The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
William Wordsworth · an autobiographical poem in blank verse in thirteen books, addressed to Coleridge · the 1805 text, completed in May 1805 and first printed in 1926 · scored on Wordsworth’s English, read from knowledge; no text in hand, and English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
Autobiographical epic in blank verse; spiritual autobiography, verse essay and narrative of revolution in one poem
Mythos
A sacred history taken inward: a paradise of childhood, a fall into the city and into revolutionary reason, an impairment and a restoration, crowned by the ascent of a mountain to a revelation, with the poet as prophet
Phase
From a Lake District childhood through school, Cambridge, the Alps, London and France in the Revolution, to the recovery of imagination and the ascent of Snowdon; told from the present of the writing and addressed throughout to Coleridge
Presentation
Poem in thirteen books of unrhymed iambic pentameter in verse paragraphs; the 1805 text, completed in May 1805, preserved in fair copies and first printed in 1926
Register
From the terror of the stolen boat and the Simplon gorge to the comedy of Cambridge, the catalogue of London, chronicle in verse and discursive argument
Scale
One mind and its friend, a northern childhood, and the course of a generation through the Revolution
Governing Proposition
A poet, unable to choose the subject of a great work, turns instead to tell his friend Coleridge how his own mind was made: by a childhood among lakes and mountains, by Cambridge, the Alps, London and revolutionary France, by the loss of his powers when the Revolution failed him, and by their return. The wager of the poem is that the growth of one unremarkable mind is matter enough for an epic, and that a self is made less by events than by a few moments, often of fear or guilt, which the mind keeps and returns to for its strength.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Book I finds a poet ready to begin a great work and unable to choose its subject. He weighs the themes an epic might take: an Arthurian tale, the wars of Mithridates, Gustavus of Sweden. Each is put aside. Then a question breaks in, “Was it for this”, and the poem turns from history to a river, the Derwent, and to the child who grew up beside it. The question is the poem’s first act and its whole method: a man who cannot find his subject in the world finds it in how he was made.
The poem was begun with that question. At Goslar, in the winter of 1798 to 1799, Wordsworth wrote a fragment that opens on it; by 1799 it had become a poem in two parts; through 1804 it grew, and a plan of five books was made and abandoned; in May 1805 it was complete in thirteen. It is written in unrhymed iambic pentameter throughout, in verse paragraphs, and it is addressed from first to last to Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It was planned as a preliminary to The Recluse, a philosophical poem that was never finished. It is scored here as the text of 1805, the poem as Wordsworth finished writing it, before thirty-five years of revision added orthodox piety, cut a whole episode and softened the political books. The fourteen books published in 1850 are the same work revised.
The childhood is given in episodes, and the poem names its two ministers at once: “I grew up / Fostered alike by beauty and by fear”. A boy takes a boat that is not his and rows out on the lake; as he pulls, a cliff seems to rise behind him and grow with each stroke, “As if with voluntary power instinct”, until he turns back, and for days after his mind is troubled by “unknown modes of being”. In winter the boys skate on the ice, and when the boy stops, the world goes on turning about him, “With visible motion her diurnal round”. Fear and beauty are not set against each other. Both are the means by which the world first worked on him.
Movement II
Book II continues the school-time, and with it the poem names its own double life. Looking back, the poet seems to himself “Two consciousnesses”: the man who remembers and the child remembered, each present to the other. The verse moves from the scene to the reflection on it and back, and the reader learns to hear two times in one sentence. Book III goes to Cambridge, and the register falls to comedy and anecdote: the young poet, in the rooms that were once Milton’s, drinks to Milton’s memory until his head turns. The comedy is the mind’s first estrangement from its powers, and much of the book around it is chronicle.
Book IV brings the student home for the summer, and on the road he meets a discharged soldier, the first of the poor the poem will keep finding. Book V is about books. It defends romance and fairy tale against the system-makers who would educate a child by plan, and satirises at length the infant prodigy such a plan produces. At its centre is a dream that comes out of a reading of Don Quixote: an Arab carries a stone, which is geometry, and a shell, which is poetry, fleeing before a deluge that will drown the world. An apocalypse is built from a borrowed book and made the poet’s own.
Book V also holds the Boy of Winander, first printed in Lyrical Ballads in 1800 and set here among the books: “There was a Boy; ye knew him well, ye cliffs / And islands of Winander!” The passage gives the boy, and then his grave. Nearby a drowned man rises from Esthwaite. Death enters the childhood early, and the poem keeps its dead close, as it will keep the father’s.
Movement III
Book VI takes the student from Cambridge to the Alps. The travellers climb toward the pass expecting a summit and learn only after the fact “that we had crossed the Alps”. The moment the journey was to crown has already gone by unseen. It is the poem’s great disappointment, and the verse does not cover it: it stops.
Into the gap rises Imagination, an “unfathered vapour”, and the poet, writing years later, breaks off the story to address that power directly, at the very point where the story failed. The descent that follows, down a gorge of torrent and rock, is among the highest passages in English: “woods decaying, never to be decayed”, the whole scene read as “Characters of the great Apocalypse”. The summit was not where it was looked for. The revelation comes in the failure and in the descent, and the poem’s form has bent to let it in.
Book VII is London, and the poem turns catalogue: streets, shows, crowds, the sights of a city that has no order but its number. Two things stand out of it with full force: a blind beggar, and the din of shows and freaks at Bartholomew Fair. Between them the catalogue runs diffuse. The city is the first stage of the impairment the last books will repair: a mind formed by lakes and mountains set down among sights it cannot hold.
Movement IV
Book VIII looks back, under the title Retrospect, Love of Nature Leading to Love of Mankind. It retells the tales of shepherds and sets against them a catalogue of a Chinese garden, and it argues that the boy who loved the hills came by that love to love the people who worked them. The argument is stated more than shown. The shepherds are seen at the distance of a tale, and the verse that carries the claim is discursive, explaining what the episodes of the early books had enacted.
Books IX and X are France. The poet lives there in the Revolution, takes the politics of his friend Beaupuy as his own, and sees in a “hunger-bitten girl” the poverty the Revolution was to end. Book IX ends with Vaudracour and Julia, a borrowed tale of two lovers, told from outside, in a manner the rest of the poem does not use. It stands in for what Wordsworth would not tell: his love for Annette Vallon in France, and their child. He later cut the tale from the poem and printed it on its own, in 1820.
Book X carries the hope to its height and through its failure. “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very heaven!” Then the Terror, England’s war on France, and the reason of Godwin, taken up as the whole of the mind until the mind gives way. Much of the narrative here is chronicle in verse, and a passage on the Revolution was among the few pieces printed in Wordsworth’s lifetime, with the skating, in Coleridge’s The Friend in 1809. The fall into the city is completed by a fall into reason, and the poem arrives at its impairment.
Movement V
Books XI and XII are titled Imagination, How Impaired and Restored, and the restoration comes from where the poem began. “There are in our existence spots of time”, moments that keep “A renovating virtue”, from which the mind draws strength again. A child comes upon a gibbet, and then upon a girl with a pitcher, the scene charged with a “visionary dreariness”. A boy waits for horses in the days before his father’s death. The spots were withheld until here, so that the poem does what it says: the past returns when it is needed.
Book XIII climbs Snowdon. Near the top the moon appears over a sea of mist, and through a rift in the mist comes the roar of waters. The poet reads the scene at once as “the emblem of a mind / That feeds upon infinity”: the mind that receives the world and remakes it. The ascent ends in a revelation, Snowdon in the place of Sinai, and the summit missed in the Alps is reached at last, in the poem’s last book, by a mind restored.
The poem closes on its friend. Poet and friend will be “Prophets of Nature”, and the last lines turn the history of one mind into a vocation shared: “what we have loved, / Others will love, and we will teach them how”. Wordsworth read the poem aloud to Coleridge at Coleorton in January 1807, and Coleridge answered with “To William Wordsworth”. Then it was withheld. It appeared only after Wordsworth’s death in April 1850, in fourteen books, titled by Mary Wordsworth and subtitled Growth of a Poet’s Mind; the text of 1805 waited until Ernest de Selincourt printed it in 1926.
Act III · The Twelve
The test is subtractive, and the poem fails it in places, not briefly. The spine is required: the argument is that a mind is made by a few charged encounters and remade by returning to them, and the spots of time, the crossing of the Alps and Snowdon each bear weight. Take out the political books and the impairment of Books XI and XII has no cause. Length is not the charge. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what could go without loss: much of Cambridge in Book III, which is half anecdote; the long satire of the infant prodigy in Book V; London in Book VII beyond the blind beggar and Bartholomew Fair; the shepherd tales and the Chinese garden of Book VIII; the chronicle in verse of Books IX and X; and Vaudracour and Julia, a borrowed tale and the clearest removable part, which Wordsworth himself removed. Perhaps a sixth of the whole is permitted rather than compelled.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and it holds: a self is a history, built less from events than from a few moments, often of fear or guilt, which the mind keeps and returns to for strength. “There are in our existence spots of time”, Book XI says, that keep “A renovating virtue”: the stolen boat, the gibbet and the girl with the pitcher in her “visionary dreariness”, the wait for horses before the father’s death. The poem discloses the double life of memory, the remembering self beside the remembered, “Two consciousnesses”; and the course of a generation through revolutionary hope to disillusion. Held off the top on two counts: the recovery through love of nature leading to love of mankind is asserted more than shown, and the poem keeps silent where its subject was most compromised, on Annette Vallon and their child.
Score: 9.1 / 10
The ceiling is among the highest in English, and the dreadful stands as high as the elevating. The stolen boat, when a cliff rises behind the boy “As if with voluntary power instinct” and leaves in his mind “unknown modes of being”; the skating, the earth turning “With visible motion her diurnal round”; the Boy of Winander and his grave; the drowned man rising from Esthwaite; the Simplon, where the poet learns after the fact “that we had crossed the Alps”, and the gorge below, its “woods decaying, never to be decayed”, “Characters of the great Apocalypse”; Snowdon, the moon over a sea of mist and the roar of waters through a rift. Height is beyond question. Frequency is the charge that holds the axis a step from the top: Books III, VIII, IX and X, and much of VII, rise rarely.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Myth built, not evoked. The structure is a sacred history transposed into one mind: a childhood in a paradise of beauty and of fear, a fall into the city and into revolutionary reason, an impairment of imagination, and a restoration crowned by the ascent of a mountain to a revelation, Snowdon in Sinai’s place and the poets named “Prophets of Nature”. The dream of the Arab in Book V, carrying a stone and a shell before the deluge, is an apocalypse built out of a reading of Cervantes and made Wordsworth’s own. At the Simplon Imagination rises as an “unfathered vapour” where the summit was expected: the epic’s descent of a power, taken inward. The particular stays particular: the Derwent, Hawkshead, a borrowed boat. Held a step down because the archetype is often stated in the discursive verse rather than carried by the episodes, and Books VII to X run long with little mythic charge.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The inheritance is the epic, and above all Milton. In Book I the poet weighs the subjects an epic might take, an Arthurian tale, the wars of Mithridates, Gustavus of Sweden, and puts them aside, until the question “Was it for this” turns the poem upon his own childhood. The departure is from the epic of a nation or of God to the epic of one unremarkable mind, told at epic length in Milton’s metre, with no plot but growth and no hero but the speaker. The stake was real, and it was paid: Wordsworth never published the poem, and the wager was placed while its winnings were withheld for forty-five years, until after his death. Held below the top only because the confessional and spiritual autobiography, Augustine’s and Rousseau’s, had already opened the subject in prose.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Change the form and the poem loses what it knows, nearly throughout. The verse paragraph is the instrument of a mind thinking about its own past: it moves from the scene to the reflection on the scene and back, and the blank verse lets the remembered moment and the present remembering share one sentence. The order is not chronological. The spots of time are withheld until Book XI, so that the poem enacts what it argues, that the past returns when it is needed; and at the Simplon the narrative breaks off to address Imagination at the very point where the narrative failed. As prose memoir the poem would keep the episodes and lose their double consciousness; as lyric it would lose the claim of epic scale, which is the argument. Held below the top because the form is container rather than instrument in the chronicle of Books IX and X and in Vaudracour and Julia.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Evidence, not promise. The poem has borne a century of intense re-examination without exhausting, and it has been read from opposite directions, each reading finding it able to bear the weight: Geoffrey Hartman’s, of a consciousness wary of its own apocalyptic power; M. H. Abrams’s, of the central text of a natural supernaturalism that secularised the plot of redemption; Paul de Man’s, of a test of the limits of autobiography; Harold Bloom’s, of the quest turned inward. Its textual history is a field of its own: the versions of 1799, 1805 and 1850 are read against one another as the record of a mind revising its own record. The formal depth, the timing of memory against narration, still yields. Held a little below the very top because much of the return is academic.
Score: 9.2 / 10
The field is English poetry of the nineteenth century, and with it European Romanticism. The intrinsic force stands near the top: the poem reorganised what a long poem could be about, making the growth of a mind sufficient matter for epic, and it set the pattern that the Romantic and modern novel of the artist’s growth would follow, the circuitous journey from childhood vision through crisis to a recovered vocation. The reach is discounted for delay. The poem was unknown to the generation it would most have shaped, whose Wordsworth came through Lyrical Ballads, the Poems of 1807 and The Excursion. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: published in 1850, and the 1805 text only in 1926, the poem reached furthest in the twentieth century, in a criticism that made it the central Romantic text, in the poetics of memory and in the autobiographical long poem. Delayed influence is credited and discounted, and the figure does both.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is safe: the 1805 text survives whole in fair-copy manuscripts, with the usual editorial questions and nothing lost. Presence carries the charges. The span since composition is two hundred and twenty years, but the poem was printed only in 1850 and this text only in 1926, so the presence shown is a century and three quarters for the work and a century for the 1805 text. It is continuously read, edited and taught, but mainly in the academy and in excerpt, the boat, the skating, the Simplon, the dawn of the Revolution, with no wide life outside literary study to match the most read works of its century. Both charges apply, the late printing in part. The surface has outlived its conditions: the Revolution is history, and the poem is read for the mind that lived it.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Judged on Wordsworth’s English, with no translation between. At its height the blank verse is one of the great instruments in the language: Miltonic in weight but nearer speech, able to slow a moment to the speed of perception, “As if with voluntary power instinct”, and to carry abstraction without losing the thing seen. The enjambment carries thought across the line: “I grew up / Fostered alike by beauty and by fear”. The episodes are built with a narrator’s timing: the boat stolen, the cliff growing with each stroke, the flight back, the troubled days after. The paragraph that ends Book XIII, “what we have loved, / Others will love, and we will teach them how”, lands in full control. The charges are real: the flat, abstract and self-explaining stretches are many in Books III, VIII, IX and X, where perception turns to lecture and the verse can be felt marking time.
Score: 8.9 / 10
One law governs: every episode is weighed by what it did to the growth of the mind, and the poem keeps to it across a wide range. Take the most distant elements: the comedy of Cambridge, where the young poet drinks to Milton’s memory in Milton’s rooms until his head turns, and the terror of the Simplon gorge; the din of Bartholomew Fair and the stillness of Snowdon; the politics of Beaupuy and the “hunger-bitten girl” of Book IX beside the spots of time. They obey the same law: London and France are the impairment that the natural spots repair, and the comedy is the mind’s first estrangement from its powers. The range is wide and the law holds. Two places strain it: Vaudracour and Julia, a tale told from outside the speaker’s mind, which obeys a different physics; and the political books, where the law becomes argued history and coherence is kept by statement.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Many orders, held by one consciousness, which is the axis’s chief order and which the poem holds as few works do. The natural order: lake, mountain, river, weather, the seasons of a northern childhood. Education and books: the school, Cambridge, Book V’s defence of romance and fairy tale against the system-makers. The city, in London. Labour and the poor: the shepherds of Book VIII, the discharged soldier of Book IV, the blind beggar, the starving girl in France. The state and history: the Revolution, the Terror, England’s war on France, the reason of Godwin. The sacred, as nature’s ministry and the poet’s calling. Friendship, in Coleridge, addressed throughout. They are integrated through the one mind. What holds the axis is what is thin: the family is present chiefly as death, Dorothy enters late, and love, Annette and the child, is displaced into a borrowed tale. The world is held as it touched one man.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.8 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Sublime, The Swerve and The Bottomless Well at 9.2. A ceiling among the highest in English, from the cliff rising behind the stolen boat to the moon over the mist on Snowdon; a turn from the epic of a nation or of God to the epic of one unremarkable mind, its stake paid in forty-five years unpublished; and a century of return from opposite directions, with three versions read against one another as a mind revising its own record.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 7.6, held by what could go without loss: much of Cambridge, the satire of the infant prodigy, the diffuse stretches of London, the shepherd tales and the Chinese garden, the chronicle of Books IX and X, and Vaudracour and Julia, which Wordsworth himself removed; perhaps a sixth of the whole. Next above it, The Archetypal Deep, The Inner Law and The Encompassed at 8.7: an archetype often stated rather than carried, a law kept by statement in the political books, and a world thin in the family and in love.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.6 against a threshold of 7.5, by a tenth. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.0, The Made at 8.9, The Inner Law at 8.7, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Swerve at 9.2, The Unconcealment at 9.1, The Imperishable at 8.9, Pressure on Tradition at 8.8 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.7 clear the bar of 8.5, the last by two tenths. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis it governs falls below 7.6, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.7. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone, at 8.8, and chiefly by The Inevitable.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of William Wordsworth’s The Prelude in the text of 1805: the poem in thirteen books as completed in May 1805 and preserved in the fair-copy manuscripts, first printed by Ernest de Selincourt in 1926, and read in the parallel edition of the texts of 1799, 1805 and 1850 by Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams and Stephen Gill (Norton, 1979). It is scored as that text, the poem as Wordsworth finished the act of writing it. The text in fourteen books published in July 1850 is named as context: where its reach and presence count, on Pressure on Tradition and The Imperishable, they are credited to the poem as a version of the same work, and the 1805 text is charged for its own late printing. No text was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Every axis is judged on Wordsworth’s English, with no translation between. Events are paraphrased, English is quoted only where its words are certain, and citations are by book; Books I, II, IV, V, VI and XI to XIII are known closely, Books III and VII to X in outline and in their main episodes. Coleridge’s poem and the criticism named under The Bottomless Well are cited as the record of the poem’s reception and are not part of the work. Facts that could not be verified, among them the line counts of the versions, Wordsworth’s own words on the poem in his letters, Coleridge’s first words on hearing it, phrases of the boat episode beyond those quoted, the reception of the text of 1850, and the names of some later critics, are not given.