I heard among the solitary hills
Low breathings coming after me, and sounds
Of indistinguishable motion, steps
Almost as silent as the turf they trod. (I:329-332)
And, as Wordsworth is poised over a nest to plunder the eggs of a mother bird he has a sense of becoming defamiliarized with the landscape:
With what strange utterance did the loud dry wind
Blow through my ears! The sky seemed not a sky
Of earth, and with what motion moved the clouds! (I:348-350)
The imagery of fast-moving clouds and of an alien sky suggests a kind of turbulence, a disruption. The young Wordsworth unwillingly gives the natural phenomena surrounding him an animistic aura. These are examples of nature working on the mind by fear and astonishment, heightened by solitariness and isolation. Superstition is composed of such feelings; subtle universal impressions that there are powerful agencies at work in the natural world. Wordsworth looks upon these ‘natural presences’ as his teachers. It is perhaps significant that in a book entitled ‘childhood and school-time’ there is no classroom scene of any kind. He is implying that important values are imputed to us by the natural world and adopts a kind of primitivist stance on education. The projection of his young self as wild and untamed except by the elements that surround him is an idea reminiscent of Rousseau’s noble savage.
The fear and awe found in the recollections of book I, would alone present a one-sided picture of Wordsworth’s childhood. He begins homage to the inspirations of the natural world with an address to the River Derwent. The first stage of the foster-care is befitting of the tenderness required by the infant; the river, says Wordsworth, ‘lov’d / To blend his murmurs with my Nurse’s song’ (I:270-271). A knowledge of the calmness and serenity of nature is communicated through the subliminal whisperings of the river to the sleeping infant. The river then becomes a playmate and, it seems, through the act of play, which first allows the child to assert its own aggression, Wordsworth progresses to the image of his 5-year-old self as ‘A naked savage, in the thunder shower’ (I:303). But before it reaches this stage, the child must develop the capacity to find the world valuable, and this is achieved primarily, through objects of beauty. This topic is dealt with more thoroughly in the passages of book II:
From early days,
Beginning not long after that first time
In which, a babe, by intercourse of touch,
I held mute dialogues with my Mother’s heart… (II:281-283)
Wordsworth captures here the sense of an interchange between mother and baby; a relationship that relies on texture. The ‘intercourse of touch’ is what first allows a baby to reach out to the world; its first appreciation of beauty is what brings about creativity. This type of discourse calls to mind the theory of object-relations psychology, particularly the work of D.W. Winnicott on transitional objects and the origins of creativity. Winnicott says ‘It is creative apperception more than anything else that makes the individual feel that life is worth living’(p.65).What he refers to as creativity in the infant, Wordsworth calls the first ‘Poetic spirit of our human life’ (II:276). He goes on to present the human mind as a reconciler of oppositions, a faculty of concordia discors, by comparing it to the ‘harmony of music’ (I:352). Poetry, like music, can synthesize, discordant elements and find a balance between the sublime/fear and the beauty/love.
The beauty and fear Wordsworth believes to have been have been part of his upbringing correspond to what he calls the ‘interventions’ (I:370) of nature, whether they be gentle or severe. He conceives the theft of the shepherd’s boat in book I to be one such intervention. As he embarks, the scene appears one of perfect equilibrium between the beautiful and the sublime with the lake ‘shining clear / Among the hoary mountains’. Once again, Wordsworth feels ambivalence towards his act of transgression; he calls it an act of ‘troubled pleasure’. However, his flight begins as one of calmness, safety, and smoothness – qualities of the beautiful. Nature’s intervention - the sudden apparition of the huge cliff – displays typically sublime characteristics. The peak, which seems to rise up to all its vastness in the space of two oar strokes, is an obscure but threatening image and extremely productive of the sublime. The reader gets the impression that, as the young Wordsworth is experiencing the same compunctious guilt, his mind undertakes an involuntary exaggeration of the mountain’s greatness of dimension. Wordsworth’s style, here, participates in the illusion:
When from behind that craggy steep, till then
The bound of the horizon, a huge Cliff,
As if with voluntary power instinct,
Uprear’d its head. I struck and struck again,
And, growing in still in stature, the huge cliff
Rose up between me and the stars, and still,
With measured motion, like a living thing
Strode after me. (I:405-412)
His language is almost as dizzy and tumultuous as the peak he is describing in contrast to the preceding description of the calmness and serenity of the lake. The animism here attributed to the cliff seems much stronger than Wordsworth’s previous vague impression of pursing footsteps. There is a kind of tension between the objective describer, attempting to familiarize a mysterious picture of the world and the unsettling distortions of the subjective shaper of sensory experience. Wordsworth’s momentary estrangement is part of an interchange between the sublime display of the elements and his own mind is working as ‘creator and receiver both’ (II:273). It also seems to leave something altered in his perception:
…and after I had seen
That spectacle, for many days, my brain
Work’d with a dim and undetermin’d sense
Of unknown modes of being... (I:417-419)
This is more than an idea that the mind can play funny tricks on us. There is a Kantian suggestion that the mind has the power to transform that which we see. In both ‘spots of time’, the young Wordsworth is a wanton thief but this wantonness stems from a mysterious desire that ‘o’erpower’d [his] better reason’. Pangs of guilt and the resulting fear give the mind something that it is glad to have. The mind is able to change the universe. We can be ‘fostered’ by emotions like fear and guilt because they are a means of disciplining power. It is interesting that although Wordsworth is talking about reprimands and the feeling of guilt, the language he uses is not demeaning. Guilt is ennobled by these passages (‘Praise to the end! / Thanks likewise for the means!), but he also communicates to us that the strength and the passion under which he acted are important to him. He is glad that he acted as he did because such acts teach us the meaning of our desire; we do not know our passions in isolation or abstraction. When overpowered by such desire the individual becomes plunderer and/or predator, and reacts aggressively to the world. Wordsworth knows that such aggression is part of who his character - he also knows that our strength and passion matter. Though not ashamed by this fact, he is frightened by it and this is manifested by the images of the landscape in disruption and turbulence.
Towards the end of book I, Wordsworth seems to place ‘Ye lowly Cottages in which we dewlt’(I:525) ) in opposition to ‘Ye Presences of nature’(I:490):
Ye lowly Cottages in which we dwelt,
A ministration of your own was yours,
A sanctity, a safeguard, and a love!
Can I forget you, being as you were
So beautiful among the pleasant fields
In which ye stood? Or can I here forget
The plain and seemly couintenance with which
Ye dealt out your plain conforts? ... (I:325-332)
He professes the cottages not only to have a beauty of their own but also a ‘ministration’ of their own. Wordsworth sees himself to have been governed by the indoor world as well as the natural world. His thinking does not run parallel to Rousseau’s who tends to condemn anything not of the natural world. The indoors is part of the facilitating environment needed by the child. Many of the qualities Wordsworth associates with the cottage are what Burke would describe as beautiful. It can remain light, when the outside has become dark, it is secure and safe. This type of beauty is a kind of sanctuary, an asylum from the harshness of the outside world. He draws us into the mundanity and the engrossment in the harmless fun of the interior of the cottage - as a conservatory or an enclosure - then he reminds us that
Meanwhile, abroad
The heavy rain was falling, or the frost
Raged bitterly, with keen and silent tooth… (I:562-564)
Surely everybody is familiar with this enjoyable sensation of feeling safe, warm and comfortable while bearing witness to the violence of the conditions outside. He evokes this sensation to show us that while he considers himself to be a child of nature he is also glad to have the boundaries the walls of a house provide him with. But it is also worth noting that he describes the pleasures of the indoor world as ‘plain comforts’ (II:532), something very far removed from the ‘danger and desire’ he finds impressed upon the features of the earth. Wordsworth is pointing out that it is regressive in someway to live only with comfort and to remain within the sanctuary of our four walls; we must venture outside. This is something similar to Winnicot’s notion that living compliantly – in this case with plain comfort and no more – is the sign of an unhealthy mind. Wordsworth might take it as an example of an unpoetic mind; he would deem remaining among the artificial as anti-creative.
Wordsworth’s claim that he grew up ‘foster’d alike by beauty and by fear’ has a great many implications. One might say the passages surrounding this claim are written in the language by which our passions are known to us. They focus on acts of desire that emphasis the fact that doing has implications for being. Wordsworth communicates something raw, basic and powerful in his attempt to get to the very core of the nature of our desire. The mind as our faculty of desire and reason finds itself in a constant struggle to find a synthesis we can be happy with as we react with the world. In order to be happy, and well, we need both beauty and fear. Wordsworth is aware that he could not have been healthily fostered exclusively by one or the other. He is defining his ability to fashion meaning out of the great paradoxes of life. Although the imagination is not yet referred to here, we can already see the why he considers it a quintessential power of the human mind.
Word count: 2,449
Works Cited
Boulton, J. T. Burke’s Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Limited, 1958.
Selincourt, Ernest De. The Prelude by William Wordsworth. London: Oxford University Press, 1936.
Winnicott, W.D. Playing and Reality. London: Tavistock Publications, 1971.