Wales was fed by the Funack and the Rydol) is, in the light of this passage, a special instance of the problematics of location—of mapping by means of time, place, or word. Haunting confusions that unsettle the “repose” of the travelers—that disturb the stable location (identity) of place or time—also characterize the episodes following closely on the Simplon Pass experience (see 1805 Prelude vi.617–54). Such expressions as “The sister streams of Life and Death” (1850 Prelude vi.439; cf. Descriptive Sketches, l. 72), referring to the “Guiers vif” and “Guiers mort” that mingle as one torrent, should also be noted. It is appropriate to conclude by returning to Wales and the “chasm” through which innumerable “waters, torrents, streams” roar with “one voice” (1805 Prelude xiii.56–65).

11 The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, iii, 47. The Quillinans were living on the banks of the Rothay when their daughter was born in late 1821. The first Mrs. Quillinan died in May 1822. Wordsworth consented to Dora's marriage with Edward Quillinan in 1841. On naming, cf. Coleridge's christening his second child “Derwent.”

12 “Passed away”: literally of the Duddon entering the Irish Sea, the “Deep / Where mightiest rivers into powerless sleep / Sink,” as Sonnet 32 says eloquently. For the ominous and apocalyptic meaning, see my Wordsworth's Poetry (1964; rpt. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1971), p. 336.

13 “Poets, young or old,” is also not unambiguous: it could mean poets in their youth and their old age, or poets of olden times (Spenser, Drayton, etc.) and of the present day.

14 See “The Ruined Cottage,” ll. 499–500.

15 See 1805 Prelude v. 12 and MS variant of the Snowdon vision quoted by de Selincourt in his edition of The Prelude (2nd ed., rev. Helen Darbishire, Oxford: Clarendon, 1959), p. 622.

16 In bare summary: there can be an instability of the signified (is “How art thou named?” addressed to a god, river, or ... ?), but there is no express instability of the signifier, as in James Joyce's “riverrun” of words. In Wordsworth the instability of the signifying phrase remains deeply implicit and can only be brought out by the echo effect Kenneth Burke calls “joycing.” So “dread chasm / dead chasm” or even “dread chasm / d(r)ead calm.” The conjunction of stable sign and unstable referent has a more uncanny effect (an effect, actually, hovering between homelessness and unlieimlichkeit) than Joyce's pattern, which tends toward unstable sign and stable (if multiple) referent. The extraordinary thing in the case of “Viamala” is that both the name (sign) and the region denoted by it (referent) become unstable: the name “crosses” literal and figurative significations, and the region expands to cover various chasm experiences, each characterized by a chiasmic structure of narrowing and opening, constrictive and compensatory features.

17 It is likely that Wordsworth was thinking in Descriptive Sketches, ll. 207–14, of the name “Devil's Bridge,” though what is actually described is a wooden covered bridge and not the famous stone bridge of that name in the Viamala region. Dorothy Wordsworth's journal of the 1820 trip describes another Devil's Bridge, that in the Schöllenen gorge of the St. Gotthard pass, of which William Turner made a fine water-color after his 1802 visit. (See Turner in Switzerland by Andrew Wilton [Zurich, 1976], pp. 60–63.)

Ere long, winding to the right, we come into the narrow pass, till then unseen. The Devil's bridge is before us, and the cataract beyond, raging between the crags. Prom that point, the river tumbles down, in a succession of cataracts, to the glen which we had left behind.... The bridge, a single arch, light in appearance compared with the rocks above it, is built of grey granite which sparkles through an overgrowing of lichens, of the richest orange hue, that has crept over its walls and over the neighboring rocks. Three young kids were standing in perfect peacefulness, on a crag close to the bridge and the impassioned torrent, a living image of silence itself, in the midst of a deafening and dizzy tumult! ... we enter under an arch hewn out of the rock, and pass through a long vaulted way, the roof continually dripping. This passage is imperfectly lighted in the middle by a hole hewn out in the side of the rock which lets in the sound of the river. I looked not through it, but made towards the outlet at the end, through which also the light is seen and nothing else. But all at once ere we are fairly out of this gloomy passage, the green, smooth and spacious Vale of Urseren.... (Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. E. de Selincourt [London, 1959], ii, 186)

Some pages later she refers to her brother's previous journey. ‘The vale of Missox [is] on our left into which my Brother and Jones descended from the head of Como in their way to Urseren, crossing the Spluga, and taking the Via Mala in the Country of the Grisons“ (p. 198). The Viamala of the St. Gotthard Pass region is clearly not the Simplon Pass region, yet there may have been a conflation of various ”gloomy passage“ experiences. In his well-known article on ”Wordsworth and the Simplon Pass“ Max Wildi points out that the chasm through which Wordsworth and Jones passed narrows at one point to a gap that ”was impassable in earlier centuries, like the Schôllenen gorge at the Devil's Bridge on the Gotthard route“ (English Studies, 40 [1959], 229). Helena Maria Williams had written that ”the only architecture which I thought admirable, were the performances of the Devil over the abysses of St. Gothard, and the tremendous chasms of the Via Mala“ (A Tour in Switzerland [London, 1798], ii, 35). As to ”Devil's Bridge,“ the name, as we read in The Penny Magazine of the ”Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge“ (No. 216, Aug. 1835), ”is very generally applied to bridges placed in difficult and hazardous places, the popular ignorance of old times easily getting over the difficulty of their construction by attributing them to the evil one. There are many devil's bridges among the Alps, in Savoy, Switzerland, the Tyrol, and the Grisons....“ D. V. Erdman has kindly drawn my attention to a topographical tract published in London, 1796, by George Cumberland, with the title An Attempt to Describe hafod, and die Neighboring Scenes about the Bridge over the funack, Commonly Called the devil's bridge etc. It refers to the same bridge that the Penny Magazine goes on to describe vividly. Cumberland intersperses his account with allusions to Milton, and stresses (like the Penny Magazine) that the Welsh waterfall is as grand as anything found in the Alps. He evokes the ”incredibly stupendous chasm of intervolving valleys, clothed to their misty top with wood of—Thickest covert, interwoven shade, a verdant wall,’“ and how the torrent ”pours headlong and impetuous ... leaping from rock to rock, with fury, literally ‘lash[ing] the mountain's sides’ ... and flashing at last into a fan-like form ... [it falls] rattling among the loose stones of the Devil's Hole; where, to all appearance, it shoots into a gulph beneath,“ etc. This is also the Devil's Bridge and torrent Wordsworth visited, although placed by him in ”North“ Wales. Other descriptions of it can be found in B. H. Malkin, The Scenery, Antiquities, and Biography, of South Wales, from Materials Collected during Two Excursions in the Year 1803 (London, 1804), pp. 364–68, and George Borrow, Wild Wales (1862), Chs. lxxiii–lxxiv. As to ”Devil's Hole,“ it reminds us of the ”Verlorene Loch“ in the Alps, so closely associated with Viamala.

Beyond Thusis the valley takes a sudden rise of 984 feet, and through this the Hinter Rhine flows in a gorge nearly two miles long. Only skilled mountaineers were able to use the way near the river, and the main path led over the mountains. The remains of this “via strata” are still visible. This was called the “good road,” and the valley path used by the chamois-hunters “the bad road,” and the whole ravine, which could scarcely be used at all, was called the “Verlorene Loch.”(F. Umlauft, The Alps [London, 1889], p. 144)

For a dramatic description of the same region, see Friederike Brun, Tagebuch einer Reise durch die öst-liche südliche und italienische Schweitz. Ausgearbeitet in den Jahren 1798 und 1799 (Copenhagen, 1800), pp. 69–78. Hölderlin's “Der Rhein,” from which my first epigraph is taken, seems conscious of similar reports or descriptions.

18 See 1805 Prelude xiii.63, and the sonnet “To a Friend, Composed on the Road Leading to Ardres, August 7th, 1802.” On the significance, vacillating between apocalyptic and edenic, of water (especially water-sound) imagery in Wordsworth, see my The Unmediated Vision (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1954), pp. 29–35, 41–44.