Abstract
Soon after arriving in Grasmere, Wordsworth wrote of his aesthetic programme,
I cannot at this moment read a tale Of two brave vessels matched in deadly fight And fighting to the death, but I am pleased More than a wise man ought to be; I wish, I burn, I struggle, and in soul am there. But me hath Nature tamed … Then farewell to the Warrior’s deeds, farewell All hope, which once and long was mine, to fill The heroic trumpet with the muse’s breath (HG, 929–34, 953–55)
The aesthetic is confirmed in Hart-Leap Well’s contemporaneous renunciation—‘the moving accident is not my trade’—and it is theorized, consistently with this ‘farewell’, at the close of The Prelude, where the Bard’s stern tendencies are tamed by Dorothy, Coleridge, and Mary (that is, ‘by all varieties of human love’). It seems to have been something of a fixity in Wordsworth’s self-image.
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Notes
See David Chandler, ‘The Politics of Hartleap Well’, CLB, ns. 110 (2000) 109–19, 117
Stephen Parrish, The Art of Lyrical Ballads, 132–3, finds it disappointing that ‘As the story is being related … our interest focuses on its incidents, not on the speaker’s psychology’. Don Bialostosky contests this view in Making Tales, 89–91.
Bialostosky, 89.
OED citations for manhood include: ‘Keep … a little Pity to distinguish Manhood lest other Men … should … judge you to be numbered with the brutes’ (Rowe, 1702).
Burke, Reflections, 271, cited in David Bromwich, ‘The French Revolution and Tintern Abbey’, Raritan, 10:3 (1991) 1–23, 13.
Hazlitt, Complete Works, 8: 248, cited Bainbridge, 221.
Peter J. Manning, Reading Romantics, 56.
Simon Bainbridge, ‘“Men are we”: Wordsworth’s “Manly” Poetic nation”, Romanticism, 5 (1999) 216–31, 223, 226. My discussion here is broadly indebted to Bainbridge’s stimulating essay.
Michele Cohen, Fashioning Masculinity: national identity and language in the nineteenth century (London: Routledge, 1996), 9.
Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in Eng-
land, 1715–1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 72; Carolyn Williams, Pope, Homer and Manliness: Some Aspects of Eighteenth-Century Classical Learning (London: Routledge, 1993), 9. Both cited, Cohen, 8.
Clarissa, 4.24, cited in G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1992, 337. Herbert Sussman, Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and Masculine Poetics in Early Victorian Literature and Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 13.
Confusions abound. Marlon Ross (‘Romantic Quest and Conquest: Troping Masculine Power in the Crisis of Poetic Identity’, in Mellor Romanticism and Feminism, 26–51) claims that Nature’s fostering force in Wordsworth’s poetry is superseded by the assertion of masculine maturity, ignoring the fact that the maternal has usurped the place of the paternal in the first place. Simon Bainbridge considers that in praising the ‘manly tone’ of the political sonnets in the Annual Review, Lucy Aikin is ‘creating her own self-authorizing manly voice’ (229). But it is only necessary for Aikin to be creating a ‘manly voice’ if manly is constructed against the female, which construction the article has placed in question.
Aids to Reflection defines ‘Manhood or manliness’, in somewhat gendered tropes, as ‘Strength of Character in relation to the dictates of Reason; Energy of Will in preserving the Line of Rectitude tense and firm against the warping forces and treacheries of Temptation’. Aids to Reflection, ed. John Beer, CC Volume 9 (London & Princeton: Routledge and Princeton University Press, 1993), 195.
Thomas Hughes, The Manliness of Christ (1879; London: Macmillan, 1907). In the British Library (Boston Spa) copy of this Macmillan’s Sixpenny Series reprint a reader has inscribed on the flyleaf: ‘true Manhood lies in the desire of men and women [my emphasis] to reach the ideal’. Contrary to popular belief, Hughes contested the ‘muscular’ variant of Christianity in favour of the Arnoldian: ‘a great athlete may be a brute or a coward, while a truly manly man can be neither’ (12). See also Norman Vance, ‘The Ideal of Manliness’, in The Victorian Public School, ed Brian Simon and Ian Bradley (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1975); and J. A. Mangan and James Walvin, eds, Manliness and Morality: Middle-Class Masculinity in Britain and America, 1800–1940 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987).
Prelude 1805, 13.211–68. The lines are revised in 1850 so that Mary takes her place alongside Dorothy and Coleridge in the project to temper a too exclusive attachment to the Miltonic sublime. W. J. B. Owen’s ‘The Descent from Snowdon’, TWC 16:2 (1985) 65–74, sees Wordsworth renouncing precisely the imaginative qualities that create the sublimities of The Prelude. One might argue that one revisionary aim of the 1850 Prelude is to bring the sublime and the beautiful into optimum balance—as for instance in rephrasing the Boating spot so as magnify the sense of tenor. Thus ‘with trembling oars I turned’ replaces ‘trembling hands’; and ‘with the din smitten’ puts a word of power in place of the lame expression ‘with the din, meanwhile’.
Hannah More, Essays on Various Subjects, Principally Designed for Young Ladies (London: 1785), 14.
More, Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education (1799), vols 7 and 8 of Works of Hannah More (London: T Cadell, 1818), 8.301–31, 7.210.
Shaftesbury, quoted from George Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility, 117; Joseph Spence, Letters from the Grand Tour 1730–1741, ed. S. Klima (London: McGill-Queen’s University press, 1975), 9–10; both cited Cohen, 4.
Mary Hays, Letters and Essays: Moral and Miscellaneous (London: Knott, 1793) 20. See also her cautionary ‘History of Melville and Serena’, 31–41.
De Quincey, Recollections, 131–3.
William Alexander, The History of Women from the earliest Antiquity to the PresentTime, 2 vols (London 1779), 1: 314 (Cohen, 110).
This departure from stereotypes has caused widespread puzzlement. For censure of Wordsworth for ‘confirming the socio-historical subordination of women’ see Marlon B. Ross, ‘Naturalizing Gender: Woman’s place in Wordsworth’s Ideological Landscape’, ELH, 53:2 (1986) and Mary Jacobus, ‘Behold the Parent Hen’, Romanticism, Writing and Sexual Difference (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989). For extenuation (on the ingenious grounds that as the hazels are gendered both male and female, the boy’s assault destroys simultaneously father and mother figure, transferring his allegiance to the brother-sister nexus) see Rachel Crawford, ‘The Structure of the Sororal in Wordsworth’s “Nutting”’, SiR 31:2 (1992) 197–211. These perspectives are discussed by Gregory Jones in ‘Rude Intercourse’, cited in chapter 3 (n. 13).
They include Once in a lonely hamlet (March 1802); Resolution and Independence (1802–1807); Great men have been among us and I grieved for Buonaparte (1802); Rob Roy’s Grave (1805–1807); The Happy Warrior (1805–1807); The Waggoner (1805–1819); The Horn of Egremont Castle (1807, for its emphasis upon magnanimity and its exhibition of competitiveness as the antithesis of ‘the happy warrior’ ); Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle (1807); The White Doe (1808–1815); and Artegal and Elidure (1815–1820). The Waggoner contrasts the notably gentle Benjamin with the braggart veteran of Trafalgar, whose conduct exhibits both national chauvinism after Trafalgar, and male chauvinism. This hero’s true quality is attested in the way he is introduced to Benjamin, ‘It is my husband’, softly said/The Woman as if half afraid’ (Benjamin the Waggoner, ed Paul Betz [Ithaca & NY: Cornell UP, 1981], 63, lines 239–40) and is confirmed by his neglect of her when drink is to be had.
For gendered reviews of Keats see Susan J. Wolfson, ‘Feminizing Keats’, in Critical Essays on John Keats, ed. Hermione de Almeida (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1990), 317–56, Ann Mellor, Romanticism and Gender (New York and London: Routledge 1993), 171ff, and Wolfson and others in Nicholas Roe, ed. Keats and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). My association of Wordsworth and Keats as poets risking emasculation runs counter to received opinion. Marlon B. Ross in The Contours of Masculine Desire: Romanticism and the Rise of Women’s Poetry (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989) thinks that ‘the potential to have poetic foremothers, as well a forefathers, is much greater for Keats than for Wordsworth’ (as if Charlotte Smith and Helen Maria Williams were not hugely significant to the young Wordsworth). Ross sees Wordsworth ‘more directly linked to the male tradition of Dryden and Pope both in terms of time and class status [?]’ and as returning poetry ‘to its roots in manly action’ and away from the ‘emasculation’ threatened by ‘sickly German tales or presumptuous female romancers’ (156).
Woof, 170, 173, 182, 185, 191–201, 222, 230, 231, 254.
The Matron’s husband, her ‘helpless charge’, is alive, but ‘utterly dead’ to fear and hope.
The richest of all Wordsworth’s expressions of empathy with motherhood, Once in a lonely hamlet combines the dependency of The Mad Mother with the desire of the Forsaken Indian Woman to hold her child once more. The emigrant mother’s desire to pretend ‘one little hour’ that this English child is hers is contrasted with the aged Matthew’s courage, in ‘and did not wish her mine’. In her whispered dialogue with a borrowed child, the mother is troubled by inability to visualise the smiles of her own child. She knows that her tears burden and perplex the borrowed infant, yet needs ‘to call thee by my darling’s name’ so that for a while, at least ‘My heart again is in its place’. It is impossible not to suppose that the poet knew all about such temptations.
David Chandler, ‘The Politics of Hart-Leap Well’, 110.
Wordsworth attributes this information to Dr Whitaker, PW, 3: 550.
Nicolson and Burns, xxxviii.
Col. A. H. Burne, cited Geoffrey Hill, Collected Poems, 201.
John Beaumont, Bosworth-field: With a Taste of the Variety of Other Poems, Left by Sir John Beaumont … Set Forth by his Sonne, Sir lohn Beaumont (London, 1629).
Geoffrey Hill, Funeral Music, 3 (Collected Poems, 72).
Online http://24.1911encyclopedia.org/B/BA/BALLADS.htm.
OED, citing Wilberforce, 1848.
No. 126 of John Scott’s The Champion, Sunday June 4, 1815, announced: ‘This day is published … THE WHITE DOE OF RYLSTONE’. No 127, Sunday June 11, 1815, carried a three column report from Paris on the acclamation of Napoleon, at his restoration. In No 128, Sunday June 18, 1815, ‘The important news of the week is, that Buonaparte is generally believed to have left Paris, and to have joined his troops: the awful blow may therefore be hourly expected.’
The Edinburgh Review, Vol 25, October 1815 (No. L), 355. ‘In the Lyrical Ballads, he was exhibited, on the whole, in a vein of very pretty deliration [sic]; but in the poem before us, he appears in a state of low and maudlin imbecility… It may be that he has dashed his Hippocrene with too large an infusion of lake water, or assisted its operation too exclusively by the study of the … ballads of “the north countrie”.’
Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry, 328. For another major reading see John F. Danby, The Simple Wordsworth, 128–45. For reception, see W. J. B. Owen, ‘The White Doe of Rylstone in its Time’, TWC 29: 1 (1998) 20–25, and Peter J. Manning, Reading Romantics: Text and Context (New York and Oxford: OUP, 1990).
I borrow from W. J. B. Owen two of Wordsworth’s remarks to Scott. Wordsworth wrote to Scott in 1805: ‘High as our expectations were, I have the pleasure to say that the Poem [The Lay] has surpassed them much. We think you have completely achieved your object” (EY, 553). How high were those expectations? Of Marmion he wrote: ‘I think your end has been attained; that it is not in every respect the end which I should wish you to propose to yourself, you will be well aware (MY, 1: 264). Owen, 22.
See de Selincourt’s judgement that ‘whereas Scott never achieved or, indeed, attempted those subtler melodies on which Coleridge based his claim to metrical originality, W. equalled if he did not surpass them’ (PW, 3: 546).
Peter J. Manning argues that ‘At the core of both the materials of The White Doe and the political situation on the Peninsula is the struggle of a native Catholic population against a powerful central authority.... The Rising of the North of 1569 was the last battle of feudal England against the modern state that the Tudors instituted.... All Wordsworth’s local and nostalgic sympathies should have been with the rebels, as they were with the oppressed Spaniards and Portuguese’ (Reading Romantics, 180–1). Aligning Elizabeth with Napoleon is odd, but Manning’s reading of Wordsworth is premised throughout on the idea that Napoleon represented progress. Marlon B. Ross, eschewing textual reference, finds the poem robustly Tory: ‘through the voice of Francis, Wordsworth issues a warning to jacobin sympathisers or other disgruntled factions threatening civil discord’. Both The White Doe and Scott’s Rokeby are about ‘the potential loss of property’ and incitements to British imperialism. ‘Romancing the nation-State: The Poetics of Romantic Nationalism’, in Jonathan Arac and Harriet Ritvo, ed., Macropolitics of Nineteenth-century Literature: Nationalism, Exoticism, Imperialism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 82, 73, 75.
James Mulvihill, ‘History and nationhood in Wordsworth’s White Doe of Rylstone’, CLIO 18:2 (1989) 135–151 also makes the point that Francis experiences the poet’s ‘conflict of sensations without name’, 148.
See Mulvihill, 150.
In one of the touches of the poem that bear on personal sorrow, Francis is buried—by communal tact—at the priory, not at the hall, so that Emily will not have it constantly before her.
Emily’s transfiguration towards the point when she can return to the burial place and receive ‘the memory of old Loves,/Undisturbed and undistressed’ not unlike Mary Wordsworth’s. Remaining in Grasmere, overlooking the churchyard where the bodies of Thomas and Catherine lay, would, Wordsworth wrote in 1813, ‘grievously retard our progress towards that tranquillity of mind which it is our duty to aim at’ (MY, 2.66). As W. J. B. Owen argues, Mary attained her ‘triumph pure’ only slowly and with great difficulty, and Wordsworth’s poem honours her for it.
Letters of John Keats, ed. Maurice Buxton Forman, 4th edn (London: Oxford University Press, 1960), 96.
Milton, Prose Works, 5.34. In Milton, but not in Wordsworth, Elidure is subsequently deposed by his two younger brothers, who divide the kingdom, but pre-decease him, whereupon Elidure becomes king for the third time, ‘finishing the interrupted course of his mild, and just reign, as full of virtuous deeds, as daies to his end’ (5.35).
Reliques, 3: 340.
Last Poems, ed. Jared Curtis (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1999), I 28.
See Judith W. Page, Wordsworth and the Cultivation of Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 133–42. Without this discussion I doubt if I would have considered this poem in these terms.
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© 2003 Richard Gravil
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Gravil, R. (2003). ‘The Milder Day’; or, Manliness and Minstrelsy. In: Wordsworth’s Bardic Vocation, 1787–1842. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230510333_10
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