TIe CIuvcIavd anong lIe WovdsvovlIian Mounlains Mapping lIe Connon Ovound oJ

BealI and lIe BeconJiguvalion oJ Bonanlic Connunil

AulIov|s) MicIeIe Tuvnev SIavp
Bevieved vovI|s)
Souvce ELH, VoI. 62, No. 2 |Sunnev, 1995), pp. 387-407
FuIIisIed I The Johns Hopkins University Press
SlaIIe UBL http://www.jstor.org/stable/30030081 .
Accessed 04/12/2012 1006
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
.
The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
ELH.
http://www.jstor.org
This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.72.228 on Tue, 4 Dec 2012 10:06:05 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
THE CHURCHYARD AMONG THE WORDSWORTHIAN
MOUNTAINS: MAPPING THE COMMON GROUND OF
DEATH AND THE RECONFIGURATION OF ROMANTIC
COMMUNITY
BY MICHELE TURNER SHARP
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":
We see life vanish but we
express
this fact
by
the use of a
special
language.
... The
body
of
the
deceased is not
regarded
like the
carcass of some
animal:
specific
care must
be
given
to it and a
correct
burial;
not
merely
for
reasons of
hygiene
but out of moral
obligation. Finally,
with the occurrence of death a dismal
period
begins
for the
living during
which
special
duties are
imposed
upon them.1
Death and the rituals that surround
it,
both
public
and
private,
are
thus not to be seen as
wholly
individual
phenomena
but as social
constructions. How and where individuals
bury
the
dead,
how
individuals
accomplish
or fail to
accomplish mourning,
form a useful
filter
through
which
fundamental,
although historically
variable,
traits of a
given society
come into focus.
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."2
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
ELH 62
(1995)
387-407
c
1995
by
The
Johns Hopkins University
Press 387
This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.72.228 on Tue, 4 Dec 2012 10:06:05 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
that surround them
complicate
Wordsworth's distribution and differ-
entiation 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 controver-
sial-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."3
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."'4
Simpson
finds in this
poem
a
paradigm
of active retirement . . .
possible only
in small commu-
nities,
of the sort that Wordsworth saw to be
increasingly
threat-
ened. Here
only
can one combine
"private
life / And social
neighborhood," mingling
with others while
remaining "self-gov-
erned,
and
apart."5
The
point
is
precisely
that these conditions were
increasingly
threat-
ened. As Wordsworth wrote in his famous letter to
Fox,
an
economy,
like that of the Northern
statesmen,
based on the
independent
ownership
of a small
property,
was
(if
it had ever
existed)
"rapidly
disappearing."6
And
regardless
of the
potential
benefits afforded to
the small
proprietors
in a subsistence
economy,
the fixation on such
an
economy
risks an atavism that falls short of the
progressive
orientation that
Simpson
is correct to see in Wordsworth.
Indeed,
the
point
to
excavating
the
complicity
between urban and rural
spaces
that occurs in the
vicinity
of burial sites is neither to devalue
Wordsworth's liberal tendencies nor is it to convict him of bad
faith,
but rather to uncover Wordsworth's critical
rigor
and to
suggest
a
paradigm
shift of
potentially important
dimensions. For as I will
388 The
Churchyard Among
the Mountains
This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.72.228 on Tue, 4 Dec 2012 10:06:05 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
argue
in
conclusion,
Wordsworth
deploys
this
indifference,
which is
surely
another name for
death,
as the
ground
for a romantic
subject
and
community predicated
on
singularity
and hence on
difference,
a
ground
that
suggests
the
possibility
of a
non-totalizing collectivity.
I. EPITAPH AS BURIAL
Wordsworth
opens
the first of his
"Essays Upon Epitaphs" by
invoking,
with the
help
of
Camden,
the central
place
of burial in the
constitution of civil
society.
"'Never
any neglected
burial but some
savage
nations,"'
he
quotes
Camden
(as
quoted by
Weever)
as
having
written.'
Having
set burial at the head of his first
"Essay,"
Wordsworth
introduces
epitaphic writing
as not
only
the first use to which letters
were
put
but as themselves a more efficient
way
of
burying
the dead.
"As soon as nations had learned the use of
letters,
epitaphs
were
inscribed
upon
these
monuments;
in order that their intention
might
be more
surely
and
adequately
fulfilled"
(PW, 2:50).
Epitaph
thus
marks no essential difference from the
original
act of burial and
differs from the rude stones and mounds of earth raised
by primitive
peoples only
in its
efficacity
and relative
permanence.
Thus we find
the Pastor of The Excursion
retelling
the
story
that Ellen's feet had
inscribed on the earth in their
perpetual
return to the side of her
infant's
grave,
for
the
swelling
turf
reports
of the fresh
shower,
but of
poor
Ellen's tears
Is
silent;
nor is
any vestige
left
Of the
path
worn
by
mournful
tread of her
Who,
at her heart's
light bidding,
once had moved
In
virgin
fearlessness.8
Wordsworth's
compressed
historical
analysis
of
epitaph
evinces a
critical
subtlety lacking
in the
sweeping generalization
uttered
by
Dr.
Johnson
and cited
by
Wordsworth in a footnote to his first
"Essay":
"To define an
Epitaph
is
useless;
every
one knows that it is an
inscription
on a Tomb
[and]
...
implies
no
particular
character of
writing"
(PW, 2:49),
claimed Dr.
Johnson.
Wordsworth,
on the other
hand,
recognizes
the
implication
of
epitaph
and its historical modu-
lations within the socio-historical constitution of human
community.
In its articulation of the relation of the
living
to the
dead,
epitaph
is
both an index to the health of
society
and,
as the
pedagogical
scenario sketched out in the notes
appended
to the first
"Essay"
hints,
an
implement
to its reform.
Epitaph
does indeed
imply
a
particular
character of
writing,
a character that varies
according
to
Michele Turner
Sharp
389
This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.72.228 on Tue, 4 Dec 2012 10:06:05 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
the
particular
modes of
burying
the dead and
commemorating
the
characters of the deceased. The
well-wrought epitaph,
the
literary
equivalent
of the well-buried
corpse,
thus becomes a
key
to
identify-
ing
the kind of idealized
community
that
Wordsworth's
"Essays"
intend.
What, then,
is the
community
to be constituted in and
through
a
proper
burial of the
dead,
a burial that
might ideally provide
a non-
debilitating
and healthful relation to death and loss? The obvious
answer would
certainly
seem to be the sort of idealized rural
community
invoked
everywhere
in Wordsworth from the Preface to
Lyrical
Ballads to The Excursion. Wordsworth's meditation on
epi-
taph
would seem to be no
exception
to this
general
rule. Indeed the
rural
community
seems the site
par
excellence for the
repose
of the
dead.
Early
in his first
"Essay,"
Wordsworth devotes several
pages
to a
consideration of burial
practices
from ancient times to the
present
that
place
the dead at a
proper
remove from the urban milieu.
Wordsworth
praises
the ancient custom of
interring
the dead
beyond
the walls of the
city along roadways leading
into and
away
from
it,
where the
traveler,
heeding
the formulaic
injunction
of the
epitaph
to
halt,
would
naturally
be
given
to
contemplate
his own
humanity
and his ultimate destination. The
physical setting
and the
disposition
of the traveler there
halted,
resting
in the shadow of a funeral
monument,
would have
supplied strong appeals
to visible
appearances
or immediate
impression, lively
and
affecting analogies
of life as a
journey-
death as a
sleep overcoming
the tired
wayfarer-of
misfortune as
a storm that
falls
suddenly upon him-beauty
as a flower that
passeth away,
or of innocent
pleasure
as one that
may
be
gath-
ered-of virtue that standeth firm as a rock
against
the
beating
waves.
(PW, 2:54)
While these beneficent effects were
generally
unavailable to the
denizen of a
modern-day, increasingly
urban British
society, they
were,
to some small
degree,
Wordsworth
writes,
"counterbalanced to
the inhabitants of
large
towns and
cities,
by
the custom of
depositing
the dead
within,
or
contiguous
to,
their
places
of
worship"
(PW,
2:54).
The dead are thus at a remove from the
"getting
and
spend-
ing"
so
injurious
to our vital
powers.9
But Wordsworth
prefers
above
all else the site of the
village church-yard
for the burial of the dead.
The rural
cemetery, "lying
as it does in the
lap
of
nature"
and
"most
favourably
contrasted with that of a town of crowded
population"
390 The
Churchyard Among
the Mountains
This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.72.228 on Tue, 4 Dec 2012 10:06:05 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
(PW, 2:55),
and
contiguous
to the
community's
site of
worship,
situates the dead at the heart of the
natural,
the
communal,
and the
spiritual.
The dead are there where the
living,
as
they
come
together
to
worship,
are most
likely
to
contemplate
their ultimate
spiritual
destination. Wordsworth describes such a scene in
glowing
terms:
The sensations of
pious
cheerfulness,
which attend the celebra-
tion of the
sabbath-day
in rural
places,
are
profitably
chastised
by
the
sight
of the
graves
of kindred and
friends,
gathered together
in that
general home
towards which the
thoughtful yet happy
spectators
themselves are
journeying.
Hence a
parish-church,
in
the stillness of the
country,
is a visible centre of a
community
of
the
living
and the
dead;
a
point
to which are
habitually
referred
the nearest concerns of both.
(PW, 2:55-56)
Not
only
do the dead
belong properly
to the rural
community,
but
putting
the dead in their
proper place, giving
them a
proper
burial,
comes to mark and
identify
the kind of rural
community,
a commu-
nity
that includes the dead with and within the
living,
so idealized
by
Wordsworth in his
"Essays"
and elsewhere. Rural burial customs-
which here must include the
rustic, unlearned,
and monotonous
epitaphic compositions
that adorn their
rough
markers-insofar as
they
reflect the
strength
of the rural
community, visibly present
the
strong
affections and attachments that characterize such communi-
ties. Wordsworth describes the
"strength
and
sanctity
of these
feelings
which
persons
in humble stations of
society
connect with
their
departed
Friends and Kindred"
(PW, 2:65),
and notes that
these
feelings
translate into a
general
transfer of
corpses
from one
locale to another that reverses the
"general
transfer of
inhabitants"
from their
birth-places
to other
parts
of the
country:
Strong
and
inconquerable
still continues to be the desire of
all,
that
their
bones
should
rest
by
the side of their
forefathers,
and
very poor
Persons
provide
that their bodies should be
conveyed
if
necessary
to a
great
distance to obtain that last satisfaction.
(PW, 2:66)
Implied
in Wordsworth's
argument
is most
certainly
a
critique
of the
various economic forces that would have
given
rise to this
general
transfer of inhabitants from one locale to
another,
or even
worse,
from
village
to
city.
Within and across the
oblique
movement of
Wordsworth's
logic,
burial within the rural
community
comes to
stand for burial in
general,
for the return of the
body
to its
proper
place.
But the obverse is
equally
true. The return of the
body
to its
Michele Turner
Sharp
391
This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.72.228 on Tue, 4 Dec 2012 10:06:05 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
proper place, giving
it a
proper
burial,
grounds
the constitution of
the ideal
community.
II. THE CHURCHYARD BY THE SEA
The
analogy
that introduces the discussion in Wordsworth's sec-
ond
"Essay"
of the
"strength
and
sanctity
of these
feelings
which
persons
in humble stations of
society
connect with their
departed
Friends,
and kindred"
(PW, 2:65)
seems
initially
to
argue just
this
point.
Wordsworth
imagines
one of his characteristic
"strangers"
who,
having
come
upon
a rural
cemetery
and
having
read a number
of the "brief
Chronicles,
as the tomb-stones
usually
contain,
of
faithful
Wives,
tender
Husbands,
dutiful
Children,
and
good
Men of
all
classes;
... will be
tempted
to
exclaim,
. . . 'Where are all the bad
People
buried?"'
(PW, 2:63).
But such a
reading
indicates a misun-
derstanding
of the nature of
epitaph
and
paints
an
illusory picture
of
life in the
community.
It is indeed a delusion akin to a
specifically
hallucinatory experience,
and one to which Wordsworth himself
claims to have been
prone:
"Amid the
quiet
of a
Church-yard
thus
decorated as it seemed
by
the hand of
Memory,
and
shining,
if I
may
so
say,
in the
light
of
love,"
he
writes,
"I have been affected
by
sensations akin to those which have risen in
my
mind while I have
been
standing by
the side of a smooth
Sea,
on a Summer's
day"
(PW,
2:63).
As in book 6 of The
Excursion,
and in
language
that echoes
Wordsworth's
blessing
of nature in "Tintern
Abbey,"
he
compares
the
village church-yard
to an
"enclosure"
within an
"unkind
World
...
where the voice of detraction is not
heard;
where the traces of evil
inclinations are
unknown;
where contentment
prevails,
and there is
no
jarring
tone in the
peaceful
Concert of
amity
and
gratitude"
(PW,
2:64).
But Wordsworth's choice of
analogy
is both odd and
revealing.
The banal and
monotonously laudatory language
of the rural
epi-
taphs
is an
overtly incomplete
and inaccurate
representation
of the
life that these rural dead must have led and which those that survive
them continue to lead. The
rigorous
deletion of
anything
that
might
detract from the beneficent
portrayal
of the dead creates in
Wordsworth's mind an
image
of a
smooth,
unruffled
Sea,
a surface.
Oddly,
this surface creates the illusion of an
inside,
an "Enclosure"
within and
against
the acrimonious world that Wordsworth consis-
tently
finds the
public, particularly
the urban to be. In "Tintern
Abbey"
Wordsworth recalls
"oft,
in
lonely
rooms,
and 'mid the din /
Of towns and cities"
having
found
"tranquil
restoration" in the
392 The
Churchyard Among
the Mountains
This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.72.228 on Tue, 4 Dec 2012 10:06:05 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
memories of "these beauteous
forms"
seen
again
after five
years.
The
city
is a restless
place,
a "fretful stir /
Unprofitable,"
the site of a
"dreary
intercourse of
daily
life,"
where "evil
tongues,"
"rash
judge-
ments,"
and "sneers of selfish
men"
predominate
and
preclude
the
possibility
of a more humane
interaction.1'
The monotonous
epi-
taphic
record lulls Wordsworth into a sense of
being
secluded and
protected
from the
public,
enclosed within the
comforting
confines
of the rural
community
whose sentimental bonds have
precipitated
the banal
record,
introducing
him,
as he had earlier
intoned,
into the
company
of a friend. But as the earlier invocation of the
illusory
quality
of this
experience may already
have
suggested,
a
wrong
turn
has been
made,
for the reverie
provoked by
the monotonous record
draws the
stranger
not into the
lap
of nature with its
community
of
the
living
and the
dead,
but out of the world of the
living
and into the
world of the dead. The enclosure within an unkind world is that of
the tomb. The
hallucinatory
nature of the
experience
constitutes a
lesson in
reading
that addresses both the
proper reading
of
epitaph
and the
proper reading
of Wordsworth
reading epitaph,
a
reading
that,
in the latter
case,
points
to the
proper siting
of the
churchyard
among
the mountains and of
epitaph
as the
topographical
intersec-
tion of the earlier and later Wordsworth. This is a
reading
lesson that
points
in two
directions,
both toward a
retrospective reading
of
several of the deaths that
punctuate
Wordsworth's earlier work and
forward to The Excursion and
beyond.
The lesson to be
gleaned
from the
stranger's
misdirected
reading
of the
simple epitaphs
found in the
village churchyard pertains
to the
danger
of a literal
reading.
The
stranger's
mistake is to have read the
epitaphs
as a
literally
accurate
representation
of rural
life,
with the
unsympathetic,
uneducated
eye
of "a
rigorous
observer deficient in
the
spirit
of forbearance and those
kindly prepossessions,
without
which human life can in no condition be
profitably
looked at or
described"
(PW, 2:64).
The
stranger
mistakes the absence of
any
negative
mark on the tombstones as
signifying
the absence of
any
negative
trait in the lives of the rural denizens it documents. He
assumes the
perfect
correlation of a mirror
image,
the
perfect
replication,
in all its
detail,
of the
object
of
representation
in its
representing epitaphic
text,
thus
mistaking
the
village Churchyard
for a new-found rural Arcadia.
But,
as Wordsworth has demonstrated
in what
might
constitute the
writing
lesson of the
"Essays Upon
Epitaphs,"
the truth of the
epitaphic register
resides not in its literal
representation
of the deceased-and
by
extension,
the
community
Michele Turner
Sharp
393
This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.72.228 on Tue, 4 Dec 2012 10:06:05 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
wherein he or she had resided-but rather in its indirect
presenta-
tion of the sentiment that had
prompted
such an
inaccurate,
bla-
tantly
abbreviated
representation."
The absence of
any
deleterious
mark
represents
not the absence of
vice,
greed,
or dissention from
the rural
community,
but rather the
presence
of an affection that
properly
hides such vice from the view of a
stranger's eyes.
Thus,
Wordsworth's
delusory
"reverie"
and mistaken
reading
of the
smooth,
unruffled
sea,
as an enclosure
against
the
jarring
tones of
public
life,
quickly gives
rise to an
explicit
vision of death. Wordsworth
reports
being
roused from his reverie
by
a
consciousness,
suddenly flashing upon
me,
of the
anxieties,
the
perturbations,
and,
in
many
instances,
the vices and rancor-
ous
dispositions, by
which the hearts of those who lie under so
smooth a
surface
and so
fair
an outside must have been
agitated.
The
image
of an unruffled Sea has still
remained;
but
my fancy
has
penetrated
into the
depths
of the Sea-with
accompanying
thoughts
of
Shipwreck,
of the destruction of the Mariner's
hopes,
the bones of
drowned
Men
heaped together,
monsters of the
deep,
and all the hideous and
confused
sights
which Clarence saw
in his Dream.
(PW, 2:64;
emphasis
added)
On the surface of an outside that becomes the sheltered interior of
the
tomb,
follows a vision of the inside that had been
thought
to be
the
outside,
all that was excluded
by
the
calm, monotonous,
and
loving epitaphic
record.
Reading
the
epitaphic
record
literally,
without the subtle
eye
of
the
sympathetic
reader,
gives
rise to a vision of the death that such a
model of indifference
portends.
Rather than
faithfully imaging
the
deceased,
such a
reading
ends
by imagining
the
corpse, disinterring
the
body
that burial
properly
hides from view.
Indeed,
the unburied
body figures
the
collapse
of difference
implicit
to the literal
reading.
Thus the
passage
below the smooth surface of the
epitaph
to the
interior of the
grave
reveals not an
image
of a
properly
buried
corpse,
but the utter
impossibility
of burial. The hallucination
provoked by
the literalist
reading
finds its
complement
in an
image
of death at
sea,
a death whose
particular
horror consists in the state
of radical
indeterminacy
in which it leaves the
deceased,
a state in
which
burial,
and hence resolution of
mourning,
is
impossible.'2
The model of
misreading
that Wordsworth articulates in the
opening paragraphs
of his second
"Essay"
associates the indifference
of the literal
reading
of the rural
epitaphic
text and its concomitant
vision of loss at sea with forever unresolved
mourning. Keeping
in
394 The
Churchyard Among
the Mountains
This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.72.228 on Tue, 4 Dec 2012 10:06:05 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
mind the
power
of burial to
perform mourning
and hence to center
and consolidate human
community,
the
surprising
association of an
idealized
reading
of rural
community
with a
shocking
failure to
bury
the dead becomes
highly significant.
Wordsworth's
prose
here
sug-
gests
a
remapping
of his idealized rural
community
of the
living
and
the dead. The contours of this new
geography,
the definition and re-
definition of
space
that it
suggests, may
be sketched
by
an
investiga-
tion of the
opposed spaces
of the rural and the urban as
they
inhere
in Wordsworth's two
long, near-epic poems,
The Excursion and The
Prelude.
III. AN EXCURSION THROUGH THE FIXED CENTER OF A TROUBLED
WORLD
Hartman somewhat
flippantly
remarks that
Those famous misreaders of Wordsworth who
say
he advocates
rural nature as a
panacea
should
be
condemned to read The
Excursion once a
day.
It
might
not raise their estimate of the
poem,
but it would
certainly
be fit
punishment.
Nowhere does
Wordsworth
acknowledge
more
explicitly
the
difficulty
in reform-
ing
human
nature.'3
The rural
space
of The Excursion indeed seems
qualitatively
differ-
ent from that of the earlier
poetry
and evidences an enhanced
realism of
description.
Rural
space
is no
longer
the
idyll
invoked in
the Preface to
Lyrical
Ballads,
for
example.
Its enclosed self-
sufficiency
has been breached not
only by capitalistic
economic
forces but also
by exactly
the
vice, rancor,
and unresolved
anguish
that follows
upon
Wordsworth's reverie of a calm enclosure secured
against
the
jarring
tones of an unkind
public space
in the
opening
paragraphs
of the second
"Essay Upon Epitaphs."
Indeed,
The
Excursion seems an
explicit commentary
on and corrective to the
misreading
of the rural
space.
As
Simpson
notes,
The
Excursion,
in
addition to
bearing
witness to the incursion of urban structures of
economic relations within the rural
space-as
evidenced
by
the
break-neck ride of the
peasant, good
and moral in
every respect,
bearing
timbers to fuel the
ship-building
industry--"also
suggests
the
degree
to which the rural
idyll
is
questionable
in its
own,
intrinsic
terms,
regardless
of the threats of ulterior vested inter-
ests."'4
The
Excursion's
community
of the
living
and the
dead,
the
tight-knit community organized,
as in "The
Brothers,"
around the
unmarked
graves
of its
village cemetery,
has been
virtually
taken
over
by
the
graveyard.
Hartman,
largely
critical of this
poem
whose
Michele Turner
Sharp
395
This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.72.228 on Tue, 4 Dec 2012 10:06:05 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
"defect,"
as he
puts
it,
"is to show us death and to word
hope,"
for
example,
writes,
"The
poem
declines ... into a massive communion
with the
dead,
noble
raptures spoken
above their
graves,"
and
continues to
add,
"I doubt that there exists another
poem
of such
length
in which death and
tragic
mutation become so
literally
the
ground
of the whole." He notes as well that "as the
poem proceeds,
and more
ghosts
are
raised,
nature takes on the
aspect
of a
large
graveyard."'5
The
Vicar,
as he relates the
"authentic
epitaphs"
of
those buried in the
cemetery,
thus
passes effortlessly
from
speaking
of the
living
to
speaking
of the dead. The stories of those alive in the
vale blend
insensibly
into the stories of those there buried.
Indeed,
the
dwellings
of the
living,
like the
graves
of the
dead,
rise
barely
differentiated from the
landscape.
Like the
dead,
the
living
seem to
reside within the
earth,
within the walls of the tomb. Thus the first of
the
"authentic
epitaphs"
to be shared
by
the Vicar tells the tale of the
yet living
humble and virtuous inhabitants of the mountain
cottage
who reside in
A house of stones collected on the
spot,
By
rude hands
built,
with
rocky
knolls
in
front,
Backed also
by
a
ledge
of rock,
whose crest
Of birch-trees waves over the
chimney top;
A
rough abode--in
colour,
shape,
and
size,
Such as in unsafe times of border-war
Might
have been wished for and
contrived,
to elude
The
eye
of
roving plunderer-for
their need
Suffices;
and
unshaken
bears the assault
Of their most dreaded
foe,
the
strong
South-west
In
anger blowing
from the distant sea.
(E, 5.693-703)
The
couple
live
precariously perched
on their mountainside like
birds in a
"shallow
nest"
(or
should we
say
a shallow
grave?),
and
seem to be
relics,
ghostly
survivors,
of a distant
past.
When the inhabitants of the vale are not odd and
misplaced
relics
of an almost lost
past, they
are
obsessively
fixated on a vision of
just
such an irretrievable
past.
Indeed,
the vale is
peopled
almost
exclusively by
individuals with a
pathological
relation to death and
loss that
gives
them the
aspect
of the
living
dead
long
before their
actual deaths. In The Excursion death becomes the literalization of
an
already
existent state of affairs. Let me illuminate but a few of the
participants
of this
deathly parade.
Second
only
in
prominence
to
Margaret
of "The Ruined
Cottage,"
is the
Solitary,
the intended
beneficiary
of the
kindly
efforts of the Poet and Wanderer. The
poet
396 The
Churchyard Among
the Mountains
This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.72.228 on Tue, 4 Dec 2012 10:06:05 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
describes the secluded
valley
of which the
Solitary
is the sole
inhabitant as "Urn-like ... in
shape, deep
as an urn"
(E, 2.332-33).
In this
"sweet
Recess" with its
single dwelling,
the Poet throws
"down
[his]
limbs at ease /
Upon
a bed of heath"
(E, 2.350-51).
He is
delighted
with the
spot,
So
lonesome,
and so
perfectly
secure;
Not
melancholy-no,
for it is
green,
And
bright,
and
fertile,
furnished in itself
With the few needful
things
that life
requires.
-In
rugged
arms how
softly
does it
lie,
How
tenderly
protected!
Far and near
We have an
image
of the
pristine
earth,
The
planet
in its nakedness: were this
Man's
only
dwelling,
sole
appointed
seat,
First, last,
and
single,
in the
breathing
world,
It could not be more
quiet; peace
is here
Or
nowhere;
days
unruffled
by
the
gale
Of
public
news or
private; years
that
pass
Forgetfully;
uncalled
upon
to
pay
The common
penalties
of mortal
life,
Sickness,
or
accident,
or
grief,
or
pain.
(E, 2.354-69)
This
spot,
like the
grave,
shelters its sole inhabitant from the
rancor,
the
sickness, accident,
grief,
and
pain,
the
"common
penalties
of
mortal
life,"
indeed from mortal life itself. Thus in book
5,
the Poet
will see the
Solitary,
the inhabitant of the urn-like
vale,
as himself
become a
funerary
marker.
"Puzzling
out" the "faded narrative" of an
epitaph,
the Poet is
interrupted by
the
whisper
of the Wanderer who
draws his attention to the
spectacle
of the
Solitary,
Standing apart;
with curved arm reclined
On the
baptismal
font;
his
pallid
face
Upturned,
as if his mind were
rapt,
or lost
In some
abstraction;-gracefullyhe
stood,
The semblance
bearing
of a
sculptured
form
That leans
upon
a monumental urn
In
peace,
from morn to
night,
from
year
to
year.
(E, 5.211-17)
As in Milton's
description
of the effect of
Shakespeare's
death on
those who mourn
him,
whose "too much
conceiving"
transforms to
marble,
the
Solitary,
his mind
"rapt,
or lost / In some
abstraction,"
has turned himself to
stone,
created himself as his own monumental
tombstone.
Michele Turner
Sharp
397
This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.72.228 on Tue, 4 Dec 2012 10:06:05 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
This theme is much in evidence in The
Excursion,
a
poem
full of
depictions
of individuals
who,
plagued by memory, by
excessive
grief,
write their own
epitaphs
or become their own tombstones.
Thus in book
4,
"Despondency
Corrected,"
the Wanderer will
diagnose
the
Solitary's
illness as that of those
who,
"With
bodily eyes,
...
are borne down
by
love / Of what is
lost,
and
perish through
regret"
(E, 4.172-73).
Such an "innocent
Sufferer,"
the Wanderer
explains,
"often sees
Too
clearly;
feels too
vividly;
and
longs
To realize the
vision,
with intense
And over-constant
yearning;-there-there
lies
The
excess,
by
which the balance is
destroyed.
Too,
too contracted are these walls of
flesh,
This vital warmth too
cold,
these visual
orbs,
Though inconceivably endowed,
too dim
For
any passion
of the soul that leads
To
ecstasy;
and,
all the crooked
paths
Of time and
change disdaining,
takes its course
Along
the line of limitless
desires."
(E, 4.174-85)
And this melancholic disease is not
unique
to
Margaret,
the
Solitary,
and his wife. This "dreadful
appetite
of death"
(E, 4.604)
is indeed
endemic to the sheltered
vale,
touching nearly
all of those whose
histories we come to know.
In The
Excursion, then,
the rural
space
has become
explicitly
a
place
of death or
death-in-life,
of
pathological
and excessive
memory,
a
space
wherein the dead are never
determinately
buried and
grief
never resolved. The rural milieu misread as a secluded
idyll
has thus
come
perceptibly
into
explicit
relation with its
other,
the urban. We
need
only
to recur to
Wordsworth's
pained description
of London in
book 7 of The Prelude to seal the resemblance.
IV. DESCENT TO THE UNDERWORLD
The Prelude's London and The Excursion's secluded
vale,
as
Hartman has most
perceptively
but
only implicitly pointed
out,
both
figure
the
poet's epic
descent into the underworld. If in The
Excursion, nature,
as Hartman has
noted,
subtly
"takes on the
aspect
of a
large graveyard,"
a
region
inhabited
by
the dead and the
living
dead,
a
topography
in which the dead and the
living
have
entirely
too
much in
common,
then we must read London as its
metonymic,
398 The
Churchyard Among
the Mountains
This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.72.228 on Tue, 4 Dec 2012 10:06:05 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
spectral figuration.16
Wordsworth's London is
overtly
and
explicitly
a
city
of the
dead,
a
place
of "Private
courts,
/
Gloomy
as
coffins"
and
"unsightly
lanes,"
entangling
and
labyrinthine."
It bombards the
eye
with
Shop
after
shop,
with
symbols,
blazoned
names,
And
all the tradesman's honours overhead:
Here,
fronts of
houses,
like a
title-page
With letters
huge
inscribed from
top
to
toe;
Stationed above the door like
guardian saints,
There,
allegoric shapes,
female or
male,
Or
physiognomies
of real men.
(P, 7.173-80)
The blazoned
names,
inscribed
letters,
and
guardian
saints model
the streets of London as those of a vast
city
of the
dead,
a
necropolis,
an enormous urban
cemetery
wherein a
"weary throng,"
an
"endless
stream of men and
moving things,"
an "illimitable
walk,"
circulates
restlessly
or lies
statically
inert. These
somnambulistic,
ghostly
residents of London whose nameless faces
glide
before the
poet,
"shapes" only,
like those of "A
second-sight procession,
. . . Over still
mountains"
(P, 7.602)
are the
walking
dead,
with
epitaphs
affixed to
their wraith-like or skeletal bodies. The narrator
singles
out: the
actor at Sadler's Wells rendered
miraculously
invisible
by
the label
flaming
forth
upon
his black
garb; Mary
of
Buttermere,
the
subject
of a drama of
"living
men / And recent
things yet
warm with life"
(P,
7.313-14),
"doubtless treated with
irreverence,
/ Albeit with their
very
best of skill"
(P, 7.319-20),
and
who,
although
alive,
can double
the dead
Lycidas
as the
subject
of the
poet's
"memorial
verse." The
catalogue
continues with the
"rosy
babe"
whom Wordsworth
imag-
ines
embalmed
By Nature-through
some
special privilege
Stopped
at the
growth
he
had--destined
to
live,
To
be,
to have
been, come,
and
go,
a child.
(P, 7.400-403)
The
poet oddly imagines
the child envious of the
grave
and
peaceful
sleep
of
Mary
of
Buttermere's "nameless
babe."
Finally,
there are an
"Italian,
with his frame of
images
/
Upon
his
head,"
virtually
a
walking sepulchral
monument,
and a
nearly
inert
beggar
"in sailor's
garb"
who "lies at
length
beside a
range
/ Of written
characters,
with
chalk inscribed /
Upon
the smooth flat stones"
(P, 7.220-23).
What all
Michele Turner
Sharp
399
This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.72.228 on Tue, 4 Dec 2012 10:06:05 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
of these
figures
have in common is the static
immobility
of
statuary
and the
deathly
silence of the
corpse. They
are
figures
of
death,
walking
memento
mori,
the skeletal
participants
in a dance macabre.
But the most famous and most
extensively
commented on of these
spectral figures
is
certainly
the blind
beggar. Many
have noted the
man's
deathly physiognomy.
He is
"unmoving," "propped against
a
wall,"
of
"fixed
face and
sightless eyes,"
on whose
"shape"
(a
term
that can
only
recall Milton's
Death)
is affixed a written
history
that
emblematizes "the utmost that we know / Both of ourselves and of
the universe"
(7.619-20).
This
episode
has most
frequently
been read
in the context of the
sublime, as,
to
quote Stephen Knapp,
a
"translation of
discrepancy
into a revelation of
power,"
in which an
"experience
of failure
indirectly
reveals the
preternatural strength
of
desire and
hope."'8
Thus Thomas Weiskel
argues
that Wordsworth's
encounter with the blind
beggar
is the
epiphany
of absolute limitation which
precipitates
the
sublime moment. . . . The
beggar
is our
epitome
or
type;
he
represents
our
world,
what we can know at the
point
where
earthly
limits become definitive. But
just
at this
point-which
corresponds
to the flash when the
light
of sense
goes
out-the
other,
unknown world comes into
being,
like the invisible world
of the
Simplon
Pass
passage.
We are
"admonished"
and
placed
in
an attitude of
respect
as we feel our
incapacity
of
attaining
that
"other" world.'9
While these
analyses
are of
extraordinary conceptual vigor
and
intelligence,
I would like to deflect them in a
slightly
different
direction. "These I fear / Are
falsely catalogued"
(P, 7.642-43)
as the
poet
will soon
say.
The
poet's
encounter with the blind
beggar
is the
acute enactment of the
failed,
egotistical
modes of
representation
whose
catalogue
is the list of
figures
to which we have
already
pointed.
The blind
beggar
is
only
the
penultimate
of the
spectacles
to be seen on the streets of
London,
a milieu
virtually
over-run with
bad art. Wordsworth's
long
introduction to the theater of Sadler's
Wells focuses
again
and
again
on the
spectacular
mimesis of the tide
of
images
that doubles the
weary throng
of London's
spectral
inhabitants.20 These
images
are "mimic
sights
that
ape
/ The absolute
presence
of
reality"
(P, 7.248-49),
"imitations
fondly
made in
plain
/
Confession of man's weakness and his loves"
(P, 7.254-55).
And
Wordsworth is
unequivocal
as to the deleterious
potential
of these
"greedy" images
that
ape
the absolute
presence
of
reality. They
are
the focal
point
of a
faceless,
monstrous
community,
that of the
400 The
Churchyard Among
the Mountains
This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.72.228 on Tue, 4 Dec 2012 10:06:05 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
"many-headed
mass"
(P, 7.467)
of
spectators,
a
hideous,
amorphous
entity
"alive with
heads,"
a
"parliament
of monsters." As the refer-
ence to "Samson
Agonistes"
in the
description
of
Jack
the Giant-
killer
intimates,
this is a
violently
destructive
art,
one
that,
like the
blasphemous
woman,
"split[s]
the race of man / In
twain,
yet leaving
the same outward
shape"
(P, 7.426-27).
The erosion of difference or
distinction between the
objects
of
representation
and the
represen-
tation of the
objects
toward which all these
examples
tend-the
latter
figures
a
walking corpse,
an undead
spirit restlessly
envious of
burial,
like the child embalmed in the
poet's memory-inheres
finally
in the encounter with the blind
beggar,
and culminates in the
depiction
of Bartholomew Fair. The blind
beggar
with his affixed
epitaphic history dramatically
and
spectacularly
enacts an unchaste
and deleterious relation of text to
thing,
a relation into which the
constitutive differences
inhering
between text and
thing
are sucked
as into a
whirlpool, sending
the
mind,
"at this
spectacle[,] turn[ing]
round / As with the
might
of waters"
(P,
7.616-17).
Hertz maintains
that
in the
play
between the
Beggar's
blank face and the
minimally
informative text on his
chest,
the difference between what
Wordsworth can see and what he can read is
hardly
reestablished
in
any plenitude:
it is a fixed difference-the text won't float
up
and blur into the lineaments of the
Beggar's
face-but it is
still
almost no difference at all.
However,
it is
precisely
the
fixity
that
is the
point.21
It is true that we are at no
point tempted
to
identify
the man and his
label in the
happy
communion of a semiotic
symbiosis,
and that in
this
sense,
the
difference,
as Hertz would have
it,
is fixed. But the
difference that is fixed is more indifference than
anything
else,
the
rigor
mortis of a denatured
sign.
The relation between the man and
the
text,
between the
"fixed
face"
and affixed
history,
makes it
impossible
for us to decide whether the man is alive or
dead,
whether he should be buried or
fed,
gaped
at or
spoken
to.
Just
as
the illicit
representational preservation
of
Mary
of Buttermere as a
recent
thing "yet
warm with
life"
confuses the difference between
life and
death,
making
her the
apt subject
even for the
poet's
"memorial
verse,"
the
juxtaposition
of text and man in the case of the
blind
beggar
confuses our
response.
This
spectacular
confusion
redounds on the
poet, resulting
in an intimation of unredeemable
mortality:
Michele Turner
Sharp
401
This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.72.228 on Tue, 4 Dec 2012 10:06:05 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
and it seemed
To me that in this label was a
type
Or emblem of the utmost that we know
Both of ourselves and of the universe.
(P, 7.617-20)
The editors of the Norton critical edition of The Prelude
helpfully
draw our attention to Wordsworth's
original
formulation of these
lines,
preserved
in MS. X:
and I
thought
That even the
very
most of what we know
Both of ourselves and of the
universe,
The whole of what is written to our
view,
Is but a label on a blind man's chest.
(P, 260, n.7)
This intimation of limitation smites the
poet
with astonishment. He
is
subject
to the same
perceptual
loss that he had encountered
staring mutely
at the
grave
of the Winander
boy:
And on the
shape
of this
unmoving
man,
His fixd face and
sightless eyes,
I
looked,
As if admonished from another world.
(P, 7.621-23)
These lines evince a
destabilizing
confusion of
perspective
that
inheres in the
poet's
"as
if." Does the
speaker
look with the
fixity
of
gaze
of someone admonished from another
world,
or does he
just
look like someone who has been so admonished? Does he describe
what his
looking
was
like,
or what his
looking
looked like? This
confusion threatens to fix him in his
tracks,
to drown
him,
as
Hartman
puts
it,
in "the
engulfing solipsism
of
Imagination."22
London's
spectral
inhabitants and mimic art thus
figure
the death-
in-life of the
melancholy
dwellers of The
Excursion,
ever
prey
to the
furies of
memory,
to the relentless vision of the dead. The church-
yard among
the mountains and the urban
necropolis
are two faces of
death,
the calm enclosure and
watery anguish juxtaposed
in the
second
"Essay"
that have thus come into a relation of
specular
duplicity.
The
easy passage
between the
idyllic
enclosure,
a
place
shielded from the
"common
penalties
of mortal life"
(E, 2.368)-
from,
as we earlier
stated,
mortal life itself-to the vision of radical
indeterminacy
and indifferentiation of loss at sea that
figures
the
urban
milieu,
reveals the inner relation that holds between these two
402 The
Churchyard Among
the Mountains
This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.72.228 on Tue, 4 Dec 2012 10:06:05 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
very
different
settings.
Like the satanic and the divine in the
Miltonic intertext that
figures
so
prominently
in Wordsworth's "Es-
says,"
the urban and the rural are inverted mirror
images
of each
other. The
peaceful
stasis of the
rural,
its self-enclosed
sanctity,
is as
much the hermetic seal of the tomb as the
deathly proliferation
of
types
that constitutes the urban. The indifferentiation of the urban is
as static as the rural and the stasis of the rural is as undifferentiated
as the urban. Both are marked
by
confusion-confusion of
past
and
present,
of the same and the
different,
such that similitude and
difference are no
longer meaningful.
V. DEATH'S COMMON GROUND
But if London has become the
metonymic
double of The Excursion's
rural
community-the spectral interpretation
that haunts its calm
enclosure-are we then to
conclude,
as so
many
others have
done,
that Wordsworth has failed as a social theorist? In order to frame a
response
to this
question
I would like to invoke Wordsworth's own
deployment
of frames in The Excursion. For
while,
as we have
noted,
the
tendency
toward
misreading
that becomes so salient amid the
gently
mounded
graves
of the
churchyard
seems to instill itself as
much on the inside of the tales-the "authentic
epitaphs"
told
by
the
Vicar-as on the
part
of the active interlocutors-the
Poet,
Wan-
derer,
and
Solitary-,
these
interlocutors,
as a
corporate subject-a
subject
refracted into a
plurality
of voices-inscribe The Excursion
with its own
critique.
It is
indeed,
I would
argue,
The Excursion's
corporate subject,
a
subject
in
conversation,
that forms Wordsworth's
response
to the endemic confusion and
misreading
that marks the
rural as much as the urban milieu. With the dramatic frame of The
Excursion,
Wordsworth reads his own
misreading,
his own
(unavoid-
able) error,
by multiplying points
of view. As Susan
J.
Wolfson
aptly
notes:
To the extent that Wordsworth shows view to be
point of
view,
and
emphasizes
the
self-reflecting configurations
of what one
sees,
he unsettles the
absolute
claim of
any
one
speaker
or
any
one moment of
speech.23
The Excursion has no
universally
authorized
poet
or reader. Like the
deaf Dalesman and the blind
Dalesman,
each falls
prey
to his or her
own excess or deficit of vision or
memory.
But as the
companion
tales
of these two Dalesmen
demonstrate,
if one mode of
sensing
the
world is defective or
lacking,
another
might compensate, preserving
Michele Turner
Sharp
403
This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.72.228 on Tue, 4 Dec 2012 10:06:05 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
each from
tumbling
(unlike
James
in "The
Brothers")
over the
edge
of the
precipice:
What terror doth it strike into the mind
To think of
one,
blind and
alone,
advancing
Straight
toward some
precipice's airy
brink?
But
timely
warned,
He would have
stayed
his
steps,
Protected, say enlightened, by
his ear;
And on the
very edge
of
vacancy
Not more
endangered
than a man whose
eye
Beholds the
gulf
beneath.
(E, 7.491-98;
second
emphasis
added)
The dramatic form of The Excursion embeds an
"intermittent,"
but
nevertheless
ongoing
"disclosure of limitation in the
poem's
didactic
voices."24 But in this disclosure of limitation there is correction and
complementation
as well
that,
as Frances
Ferguson
notes,
shelters
an "essential
reserve."25
And this
reserve,
this fundament of
being,
is
that of the
grave,
the
ownership
of a bare
"six
feet of earth where our
forefathers lie!"26
If The Excursion
begins
with the
juxtaposition
of two
poetic
spaces,
that of the
twilight
cave and the wide bare
common,
it ends
with a third:
From that exalted station to the
plain
Descending,
we
pursued
our homeward
course,
In mute
composure,
o'er the
shadowy
lake,
Under a faded
sky.
No trace remained
Of those celestial
splendours; grey
the vault-
Pure, cloudless, ether;
and the star of eve
Was
wanting;
but inferior
lights appeared
Faintly,
too faint almost for
sight;
and some
Above the darkened hills stood
boldly
forth
In
twinkling
lustre,
ere the boat attained
Her
mooring-place;
(E, 9.757-66)
This
plain,
where the
early evening sky
stretches like a luminous
vault in which
only
lesser stars
shine,
figures
the
reconfiguration
of
subjectivity
that Wordsworth's meditation on
epitaph
both evidences
and forces. This is a
subject essentially
constituted
by
its
finitude,
its
mortality,
which is also to
say, by
its
singularity. Early
in his
career,
in
"The Old Cumberland
Beggar,"
for
example,
Wordsworth could
invoke the
"one
human heart" bodied forth in the
gesture
of
charity
to the old
man,
the
"silent monitor"
of the
community.
But
by
1810,
404 The
Churchyard Among
the Mountains
This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.72.228 on Tue, 4 Dec 2012 10:06:05 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
following
the deaths of his brother
John
and his two
children,
Thomas and
Catharine,
this human heart no
longer provides
the
same sort of unified
ground supposed
in "The Old Cumberland
Beggar,"
or the common human nature to which Wordsworth makes
regular
reference in the Preface.
Indeed,
the one human
heart,
by
1810,
has become
something
much more
modern,
more a heart of
darkness than
any readily
available
ground
of
commonality.
The
ground
of
commonality
has become the common
ground
of the
grave,
the
"all-uniting
and
equalizing receptacle
of the
dead" (PW,
2:57).
The
community
centered around the
graves
of the
dead,
around the
gesture
of
burial,
is thus a
community
centered around
its own
mortality,
centered
by
the
inscription
of
singularity,
and
hence of
difference,
at its heart. If we have left the definition of this
new
community only hazily
marked
out,
this is because it is nowhere
explicit
in Wordsworth.
Indeed,
Wordsworth is
always
better at
describing
what he dislikes than what he likes. But the end of The
Excursion,
like Adam and Eve's descent out of Eden and into
history,
nevertheless
points
forward,
opens
onto a
reconfigured subjective
and
intersubjective space,
a
space
not
only incorporating,
but founded
on difference and
singularity,
on
multiple points
of
view,
and on the
conversation that ensues. The latent
impropriety
of the land and of
the Romantic
subject
has been recast onto and into the new
property
of six feet of earth. The
interruption
of death has become the
center,
the
anchor,
of a
newly
valuated
(post-romantic) subject
and a
newly
valuated
community
founded on the common
ground
of the
grave,
of
mortality,
and
singularity.
SUNY
Buffalo
NOTES
Robert
Hertz,
Death and the
Right
Hand,
trans.
Rodney
and Claudia Needham
(Glencoe,
IL: Free
Press, 1960),
27-28.
2 Geoffrey
Hartman,
"Inscriptions
and Romantic Nature
Poetry,"
The Unremark-
able Wordsworth
(Minneapolis:
Univ. of Minnesota
Press, 1987),
40.
3
William
Wordsworth,
Preface to the 1800 edition of
Lyrical
Ballads,
Selected
Poems and
Prefaces by
William
Wordsworth,
ed.
Jack Stillinger
(Boston:
Houghton
Mifflin
Co., 1965),
447.
4 David
Simpson,
Wordsworth's Historical
Imagination:
The
Poetry of Displace-
ment
(New
York:
Metheun, 1987) 189,
190.
5 Simpson
(note
4),
206.
6 William Wordsworth to Charles
James
Fox,
14
January
1801, "The
Early
Years
1787-1805,"
The Letters
of
William and
Dorothy
Wordsworth,
ed. Ernest de
Selincourt,
8 vols.
(New
York: Oxford Univ.
Press, 1967),
1:314-15.
Michele Turner
Sharp
405
This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.72.228 on Tue, 4 Dec 2012 10:06:05 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
7
William
Wordsworth,
"Essays Upon Epitaphs,"
The Prose Works
of
William
Wordsworth,
ed. W.
J.
B. Owen and
Jane Worthington Smyser,
3 vols.
(New
York:
Oxford Univ.
Press, 1974), 49-50;
hereafter cited
parenthetically
in text
by
volume
and
page
as PW.
8
William
Wordsworth,
The
Excursion,
The Poetical Works
of
William
Wordsworth,
ed. Ernest de Selincourt and Helen
Darbishire,
5 vols.
(Oxford:
Clarendon
Press,
1949) 6:815-20;
hereafter cited
parenthetically
in text
by
book and line number as
E;
other
poems
from the edition cited in notes
by
volume,
page
and line number.
9
William Wordsworth
(note 8),
"The World Is Too Much With
Us;
Late and
Soon,"
3:18.2.
10 William Wordsworth
(note 8), "Lines:
Composed
a Few Miles Above Tintern
Abbey,
On
Revisiting
the Banks of the
Wye During
A
Tour,
July
13, 1798,"
2:259.
1
See Wordsworth's first
"Essay,"
where he
explains
that in the
well-wrought
epitaph,
"The character of a deceased friend or beloved kinsman is not
seen,
no-
nor
ought
to be
seen,
otherwise than as a tree
through
a tender haze or a luminous
mist,
that
spiritualises
and beautifies
it;
that takes
away,
indeed,
but
only
to the end
that the
parts
which are not abstracted
may appear
more
dignified
and
lovely: may
impress
and affect the more"
(PW, 2:58).
12
Death at sea
certainly
had a
personal
salience for Wordsworth in the death of
his brother
John. Although
there was never
any
doubt that
John
had
perished
in the
sinking
of the Earl of
Abergavenny,
his
body
was not recovered for burial until six
months after the wreck. The loss of the
body
was a source of
pain
to
Wordsworth,
who was much concerned that it be
properly
buried. He wrote to his brother
Richard
inquiring
if it would "not be
proper
to write to the
Clergyman
at
Weymouth
or to some other fit
person
there,
informing
him of
your
address,
or
desiring
him to
take
upon
himself the
charge
of
having John properly
buried in case his
body
whould be found"
(letter
to Richard
Wordsworth,
7 March
1805,
Letters
[note 6],
552).
Not
long
after William's
inquiry, Dorothy
writes to
Lady
Beaumont
informing
her of the
recovery
of the
body by dragging,
and its burial at
Wyke
near
Weymouth.
"This is a
great
comfort to us-his
grave
is a
resting-place
for our
thought-the
end
of all in this world. We have
nothing
more to
hope
or
expect
in connection with him
but the time when we shall
go together
to visit the
spot. My
dead Friend I am much
comforted-I have
many happy thoughts"
(Letters [note 6], 574).
13
Geoffrey
Hartman,
Wordsworth's
Poetry:
1787-1814,
(Cambridge:
Harvard
Univ.
Press, 1971),
320.
14
Simpson
(note 4),
190.
15 Hartman
(note 13), 295-96,
299.
16
Hartman,
299. Hartman calls London an "underworld" in which the
poet
moves
with a
"strange immunity"
like that of "Aeneas in his cloud"
(234).
And he
appends
a note to his
perceptive imagination
of the
parallel
between Wordsworth/Aeneas
pointing
to the
image
of "the cloud / Of
infancy"
(4.83-84)
found nowhere else than
in the Excursion. He seems further to have been the first to comment on the
similarity
that the
epitaph
books of The Excursion bear to the
epic nekya
(the
descent into the world of the
dead),
although
he
mistakenly
reads the
nekya
of The
Excursion,
I would
hold,
as a
parody
(296).
17 William
Wordsworth,
The
Prelude,
William
Wordsworth,
The
Prelude, 1799,
1805, 1850,
ed.
Jonathan
Wordsworth,
M. H.
Abrams,
and
Stephen
Gill
(New
York:
W. W. Norton and
Co., 1979),
7.196-97.
Except
where otherwise
noted,
all citations
406 The
Churchyard Among
the Mountains
This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.72.228 on Tue, 4 Dec 2012 10:06:05 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
refer to the 1805 version of The Prelude and will hereafter be cited
parenthetically
in the text
by
book and line as P.
18 Stephen Knapp,
Personification
and the Sublime: Milton to
Coleridge
(Cam-
bridge:
Harvard Univ.
Press, 1985), 106,
107.
19
Thomas
Weiskel,
The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and
Psychol-
ogy of
Transcendence
(Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins
Univ.
Press, 1976),
44. The blind
beggar figures
likewise in Neil Hertz's
reading
of the sublime moment in Wordsworth.
See
chapter
three of his
book,
The End
of
the Line
(New
York: Columbia Univ.
Press, 1985),
40-60.
20
Wordsworth
makes
explicit
the
parallel
between the
"weary throng"
of London's
inhabitants and the
images
when he writes of Bartholomew
Fair,
"the
midway
region
and above / Is
thronged
with
staring pictures
and
huge
scrolls,
/ Dumb
proclamations
of the
prodigies"
(P,7.665-67).
The
staring pictures, huge
scrolls,
and
dumb
proclamations
have as much
vitality
as the
"chattering monkeys"
and "chil-
dren
whirling
in their
roundabouts,"
the
buffoons,
hurdy gurdy player,
"silver-
collared
negro,"
the
equestrians,
tumblers, women,
girls,
and
boys,
albinos,
painted
Indians, dwarfs, "the
horse of
knowledge
and the learned
pig,"
that
partially
complete
the list.
21
Hertz
(note 19),
59-60.
22
Hartman
(note 13),
242.
23 Susan J. Wolfson,
The
Questioning
Presence:
Wordsworth, Keats,
and the
Interrogative
Mode in Romantic
Poetry
(Ithaca:
Cornell Univ.
Press, 1986),
124.
24
Wolfson
(note 23),
124.
25 Frances
Ferguson,
Wordsworth:
Language
As
Counter-Spirit
(New
Haven: Yale
Univ.
Press, 1977),
241.
26 This is the
concluding
line of
"Repentance:
A Pastoral
Ballad";
Wordsworth
(note 8),
2:46.36.
Michele Turner
Sharp
407
This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.72.228 on Tue, 4 Dec 2012 10:06:05 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions