The Word As Borderer

Abstract

In taking up the matter of Wordsworth’s incarnational poetics, I am admittedly retracing well-traveled ground. Frances Ferguson’s Wordsworth: Language as Counter-Spirit offers one of the early and best discussions of the subject. In that work Ferguson calls attention to the eternal difficulty encountered in any discussion of language—the absence of a nonlinguistic control “against which to measure language” (I)¹—and provides invaluable exploration of Wordsworth’s linguistic speculations in support of the claim “that Wordsworth thought seriously and coherently about language in both his prose and poetry” (xi). Ferguson emphasizes the poet’s departure from the often-discussed metaphor of Romantic organicism in his positing of the epitaph as a metaphor for poetry (xii),² a metaphor that, Ferguson claims, exists in tension with the notion of “linguistic ‘incarnation.’” He comments, “Although Wordsworth might seem to offer ‘language-as-incarnation’ as a replacement for the eighteenth-century notion of ‘language-as-dress,’ both the Essays upon Epitaphs and Wordsworth’s poetry generally prompt a reevaluation of what linguistic ‘incarnation’ might be” (xvi). Ferguson finds that the “‘fallings from us,’ the ‘vanishings’ within the life of the individual, and the multiple miniature deaths which figure as a part of that Wordsworthian life suggest that neither human incarnation nor linguistic incarnation is a fixed form which can be arrived at and sustained” (xvi).

And the word became flesh and dwelt among us …

—Jn. 1:14

Visionary Power Attends upon the motions of the winds Embodied in the mystery of words.

—Prelude 5:619—21