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A "World of Shades": Mourning, Poesis, and Community in William Wordsworth's "The Vale of Esthwaite"
Abstract
William Wordsworth's view of 'the living and the dead' is integral to his sociology and his poetry, and can be traced back to his unpublished 1787 poem, "The Vale of Esthwaite," and to its "mourning of the dead." The poem's troubled mourning (its mourning of mourning) guides the narrative towards a nascent "Wordsworthian vision of community" as an economy of losses and tributes exchanged between mourners and their mourned. Such mourning makes both poetry and social bonds not just possible but necessary, as the products of an interminable burden not to be borne alone.
ELH 62.2 (1995) 387-407
As scholars devoted to the anthropology and sociology of death would teach us, the way that individuals relate to death -- and to the dead -- has much to do with how individuals relate to each other. In his pioneering study devoted to the practice of double burial among the Olo Ngaju people of Borneo, Robert Hertz notes "death has a specific meaning for the social consciousness; it is the object of a collective representation":
It is with these considerations in mind that I turn my attention to William Wordsworth, the poet who, as Geoffrey Hartman has aptly noted, characteristically "reads landscape as if it were a monument or grave." The topography of Wordsworth's poetry and prose is indeed littered with graves and traces of burial. An analysis of the deployment of these graves within the landscape and of the forces that come into play around them should provide us with the means to draw specific conclusions about how the notion of community functions in Wordsworth's thought, about where it ought to be located and what its defining traits should be. In particular, as we shall see, the distribution of burial sites and the rituals of mourning that surround them complicate Wordsworth's distribution and differentiation of urban and rural spaces. Indeed, a critical look at the persistent failure of the inhabitants of rural spaces successfully to mediate death and the loss that it figures -- their persistent failure to put the dead to rest -- suggests a subtle complicity or indifference between the urban and the rural. The emergence of this complicitous indifference challenges Wordsworth's argued -- and ever controversial -- preference for "humble and rustic life" as "that condition [in which] the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity." It likewise presents a challenge to a critic such as David Simpson who, without any naivete or lack of critical rigor (and in opposition to recent trends in Wordsworth scholarship defined by James Chandler, Marjorie Levinson, and Alan Liu), takes Wordsworth at his word. Although Simpson is able to note in his analysis of The Excursion the extent to which this poem represents country life as "clearly tainted both from without and from within," and hence the "degree to which the rural idyll is questionable in its own, intrinsic terms, regardless of the threats of ulterior vested interests," he avers with the poem's narrator that "there is no doubt that rural life and solitude do... 'favour most / Most frequently call forth, and best sustain' the 'pure sensations' of both self-interest and the 'mutual bond.'" Simpson finds in this poem a
ELH 62.2 (1995) 347-386
Some of the most influential work in the deconstruction of rhetoric, work often tested on Romanticism at large and on Wordsworth in particular, has repeatedly returned for discussion and debate to a figural complex -- namely, the overlap of prosopopoeia and apostrophe (personification and invocation) -- that is found implicated when the relation of death to language is pursued under the common denominator of absence. This work has proceeded along lines that tend to obscure the classically-based distinctions between these two figural modes and that further disable a full appreciation of the ways in which these very tropes are widely mobilized in neoclassical verse, especially in poetry on the subject of death. Without such distinctions about eighteenth-century texts, tropological employment in Romantic verse is easily misconstrued. Before turning to Wordsworth's critically devalued Excursion, I wish to offer as test cases three eighteenth-century poems about death by Blair, Gray, and Cowper, and suggest that their range of figural logic challenges the usual explanations of tropological functions and their relation to representations of death.
We will find that, although evaluative literary history has tended to grant Robert Blair's The Grave (1743) only occasional attention -- despite the poem's immense influence and its central location in the eighteenth-century Graveyard School -- its simultaneous bestowal and erasure of animicity capitalizes in didactic fashion on the very failure of prosopopoeia and apostrophe to animate or to act as catalysts for vocalization. The dizzying series of displacements and substitutions of subjects, always considered a crux in Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" (1751), results from a complex manipulation of epitaphic rhetoric. While the structure of the "Elegy" hinges on the traditional epitaph's separation of personification and apostrophe, William Cowper's "Inscription for the Tomb of Mr. Hamilton" (1800) partially collapses the boundaries between speaker, addressee, and reader by making the reader's body the site of personification and apostrophic address. In appropriating the very person of the reader in order to personify meaning, Cowper not only works within an epitaphic tradition for didactic purposes, but anticipates Romantic definitions of the more self-commemorating epitaphic mode. These three works mark stages in the representation of an intersubjectivity -- that phenomenological sense of a network or nexus of consciousness -- rendered increasingly generalized and community-oriented. Wordsworth's Excursion (1814) is thus revealed, not as the unwitting lapse into sentimental philosophizing, but as the deliberate, culminating expression of the collective rather than the individualist nature of the epitaphic charge. But before visiting any poetic sites, our figural excursion will begin by revisiting major deconstructive interpretations of tropological logic to establish how figural representations comment on their interpretations and vice versa.
The crux of all the texts to be considered here -- both poetic and theoretical alike -- is the situating of voice. It is not surprising that there should be difficulties in establishing a logic of address in an epitaphic text or in a theoretical exploration of the implications of absence-riddled language, since the traditional epitaph itself regularly problematizes the issue of who is speaking to whom. A reader-response situation is literally inscribed in "Halt, traveler," that imperative opening common to so many classical epitaphs, from which the English epitaph borrows much of its structure and many of its motifs. Made to pause in his journey, the traveler is often instructed to read the text before him in order to honor and, in a rather shadowy sense, to reanimate briefly the deceased, who through the epitaph, demands attention. A promise of general good fortune or of similar commemoration in the future after the current reader is dead -- a return on funerary "credit" -- may be tendered to increase the appeal. Of course, the reader is already activating the text by the time the instruction comes to do so; his arrest depends on his recognition of an inscription as something requiring a reading. Unlike private reading, however, which "gives voice to" a text, reading out loud transforms the epitaph into a public voicing that creates a relationship with the deceased and her inscription, no matter how tenuous or temporary. The silent voice of the tombstone, otherwise inert language, is...