by Stephen Gill
When I first got to know Wordsworth’s poetry single lines enchanted me without my quite knowing why. This, for example, ‘When I have angled up the lonely brooks’ (1805 Prelude, VIII, 399). I knew nothing about angling nor, being born and brought up in Birmingham, did I have a lot to do with lonely brooks. But in that one line an image of the young poet came alive for me. The word ‘up’ is the key—as prepositions so often are in Wordsworth. He is struggling up, the poet who would later hymn ‘Effort, and expectation, and desire,/And something evermore about to be’. And he is alone.
The image of Wordsworth, like Michael, ‘alone/Amid the heart of many thousand mists/That came to him and left him on the heights’, is a powerful one. It can be reinforced by his identification with so many figures in his work, the Shepherd Lord, for example, in the Song, at the Feast of Brougham Castle, for whom imposed solitude made possible his survival and growth:
Love had he found in huts where poor Men lie,
His daily Teachers had been Woods and Rills,
The silence that is in the starry sky,
The sleep that is among the lonely hills.
I think these are some of the most haunting lines in the whole of Wordsworth’s poetry, but they are almost certainly not as well known as the ones that begin, ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud‘. This poem opens with the speaker recalling a particular pleasure experienced when he was alone; it closes with the affirmation that being able to recreate the experience through memory, to see the daffodils again with the inward eye, is ‘the bliss of solitude’. It is a phrase to dwell on. ‘Bliss’ is a notch higher even than ‘joy’ and Solitude is clearly the ground for the heightened state of being the poet enjoys. Given that Daffodils’ (as the poem is always called) is often said to be the nation’s favourite poem – a recent Daily Telegraph cartoon about self-isolation, by ‘Matt’, assumes familiarity – it has surely done more than anything else to ensure the continuance of the image of Wordsworth as a solitary, a celebrant of alone-ness and the private pleasure of the inward eye.
It was an image with much currency during his lifetime. Reviewing The Excursion in 1814 Hazlitt attributed the various elements of the poem, its landscapes, people, language, to the creative force of Wordsworth’s singleness, his ‘intense intellectual egotism’. ‘The power of his mind preys upon itself’, Hazlitt declared. ‘ It is as if there were nothing but himself and the universe. He lives in the busy solitude of his own heart; in the deep silence of thought.’ It is a striking formulation. ‘Deep silence’ Wordsworth would have happily owned (‘And when it chanced/That pauses of deep silence mock’d his skill,/Then sometimes, in that silence . . . ‘) and ‘busy solitude’ is very fine. Hazlitt’s words could stand as text to the most famous portrait of the poet, Haydon’s Wordsworth on Helvellyn now in the National Portrait Gallery.
Wordsworth on Helvellyn, by by Benjamin Robert Haydon, 1842. National Gallery, London
The old man is depicted on a mountain whose rugged stature he might be thought to share. Head bowed as it is in so many Wordsworth portraits, arms crossed, his gaze intently down not outwards, the poet is silent, still, but busy in the solitude of his own thoughts. This is the Wordsworth of whom Coleridge observed, ‘He is a man of whom it might have been said,–“It is good for him to be alone”.
Had Hazlitt been able to review The Prelude in 1850 he would surely have seized on lines 54-77 in Book Second in which the poet separates out the some of the elements that shaped his early life in order to weigh their varying contribution before assessing their combined effect. Beauteous forms of Nature on the one hand, boyish sports on the other, competitive games but common rewards, ‘all pleased alike,/ Conquered and conqueror’. This key passage comes to a climax with a roll-call of benefits from such a start in life, but it closes with the declaration, ‘And I was taught to feel, perhaps too much,/The self-sufficing power of Solitude.’ How characteristic of Wordsworth, in The Prelude especially, to offer a beautifully cadenced definition of a positive tinged with just a slight reservation about it. And how effective that ‘perhaps’ is. It asks readers to make a judgement and the rest of the poem unrolls to help them make it. What would be just about the right amount of Solitude? To what degree can it be ‘self-sufficing’ before becoming solipsistic? Is it a matter of degree at all? Hazlitt would surely also have dwelt on the declaration a little later in the same book that the young poet’s attentiveness to everything as the world grew before him brought rewards from
life, and change, and beauty, solitude
More active even than ‘best society’,
Society made sweet as solitude
By silent inobtrusive sympathies
And gentle agitations of the mind
From manifold distinctions, difference
Perceived in things where to the common eye
No difference is; and hence, from the same source
Sublimer joy: for I would walk alone
In storm and tempest . . .
‘I would walk alone’. But the poetry is emphatically not that of a loner. Whenever Wordsworth marks out stages in his own development—ultimately but not necessarily as a poet—it is always from solitary absorption towards hearing the still sad music of humanity. I have occasionally been asked by someone wanting to get to know Wordsworth’s poetry where to begin. The answer, of course, is ‘Tintern Abbey’, about as a good a starting-point as any body of work in the English language offers, but after that? I would want to take a newcomer to those poems in which Wordsworth is most attentive to other human beings. To the celebration of companionship in some of the most beautiful lines in The Prelude, the scene at dusk on Windermere, where Wordsworth and his friends listen to the minstrel of their troop, blowing his flute (Book II, 170-180); to the description of the London artisan holding his child in his ‘brawny arms’, while gazing at it ‘with unutterable love’ (VIII, 844-859); to the ‘Sweet Boys’ who ‘whooping with a merry shout’ both puzzle and delight the poet in ‘Beggars‘; to ‘Michael‘, a poem essentially about the power of love:
why should I relate
That objects which the Shepherd loved before
Were dearer now? That from the Boy there came
Light to the sun and music to the wind;
And that the Old Man’s heart seemed born again;
to the exquisite lines in homage to Dorothy Wordsworth in ‘Home at Grasmere‘,
Mine eyes did ne’er
Rest on a lovely object, nor my mind
Take pleasure in the midst of happy thoughts,
But either She whom now I have, who now
Divides with me this loved abode, was there,
Or not far off. Where’er my footsteps turned,
Her Voice was like a hidden Bird that sang;
The thought of her was like a flash of light
Or an unseen companionship, a breath
Of fragrance independent of the wind.
As an expression of gratitude this must stand with the closing section of The Prelude in which Wordsworth addresses Coleridge,
O most loving soul,
Placed on this earth to love and understand,
And from thy presence shed the light of love,
Shall I be mute ere thou be spoken of?
In its early stages the autobiographical poem was dedicated to Coleridge; now the poem as a whole is presented as an ‘offering of my love ‘.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1804, portrait by James Northcote, at the Wordsworth Trust
Solitude was vital for Wordsworth the poet, but it was not defensive isolation. The figure in the early ‘Lines Left in a Seat in a Yew-Tree‘ is self-isolating. Disappointed in life he has cut himself off from the world. Wordsworth, on the contrary, values the self-sustaining power of solitude as the pre-condition for embracing our need for human society. His poetry is alive with human figures of all kinds; it records stories the poet heard; it rescues the human drama behind a pile of stones. His greatest ode (and greatest single poem?) ends with the common stuff of human life, its joys and fears:
The Clouds that gather round the setting sun
Do take a sober colouring from an eye
That hath kept watch o’er man’s mortality;
Another race hath been, and other palms are won.
Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.
Wordsworth observed to Henry Crabb Robinson, ‘If my writings are to last . . . they will please for the single cause, That we have all of us one human heart!’
Stephen Gill is an Emeritus Professor of Oxford University and a Fellow of Lincoln College. For many years a Trustee, he is now a Fellow of the Wordsworth Trust. His edition of The Salisbury Plain Poems of William Wordsworth in 1975 inaugurated the Cornell Wordsworth Series and he has since twice edited selections of Wordsworth’s poetry and prose for Oxford University Press. In addition to editing collections of essays, he was written Wordsworth and the Victorians (1998) and Wordsworth’s Revisitings (2012). His acclaimed 1989 biography William Wordsworth: A Life has just been revised and reissued in a new edition by Oxford University Press, to mark the 250th anniversary of the poet’s birth.
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