The Word as Borderer

Abstract

In an effort to keep this chapter to manageable length, I have selected for analysis four poems and one passage spanning the years 1797 to 1805, years in which various aspects of Wordsworth’s incarnational poetics are prominent: “The Thorn,” “Lucy Gray,” “Three years she grew in sun and shower,” “To H. C., Six Years Old,” and the drowned-man episode of the Prelude, Book 5. These poems from the early period demonstrate the practice of a poetics that is given its fullest theoretical expression only several years later (in the “Preface to Poems” and in the Essays upon Epitaphs), by which time the poetic practice, but apparently not the theory, has shifted to reflect the poet’s increasing religious orthodoxy. While the later poetry has its beauties, the particular artistry of incarnational poetics is of necessity compromised when the terrain on one side of it changes radically, as it must when a fairly well-defined afterworld crowds in upon nature and the natural man. Each of the selected poems demonstrates Wordsworth’s concern with the power of words as things, his willingness to explore the implications of incarnational poetics in light of shifting or evolving premises concerning nature’s sentences (signs), the human linguistic response—to incarnate or to clothe in words—and the relationship of that embodiment or clothing (the vital/fatal poet’s work) to the originary utterance whereby Word becomes flesh and through whom all things are made.