How Awesome is this Place!

Abstract

Wordsworth’s intense and quite idiosyncratic interest in the relationship of language to land, while evident throughout his works, is focused in the Poems on the Naming of Places,¹ written in his first year of residence at Grasmere. The epigraph to this chapter is found in M S. M as Motto for Poems on the Naming of Places (P. W. 2:486). It appears to issue a caution against reading these poems as personal history and invites close attention to their poetic devices. The phrase “endless allegories” is particularly suggestive, for, as in Robert Lowth’s Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews, the term allegory at this time suggested a master trope of resemblance—often a created rather than an intrinsic resemblance, and especially evocative of biblical models, encompassing metaphor, continued metaphor, parable, and mystical allegory.² Yet Wordsworth, in the “Advertisement” to these poems, purports to claim the status of personal history for them, and even to trivialize their subject matter—“little incidents.” This apparent discrepancy in authorial claims provides only one dimension of the poems’ difficulties. Are the poems found tales and endless allegories, or are they exercises in recording the “private and peculiar interest” attendant on certain unnamed sites near Grasmere? Here is Wordsworth’s “Advertisement”:

By persons resident in the country, and attached to rural objects, many places will be found unnamed or of unknown names, where little Incidents must have occurred, or feelings been experienced, which will have given to such places a private and peculiar interest. From a wish to give some sort of record to such Incidents, and renew the gratification of such feelings, Names have been given to Places by the Author and some of his Friends, and the following Poems written in consequence. (P. W. 2:III)

[Some minds] find tales and endless allegories By river margins, and green woods among

—P. W. 2:486