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Wordsworth on Imagination: The Emblemizing Power
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
It is impossible to move very far in either the poetry or the prose of Wordsworth without meeting an explicit reference to what is at once the most ubiquitous and most nebulous term in his vocabulary—the imagination. All too often, his references to this important faculty, which holds the key to his theory of poetry, are fragmentary and confused. Nevertheless, his statements on the imagination—and particularly those of his later years—seem to point substantially in one direction: that the primary effect of imaginative power is the evocation of meaning from the material world, the manifestation of a visible object as the emblem of invisible truth. As a practicing poet, Wordsworth best embodies this effect in the most consciously and deliberately “imaginative” of all his poems—The White Doe of Rylstone. But in order fully to appreciate his achievement in this regrettably neglected work, it is necessary first to consider the process of emblemization as Wordsworth himself conceived and described it.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1966
References
1 Citations designated PW in my text are from The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1940–49); references to PW, ii, are to the second edition of Volume ii, rev. by Helen Darbishire (Oxford, 1952). From this edition I quote the major critical essays as well as the poetry.
2 Citations from Wordsworth's letters in my text are designated as follows: EL for Early Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, 1787–1805, ed. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford, 1935); MY for The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Middle Years, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1937); and LY for The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Later Years, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1939). In the MY and LY volumes, the pagination is continuous.
3 As early as 1805, he had told George Beaumont that taste in natural beauty springs from “the human heart, as under the direction of the divine Nature conferring value on the objects of the senses, and pointing out what is valuable in them” (EL, p. 528). Much later he told Isabella Fenwick that by its emblematic use of trees, animals, and the like, Holy Scripture exercises the imagination, teaching men to derive spiritual benefit from the contemplation of natural objects (PW, ii, 524–525).
4 See, for example, Seymour Lainoff, “Wordsworth's Final Phase: Glimpses of Eternity,” SEL, i (1961), 63–64; Hugh I'A Fausset, The Lost Leader (London, 1933), p. 8; Herbert Read, Wordsworth (London, 1930), pp. 15–16; and John Jones, The Egotistical Sublime (London, 1954), passim.
5 Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and Their Writers, ed. Edith J. Morley (London, 1938), i, 89, 93, 191.
6 The first of the three statements quoted above is, by Robinson's own admission, his “compression of Wordsworth's rather obscure account of poetic abstraction”; the second is Robinson's version of what “results” from Wordsworth's explanation; and the third, again, is simply the best that Robinson himself can offer (the furthest he is “able to raise [his] mind to the subject”) by way of a summary interpretation (Robinson on Books, i, 89, 93, 191). Clearly, the two men did not always mean the same thing by the term “abstraction.” In Robinson's vocabulary, it denotes the “universal idea” which is gleaned from a generically related multiplicity of particular objects. But although Wordsworth sometimes used it in this sense—as when he speaks in the 1815 Preface of “the universality and permanence of abstractions” (PW, ii, 440)—he often had a very different meaning in mind. In the same Preface, his analysis of “To the Cuckoo” clearly shows that the imaginative “process” of abstraction denotes for him the removal and rejection of unwanted qualities (in this case corporeality), not the selection of essential ones (PW, ii, 437–438). See also the first of his Essays on Epitaphs (1810): “The character of a deceased friend or beloved kinsman is not seen, no—nor ought to be seen, otherwise than as a tree through a tender haze or a luminous mist, that spiritualises and beautifies it; that takes away, indeed, but only to the end that the parts which are not abstracted may appear more dignified and lovely.” The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. Alexander B. Grosart (London, 1876), ii, 36; italics mine.
7 Robinson on Books, i, 191.
8 See The Statesman's Manual in Complete Works, ed. W. G. T. Shedd (New York, 1953), i, 437.
9 The Mind of A Poet (Baltimore, Md., 1941), pp. 198–199.
10 Citations of The Prelude are from The Prelude, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, 2nd ed. rev. by Helen Darbishire (Oxford, 1959). Except where revisions are significant, I cite the original version of 1805–06 (designated as “A”) rather than the final text.
11 Robinson on Books, i, 89.
12 Wordsworth's Guide to the Lakes, 5th ed., ed. Ernest de Selincourt (London, 1906), p. 95.
13 Guide, pp. 47–48.
14 Parallels between The White Doe and Book i of The Faerie Queene have been noted in extenso by de Selincourt, PW, iii, 548–556, passim, and by Alice Comparetti, ed. The White Doe of Rylstone by William Wordsworth (Ithaca, N. Y., 1940), pp. 108–113, 122–123, 195–241, passim. They will not be cited here.
15 See PW, iii, 543.
16 So he wrote to Coleridge in 1808 (MY, i, 197); and his letter to Wrangham on the same subject, written a full eight years later, reveals the striking durability of his original conception (MY, ii, 705). In still another letter, Wordsworth clearly indicates that the degree of imaginative power in any poem varies directly with the extent to which its objects “affect the mind by properties [meditatively] conferred” (MY, i, 308).
17 See Comparetti, pp. 18–27.
18 John F. Danby, The Simple Wordsworth (New York, 1961), p. 133.
19 Oscar James Campbell, “Wordsworth's Conception of the Esthetic Experience,” Wordsworth and Coleridge: Studies in Honor of George McLean Harper, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs (Princeton, 1929), pp. 33–38.
20 At different times, he gave substantially the same account to Isabella Fenwick (PW, iii, 543) and Crabb Robinson (Robinson on Books, i, 170). See also his statement to Justice Coleridge in Christopher Wordsworth's Memoirs of William Wordsworth, ed. Henry Reed (Boston, 1851), ii, 313.
21 See MY, i, 213; MY, ii, 704–707; and Wordsworth's comments to Miss Fenwick in PW, iii, 543.
22 He termed it “the very worst poem we ever saw imprinted in a quarto volume.” The Edinburgh Review, xxv (1815), 355.
23 Memoirs, ii, 313. See also the comment recorded by J. M. Sutherland in William Wordsworth, The Story of His Life (London, 1887) p. 138.
24 The language is Wordsworth's in Memoirs, ii, 313.
25 Since the movement of White Doe is circular rather than linear, de Selincourt rightly implies that the logic of its structure is discernible only in a second reading.
26 See, for example, Florence Marsh, Wordsworth's Imagery: A Study in Poetic Vision (New Haven, 1952), pp. 62–63. On the other hand, Martin Price does well to note that the spirituality of the Doe is not directly imposed on the reader, but is “mediated through imaginative spectators.” “Imagination and The White Doe of Rylstone,” PQ, xxxiii (April 1954), 196.
I must add that my own views on The White Doe had crystallized before I examined Mr. Price's excellent article (pp. 189–199), and I was pleased to learn that his interpretation supports and supplements mine at many points. I have not recorded occasional correspondences in our views, differences in emphasis, and the like.
27 What is implicit here becomes explicit later, when Norton remembers that “She would not, could not disobey, / But her Faith leaned another way” (11. 872-873). Cf. Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane: “My Father, if it be possible, let this chalice pass from me. Nevertheless not as I will but as thou wilt” (Matthew xxvi.39).
28 See his comments on the poem to Miss Fenwick in PW, ni, 543. The words “fortitude of patience and heroic martyrdom,” drawn from Paradise Lost (rx.31-32), also occur in Wordsworth's letter to Coleridge of 1808, in which he describes the purification of Emily (M Y, 1,197).
29 I allude to the lines from The Borderers (1539-44, PW, I, 188) which in 1837 were included with the prefatory matter of The White Doe:
Action is transitory-a step, a blow,
The motion of a muscle-tliis way or that-
‘Tis done; and in the after-vacancy
We wonder at ourselves like men betrayed:
Suffering is permanent, obscure and dark,
And has the nature of infinity.
(PW, III, 283)
30 See his letter to Coleridge of 1808 (MY, i, 197), and his insistence on the relation between suffering and action in the Essay of 1815 (PW, ii, 427).
31 The words are those of Francis, and by them Emily is “consecrated” (l. 591) to her suffering—a fact of which we are reminded later (l. 999), just before she is tempted to violate her brother's injunction (ll. 1059–61, 1092–1100). Wordsworth stresses the importance of this “reminder” in one of his letters (MY, ii, 718), and it is worth noting that the Greek word for “consecrated” is Christos.
32 I use the terms of Wordsworth's remarks to Miss Fenwick (PW, iii, 543).
33 In his letter to Coleridge of 1808, Wordsworth writes that Emily “[ascends] to pure ethereal spirituality, and [is] forwarded in that ascent of love by communion with a creature not of her own species, but spotless, beautiful, innocent, and loving in that temper of earthly love to which alone she can conform, without violation to the majesty of her losses, or degradation from those heights of heavenly serenity to which she has been raised” (MY, i, 197–198).
34 Note the lines from “Address to Kilchurn Castle” (ll. 6–9 in PW, iii, 78), which in 1837 were used as an epigraph to this final canto:
Powers there are
That touch each other to the quick—in modes
Which the gross world no sense hath to perceive,
No soul to dream of.
And cf. his conversation with Mrs. Hemans in 1830, recorded in Memoirs, ii, 476.
35 Wordsworth himself clearly implied this when, in his letter to Coleridge of 1808, he spoke of “fluxes and refluxes of the thoughts which may be made interesting by modest combination with the stiller actions of the bodily frame, or with the gentler movements and milder appearances of society and social intercourse, or the still more mild and gentle solicitations of irrational and inanimate nature” (MY, i, 198; italics mine). The phrase “made interesting” in this context means something very close to Coleridge's “credibilized.”
36 As Wordsworth told Miss Fenwick, Emily achieves her conquest of sorrow “not without aid from the communication with the inferior creature, which often leads her thoughts to revolve upon the past with a tender and humanizing influence that exalts rather than depresses her” (PW, iii, 543).
37 See the lines appended to those excerpted from The Borderers (1539–44), which appeared in 1837 with the prefatory matter of The White Doe (PW, iii, 283).
38 See Coleridge's letter to Joseph Cottle of 7 March 1815: “The common end of all narrative, nay, of all, Poems is to convert a series into a Whole: to make those events, which in real or imagined History move on in a strait Line, assume to our Understandings a circular motion—the snake with it's Tail in it's Mouth.” Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, iv (Oxford, 1959), 545.
39 Table Talk for 31 May 1830 in The Table Talk and Omniana of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. T. Ashe (London, 1923), p. 87.