Conclusion: Other Spaces

Abstract

By the time that Wordsworth published The Excursion, he recognized that the historical developments of his own lifetime were working actively against his early imaginative configurations of the world, intruding into and disrupting the spaces that seemed most conducive to his ideas of a perfect social life. While The Excursion shows him largely attempting to accommodate those historical developments rather than resisting them, the poetry and prose of the years following the publication of this work show that he never fully succeeded in his attempt, or, rather, that with continuing historical changes he had to make the attempt time and time again. Thus, even in a late sonnet like ‘Steamboats, Viaducts, and Railways’, which he wrote as part of Poems Composed or Suggested During a Tour, in the Summer of 1833 and published first in 1835, then again in the 1844 Letters on the Kendal and Windermere Railway, his tone is one of forced cheer as he describes the effects that new modes of transportation have had on the sites of natural beauty that he configured and valued as a poet. Specifically, he attempts to remain cheerful as he describes the conquering of ‘space’ by the forces of ‘time’:

Motions and Means, on sea & land at war With old poetic feeling, not for this Shall ye, by poets even, be judged amiss! Nor shall your presence, howsoe’er it mar The loveliness of nature, prove a bar To the mind’s gaining that prophetic sense Of future good, that point of vision, whence May be discovered what in soul ye are. In spite of all that Beauty must disown In your harsh features, Nature doth embrace Her lawful offspring in man’s Art; and Time, Pleased with your triumphs o’er his brother Space, Accepts from your bold hands the proffered crown Of hope, and welcomes you with cheer sublime.¹