Wordsworth’s The River
Duddon – A series of Sonnets, first published in 1820, form the opening
work in the ‘third and last volume of the Author’s Miscellaneous Poems’. The book contains thirty other poems, varied
in style and subject matter, including a long narrative romance, Vaudracour and Julia and a reprint of an
extended prose work, A Topographical Description of the Country of the Lakes, in
the North of England. Stewart Wilcox
observes, “none of Wordsworth’s later poems has been so neglected as his sonnet
cycle The River Duddon”.
Though written in 1954, Wilcox’
comments remain pertinent. Kim, writing
in 2006, almost paraphrases the earlier critic,”The River Duddon has been neglected by modern readers. Only
“After-thought” is regularly anthologised:
the other thirty-two sonnets have generated a surprisingly small amount of
commentary”.
This latter point is a key to the critical history of the sonnet series.
Scholars have either treated the work partially, concentrating on the more
sublime sonnets which conclude the series, or they have considered specific
poems within a broader discussion to reinforce a particular viewpoint, rather
than critically evaluating the series in its entirety
For example, Kim, whilst recognising
the issue of ‘part treatment’, nevertheless concentrates his commentary on a
close reading of the final three sonnets to develop his central thesis that
aesthetic considerations of Wordsworth’s ‘middle period’ cannot be de-coupled from
political ones. Kim analyses the final two sonnets from what is an essentially
ideological standpoint. Lines from the concluding sonnet which contrast “sovereign Thames […] / With Commerce
freighted or triumphant War” with “the
lowly mast” found in the Duddon’s “native
stream” are regarded as a reflection of Wordsworth’s increasing nationalism
evidenced in his tract on The Convention
of Cintra (1809).
Whereas Kim focusses his attention on
those sonnets within the series which best support his ideological stance,
Uddin Khan’s essay on the contemporary critical reception of the volume as a
whole asserts how the sonnets generally reflect the volume’s overall
classicising tendencies: ‘the elevated language in which the Duddon is
described – “stately,” “majestic,” “lordly,” “imperial,” and “lofty,” [is]
commensurate with the elegance of diction and the gracefulness of tone throughout
the entire volume.’
More general interest in the sonnet
sequence by leading Wordsworth scholars has been minimal, occasionally
surprisingly so. Jonathan Bate, in a pioneering work of British eco-criticism, Romantic Ecology, Wordsworth and the Environmental
Tradition (1991), utilizes the prose Guide
to the Lakes published in the ‘Duddon volume’ as a central plank of his
re-reading of Wordsworth from a ‘green’ perspective, asserting “the poet is as
much geographer as historian”.
In the book’s final chapter Bate explores “the magic of places” asserting “for
Wordsworth, pastoral was not a myth, but a psychological necessity”.
Given the close parallels between the sonnet series and the portrayal in The Guide to the Lakes as a semi-idyllic
“Republic of Shepherds and Agriculturalists”, then the omission of any mention
of the sonnet sequence in Romantic
Ecology seems surprising.
Similarly, Stephen Gill – author of
the keynote literary biography of Wordsworth – in his essay ‘Wordsworth and The River Duddon’ concentrates on the
dedicatory poem to Wordsworth’s brother, ‘To the Rev. Dr. W –‘, then comments at
some length on remainder of the volume as a ’poetical miscellany’. Consideration
of the sonnet series, however, is glossed over. Like Bate, an in-depth analysis
of the prose Topographical Description is
preferred as the primary vehicle to explore localism in the later Wordsworth.
In the case of Gill, the reason for his apparent neglect of the sonnets may be
gleaned from his earlier biography, where he observes “The whole sequence is
competent, but it concludes magnificently”.
Again, the ‘sublime’ final sonnet is celebrated, but the quality of the series
as a whole is dismissed as merely ‘competent’.
In order to find a piece of substantial
scholarship which considers the Duddon Sonnets
as a whole, one has to rely on Wilcox’ essay from the 1950’s. He makes a good case for seeing the series as
a reflection of Platonic symbolism, concluding:
This emphasis on time is centrally structurally and
philosophically. The stream and Stream, which partitively correspond to nature
and Nature, likewise correspond to man and Man. The Platonic copies in time
suggest the eternal Forms out of it.
Though Wilcox asserts a thematic and philosophical coherence
within the sonnet series, he achieves this by supressing consideration of the
marked stylistic variations within the work. Uddim Khan summarises these
‘traditionalisms’ as “personifications, inversions, picturesque and classical
elements”.
Often in the Duddon sonnets Wordsworth strays far from “the real language of
men” which he advocated in the preface to Lyrical Ballads. Traditionalism here goes
beyond questions of poetic diction; in certain poems Wordsworth adopts an
overtly Augustan aesthetic, the reader familiar with Wordsworth of Tintern Abbey or The Prelude can be ‘wrong-footed’ by such interpolations. What is
the poet’s intention – pastiche, Parody or apostasy?
In the decades following Wilcox’ paper,
literary theory took a distinctly ‘ideological’ turn. Bate, in his introduction
to Romantic Ecology characterises this
as follows:
The 1980s witnessed something of a return to history, a move
away from ahistorical formalisms, among the practitioners of literary
criticism. In the area of English Romantic poetry […] the capstone of the
decade’s criticism was […] by Alan Lui called Wordsworth, The Sense of History.
The conception of ‘ideology’ and ‘history’ underlying these books are in the
broad sense Marxist.[12]
Since the stylistic variations within the Duddon Sonnets -the
mix of Wordsworthian romantic diction with ‘traditionalism’ - render them
difficult to position ideologically, unsurprisingly they have been neglected by
Marxist critics. However, the period since the 1980s also saw the emergence of
post-modernism. Here the ‘neglect’ of the Duddon sonnets is less explicable.
Given the series’ conscious historicism, its lapses into pastiche, and even
parody of the Augustan aesthetic, for scholars interested in a dialogical
rather than dialectic approach then the ‘intertextuality’ and examples of
heteroglossia found within the text may have been expected to have attracted critical
attention. However the work has not been considered in this light. The
intention of this essay is to address this gap.
Scholarship of the past half century has
concentrated on the final ‘After-thought’ sonnet and overlooked the rest of the
work. This is not how the Duddon Sonnets
were considered on publication. Wordsworth himself regarded the series as being
capable of being interpreted as a single work. He writes, “The reader […] interested
in the foregoing Sonnets which together may be considered as a Poem”.
This sentiment was re-iterated by Mary Wordsworth, in a letter from December
1818 she asserting that the Duddon
Sonnets “all together compose one piece.”
Furthermore, the series was critically received in this light. In 1821 the Tory
monthly, British Critic, reversing
its previous antipathy towards Wordsworth, praised the series as follows:
The gem of the volume is a set of sonnets on the River
Duddon, in which the poet, following the stream from its mountain source down
to its mixing with the sea, seizes on all the incidents by the way that strike
his attention. This is a beautiful idea: each incident has the completeness and
unity essential to a sonnet while the stream is the connecting link.
The remainder of this essay will examine the principles upon
which the ‘set of sonnets’ were arranged creating a ‘completeness and unity’
which enabled them to be regarded as ‘altogether one piece’. Furthermore, it will argue that the particular
approach that Wordsworth took to arranging the sonnets signalled a development in
his aesthetic outlook which proved instrumental in changing critical attitudes to
his work in general. There is some truth in De Quincy’s later statement, “Up to
1820 the name of Wordsworth was trampled underfoot; from 1820 to 1830 it was
militant; from 1830 to 1835 it has been triumphant.”
Towards the end of his life Wordsworth acknowledged the role the Duddon sonnets
had played in popularising his work. Speaking to Dr Cairns in 1849 he noted,
“My sonnets to the River Duddon have been wonderfully popular…”
In order to re-discover the Duddon sonnets as a single work I have
undertaken a close, annotated reading of the series seeking to give equal
consideration to each of the sonnets, rather than, as recent scholars have
done, concentrating only on those which are deemed ‘successful’ or most
ideologically suited to sustaining a particular critical stance.
This will then be considered in relation to Wordsworth’s reflections on poetic
theory contained within the Preface of 1815. The preface represents a
considerable development in the scope or Wordsworth’s thinking about poetry, He
seeks to reconcile his radical theories regarding poetic diction found in the
more famous Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800) with notions of taste, decorum
and Form inherited from Augustan verse and the Classical traditions.
The ‘re-reading’ has also been
influenced by Don Peterson’s recent ‘new commentary’ on Shakespeare’s sonnets.
In the introduction Paterson distinguishes between two kinds of reading: secondary reading – associated with
literary criticism which seeks to unpack “a poem’s multiple senses [by] the
careful analysis of its deep structure”, and primary reading, which “engages with the poem directly as a piece
of trustworthy human discourse”. Paterson’s approach was refreshingly simple -
he read and annotated two sonnets a day “fitting them round work routine and
domestic obligations, into leisure and dead time”. I simply emulated his approach annotating a sonnet
a day for a month; these notes were subsequently copied into the following
blog: http://imaginedelsewhere.blogspot.co.uk/
The process of ‘primary reading’ did
provide an insight into the structure and shape of the whole series, but
initially the results appeared ambiguous. One was aware of a simple,
over-arching structure: the river rises in the mountains, “a Child of the
clouds”, and “sinks' into the 'Deep” in the final sonnet. Wilcox has summarised
this 'arc' succinctly:
“Keeping in mind then that the Duddon in
its growth and moods not only reveals the activities of various stages of life,
but also is symbolic of man's spirit as it emerges from the unknown, runs its
earthly course, and merges again with the eternal , […] Wordsworth uses the
river to give them coherent development.”
Wilcox' anthropomorphic reading of the series is not entirely
invalid, but it only applies in parts. Just as many of the sonnets undermine his
vision of 'coherent development' as assert it. The series is characterised by
variety, ambiguity and interpolation as much as displaying a centralising
theme.
Ambiguity is signalled from the
outset. Sonnet I opens in a classicising mode, alluding to a 'Horatian lyre',
the spring of Bandusia, and evokes the Duddon as a Muse. Wordsworth, even in
his most Epic moments, in the opening lines of The Excursion' or The Prelude,
does ‘summon’ the Muse so directly. Clearly the ' epic' opening deliberately
invites the reader to accept this 'native stream' as a subject suitable for
treatment in 'the grand manner'. Even here there is ambiguity. The Spring of
Bandusia refers to Horace's hymn to Spring - Ode
III, 13. Horatian Odes belong to the lyric, rather than the epic
tradition. Wordsworth asks for the
Duddon series to be seen in the same light as Horace's short, lyrical odes
which were collected together into 'themed' books. However, the Duddon Sonnets is multi- faceted; an
overriding narrative structure is provided by the motif of the river, but a
recurrent subsidiary theme is woven throughout which addresses questions of poetic
tradition, genre, and diction.
Throughout the series narrative flow
is diverted by interpolations of various kinds: Sonnet VII is a parody of a
Petrarchan love poem; Sonnet XXIV adopts the tone of the Augustan pastoral;
Sonnet XXIV seems typically Wordsworthian
- like a snippet of The Prelude,
Book II; Sonnet XXIX takes a didactic, moralising turn. At the stage of primary reading such apparent
thematic diversions can be frustrating appear inexplicable in relation to the
poem's overall narrative structure.
Indeed it can be tempting to regard them as detrimental to the work's
coherence and judge the series as a miscellany masquerading as a sequence. It
may be that such an initial response accounts for the general critical neglect
of the work.
However, this does not take into
consideration that critical comment at the time of publication praised
specifically the series' structure and form.
Moreover Wordsworth insisted that the sonnets should be read as a single
poem. In order to understand contemporary attitudes towards the work we must
re-examine the principles upon which the poems were arranged. The remainder of the essay will attempt to do
this by analysing the poem in the light of the literary theories developed in
the preface to the 1815 edition of Wordsworth’s collected poems.
Critical responses to Wordsworth were prompted as much by the content of the
prose Prefaces as the poems themselves. As
Uddim Khan points out:
“Although mixed and completely
favourable reviews were not very scarce, adverse and abusive reviews were
overwhelming by comparison. Ever since the 1800 Preface to the epoch-making Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth was plunged
into critical controversies surrounding his poetic theory in practice. In the Annual Review of 1808, Lucy Aitkens took
issue with his theory of poetry as submitted to the Public in that Preface.”
In particular, Aitkens “argued for bold sweep of wit, fancy
and imagination, and richly figurative and truly poetical diction”.
Though Gill, in William Wordsworth – A Life is somewhat dismissive, agreeing with
the Monthly Review’s assessment of the 1815 Preface as “neither remarkable for
clearness of idea nor for humility of tone”, nevertheless, it provides us with
the most comprehensive account of Wordsworth’s response to Aitken, critique of
his poetic theory and provides insight into his method of arranging shorter
poems thematically.
Wordsworth begins the Preface by
listing the qualities of the poetic mind: Observation, Sensibility, Reflection,
Imagination and Fancy, and Invention. He then enumerates the main forms of
poetry – Epic, Lyric, Pastoral etc., and illustrates them using both classical
and English examples.
This is neither controversial nor innovative. Where the Preface does become
more interesting is in the following section where Wordsworth begins to articulate
his own approach to classifying or ordering collections of poetry: “It is deducible from the above,
that poems apparently miscellaneous may with propriety be arranged either with
reference to the powers of mind predominant in the production
of them.”
The poet is keen to point out that this requires flexibility, acknowledging that
most poems are multi-modal: “I wish to guard against the possibility of
misleading by this classification, it is proper first to remind the Reader,
that certain poems are placed according to the powers of mind, in the Author’s
conception, predominant in the production of them; predominant, which
implies the exertion of other faculties in less degree.”
Wordsworth’s awareness of differing reading strategies in this regard is
interesting. He makes clear his desire to accommodate the needs of both
‘unreflecting readers’ and the more discerning by balancing engaging variety
with thematic unity.
“Where there is more imagination
than fancy in a poem, it is placed under the head of imagination, and vice
versâ. […] The most striking characteristics of each piece, mutual
illustration, variety, and proportion, have governed me throughout”
The discussion of the differences between fancy and
imagination which follows is crucial to understanding how Wordsworth conceived
the Duddon Sonnets as ‘one poem’. He
explores the modes of fancy and imagination from two standpoints. Firstly, he
presents these two notions as poetic ‘meta-categories’ and differentiates
between their broad subject matter - succinctly summing up the difference in
the phrase” “Fancy is given to quicken and to beguile the temporal part of our
nature, Imagination to incite and to support the eternal.” Thus ‘fancy’ “is as capricious as
the accidents of things, and the effects are surprising, playful, ludicrous,
amusing, tender, or pathetic, as the objects happen to be appositely produced
or fortunately combined.” However, ‘imagination’ “is conscious of an
indestructible dominion;—the Soul may fall away from it, not being able to
sustain its grandeur; but, if once felt and acknowledged, by no act of any
other faculty of the mind can it be relaxed, impaired, or diminished.”
This fundamental
difference in mode is mirrored in the way the two categories function
poetically. For Wordsworth, the difference resides in how metaphor works within
each category. Following an extended
analysis of the two terms in “British Synonyms discriminated, by W. Taylor” and a critique of Coleridge’s ideas from Biographia
Literaria, Wordsworth illustrates the difference by way of example.
Commenting on Cotton’s Ode Upon Winter, metaphor is characterised by “a
rapidity of detail and a profusion of fanciful comparisons, […] and a correspondent hurry of
delightful feeling.” The Fancy tends towards comparisons which are simple,
profuse and ephemeral. Seldom reticent
to assert his position in relation to illustrious antecedents, Wordsworth
considers the function of metaphor within poems of imagination, firstly in
Virgil, then in Shakespeare, before reflecting on his own ‘To The Cuckoo’. In poems of Imagination imagery may be more sparse,
but more striking and enriched with multiple associations which ‘grow‘on the
reader. To paraphrase this distinction in current terminology, Wordsworth
suggests imaginative metaphors operate primarily through connotation whereas as
‘fanciful’ ones are more denotative.
How these
theories assist us to appreciating the structure of the Duddon Series is
illustrated in Appendix 1, figure 1. Here the individual sonnets have been
analysed in relation to the poetic forms and classes set out in the Preface.
Each poem has then been assigned as belonging to either the category of Imagination
(bold) or Fancy (italic). To assist in linking the analysis back to the
original compositional order, the sonnets have been hyperlinked to the text and
notes in the ‘primary reading’ blog. Admittedly such a process of ‘reverse
engineering’ from theory to text is not without its limitations; the process of
critical analysis will always be an approximation of the how Wordsworth’s theory
and practice inter-related. Nevertheless the process is instructive. What
emerges is a structure in which the pastoral mode (Idyllium) predominates, but
where the Epic, utilising the recurrent motif of the river as “guide and
friend”, forms an overarching narrative arc - concentrated particularly at the
series’ opening and closing sections. For this reason I have termed the series,
‘An Epic of Fancy’.
In relation
to Imagination and Fancy, analysis shows that there is almost an exact balance
between the two modes. The resultant poem embodies the kind of poetry that Lucy
Aitken called for in her critique of the Preface to Lyrical Ballads: “a bold sweep of wit, fancy and imagination,
and richly figurative and truly poetical diction.”
One senses Wordsworth, without abandoning his original tenets – he continued to
revise and develop the unpublished Prelude
throughout this period – nevertheless was responding consciously to the
more negative aspects of contemporary criticism of his work.
What such structural analysis cannot
reveal is the versatility of Wordsworth’s technique in achieving this,
switching between Augustan ornament and more austere contemporary diction with wit
and studied virtuosity. For example, Sonnet VI ‘Flowers’ adopts a deliberately
ornate, Augustan voice:
…And caught the
fragrance which the sundry flowers,
Fed by the stream with soft perpetual showers,
Plenteously yielded to the vagrant breeze.
(Ll.
7 – 9)
The language is reminiscent of the idyllic pastoralism of James
Thompson’s The Seasons (1730.)
However, the sonnet which follows is an overt parody of such classicising
tendencies:
"Change me, some
God, into that breathing rose!"
The
love-sick Stripling fancifully sighs,
The
envied flower beholding, as it lies
On
Laura's breast, in exquisite repose;
(Sonnet
VII, LI. 1 – 4)
For
all the Duddon Sonnets’ preoccupations with ‘traditionalism’, it would not be
correct to represent the series as wholly retrospective. The poet of Tintern Abbey and Lyrical Ballads re-appears occasionally:
….for fondly I pursued,
Even when a child, the
Streams--unheard, unseen;
Through tangled woods, impending
rocks between;
Or, free as air, with flying inquest
viewed
The sullen reservoirs whence their
bold brood--
Pure as the morning, fretful,
boisterous, keen,
Green as the salt-sea billows, white
and green--
Poured down the hills, a choral
multitude!
(Sonnet
XXVI, Ll 1 – 8)
Furthermore,
Wordsworth reveals his awareness of contemporary developments in natural
science. In the final lines of Sonnet
XV, the poet speculates on the formation of unusual rock formations at
Wellbarrow ravine:
Was it by mortals
sculptured?--weary slaves
Of slow endeavour! or abruptly cast
Into rude shape by fire, with roaring blast
Tempestuously
let loose from central caves?
Or
fashioned by the turbulence of waves,
Then,
when o'er highest hills the Deluge passed?
(Ll. 9 –
14)
This
reflects Enlightenment ideas concerning the origin of the earth known as
catastrophism; it alludes to both the ‘Volcanism’ of Hutton and the ‘Neptunism’
of Buckland and Lyell; significantly, the prevailing Christian orthodoxy of
‘creationism’ is not mentioned.
Other contemporary concerns are
reflected in the sonnets ‘Open Prospect’ and ‘Sheep Washing.’ Here the ‘living
landscape’ of the Duddon Valley is explored in terms which mirror the concerns of
the Guide to the Lakes. Both the Guide and the sonnets offer a critique
of the Picturesque. Wordsworth was acquainted with both William Gilpin and
Uvedale Price, leading writers on the Picturesque. To some extent he was a
proponent of the Picturesque himself. Sonnet III
opens posing the question to the river Duddon “how shall I paint thee?” The
answer - in the ‘viewing instructions’ as to how to observe the Duddon from
Walnar Scar found in the note to Sonnet XVII; the lengthy musings on correct
tree planting included in The Guide; the
idealised depiction of “ruddy children” by a “Cottage rude and grey” in Sonnet V –
suggest the aesthetics of the Picturesque. However Wordsworth was ambivalent
towards the Picturesque; he was interested in dwelling within landscape as much
its appearance – what the social anthropologist, Tim Ingold calls the
‘taskscape’.
This interest permeates the entire Duddon Volume: in the extended memoir of the
rural pastor, Rev. Robert Walker; the sections of The Guide which concern “The Republic of Shepherds and
Agriculturalists”; and in the sonnets – number VIII’s
speculation about the “first tribes” of the valley, the depiction in Sonnet
XIII, of the fields “clustered with barn and byre and spouting mill” and in XXIII -
‘Sheep Washing’. Moreover, the
magnificent final sonnet does not conclude with a consideration of Nature
itself, but with a reflection on how man dwells within it:
While we, the brave,
the mighty, and the wise,
We Men, who in our morn of youth defied
The
elements, must vanish;--be it so!
Enough, if something from our hands have
power
To
live, and act, and serve the future hour…
(Sonnet XXXIV, Ll. 7 –
12)
This Essay has sought to treat
the Duddon Sonnets in the manner which the poet preferred– “as one poem”. The work which emerges is
an example of what Wordsworth termed in the Preface, “composite” form The Duddon Sonnets moves between the epic and idyllic mode; it attempts
to balance poems of Imagination and Fancy within a single compositional
framework. This is achieved with skill, variety and invention, displaying an
impressive grasp of the genre, technique and diction from differing epochs.
Very few of the sonnets, for all their historicism, are simply derivative or
lapse into pastiche. The work, In terms of subject matter, engages with major
concerns of the day related to literary theory, aesthetics, the Picturesque and
natural science. Given these qualities
it is unsurprising it was greeted on its publication with critical acclaim.
However, these qualities of
variety and stylistic ambiguity may have contributed to the work’s subsequent
critical neglect. The eclecticism of the Duddon Sonnets is not amenable to
analysis which seeks to place it within a particular ideology, movement or
style. Critical developments in recent decades, embracing intertextuality,
poly-vocalism and heteroglossia, may provide more appropriate analytical tools
to study ‘awkward’ works which cut across canonical conventions.
Postmodernism’s broadly dialogical approach enables us to arrive at a more nuanced
view of Duddon Sonnets, re-positioning
it within Wordsworth’s oeuvre and enriching our understanding of the rapidly
evolving literary culture of the late Regency period.
