Abstract
Graves and burial sites function for Wordsworth as a locus of difference between the vanishing rural idylls proleptically elegised in poems such as ‘Michael’, ‘We Are Seven’, and ‘The Brothers’, and the rapidly modernising world beyond the mountains. To lose the deathways constructed in and around these sites would risk the loss of every good that they conferred: belief in a sympathetic nature, the sense of a place’s distinctive history and significance, a basis on which to build enduring domestic ties, the means of incorporating individuals into communities, and, ultimately, the source for an intense affective power which radiated outwards from the soil of home to shape both society and nation. This chapter argues that Wordsworth’s poetry of the 1790s suggests that the nation would need to find new ways of retaining a sense of the presence of the dead when communities could no longer rely on their buried presence to link discontiguous generations, if these social goods were to survive in the new century. In doing so, he identifies the ways in which poetry becomes the site of an interaction between the living and the dead, offering poets the opportunity to reimagine the place of the dead in their developing conceptions of community at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsNotes
- 1.
David Bromwich, A Choice of Inheritance: Self and Community from Edmund Burke to Robert Frost (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 63; James K. Chandler, ‘Wordsworth and Burke’, ELH 47 (1980), 741–71.
- 2.
Geoffrey Hartman, ‘The Question of Our Speech’, in The Geoffrey Hartman Reader, ed. Geoffrey Hartman and Daniel T. O’Hara (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), 325.
- 3.
William Wordsworth, ‘Michael’, in Lyrical Ballads, and Other Poems 1797–1800, ed. by James Butler and Karen Green (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 252–68: l. 380; ‘The Brothers’, in Lyrical Ballads, and Other Poems 1797–1800, ed. by James Butler and Karen Green (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 141–59 (l. 156); ‘A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal’, in Lyrical Ballads, and Other Poems 1797–1800, ed. by James Butler and Karen Green (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 164 (l. 8). All subsequent quotations from these poems are taken from this edition. Where possible, I will give line numbers in parentheses in the text.
- 4.
William Coxe, Sketches of the Natural, Civil, and Political State of Swisserland (London: 1779), 6.
- 5.
Eric Birdsall, ‘Nature and Society in “Descriptive Sketches”’, Modern Philology 84.1 (1986), 41.
- 6.
William Wordsworth, Descriptive Sketches, ed. by Eric Birdsall (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), ll. 536–43. Subsequent references will be to this edition and, where possible, will take the form of line numbers in the text.
- 7.
Duncan Wu, ‘Wordsworth’s Poetry to 1798’, in The Cambridge Companion to Wordsworth, ed. Stephen Gill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) 28.
- 8.
See Chap. 1, above.
- 9.
William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1805), ed. Stephen Gill (New York: Norton, 1979), IX, ll. 96–7.
- 10.
William Wordsworth, ‘A Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff’, in The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1974), Vol. I: 48.
- 11.
Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France ed. by L. G. Mitchell and W. B. Todd, in The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), Vol. 8: The French Revolution, 1790–1794, 210.
- 12.
Samantha Matthews, Poetical Remains: Poets’ Graves, Bodies, and Books in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 156.
- 13.
Robert Pogue Harrison, The Dominion of the Dead (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003), x.
- 14.
Ibid. x; xi.
- 15.
Giambattista Vico, The New Science, trans. by Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1968), § 12.
- 16.
Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, 743–4.
- 17.
‘A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal’, ll. 7–8.
- 18.
See Clarence J. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1967); Alan Bewell, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment: Nature Man and Society in the Experimental Poetry (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989), 237–280.
- 19.
Bewell, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment, 244.
- 20.
William Wordsworth, Home at Grasmere, ed. Beth Darlington (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), ll. 123–24.
- 21.
Charles J. Rzepka, ‘Sacrificial Sites, Place-Keeping, and “Pre-History” in Wordsworth’s “Michael”’, European Romantic Review 15.2, 206. Emphasis original. Jennifer Wallace, Digging the Dirt: The Archaeological Imagination (London: Duckworth, 2004), 45.
- 22.
The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Early Years, 1787–1805, 275.
- 23.
Lyrical Ballads, and Other Poems, 1797–1800, p. 382.
- 24.
Descriptive Sketches, l. 442.
- 25.
William Wordsworth, A Guide Through the District of the Lakes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), 206.
- 26.
Wordsworth, A Guide, 206; 201.
- 27.
The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Early Years, 1787–1805, ed. by Ernest de Selincourt. Revised by Chester L Shaver. 2 ed (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1967), 313–4.
- 28.
James K. Chandler, Wordsworth’s Second Nature: A Study of the Poetry and Politics (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1994), 288.
- 29.
Burke, Reflections, 97–8.
- 30.
Burke, Reflections, 128.
- 31.
Wordsworth, Letters: The Early Years, 314–5. Original emphasis.
- 32.
‘The Brothers’, ll. 176–81.
- 33.
The OED dates the first usage of ‘want’ meaning ‘desire’ to 1707. For an elegant discussion of how the word modulates between these two meanings in poetry and song see Daniel Karlin, ‘I Want You’, Critical Quarterly 49.1 (2007), 18–35.
- 34.
The mountains should perhaps more properly be described as an analogy than as a symbol in this instance. However, as Nicholas Halmi demonstrates, the distinction between analogy and symbol proved difficult to maintain even for those Romantic theorists of the symbol who insisted on their absolute difference. See The Genealogy of the Romantic Symbol (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 1–14.
- 35.
See M.L. Armitt, The Church of Grasmere: A History (Kendal: Titus Wilson, 1912). For a useful account of wider eighteenth-century funerary sculpture, see Matthew Craske, The Silent Rhetoric of the Body: A History of Monumental Sculpture and Commemorative Art in England, 1720–1770 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).
- 36.
Robert Southey, Letters from England, by Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella, 2nd edn (London: Longman, 1808). Vol. 2: 174–5.
- 37.
Kurt Fosso, Buried Communities: Wordsworth and the Bonds of Mourning (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2004), 5. Fosso invokes shared mourning as the crucial factor in establishing such a community, yet, it is worth noting that ‘Michael’ resists any sense that the dead are either mourned or subject to the sort of epitaphic discourse that Fosso discerns in ‘The Brothers’.
- 38.
‘Michael’, l. 1.
- 39.
Harrison, Dominion of the Dead, x.
- 40.
William Wordsworth, The Fourteen-Book Prelude, ed. by W.J.B. Owen (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), II. 310.
- 41.
Letters: The Early Years, 313–14.
- 42.
See, in particular, Books 5–9 of The Excursion (1814) and ‘Essays Upon Epitaphs’ in The Prose Works of William Wordsworth ed. by W.J.B Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, 3 vols, (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1974), Vol. 2: 45–119.
- 43.
Despite these concerns, Ennerdale resisted this narrative of urban drift and proved resilient to population loss. The 1801 Census reveals it to have been a parish of 32 households consisting of 190 individuals, 35 of whom were employed primarily in agriculture, and 22 in trade, manufactures, or handicrafts. The rest were presumably children, the elderly, and those whose primary occupation was unclassified: these two broad categories of occupation would be revised in subsequent census returns. Ten years later, the 1811 census shows that the parish had acquired one extra family while also decreasing slightly in overall population to 189. Although the poem does hint, through the Ewbanks’ story, at a fragile future for the village, the census returns remain remarkably stable through the first half of the nineteenth century: the population ranges from a low of 183 (1841) to a high of 209 (1821). In 1851, the population was 193, in a village of 37 houses, which suggests that in the first half of a century in which the population of the country more than doubled, Ennerdale’s population remained more or less the same. Over the next 20 years, however, it was to rise dramatically, increasing to 254 in 1861 and 389 in 1871. A footnote to the 1871 Census attributes this increase to the opening of iron-ore pits nearby. Industrialisation thus had a counter-intuitive effect on Ennerdale’s population, which boomed rather than suffering the slow entropic collapse that Wordsworth seems to anticipate in the poems, although we might suspect that it also brought about a shift from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft, as a community rooted in long-standing customs, kinship networks, loyalty, and shared characteristics gave way to one founded on shared employment relations and economic self-interest.
- 44.
‘Essays Upon Epitaphs’, 66.
- 45.
‘Essays Upon Epitaphs’, p. 50.
- 46.
Catherine Belsey, Culture and the Real (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005), 75.
- 47.
Fiona Stafford, Local Attachments: The Province of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 49.
- 48.
Michael Wiley, Romantic Geography: Wordsworth and Anglo-European Spaces (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 101.
- 49.
David Bromwich, Disowned by Memory: Wordsworth’s Poetry of the 1790s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 161.
- 50.
Michelle Turner Sharp, ‘The Churchyard Among the Wordsworthian Mountains: Mapping the Common Ground of Death and the Reconfiguration of Romantic Community’, ELH 62 (1995), 393–4.
- 51.
Bromwich, A Choice of Inheritance, p. 46.
Bibliography
Armitt, M.L. 1912. The Church of Grasmere: A History. Kendal: Titus Wilson.
Belsey, Catherine. 2005. Culture and the Real. Abingdon: Routledge.
Bewell, Alan. 1989. Wordsworth and the Enlightenment: Nature Man and Society in the Experimental Poetry. New Haven/London: Yale University Press.
Birdsall, Eric. 1986. Nature and Society in “Descriptive Sketches”. Modern Philology 84 (1): 39–52.
Bromwich, David. 1989. A Choice of Inheritance: Self and Community from Edmund Burke to Robert Frost. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
———. 1998. Disowned by Memory: Wordsworth’s Poetry of the 1790s. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Burke, Edmund. 1989. Reflections on the Revolution in France. In The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, The French Revolution, 1790–1794, ed. L.G. Mitchell and W.B. Todd, vol. 8, 53–293. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Chandler, James K. 1980. Wordsworth and Burke. ELH 47: 741–771.
———. 1994. Wordsworth’s Second Nature: A Study of the Poetry and Politics. Chicago/London: Chicago University Press.
Coxe, William. 1779. Sketches of the Natural, Civil, and Political State of Swisserland. London: J. Dodsley.
Craske, Matthew. 2007. The Silent Rhetoric of the Body: A History of Monumental Sculpture and Commemorative Art in England, 1720–1770. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Fosso, Kurt. 2004. Buried Communities: Wordsworth and the Bonds of Mourning. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Glacken, Clarence J. 1967. Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Halmi, Nicholas. 2007. The Genealogy of the Romantic Symbol. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Harrison, Robert Pogue. 2003. The Dominion of the Dead. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Hartman, Geoffrey. 2004. The Question of Our Speech. In The Geoffrey Hartman Reader, ed. Geoffrey Hartman and Daniel T. O’Hara, 321–348. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Karlin, Daniel. 2007. I Want You. Critical Quarterly 49 (1): 18–35.
Matthews, Samantha. 2004. Poetical Remains: Poets’ Graves, Bodies, and Books in the Nineteenth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rzepka, Charles J. 2004. Sacrificial Sites, Place-Keeping, and “Pre-History” in Wordsworth’s “Michael”. European Romantic Review 15 (2): 205–213.
Sharp, Michelle Turner. 1995. The Churchyard Among the Wordsworthian Mountains: Mapping the Common Ground of Death and the Reconfiguration of Romantic Community. ELH 62: 387–407.
Southey, Robert. 1808. Letters from England, by Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella. 2nd ed. London: Longman.
Stafford, Fiona. 2010. Local Attachments: The Province of Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Vico, Giambattista. 1968. The New Science, trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Wallace, Jennifer. 2004. Digging the Dirt: The Archaeological Imagination. London: Duckworth.
Wiley, Michael. 1998. Romantic Geography: Wordsworth and Anglo-European Spaces. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Wordsworth, William. 1967. The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Early Years, 1787–1805, ed. Ernest de Selincourt. Revised by Chester L Shaver, 2nd ed. Oxford: The Clarendon Press.
———. 1974a. Essays Upon Epitaphs. In The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W.J.B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, vol. 2, 45–119. Oxford: The Clarendon Press.
———. 1974b. A Guide Through the District of the Lakes. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
———. 1974c. A Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff. In The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W.J.B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, vol. I, 19–66. Oxford: The Clarendon Press.
———. 1977. Home at Grasmere, ed. Beth Darlington. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
———. 1979. The Prelude (1805), ed. Stephen Gill. New York: Norton.
———. 1984. Descriptive Sketches, ed. Eric Birdsall. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
———. 1985. The Fourteen-Book Prelude, ed. W. J. B. Owen. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
———. 1993. Lyrical Ballads, and Other Poems 1797–1800, ed. James Butler and Karen Green. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Wu, Duncan. 2003. Wordsworth’s Poetry to 1798. In The Cambridge Companion to Wordsworth, ed. Stephen Gill, 22–37. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
McAllister, D. (2018). Burial, Community, and the Domestic Affections in Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads. In: Imagining the Dead in British Literature and Culture, 1790–1848. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97731-7_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97731-7_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-97730-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-97731-7
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)