Abstract
Writing to Catherine Clarkson in January 1815, by when his identification with Jacobinical Druidism was a distant memory, Wordsworth repudiated with some heat the notion that he could be termed ‘a worshipper of Nature’. The cause of such errors, he insists, is reading ‘in cold-heartedness’ what was merely ‘a passionate expression uttered incautiously in the Poem upon the Wye.’1 Denying that there is anything ‘Spinosistic’ even in his ‘simile of the Boy and the Shell’ Wordsworth’s letter promptly runs into difficulties: ‘Where does she [Patty Smith] gather that the Author of the Excursion looks upon nature and God as the same? He does not indeed consider the Supreme Being [sic!] as bearing the same relation to the universe as a watch-maker bears to a watch … there is nothing so injurious as the perpetually talking about making by God.’ To his own child, Wordsworth says, he has taught the less injurious explanation that God is ‘not like his flesh which he could touch; but more like his thoughts’. The child, seeing how ‘the wind was tossing the fir trees, and the sky and light were dancing about in their dark branches’, exclaims ‘“There’s a bit of him I see it there!”’. With this perception of God as infinitely fine matter, or the spiritus of the ancients, the fond father finds no fault.
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Notes
To Catherine Clarkson, January 1815, MY, 2: 188. I am grateful to Geoffrey Blake for reminding me of this apostatic moment.
‘It is the knowledge of his complicity in an act of terror that now prompts Wordsworth to describe himself, in a rather shadowy phrase, as ‘more like a man/Flying from something that he dreads, than one/Who sought the thing he loved.’ David Bromwich, A Choice of Inheritance: Self and Community from Edmund Burke to Robert Frost (Cambridge MA: Harvard UP, 1989), 72.
McFarland, 121.
David Bromwich, ‘The French Revolution and “Tintem Abbey’”, Raritan 10:3 (1991) 1–23, 7.
Unlike Kenneth R. Johnston’s germinal essay on ‘The Politics of Tintern Abbey’ (TWC, 14:1 (1983), 6–14) revisionist readings of the poem have situated ‘Tintern Abbey’ within intellectual domains ideologically far removed from that occupied by William Wordsworth at the moment in question. Jerome McGann, in Romantic Ideology, saw Tintern Abbey as enacting the Romantic flight from history into an autonomous Kantian-Hegelian realm of imagination. Marjorie Levinson saw the theme of the poem as the ‘escape from cultural values’, arguing that ‘its primary action is the suppression of the social’: Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 16, 37, 91 and passim. Both studies preceded David Simpson’s needful warning that there is ‘no such thing [in Wordsworth’s writing] as a private or individual imagination capable of complete and entire self-determination’ (Wordsworth’s Historical Imagination, 1).
The Prelude, ed. E de Selincourt, lxix.
Cited from H. W. Piper, The Active Universe (London: Athlone Press, 1962), 24.
Considérations philosophiques de la gradation naturelle des formes de l’être, 1768.
Descartes, whose view of nature and its relation to the human mind was diametrically opposed to that of the French thinkers Wordsworth actually knew, and from whom he drew his own pervasive sense of the sensibility of matter, is brought in because, as Levinson explains in her later essay on ‘The New Historicism’, whereas the materialism of the eighteenth century was ‘revolutionary, demotic’, Cartesian idealism ‘provided the ancien régime its onto-epistemological model’ (in Levinson, ed., Rethinking Historicism: Critical Readings in Romantic History [Oxford: Blackwell, 1989], 25). Descartes figures in Levinson’s reading to block any suspicion that Tintern Abbey is rooted in half a century of rampant materialism. As for the blind man’s eye, Wordsworth seems to have thrown in a reading block at this point. Unproductively, one thinks of Milton. It is more helpful to remember that, as Mark Booth points out in ‘Written and Writing Bards in Eighteenth-century Lyric’ (Modern Language Quarterly. 53: 4 [1992] 393–408), there were still Celtic harpers in the eighteenth century, and many of them were blind, like the still-famous Irishman Turlough O’Carolan (d. 1783) and the Welshman John Parry, whose visit to Cambridge inspired Gray to fin-ish his stalled draft of The Bard (400). Wordsworth may have been alluding quietly to this condition, though it is likelier that he is thinking of Ossian’s blindness to nature.
Walden and Civil Disobedience: Norton Critical Edition, ed. Owen Thomas (New York: Norton, 1966).
Levinson’s reading alleges that Wordsworth in 1798 ‘cannot abide desecration’, that he would have been outraged at seeing ‘a national monument overrun with a morally unfixed class’, that for him the abbey stood for an ideal, ‘a brotherhood of the self-elect, subsidised by the whole society’ and that his ‘entire experience had led him to conceive of Tintern Abbey (the abbey, not the poem) as the incarnation of a social ideal’ (Period Poems, 33, 35, 52). Stephen Gill, more pertinently, characterised Wordsworth in 1793 as himself a ‘gentleman vagrant’ (Gill, 153).
The Politics of Nature: Wordsworth and Some Contemporaries (Macmillan, 1992), 130–4. Roe’s civil war association has been confirmed by David Chandler’s linking of this passage to Thomas Fuller’s History of the Worthies of England (1662) in which occurs the phrase ‘civil war is a vagrant’. Chandler’s suggestion, In ‘Vagrancy smoked Out’, Romanticism on the Net (1998), that Wordsworth associated ‘vagrant dwellers’ with the civil war of his own 1793 feelings, is powerfully apt. Damian Walford Davies, in ‘“Some uncertain notice”: the Hermit of ‘Tintern Abbey”’, Notes and Queries 241 (1996) 422–4, recalls the sixth century Celtic hermit Tewdrig the Blessed, who was summoned out of retirement to face a Saxon invasion: Wordsworth’s prolonged and extensive identification (along with Cottle, Southey and Thelwall) with Celtic resistance, supports this association.
John Thelwall, The Rights of Nature against the Usurpations of Establishments. 3rd edition (London, 1796), 7, 8, 16–17, 46. Wordsworth owed Thelwall an allusion, having been described as ‘Alfoxden’s musing tenant’ in Thelwall’s Lines written at Bridgewater, in Somersetshire, on the 27th of July, 1797 (published in Poems, Chiefly Written in Retirement, 1801).
Algernon Sidney, Discourses on Government (London: Joseph Johnson, 1795), xix.
Prelude, 9.469–532. Wordsworth regrets the ruination of the convent because it offered hospitality to travellers. The passage also associates the notion of a hermitage with ideas of refuge from political injustice.
Paine, The Rights of Man (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984), 159–60.
D’Holbach, The System of Nature; or, the Laws of the Moral and Physical World, tr. William Hodgson, 4 vols (London: J. Johnson, 1795), 4: 681.
My sense of the poem’s ‘historical moment’ is derived initially from H. W. Piper’s The Active Universe, enriched by Alan Bewell’s Wordsworth and the Enlightenment, and confirmed by Nicholas Roe’s The Politics of Nature. Where Roe emphasises the friends of liberty, I shall emphasise Priestley, the Stewarts, d’Holbach and Volney, the friends of nature and of liberty.
See H. W. Piper, and Thomas L Hankins, Science and the Enlightenment (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985), 6–15.
Prelude, apparatus, p 525.
Cited, Piper 22.
Wordsworth’s ‘The mind of man is framed even like the breath/ And harmony of music’, (Prelude (1805) 351–2) might also owe something to John Stewart’s less economical use of this metaphor in Apocalypse of Nature, 2 vols (London, J. Ridgway, 1792), 2: 22.
Alan Richardson, British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind (Cambridge: CUP, 2001).
Monthly Review, 66, cited Piper, 5.
See Wu, 74–5, and Leslie F. Chard, Dissenting Republican: Wordsworth’s Early Lifeand Thought in their Political Context (The Hague: Mouton, 1972) 97–8.
‘[T]he savages, in order to flatten the heads of their children, squeeze them between two boards, and by that means prevent them from taking the form which nature destined for them. It is pretty nearly the same thing with all our institutions’ (System, 1: 265).
D. J. Garat, cited, Piper 22.
M. Volney, The Ruins: or, a Survey of the Revolutions of Empires, 2nd edition (London: Joseph Johnson, 1795), 324.
Since Wordsworth rarely found the appropriate form for an intellectual or emotional configuration in less than five years, it is unsurprising that his expression in 1798 seems so redolent of ’93 (the year from which the poem’s energies and convictions derive), or that aspects of his depiction of ’93 (its ‘aching joys’ and ‘dizzy raptures’) seem more pertinent to ’89.
The Examiner, 10 December, 1815; Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols (London: Dent, 1930–34), 20: 60.
John Barrell, ‘The Uses of Dorothy: “The Language of the Sense” in “Tintern Abbey"’ in Poetry, Language, and Politics (London: St Martin’s Press, 1988).
See Piper, 18.
William Hale White, The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford, ed. Reuben Shapcott (London 1881) 24.
Peter Bell, in Alan Bewell’s powerful reading, offers ‘a history of man’s religious development, from crude metaphysics to human society’, ‘a myth of how religion arises through (not against) superstitious imagination’, and an embedded ‘history of religions’. Bewell, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment, 120, 126, 138–9.
CN 1: 1616. Ray or Durham being bishops.
For Paine’s Pantheism see Jack Fruchtman, Thomas Paine and the Religion of Nature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).
‘English Romanticism: the Spirit of the Age’ (1963), in The Correspondent Breeze: Essays on Romanticism (New York: Norton, 1984), 66.
‘William and Dorothy: a Case Study in the Hermeneutics of Disparagement’, ELH, 65 (1998) 187–221.
This startling allusion is noted by M. H. Abrams in ‘On Political Readings of Tintern Abbey’, in Doing Things with Texts, ed. Michael Fisher (New York: Norton, 1989).
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© 2003 Richard Gravil
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Gravil, R. (2003). ‘Nature’ in the Poem upon the Wye. In: Wordsworth’s Bardic Vocation, 1787–1842. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230510333_7
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