The Orphic Voice, page 33
6
No matter how far or how high science explores, it adopts the method of the universe as fast as it appears; and this discloses that the mind as it opens, the mind as it shall be, comprehends and works thus
IN BOOK II of The Prelude Wordsworth, as if for the first time, confronts consciously the difficulty of what he has set out to do, the inquiry into the origins and progress of his own mind. The 1850 version is the more telling here, and I give the passage in that form:
But who shall parcel out
His intellect by geometric rules,
Split like a province into round and square?
Who knows the individual hour in which
His habits were first sown, even as a seed?
Who that shall point as with a wand and say
“This portion of the river of my mind
Came from yon fountain?”
[203–10]
The series of images is interesting in itself, the rounds and squares, the organic image for the mind’s faculty, the river for that mind’s continuum, an image which is to reappear in the last book with imagination as a river above and below ground whose course the whole inquiry has been tracing. The main point, however, is that from the beginning a mathematical, analytic type of method is ruled out as useless. It should be understood that this is not a general dislike for mathematics or for geometry; quite the contrary. In Book VI (1805) Wordsworth celebrates geometry as a natural taste of poets, and shows real delight in it.
So was it with me then, and so will be
With Poets ever. Mighty is the charm
Of those abstractions to a mind beset
With images, and haunted by itself.
[177–80]
And he goes on to speak of its constructions as an independent world, “created out of pure Intelligence.” There is no lack of understanding of what is going on, and it is important to remember this in view of what is to happen in the great dream. It is simply that Wordsworth recognizes the need for some other instrument for the subject matter he is dealing with. He turns next to Coleridge, as if to discuss with him the nature of science and this limited analytic methodology46 which is regarded as obligatory only by those who have not paid attention to how their own minds work. The following lines are reminiscent of some of Coleridge’s best pronouncements about the nature of thinking, in The Friend, Aids to Reflection, and elsewhere:47
Thou, my Friend! are one
More deeply read in thy own thoughts; to thee
Science appears but what in truth she is,
Not as our glory and our absolute boast,
But as a succedaneum and a prop
To our infirmity. No officious slave
Art thou of that false secondary power
By which we multiply distinctions, then
Deem that our puny boundaries are things
That we perceive, and not that we have made.
It is a plea for a method of thinking which shall deal with wholes and be adequate to that task. There follow the lines:
To thee, unblinded by these formal arts,
The unity of all hath been revealed;
and after saying that neither of them would be prepared to classify and label their mental faculties in analytic fashion (which is interesting in view of the currency of the word “analysis” in contemporary psychological vocabulary) Wordsworth says:
Hard task, vain hope, to analyse the mind,
If each most obvious and particular thought,
Not in a mystical and idle sense,
But in the words of Reason deeply weighed,
Hath no beginning.
The dismissal of analysis is not to mean a retreat into some vague poetasting (mystical and idle—the conjunction has always seemed to me admirable as far as a poet is concerned, whose task is to “deal boldly with substantial things”).48 The appeal is to Reason, working in another mode. This, too, it is important to remember in view of the final image of mind which this poem puts forward.
This negative clarity about unsuitable method leads a little later to another statement on methodology which shows Wordsworth’s gathering grasp of how he is to go about his work. This is in Book in. He proposes here his own formal method; “formal” in its true, living Baconians sense and not those dead forms of the “formal arts” to be eschewed which he mentioned in the last passage.
A track pursuing not untrod before,
From deep analogies by thought supplied,
Or consciousnesses not to be subdued,
To every natural form, rock, fruit or flower,
Even the loose stones that cover the high-way,
I gave a moral life, I saw them feel,
Or link’d them to some feeling;
[121–27]
If we see in this merely “anthropomorphism” or “pathetic fallacy” we shall miss the point completely. To start with, Wordsworth is right in appealing to tradition in what he is doing here. The track is indeed not untrod, for the Orphic tradition insists all the way through that the mind, in order to think and to interpret nature, must lend itself to what it is thinking about; that thinking is not manipulation but marriage, and in the end between like forms, the mind and body and “this great frame of breathing elements,” as Wordsworth elsewhere describes the universe.49 This is that correspondence of inner and outer landscape which we saw a while ago, working sometimes one way:
An auxiliar light
Came from my mind which on the setting sun
Bestow’d new splendour,
[II.387–89]
and sometimes the other,
Hush’d, meanwhile,
Was the under soul, lock’d up in such a calm
That not a leaf of the great nature stirr’d
[III.539–41]
but always working, for this is again action and power, and a vision of all the kindred works of creation working at one another,50 a dynamic concept of a universe working in the sense in which yeast or new wine or, in country parlance, storm-brewing weather “works.” This is why the poet’s mind from childhood had seen
The surface of the universal earth
With triumph and delight, and hope, and fear,
Work like a sea,
[1.499–501]
a passage which has just spoken of “forms” and “characters,” suggesting that this traffic is a language, which we shall think about a little later on. Meantime we may notice how in the present passage the analogies are supplied by thought and by consciousnesses, mind and body working together.51 Of the nature and sensitivity of that instrument Wordsworth speaks next:
whatsoe’er of Terror or of Love,
Or Beauty, Nature’s daily face put on
From transitory passion, unto this
I was as wakeful, even, as waters are
To the sky’s motion; in a kindred sense
Of passion was obedient as a lute
That waits upon the touches of the wind.
[132–38]
This is a Wordsworthian elaboration upon the Shakespearean Orphic figure, the lute strung with poets’ sinews, the exquisitely attuned instrument which Goethe saw as scientific as well as musical instrument. Then, after reaffirming the making of its own world by the mind in the next line or two, Wordsworth again questions the rationality or irrationality of this methodology he has sketched out.
Some call’d it madness: such, indeed, it was,
If child-like fruitfulness in passing joy,
If steady moods of thoughtfulness, matur’d
To inspiration, sort with such a name;
If prophecy be madness; if things view’d
By Poets in old time, and higher up
By the first men, earth’s first inhabitants,
May in these tutor’d days no more be seen
With undisorder’d sight.
[147–55]
He appeals first to tradition, the poets who immemorially have worked according to this measure, and behind them the very Ancients whom Bacon and Vico thought about, the earliest of men with their mythological thinking; second, he claims their thinking as thinking and not feeling or delirium, steady thought with that capacity to think forward in time which is one of poetry’s most mysterious and undeniable attributes. Is this unreason? And Wordsworth faces out his pseudo-scientific era and its opinions, and answers thus:
It was no madness, for I had an eye
Which in my strongest workings, evermore
Was looking for the shades of difference
As they lie hid in all exterior forms,
Near or remote, minute or vast, an eye
Which from a stone, a tree, a wither’d leaf,
To the broad ocean and the azure heavens,
Spangled with kindred multitude of stars,
Could find no surface where its power might sleep,
Which spake perpetual logic to my soul,
And by an unrelenting agency
Did bind my feelings, even as with a chain.
[156–67]
The appeal is in the end to true science itself, to passionate powers of observation, penetration,52 discrimination, and exactitude. Postlogic is here the wide morphological and taxonomic discipline we have glimpsed it to be. This is the perpetual logic, as Wordsworth says, with which postlogic mates and works in an unceasing activity.
The greatest statement, however, upon logic and postlogic is made not in an expository passage but in a figure. This is the dream of the Arab in Book v. Its timing is to be noticed; for this is the section of the poem dealing with books and their part in the growth of the mind. It is as if, having reached this point, the poet can settle this first theme and then proceed, through a consummate dream-transition which has both themes in it, to the second stage of methodological thinking, the function of language and poetry in the great continuity of forms in nature and human nature.
In the 1805 version Wordsworth ascribes the dream to a friend, though even here the narrative drops into the first person half way through. In the 1850 Prelude Wordsworth drops the fiction and gives it simply as his own. It is another example of his lending his own life as interpretative material and instrument. We should in any case deduce the dream as his from its very power. De Quincey calls it “a dream which reaches the very ne plus ultra of sublimity.”53 It shows what dreams may do for us in postlogical thinking when they are removed from their present over-narrow interpretative framework and better understood, not as objects of interpretation but as instruments of it.
Dreams occur frequently in The Prelude; not recounted as this one is, but mentioned as part of the power and action by which the outer forms are translated into the inner. Wordsworth says that landscape and sky “held me like a dream,” or appeared “like something in myself, a dream, A prospect in my mind.” They are admitted by him to full membership of the faculty of thought: “what my dreams / And what my waking thoughts supplied.”54 Dream, we remember, came up in the respective work upon postlogic of Bacon and Shakespeare. Bacon rejected it; Shakespeare restored it in the Dream itself, united with myth and poetry, and then moved on to a higher stage of methodological discussion in King Lear, denying logic at no point but showing how postlogic might absorb logic and have powers beyond it. Yet although it is Shakespeare and not Bacon whom Wordsworth follows, there could scarcely be a more perfect fulfillment of Bacon’s would-be derogatory phrase, “Poetry is a dream of learning,” than the dream in The Prelude. It is poetry, it is a dream and something more, “speaking no dream but things oracular”55 as Wordsworth meant his poetry to do, and it is a dream of learning in its profoundest sense. So the Orphic voice, despite the shortcomings of its human instruments, works out its own perfection.
I cannot quote the whole dream, nor do I want to fragment it. It has to be read. The best thing I can do is to single out a point here and there.
The dream is first of all a shift, into the sleeping mind and its organizing powers, of the perfectly natural outer forms in which the poet found himself. He was sitting in a cave by the shore, reading a book—Don Quixote—and meditating about poetry and geometry as two forms of “the knowledge that endures.” On this the dream begins its construction.
The man with the lance who rides into the center of the dream is an Arab of the desert, and as the dream proceeds he gradually becomes also Don Quixote—both at one and the same time. Thus epic enters the dream and the poem in yet another form; this time it is not Homer or Milton but Cervantes, while the Arab figures in his person those tales of imagination from the East which Wordsworth is to celebrate explicitly four hundred lines later. Indeed it is hard not to see in this double figure a cunning dream pun on the name “Arabian Nights.”56 He carries a stone and a shell; inanimate and animate nature, and yet also quite simple properties of any seashore. The Arab tells the questioning “I” that “in the language of the Dream” both stone and shell are books. The former is (not “symbolizes” but “is”) Euclid’s elements. The inanimate structure embodies the book or language of mathematics, of which it is said that it
held acquaintance with the stars
And wedded man to man by purest bond
Of nature, undisturbed by space and time;
[104–6]
a voice of nature binding man to the stars and to his fellow man. We are not told what the shell is. It appears “of a surpassing brightness.” After the Arab has said that the first object is geometry he says only of the second as he points to it, “This . . . this other . . . this Book is something of more worth.” Then, when held to the questioner’s ear on the Arab’s invitation, the shell, as shells do, gives out sound,
in an unknown tongue,
Which yet I understood, articulate sounds,
A loud prophetic blast of harmony,
An Ode, in passion utter’d, which foretold
Destruction to the Children of the Earth,
By deluge now at hand.
The organic structure, a product of the earth no less than the stone is, begins to speak a language unknown to man and yet capable of interpretation. This is once again the Baconian point at which nature may be made to speak, or Shelley’s figure of Earth crying that language is a perpetual song. And we feel the mind progress, as if by evolution, through these six lines, growing in power of comprehension, advancing from an unknown tongue to articulation, then prophecy, then poetry itself in the form of ode; and its subject is an epic one, Noah, Deucalion, or Utnapishtim. But we are not told that the shell is poetry or language or myth. It is bright, it is precious, it utters; the comment on it is:
Th’ other that was a God, yea many Gods,
Had voices more than all the winds, and was
A joy, a consolation and a hope.
There is power and myth, a language which like the first is embedded in nature, and in human nature no less. The 1850 version makes this even clearer by saying, instead of that last line, that it had power
To exhilarate the spirit, and to soothe
Through every clime, the heart of human kind.
The two languages, logic and postlogic or mathematics and poetry, are languages of nature; and they are also languages between man and nature and between man and man. There is no question of their being opposed to one another. Both, the poet says, are treasures, and the Arab is on his way to bury both to save them from the apocalyptic menace with which the dream closes as dreams so often do, the authentic touch of nightmare in that “bed of glittering light” (as 1850 has it) along the horizon, the waters of all the world advancing to destroy dream and dreamer who wakes in terror only to find the quiet waking world as he had left it a moment before.
This is the first provisional conclusion on method in the poem: that each language is a treasure of the earth but that poetry is the more valuable (as if our word, post-logic, might here receive additional justification). The remainder of the poem is a further investigation of this.
Faithful to its purpose, the poem accomplishes this in the first place by the continuation of the autobiography. Book vends, more or less, Wordsworth’s account of his formal education (he discusses the education of children in a long passage in this book, from line 223 onward). Now come other shaping forces and fields of action: travel in Europe and a glimpse of France in 1790, in the first flush of revolutionary fervor; then London, “preceptress stern” who instructs on the quality and nature of man in cities and society; then further experience in France, with the poet now deeply involved in personal and political responsibility. This development demands an extension and deepening of the methods of postlogical thought and interpretation. To this Wordsworth proceeds through the “forms.” He gives much care to describing in the early books how in his childhood the roots were laid of that active community of outer and inner forms which was to be his great method of interpretation.57 This is, in Wordsworth’s scheme, the fundamental dynamic or myth of the mind, but it too has to grow as the mind and the life grow. It proves to be capable of this development. The interchange of forms moves forward as the living mind does, the mind of individual or of the whole species, from the fields of inanimate and animate nature to those of social life, politics, and history.
By slow gradations towards human kind
And to the good and ill of human life;
Nature had led me on.
[VIII.861–63]
The logic and postlogic theme engaged Wordsworth upon one of the great methodological endeavors of the Orphic line. This is another. It is to be seen in Erasmus Darwin’s Temple of Nature as in Goethe’s Urworte, the attempt to shape a metamorphic morphology of human life in its due place in the cosmos. Above all, however, this line goes back to Ovid, whom, we may remember, Wordsworth loved. In the Metamorphoses is the classic vision of the continuity of forms in nature from rock and tree and beast and bird up to contemporary politics, with metamorphosis as the dynamic of the process and myth as the instrument capable of conforming to and hence interpreting this immense range of Protean subject matter. And for Ovid, Orpheus, the poet, is at the crucial point of transformation between natural and social forms.
