The Orphic Voice, page 34
Wordsworth works to develop this vision. First, he alters the proportion or emphasis. Ovid’s work, we saw, divided in a proportion of 3:2, the larger proportion devoted to natural history, the smaller to human doings. Wordsworth gives this quite another turn. In his poem the preoccupation with nature as against human nature is 5:8 in 1805 (Books I–V, VI–XIII), and 5:9 in 1850 because of the rearranging and numbering of the later books (Books I–V, VI–XIV). It is an indication of the growing need for the development and investigation of the thought in these fields. The subject is discussed at length in Book VIII, which has the title “Retrospect: Love of Nature leading to Love of Mankind.” Further, he draws out Ovid’s concept of the poet as the mediator between the forms, natural and social, and shows something of what that concept implies.
The two themes come together in a late passage on methodology, Book XII in 1805, XIII in 1850 which is the more interesting version and from which I quote.
Nature for all conditions wants not power
To consecrate, if we have eyes to see,
The outside of her creatures, and to breathe
Grandeur upon the very humblest face
Of human life. I felt that the array
Of act and circumstance and visible form
Is mainly to the pleasure of the mind
What passion makes them; that meanwhile the forms
Of Nature have a passion in themselves,
That intermingles with those works of man
To which she summons him; although the works
Be mean, have nothing lofty of their own;
And that the Genius of the Poet hence
May boldly take his way among mankind
Wherever Nature leads; that he hath stood
By Nature’s side among the men of old,
And so shall stand for ever.
[283–99]
At the working point of the forms the poet is to be found, and has always been found there from the time of the Ancients onwards. So the poet is knit up with this work of nature, but that is not all. Wordsworth goes on:
Dearest Friend!
If thou partake the animating faith
That Poets, even as Prophets, each with each
Connected in a mighty scheme of truth,
Have each his own peculiar faculty,
Heaven’s gift, a sense that fits him to perceive
Objects unseen before, thou wilt not blame
The humblest of this band who dares to hope
That unto him hath also been vouchsafed
An insight that in some sort he possesses,
A privilege whereby a work of his,
Proceeding from a source of untaught things,
Creative and enduring, may become
A power like one of Nature’s.
[299–312]
This is both a statement of the Orphic tradition and an example of its continuity. That poets and poetry are a work of nature has been said by Orphic voices many times; by the Romantics about Shakespeare; by Goethe about Ovid and about himself; by Emerson. Here it is Wordsworth’s turn to say so. He does so first in connection with books in his own Book v, where books are said to be
only less
For what we may become, and what we need,
Than Nature’s self, which is the breath of God.
[220–22]
Earlier he gives examples, Homer whom he calls the Thunderer, linking him thus with myth and with the greatest of all nature’s inarticulate voices; then “the voice / That roars along the bed of Jewish song”; the “low and wren-like warblings” of folk song. Each is a different voice of nature.
The voice is the clue. Not merely the poet and the thinking mind but language itself comes up out of the earth, as it were, bearing its own continuity with the natural forms and at the very point of translation of those forms into the social ones. This was already part of the shell’s revelation in the dream, uttering as it did there a sound, voice, or language, at first unknown, then, as the ear grew attuned to it, revealing itself as poetry, which is what language, as a natural form, must be. One phrase should be remembered—that the shell “had voices more than all the winds.” This idea of a continuity not only of forms but of voices or language in nature is present in the poem Power of Sound which we looked at earlier, where Orpheus appears. Here, besides the shell in the dream, it is taken up in two other passages which carry forward not only the image of voices and winds in nature but also the whole tradition at this Ovidian and Orphic point. This is the first:
for I would walk alone,
In storm, in tempest, or in starlight nights
Beneath the quiet Heavens; and at that time
Have felt whate’er there is of power in sound
To breathe an elevated mood, by form
Or image unprofaned; and I would stand,
Beneath some rock, listening to sounds that are
The ghostly language of the ancient earth,
Or make their dim abode in distant winds.
Thence did I drink the visionary power.
I deem not profitless these fleeting moods
Of shadowy exultation: not for this,
That they are kindred to our purer mind
And intellectual life; but that the soul,
Remembering how she felt, but what she felt
Remembering not, retains an obscure sense
Of possible sublimity, to which
With growing faculties she doth aspire,
With faculties still growing, feeling still
That whatsoever point they gain, they still
Have something to pursue.
[II.321–41]
This is by no means an easy passage, but we can catch glimpses: the language of the earth, akin to spirit as the word “ghostly” suggests, stretching back to age beyond all human Ancients, the mind stirred by it stretching forward, in evolution, to growing powers and achievements; power residing in the effect of the earth-voice upon the mind, arousing there a corresponding power which, visionary and exulting, does not lose its kinship with the reason but is part of that too. The central passage, however, for our purposes here is that where language, winds, power, and shadows hover together. These are taken forward in the closely connected lines in Book v:
he who, in his youth,
A wanderer among the woods and fields,
With living Nature hath been intimate,
Not only in that raw unpractis’d time
Is stirr’d to ecstasy, as others are,
By glittering verse; but, he doth furthermore,
In measure only dealt out to himself,
Receive enduring touches of deep joy
From the great Nature that exists in works
Of mighty Poets. Visionary Power
Attends upon the motions of the winds
Embodied in the mystery of words.
There darkness makes abode, and all the host
Of shadowy things do work their changes there,
As in a mansion like their proper home;
Even forms and substances are circumfused
By that transparent veil with light divine;
And through the turnings intricate of Verse,
Present themselves as objects recognis’d,
In flashes, and with a glory scarce their own.
[V.610–29]
Here power is abroad like the winds in that deep and shadowy gulf of the mind, but now the breathing abyss and the intellectual power and the words are one. Wordsworth, as Orphic voices have done so often before, brings postlogic home to words and language, and sets in the mysterious workings of the mind and language all the action of the Baconian forms and the Ovidian metamorphoses, the Shakespearean transformations and mutations. But this remarkable passage is interesting in another way. Portraying the mind as a working abyss of creation and change, it forms part of the development of Wordsworth’s epic vision described in the Excursion preface, where the Orphic task becomes the exploration of that mind, seen as a chasm of more-than-Miltonic chaos. This image also leads forward to the final emblem of The Prelude, which takes this form.
Here is for Wordsworth the heart of postlogic, its central operative field of power. He seems to need a concept or name for it, akin to poetry yet not professionally tied to it. It is part of the greatness of this work that although for its author words were “a passion and a power”58 he does not make the working of the mind a technical poetic business, but maintains the breadth of his inquiry into genius itself as a more generalized power. Now in Book VI the name and vision of this power rise before him, with a dramatic suddenness, and out of the abyss itself. Wordsworth has just crossed the Alps and is confronting (once again actually, not just in a daydream) those mighty heights and depths.
Imagination! lifting up itself
Before the eye and progress of my Song
Like an unfather’d vapour; here that Power,
In all the might of its endowments, came
Athwart me.
[525–29]
There, all at once, is the name. But the 1850 wording is even more significant:
Imagination—here the Power so called
Through sad incompetence of human speech,
That awful Power rose from the mind’s abyss
Like an unfathered vapour that enwraps,
At once, some lonely traveller.
[592–96]
The name is there; so is the dissatisfaction with it, as if the power he conceives is more than this term generally implies. To this he will return at the end of the poem. The term meanwhile appears fairly frequently in the text from now on, while “Imagination, How Impaired and Restored” will title two of the books themselves. Then in the last book it receives its ultimate embodiment and commentary.
The opening lines describe the quintessential Wordsworthian landscape, mountains, mist, water, sky, ocean, with a few figures—the poet, his friend, a shepherd and his dog. The final emblem is again autobiography, and takes the form of a journey in outer and inner landscape. (The formal beauty of the construction of the poem as a whole should not be overlooked.) The company sets out on a misty summer night to climb Snowdon. After a long ascent they suddenly come out of the fog into bright moonlight, to see range after range of hills at their feet above the mist; beyond this, the Atlantic, the great globe itself; above their heads a sky glorious with moon and the full company of stars. The description ends with the sight of a break in the mist, “a blue chasm, a fracture in the vapour” the 1805 text says; this is the 1850 description:
through a rift—
Not distant from the shore on which we stood,—
A fixed, abysmal, gloomy breathing-place,
Mounted the roar of waters, torrents, streams,
Innumerable, roaring with one voice!
Heard over earth and sea and in that hour,
For so it seemed, felt by the starry heavens.
[56–62]
1805 adds one touch to that:
in that breach
Through which the homeless voice of waters rose,
That deep dark thoroughfare, had Nature lodg’d
The Soul, the Imagination of the whole.
The whole universe is drawn together in this emblem, the last and most all-embracing union of inner and outer forms. This is the chasm of the mind, no abstraction but a breathing-place and a power involving the entire universe. Wordsworth goes on to say so, and it is one of the marvels of this last book that his philosophical discourse here, in the 1850 text, is as powerful and beautiful as the emblem itself.
When into air had partially dissolved
That vision, given to spirits of the night
And three chance human wanderers, in calm thought
Reflected, it appeared to me the type
Of a majestic intellect, its acts
And its possessions, what it has and craves,
What in itself it is, and would become.
There I beheld the emblem of a mind
That feeds upon infinity, that broods
Over the dark abyss, intent to hear
Its voices issuing forth to silent light
In one continuous stream; a mind sustained
By recognitions of transcendent power,
In sense conducting to ideal form,
In soul of more than mortal privilege.
[63–77]
Commentary here becomes impertinent; but we might notice that Wordsworth is saying in his own way what Coleridge said about thinking, that it was self-observation; notice also that the poet’s image of the mind draws close to an image of God. A line or two later the poem continues:
The power, which all
Acknowledge when thus moved, which Nature thus
To bodily sense exhibits, is the express
Resemblance of that glorious faculty
That higher minds bear with them as their own.
This is the very spirit in which they deal
With the whole compass of the universe:
They from their native selves can send abroad
Kindred mutations; for themselves create
A like existence.
[86–95]
This is the last and most enigmatic of the “strange mutations” of the world of which Edgar spoke in King Lear, and an epitome of evolution: the entire universe as the narrative of the mind. Wordsworth goes on reassuringly to speak of the ordinariness of that mind, its capacity to make use of all its store of everyday life, its humanity. Then he speaks the logical conclusion of what he has been saying so far:
Such minds are truly from the Deity,
For they are Powers; and hence the highest bliss
That flesh can know is theirs—the consciousness
Of Whom they are, habitually infused
Through every image and through every thought.
[112–16]
This is not lip service to religion added in later life. It is in 1805 as well, which says explicitly, “hence religion, faith” (XIII. 111). What it is is an incredibly bold hypothesis concerning the relation between nature, mind, and God.59 If we do not pursue this, it is not because it is unimportant (the same thing is true of the great political themes and books of The Prelude60 which I have omitted here). It is because this is a branch of the Orphic inquiry we cannot hope to deal with yet. But it is waiting for those who can, with a power that can in some sort match the power Wordsworth here conjures and commands.
Keeping to our own limited methodology, we have one or two things more to see. The poem after this great magnificence (and it is no accident that the later version has more of this than the earlier) quiets down, as epic tends to do at its close; and on the way, Wordsworth adds a note or two upon imagination, which has now come to appear as “the main essential Power,” as 1805 says (XIII. 289). The poet says that this is what we have been tracing all along:
This faculty hath been the feeding source
Of our long labour;
[1850, XIV. 193]
the object and the means, in that image, of this long research. He goes on:
This spiritual Love acts not nor can exist
Without Imagination, which, in truth,
Is but another name for absolute power
And clearest insight, amplitude of mind,
And Reason in her most exalted mood.
This is Wordsworth’s later comment upon his own sense that imagination was an unsatisfactory term, because it made a division where none was. In the last resort logic and postlogic are a united faculty; the union of the stone and the shell is taken further, and further than we can follow it with our present halting psychologies. To this fusion Wordsworth admits love, as part of the methodology of thought:
Imagination having been our theme,
So also hath that intellectual Love,
For they are each in each, and cannot stand
Dividually
[206–9]
Love is part of the nature of the mind and its workings and powers, as the Orphic tradition has always maintained; and it is to the mind that we are finally directed in this poem, as the point at which nature is to work her further transformations, the mind which, for all Wordsworth’s passion for nature, is given unquestioned precedence, in its beauty, its fabric, and its future, all of which are, Wordsworth says, divine.
So ends Wordsworth’s Orphic song, taking its place in the evolution of the research that poetry conducts into the nature of mind and world. It is Keats who can sum up for us:
We “feel the burden of the Mystery”. To this point was Wordsworth come, as far as I can conceive, when he wrote “Tintern Abbey” and it seems to me that his Genius is explorative of those dark Passages. Now if we live, and go on thinking, we too shall explore them—he is a Genius and superior [to] us, in so far as he can, more than we, make discoveries and shed a light in them—Here I must think Wordsworth is deeper than Milton—though I think it has depended more upon the general and gregarious advance of intellect, than individual greatness of Mind.61
Keats is right; however great the Orphic vision, there is always more to be done.
7
Mythology, like the severed head of Orpheus, goes on singing even in death and from afar
IN THE Sonette an Orpheus we meet the Orphic research in an unprecedented form. Up till now the figure of Orpheus has been a general clue to what was going on in Orphic minds, but the figure appears as sideways and glancing illumination rather than as cynosure, and the work has usually been steady and prolonged. It was so with Wordsworth. His research into the mind took the form of a long inquiry into a long and steady process, and in him Orpheus is associated with epic. With Rilke we have something entirely different. Instead of a long process we have a sudden lyric spasm concentrated into a mere moment of time in which this extraordinary Orphic explosion takes place, and from which issues Part I of the Sonette an Orpheus.
