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Wordsworth's River Duddon Sonnets
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
Because none of Wordsworth's later poems has been so neglected as his sonnet cycle The River Duddon, the pleasant task remains of doing it critical justice. O. J. Campbell has used it as an illustration of Wordsworth's later symbolic art, and the geographical features of the landscape through which the Duddon flows have been adequately described. Furthermore, the English river is a happier symbol than the deer in The While Doe of Rylstone and has simpler, more natural virtues than the mystic Holy River which is the life-stream of pure religion in the Ecclesiastical Sonnets. Most of the Duddon poems, it is true, fall less sublimely upon the ear and have less nobility and perfection than the finest he composed before 1806. Even so, their level is consistently high, part of their attractiveness being a sometimes bleak austerity. In several ways too, as Wordsworth generously says in his “Postscript,” the sequence is related to Coleridge's project, The Brook, outlined in Biographia Literaria. More important, however, is the final development of an extended theme based upon water imagery, for after 1797 Wordsworth's profoundest insights are often associated with it. We have also Robert Arnold Aubin's comment that “the greatest river-poem of all is Wordsworth's River Duddon (1820)… . With its use of apostrophe, local pride, historical reflection, catalogue, moralizing, genre scenes, episode, early memories, prospect, ruin-piece, and Muse-driving ( On, loitering muse—the swift stream chides us—on!'), it is not wonderful that a reviewer perceived that the work belonged in the main stream of topographical poetry.”
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1954
References
1 Campbell, “Wordsworth's Conception of the Esthetic Experience,” in Wordsworth and Coleridge: Studies in Honor of George McLean Harper, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs (Princeton, 1939), pp. 42-44. Brief treatments of the series also are in George McLean Harper, William Wordsworth: His Life, Works, and Influence (New York, 1923), ii, 310-311; Arthur Beatty, William Wordsworth: His Doctrine and Art in Their Historical Relations (Madison, Wis., 1927), pp. 220-222; and Donald E. Hayden, After Conflict, Quiet (New York, 1951), pp. 169-171. In The Starlit Dome (London, New York, and Toronto, 1942), pp. 62-63, G. Wilson Knight devotes a paragraph to the cycle, concluding that Wordsworth expresses man's “mysterious greatness in terms of native ecclesiastical, or other, architectures.” See also Florence Marsh's admirable outline of water imagery and symbolism in The Duddon in Wordsworth's Imagery (New Haven, 1952), pp. 93-95.
2 The striking similarities between The Duddon and Coleridge's project are evident from his own account: “I had considered it as a defect in the admirable poem of the Task, that the subject, which gives the title to the work, was not, and indeed could not be, carried on beyond the three or four first pages, and that, throughout the poem, the connections are frequently awkward, and the transitions abrupt and arbitrary. I sought for a subject, that should give equal room and freedom for description, incident, and impassioned reflections on men, nature and society, yet supply in itself a natural connection to the parts, and unity to the whole. Such a subject I conceived myself to have found in a stream, traced from its source in the hills among the yellow-red moss and conical glass-shaped tufts of bent, to the first break or fall, where its drops become audible, and it begins to form a channel; thence to the peat and turf barn, itself built of the same dark squares as it sheltered; to the sheepfold; to the first cultivated plot of ground; to the lonely cottage and its bleak garden won from the heath; to the hamlet, the villages, the market-town, the manufactories, and the seaport” (Biographia Literaria, Ch. x).
3 Topographical Poetry in XVIII-Century England (New York, 1936), p. 241.
4 Text of 1805-06, i.283-285. In what follows I have drawn upon Kenneth MacLean, “The Water Symbol in The Prelude (1805-06),” UTQ, xvii (July 1948), 372-389.
5 See John Paul Pritchard, “On the Making of Wordsworth's ‘Dion’,” SP, xlix (Jan. 1952), 66-74. Regarding Wordsworth's Platonism see Melvin M. Rader, Presiding Ideas in Wordsworth's Poetry (Seattle, 1931), p. 199.
6 Campbell, “Wordsworth's Conception of the Esthetic Experience,” p. 38.
7 The motto, stanza 15 of Burns's Epistle to William Simpson, Ochiltree, reads:
The Muse, nae poet ever fand her,
Till by himsel' he learned to wander,
Adown some trotting burn's meander,
And no think lang.
8 “Little did I think then it would be my lot to celebrate, in a strain of love and admiration, the stream which for many years I never thought of without recollections of disappointment and distress.”
9 “Wordsworth's Conception of the Esthetic Experience,” p. 43.
10 Wordsworth's Essay on Epitaphs, which first appeared in The Friend, 22 Feb. 1810, not only establishes a conceptual link between the Ode: Intimations and the Duddon sonnets, but also reveals his interest in river imagery in particular: “… if we had no direct external testimony that the minds of very young children meditate feelingly upon death and immortality, these enquiries, which we all know they are perpetually making concerning the whence, do necessarily include correspondent habits of interrogation concerning the whither. Origin and tendency are notions inseparably co-relative. Never did a child stand by the side of a running stream, pondering within himself what power was the feeder of the perpetual current, from what never-wearied sources the body of water was supplied, but he must have been inevitably propelled to follow this question by another: ‘Towards what abyss is it in progress? what receptacle can contain the mighty influx?‘ And the spirit of the answer must have been … a receptacle without bounds or dimensions;—nothing less than infinity. We may, then be justified in asserting, that the sense of immortality, if not a co-existent and twin birth with Reason [i.e., Reason in her most exalted mood: Imagination], is among the earliest of her offspring: and we may further assert, that from these conjoined, and under their countenance, the human affections are gradually formed and opened out.”
11 Cited in Poetical Works, ed. Knight, vi, 234. In an early version Sonnet xxvi was addressed to the Derwent; see The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. E. DeSelincourt and Helen Darbishire (Oxford, 1946), iii, 523, n. to p. 257. Knight's note to Wordsworth's preface to The Duddon is as follows: “Wordsworth delighted in tracing the course of rivers all the way from their source to the sea. On November 12, 1808, Southey wrote to his son, ‘If I go’ (it was to Workington) ‘it will be with Wordsworth, for the sake of tracing the Derwent the whole way‘” (Poetical Works, vi, 227).
12 In this description of the course of the Duddon I am indebted to Frank Steen for several suggestions.
13 Although “long-loved” seems to contradict the remark to Miss Fenwick cited above, n. 8, the contradiction is resolved in the conclusion to Wordsworth's statements to her: “I have many affecting remembrances connected with this stream …”
14 See below, n. 16.
15 Wordsworth had used “receptacle” to mean “infinity”; see the quotation in n. 10 above from the Essay on Epitaphs.
16 For a detailed discussion of the sources of this sonnet (Milton, Horace, Moschus), as well as for the origin of lines 9-11 of Sonnet xxix, see my article “The Sources of Wordsworth's ‘After-Thought’ Sonnet,” PQ, Apr. 1953.
17 In this paragraph I am indebted to Katherine Rader for several suggestions.
18 In this last section I have drawn upon Campbell, “Wordsworth's Conception of the Esthetic Experience,” pp. 38-46; and J. V. Logan, Wordsworthian Criticism (Columbus, 1947), pp. 141-150.