The Orphic Voice, page 32
Our introduction to Wordsworth’s major Orphic work has so far been the poet’s own questioning of his aims, in the verse preface to The Excursion and in Book I of The Prelude, where epic and Orpheus appear in company. Here we have found three main points: first, an intention to look into the mind, and the ways in which that mind, of individual and species, is fitted to the universe and the universe to the mind; second, a vision of this inquiry as a journey to be made, an epic quest in search of some new insight into truth, figured by Orpheus’ descent into the underworld; third, a realization that the field of inquiry is both body and mind in its relation to nature, and that this field can be considered as one of mutual making or creation between the outward and the inward forms, to be explored by Orphean insight, memory, self-observation, and recording. We find now that these three points are taken up right at the beginning of The Prelude, and will provide us with clues with which to go forward through the poem.
The work begins so quietly that we may almost be in danger of missing what is going on. (It is part of Wordsworth’s power that under his apparent simplicity lies a wealth of ordered complication.) Where is one to begin with a growing, a history of a growing as this is, the Growth of a Poet’s Mind? The question of method as well as of matter is with us from the start. Wordsworth is to speak of this in a little while, in Book II, but the beginning of the poem speaks implicitly too. It turns out to be as natural, exact, and multiform as the subject demands, as the mind itself is. The poem begins with a figure, in a double sense; the figure of the poet in a landscape, and the great over-all poetic figure or trope of a journey which he is about to undertake. Here Orpheus sets out:
Oh there is blessing in this gentle breeze
That blows from the green fields and from the clouds
And from the sky; it beats against my cheek,
And seems half-conscious of the joy it gives.
So the Orphic song opens, with the poet in a prospect of wide landscape and open sky. A quiet beginning for epic; but nothing here is passive. Something is stirring; not just the air, not just the body receiving that sensation; the mind is active too as part of the whole situation, tentatively endowing the breeze with feelings akin to its own, while the word “beats” suggests a pulse of life outside as well as inside the human being. From the very start, inward and outward nature, mind and world, are set in a to-and-fro moving network of relatedness and interchange. Forty lines later the breeze is answered from within, where a wind that is spirit moves across a landscape of its own:
For I, methought, while the sweet breath of Heaven
Was blowing on my body, felt within
A corresponding mild creative breeze,
A vital breeze which travell’d gently on
O’er things which it had made, and is become
A tempest, a redundant energy
Vexing its own creation.
[41–47]
So the first of the three great themes of this inquiry as we are envisaging it is fully introduced: the active interpenetration of nature and human nature, the forms of the universe and the forms of the mind. Yet this, too, is not passive. The ecological relationship of the organism to its environment is active and in movement; and in the mind the two sets of forms interpret each other. So the first theme is at once subject matter and methodology, the first stage of Wordsworth’s myth.
The next figure is that of the journey. The intricacy and accuracy of the pattern the poet has chosen for his inquiry begin now to be discernible. The dynamic is not simply that of interchange between two sets of relations, those in mind and in nature. The ecological dynamic is combined with a forward movement in time, as the organism, fully alive to its ever-present interplay with its environment, sustains also its progress in time as growth and development, exhibiting that beautiful fusion of simultaneous and successive relations with which poetry seems always to be deeply occupied, whether its preoccupations are mathematical or biological. So in this poem the self stands ready to begin its journey, and myth already blossoms into its double function of dynamic inclusive framework for thought and of narrative in time.
The journey is first of all a real one, a piece of autobiography.
Now I am free, enfranchis’d and at large,
May fix my habitation where I will.
[10–11]
This moment of liberation into a sense of power, confidence, and promise was experienced by Wordsworth at a particular point in time. It is a real happening and it is important to bear this in mind; but that is only the start of what follows. Already there is considerable subtlety here, simply in the time relations39 which are dealt with in these first sixty-seven lines. Wordsworth says that he composed the opening fifty-four lines at the very time of the experience; now he is recording and remembering that moment, now past, and reconsidering what it promised for the future.
Thus far, O Friend! did I, not used to make
A present joy the matter of my Song,
Pour out, that day, my soul in measur’d strains
Even in the very words which I have here
Recorded: to the open fields I told
A prophecy . . .
My own voice chear’d me, and, far more, the mind’s
Internal echo of the imperfect sound;
To both I listen’d, drawing from them both
A chearful confidence in things to come.
[55–60, 64–67]
There is an echo here of something we glimpsed in Goethe’s way of thinking about living beings: past and future time in the organism are transmuted into the living functions of memory and prophecy. These are not merely time-scales, they are methodology also, the making of a mythological structure to accord with perceived (which is to say, created) truth. Here again the question of method in Wordsworth’s endeavor comes to our attention.
This is the first unfolding of the figure of the journey, but there is more to come. The sense of exaltation in these opening passages, the absolute freedom matched with equally absolute confidence,
I look about, and should the guide I chuse
Be nothing better than a wandering cloud,
I cannot miss my way,
[17–19]
suggest much behind the actual event, and the clue to this comes when Wordsworth chooses (the word “choose” is important for this first Book, opening and closing it) to epitomize his sense of freedom by saying “The earth is all before me.” The first of the many Miltonic echoes in the poem, says Selincourt’s note;40 and what a beginning! With it we are sent back, as we were in the Excursion preface, to Paradise Lost, not this time to the poem as a whole but to one particular part of it. The original line, “The world was all before them, where to chuse,” comes from the very end of the last book, and it is as if Wordsworth meant to dovetail his epic directly into the very place where the Miltonic epic ends. This is not the only epic remembrance these opening lines of The Prelude contain. The poet goes on to say that in his new freedom he
May quit the tiresome sea and dwell on shore,
If not a Settler on the soil, at least
To drink wild water and to pluck green herbs,
And gather fruits fresh from their native bough.
[35–38]
Here is a hint of the Odyssey, a hint taken up by a passage much later in the work:
What avail’d,
When spells forbade the Voyager to land,
The fragrance which did ever and anon
Give notice of the Shore, from arbours breathed
Of blessed sentiment and fearless love?
What did such sweet remembrances avail,
Perfidious then, as seem’d, what serv’d they then?
My business was upon the barren sea,
My errand was to sail to other coasts.
[XI. 48–56]
This journey in the poem, then, is the epic journey still, if remade to modern needs, and there are reasons for believing that Wordsworth’s statement in The Recluse was right and that none of epic’s ancient glories are lost in the process of transformation. There are hints of a kind of martial and heroic glory in this quiet poem, woven so closely into the substance of Wordsworth’s themes that one scarcely notices them at first. Phrases come to mind such as this one at the end of Book I:
even then I felt
Gleams like the flashing of a shield.41
They come at crucial points, when the poet is considering the field of action between the beauty of outward forms and the mind. Here is another from Book XI:
lights and shades
That march’d and countermarch’d about the hills
In glorious apparition.
[141–43]
What Wordsworth calls the impressive discipline of fear may be a part of this, in this poet’s marvelously positive attitude to experiences that we should be liable to think of as fearful and traumatic, especially for a child (for example, seeing the body of a drowned man brought to the surface, described in Book v). In Book 1, line 440, Wordsworth speaks again of the discipline of “both pain and fear,” as if the very wounds the mind inevitably receives could be themselves a glory; and the words the poet uses of himself take a color almost of warlike endeavor,
Of prowess in an honourable field,
Pure passions, virtue, knowledge, and delight,
The holy life of music and of verse,
a theme expanded in Book in in the retrospective passage (line 168) which begins, “And here, O Friend! have I retrac’d my life,” which speaks of glory, of Genius, Power, Creation, and Divinity, of the awful might of Souls:
This is, in truth, heroic argument,
And genuine prowess,
the rest of the passage claiming, for poet as for all men, godlike hours and a majestic sway “As natural beings in the strength of nature.” Epic is with us from the start of this journey, epic in its varied forms.42 To this the Miltonic inscription leads, just as it is to lead into the great list of possible epic subjects which occupies lines 177–238 in Book I, culminating in the image of Orpheus’ dark journey which we have already singled out and fitted to Wordsworth’s inquiry. But the Paradise Lost reference does more than simply affirm the poem’s status and genealogy. In it Wordsworth identifies himself not only with Milton and the epic tradition but with the hero of Paradise Lost, with those of whom it was first said “The world was all before them.” These are Adam and Eve, which is to say, all humanity, seen here at the point of being driven from Eden following the Fall and making their way, sadly yet hopefully too, into and through the natural universe. Wordsworth does not merely take over from Milton; he takes over from Adam in Milton’s poem, the poet now being his own subject matter and hero, to continue the narration of the next chapter in that epic journey which is the poem of mankind.
The working myth for this inquiry is now displayed. It is to be the poet’s own life as memory presents it to him. This is also to be the journey he undertakes, as he makes clear at the end of Book I:
I will forthwith bring down,
Through later years, the story of my life.
The road lies plain before me; ‘tis a theme
Single and of determined bound; and hence
I chuse it rather at this time, than work
Of ampler or more varied argument.
So the choice is made, and the image of the journey continues throughout the work, here for instance in Book III:
Enough: for now into a populous Plain
We must descend.— A Traveller I am,
And all my Tale is of myself;
[195–97]
where again the site of the journey is both inward and outward; or in Book XI:
Thou wilt not languish here, O Friend, for whom
I travel in these dim uncertain ways,
Thou wilt assist me as a pilgrim gone
In quest of highest truth.
[390–93]
The figure of the journey which is the individual life is given its other name from time to time—that of history— in phrase after phrase: “a poet’s history,” “my own history,” “this history . . . of intellectual power,” the history that is “the discipline and consummation of the Poet’s mind,” “the history of a Poet’s mind,” “this meditative history.”43 This is the second great theme, autobiography as natural history of the mind.
The scope of the Wordsworthian endeavor begins to be apparent. Coleridge is the one who recognized this from the beginning, celebrating the singer and his Orphic song, the high and passionate thoughts to their own music chanted, song that was substance and structure to itself, and had to be so by the nature of the inquiry. The great dilemma of psychology has been that only by mind can mind be investigated and that we have direct access only to one such, our own. In terms of a narrow analytic detached methodology this inevitably falsifies the mind’s evidence upon itself. Wordsworth suggests that we allow that evidence confidently,
the mind is to herself
Witness and judge,
[XII. 367]
not as special pleading but as part of a different, no less valid methodology, appropriate here because it conforms to the nature of what is being inquired into. Wordsworth is working for an extension of scientific method in this branch of biology, and against the view that a totally detached observation, recording and arranging of facts are the sole acceptable method in science. Perception and thought, for Wordsworth, are not of this nature. They are a making from the start, and the fact that Wordsworth sees this puts him in close touch with modern thought, for we are coming to realize that mind and body are not a camera and tape-recorder, but makers and organizers from the start.44 This may be what Wordsworth meant by that “creation” he speaks of in the verse preface to The Excursion, which mind and nature “with blended might accomplish.” It recurs in the great passage on the dawn of the life of body and mind in the baby, in Book II. Here, too, there is no passivity; under the dispensation of maternal love by which the child is first united with the external world of nature to which he too belongs,
his mind spreads,
Tenacious of the forms which it receives,
[253]
but it is no passive reception:
Emphatically such a Being lives,
An inmate of this active universe;
From nature largely he receives; nor so
Is satisfied, but largely gives again,
For feeling has to him imparted strength,
And powerful in all sentiments of grief,
Of exultation, fear, and joy, his mind . . .
Creates, creator and receiver both,
Working but in alliance with the works
Which it beholds.
[265–75]
In this way of looking at the world you cannot avoid “making” and “creation.” It is all action and power, those two words that occur so often throughout The Prelude.
In addition to admitting self and creation, Wordsworth admits the testimony of memory, another area where the mind may make and remake the evidence upon itself. He proposes a historic or genetic approach from the beginning, but with memory as the appropriate instrument for the uncovering of this. “Each man is a memory to himself” it runs in Book III, line 189, and the famous injunction of emotion recollected in tranquillity may have a bearing on the investigation of the mind as well as the writing of Lyrical Ballads. This is the postlogical method proposed for the “natural history”; and the “forms” are here also, as methods of interpretation. We are formed by our environment, and so it becomes part of our natural history as organisms bodily and mental. This is a constant theme of The Prelude, a very clear example of it occurring at the end of Book VII. But the intercourse and interpretation work both ways. We are not to think of it
as if the mind
Itself were nothing, a mean pensioner
On outward forms.
[VI.666–68]
Each set of forms is a key to the other.
This is the extension of postlogic which Wordsworth sees, and it goes with a concept of the organism not as a fixed entity or pattern but as a “making” and a “being-made.” Psychologically it affords a glimpse, in its union of form and memory, of a method still to be attained which might combine Gestalt and analytic psychologies in a more flexible discipline, not unlike what Goethe aimed at, an observation “beweglich und bildsam.”45
This is little more than a hint of the contribution this poem can make to the biology of thinking. It is, as Coleridge says, laid up in the archives of mankind, for gradual unfolding. A true poem, its whole structure is itself commentary upon methodology and matter: the explication and replication of the narrative, the interweaving of image and meditation that recalls Bacon’s great definition of the faculty of memory as pre-notion and emblem.
We shall trace two aspects of the development of postlogic in The Prelude, using methodological passages in the poem to direct us into the emblems in which each reaches its climax. The first theme is the relation in thinking between logic and postlogic, the Baconian and even more the Shakespearean work which in Wordsworth culminates in the dream of the Arab in Book v. The second theme is that of form as metamorphosis and method of interpretation, the continuity of forms up through nature and into man as thinking and social being, and the function of language and the poet in this progression. This is the Ovidian theme, and it culminates in the emblem of mountains, sky, and water as the power of mind in the poem’s last book.
