Wordsworth’s Double-Take

Abstract

“It was, in truth, / An ordinary sight, but…” So writes Wordsworth in one of The Prelude’s more memorable segues that I have deliberately truncated. I have done so because my interest, following the poet’s own intuition, is with the “ordinary… but”—with the ordinary as something more or extra—rather than with the sublime interiority or “visionary dreariness” to which Wordsworth immediately assigns the sight in a characteristic, if possibly erroneous, move. My truncation might well be viewed as a truncation of romanticism itself, which commentators from Coleridge to Paul de Man have variously identified as incorporating a movement of mind from the particular to the universal or, in de Man’s lexicon, from the “earthly and material” to the “mental and celestial” (13). And indeed an otherwise “ordinary sight”—”A Girl who bore a pitcher on her head / And seemed with difficult steps to force her way / Against the blowing wind” (306–8)—ultimately rises in Wordsworth’s description to the level of vision. But equally important is the way the ordinary irrupts here only to evanesce. For the ordinary’s evanescence—in this case, into something personal and aesthetic—is not simply a foregone conclusion that the transitional conjunction (“but”) anticipates and abets; it is an introjection as well in which something at once ordinary and not (again, the “ordinary… but”) is palpably reconfigured, even counterfeited, as a romantic and mnemonic surplus.

At issue…is history as our own unassimilable alterity, our difference front the directions in which “history” is pushing us… a different conception of history—one where historical thinking is the dimension in which thought becomes responsible to what is other, lost, unconscious, or potential, yet to be.

Raja Tilottama, “Imagining History” (428, 433)

[T]he world is Eden enough, all the Eden there can be, and what is more, all the world there is Romanticism’s work… [is] the task of bringing the world back, as to life.

Stanley Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary (52-53)