Abstract
“The texture of the physical” may be “on the verge of disappearing,” Frederick Garber remarks of some of Wordsworth’s encounter-poems, among which he places “A Night-Piece.”1
The sky is overspread
With a close veil of one continuous cloud
All whitened by the moon, that just appears,
A dim-seen orb, yet chequers not the ground
With any shadow—plant, or tower, or tree.
At last a pleasant instantaneous light
Startles the musing man whose eyes are bent
To earth. He looks around, the clouds are split
Asunder, and above his head he views
The clear moon and the glory of the heavens. (1–10)2
This is a poem in which “a close veil” or “texture close” (1815 text) of cloud makes a signal appearance, though Wordsworth’s clouds may strike us as problematically physical, however connatural a part of the landscape. The “close veil of one continuous cloud” (2) is all whitened by the moon, but the veil’s blank reserve casts no shadow to the ground. It is not that no shadow is cast but what is cast fails to write itself upon the ground.
The reserve of a theory; which … ought not to attempt to explain everything, but to have some clouds mingled with its light.
John Norris
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Notes
Frederick Garber, Wordsworth and the Poetry of Encounter (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971), 85.
Text from Stephen Gill, ed., William Wordsworth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 44–5.
Kenneth R. Johnston, “The Idiom of Vision,” in New Perspectives on Coleridge and Wordsworth, ed. Geoffrey H. Hartman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972), 24.
Michael Serres, Hermès IV: La Distribution (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1977), 32–7
Geoffrey H. Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1787–1814 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1971), 178–9.
For a parallel discussion of sun and moon imagery in Coleridge, see Jonathan Arac, Critical Genealogies: Historical Situations for Postmodern Literary Studies (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 87–91.
Jonathan Wordsworth, William Wordsworth: The Borders of Vision (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 444.
My discussion relates to Jacques Derrida, “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy,” New Literary History 6, no. 1 (1974): 5–74. Irene E. Harvey argues that Derrida’s sun is a model “of ‘that which can always absent itself’… in short, disappear behind the clouds.” This raises the question of the subject: “The implication of an animate sensibility, though unaddressed by Derrida, is clearly suggested here. Sensible objects themselves do not ‘turn themselves’ or ‘hide themselves’ regularly… The metaphor of the sun is thus appropriate only if the subject is drawn into the picture which Derrida… omits to add.” This echoes the way in which the more phenomenological preoccupations of texture are drawn into the issue of the text in my own discussion. See “Metaphorics and Metaphysics: Derrida’s Analysis of Aristotle,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 17, no. 3 (1986): 322–3.
Arden Reed, Romantic Weather: The Climates of Coleridge and Baudelaire (Hanover, NH: Brown University Press, 1983), 13.
See James A. W. Heffernan, The Re-Creation of Landscape: A Study of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Constable and Turner (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1985), 171.
Karl Kroeber, Romantic Landscape Vision: Constable and Wordsworth (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1975), 19.
See Florence Marsh, Wordsworth’s Imagery: A Study in Poetic Vision (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1952), 107.
Paul De Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 14–15.
For the implications of “dis-closure,” see Tilottama Rajan, “Displacing Post-Structuralism: Romantic Studies after Paul De Man,” Studies in Romanticism 24, no. 4 (1985): 463–4, 466–7.
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© 2012 Peter Larkin
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Larkin, P. (2012). Wordsworth’s Cloud of Texture. In: Wordsworth and Coleridge. Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137010940_4
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