Abstract
Geoffrey Hartman, often returning to the “Lucy” poems to take further soundings of the work of reading generally, characterizes the cycle as “a group of short lyrics on the death of a young girl… [evoking] three highly charged themes: incompleteness, mourning, and memory.”1 Without offering an entirely fresh reading of these poems, I will reflect on them in the light of this “incompleteness” considered as a horizon for both loss and dedication. Incompleteness (equally invoking mourning and memory) lies on the cusp of literary and theological approaches to these elusively minimal poems. The incompleteness is not confined to Lucy’s premature death but touches the theme of a “relation of scarcity” within the juncture of human and natural life, which I have already explored in relation to The Ruined Cottage, a text completed earlier in the same year (1798), in which Wordsworth embarked on the first of what we now know as the “Lucy” poems.2
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Notes
Geoffrey Hartman, Easy Pieces (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 145.
James Averill, Wordsworth and the Poetry of Human Suffering (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980), 207.
Spencer Hall, “Wordsworth’s ‘Lucy’ Poems: Context and Meaning,” Studies in Romanticism 10 (1971):173.
Stanley Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 51.
Paul Avis, God and the Creative Imagination (London: Routledge, 1999), 11.
Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Biblical Narrative in the Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 279–81.
Claire Colebrook, Ethics and Representation: From Kant to Post-Structuralism. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 74–5.
Geoffrey Hartman comments, “As conscious beings we are always at a distance from origin. Yet to begin with absence is still an epochal or grounding maneuver.” Hartman senses that absence is already too categorical to negotiate with poetic abundance. He continues, “Things remembered or imagined are viewed as absent not because they are lost (though they may be) but because their ‘trace’ is difficult to substantialize as a noun or a name.” See Geoffrey H. Hartman, The Unremarkable Wordsworth (London: Methuen, 1987), 29.
John Milbank, “The Soul of Reciprocity. Part Two: Reciprocity Granted,” Modern Theology 17, no. 4 (2001): 489.
Catherine Pickstock, After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 22.
Garrard Green, Theology, Hermeneutics and Imagination: The Crisis of Interpretation at the End of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 165.
Frances Ferguson, Language as Counter-Spirit (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977), 173.
David Ferry, The Limits of Mortality (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1959), 74.
Brian G. Caraher, Wordsworth’s ‘Slumber’ and the Problematics of Reading (University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 1991), 117
Mark Jones, The “Lucy” Poems: A Case Study in Literary Knowledge (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1995), 43.
J. R. Watson, “Lucy and the Earth-Mother,” Essays in Criticism, 27 (1977): 188.
Geoffrey H. Hartman, Saving the Text: Literature/Derrida/Philosophy (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 145.
Stephen Prickett, Words and the Word: Language, Poetics and Biblical Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 148.
See Jurgen Moltmann, “Is there Life after Death?” in The End of the World and the Ends of God: Science and Theology on Eschatology, ed. John Polkinghorne and Michael Welker (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2000), 254. For me, it is scarcity that procures the never fully realizable relation between the living and dead: the dead who haunt memory can never be lost enough, whilst the living are “sealed” by memory from immediate actuality, never alive enough to be unmediated by the dead.
John Milbank, “The Soul of Reciprocity. Part One: Reciprocity Refused,” Modern Theology 17, no. 3 (2001): 360. Milbank here insists on time as a one-way gift, while he argues elsewhere against any general notion of the gift as unilaterally deferring reciprocity, though the gift as such remains asymmetrical for him. See “The Soul of Reciprocity, Part Two,” 503, and “Can a Gift be Given? Prologomena to a Future Trinitarian Metaphysic,” Modern Theology 11, no. 1 (1995): 122–25.
Douglas Hedley, “Should Divinity Overcome Metaphysics? Reflections on John Milbank’s Theology beyond Secular Reason and Confessions of a Cambridge Platonist,” Journal of Religion 80 (2000): 293. Milbank does not deny some element of loss but tends to gloss it as the necessary concomitant of return-with-difference. See his “The Soul of Reciprocity, Part Two,” 503.
John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock, Truth in Aquinas (London: Routledge, 2001), 290.
See The Von Balthasar Reader, ed. Medard Kehl and Werner Löser; trans. Robert J. Daly and Fred Lawrence (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1982), 68–9.
See David P. Haney, William Wordsworth and the Hermeneutics of Incarnation (University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 1993), 33.
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© 2012 Peter Larkin
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Larkin, P. (2012). Scarcity by Gift: Horizons of the “Lucy” Poems. In: Wordsworth and Coleridge. Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137010940_7
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