George Soule

John Wordsworth’s Death and the End of The Prelude

by George Soule

A slightly revised version of a lecture given at the Wordsworth Winter School, Grasmere, Cumbria in February, 2005, and repeated at the Athenaeum of the Gould Library at Carleton College later that spring.

In an earlier lecture on “Wordsworth and the French Revolution,” I argued that the poet wrote much of The Prelude during 1804. I recalled that, although in January and February of 1804, Wordsworth thought he was wrapping his poem up in five books, in mid-March he changed his mind and launched himself into a poem that would expand to thirteen books. Why? I argued that he changed his mind because he realized he had a problem. Although had already written his upbeat conclusion, the ascent of Snowdon, he had not described any really serious low points from which his imagination could ascend. Luckily, he had such material at hand—his experiences in London at various times and in France during two different phases of the Revolution. Wordsworth realized that including these low points was necessary to the structure of his poem, which would rise above them in a triumph of the imagination. He worked hard during 1804 to push his poem towards its conclusion.

So at the end of 1804 we left Wordsworth in a good state. He had been married for over two years to a woman he loved. Of their two children, one was a year and a half old boy and only just beginning to exhibit boisterous behavior, the other still a baby of four and a half-months. His beloved sister fit into the family group well, as did his wife’s sister when she visited. The poet’s house was small, but a source of pride: he writes to brothers John and Richard that he had recently constructed “a charming little Temple in the Orchard, a Moss hut . . . with delightful views of the Church, Lake, Valley etc., etc.”[1] His closest friend, Coleridge, was about to take a trip which could restore his health. Financially, Wordsworth was in good shape, for money from the Lowther estate was trickling in. He knew he had had a good year as a poet. He tells his brothers that “I have written some pretty good verses since I saw you.”[2]

Exactly where was he in writing The Prelude? Mark Reed concludes that by the end of December, 1804, Wordsworth had pretty much completed The Prelude through Book X. He had several books to go. Reed thinks that by the end of 1804 “Wordsworth had organized his plan for the main order and primary content” of the poem as it was completed in May, 1805. “He had, as regards basic structural elements, written most of the poem.”[3] He had saved his “spots of time” (XI 257) definition and its two wonderful illustrations: the gibbet and its aftermath, the “visionary dreariness” (XI 310) of the girl walking with her pitcher. He had a verse paragraph on love written earlier, but left out of “Michael.” He had his early poem “Salisbury Plain” to draw upon. And he had the ascent of Snowdon passage and his reflections on it. He had made the decision to end his poem, not with the spots of time passage (as was planned earlier), but with the ascent of Snowdon and its meditation.[4] There still remained much work to do, but in December, 1804, he told Sir George Beaumont that he was resolved to finish it before May so that he could turn to his much delayed philosophical poem, The Recluse.[5]

The year 1805 began badly. On (probably) January 2, Wordsworth crossed Kirkstone pass carrying little Johnny and contracted the inflammation of the eyes which will afflict him off and on for the rest of his life.[6] He worked on The Prelude during January and early February, doing what exactly is hard to say.[7] Then the terrible blow struck. On February 11, 1805, two hundred years ago today, perhaps in the early afternoon, the news arrived at Dove Cottage: John had drowned.[8]

I

We have now arrived at the subject of this talk: What effect did John’s death have on the ending of The Prelude?[9] One thing is sure: it had a profound effect on the Wordsworth family. All accounts describe weeping and despair. After they heard the news, Wordsworth reports that both Mary and Dorothy “are extremely ill, Dorothy especially.”[10] The poet grieved himself. A few days later he reports that “we have done all that could be done to console each other by weeping together.”[11] It is easy to see why. Though he was a seaman, John had been particularly close to his poet brother and his sister. William described him as having the sensibility of a poet—a “silent poet.”[12] When he spent about eight months with William and Dorothy in 1800, he fitted wonderfully into Dove Cottage life. He had participated in the family pastime of naming places after each another. John discovered a way into a small clearing in the trees just southeast of Dove Cottage, and William named it “John’s Woods.” His closeness had later been given eternal expression when his initials were chiseled into The Rock of Names, now to be seen behind the Wordsworth Museum. John’s plan was, after becoming rich as a sea captain, to return to Grasmere to support his bother and sister and to “settle near us.”[13] The Wordsworths’ closeness was obvious to those who knew them. The set included Mary as well; William’s latest biographer suggests that John may have been silently in love with his brother’s wife.[14] John’s death so shattered the web of affection they all shared that soon afterwards the Wordsworth’s began to consider leaving the building that had been the group’s center, Dove Cottage. They did so a year and a half later.

After he learned of John’s death, the poet could not even write about his brother. He told Sir George Beaumont that “I composed much, but it is all lost except a few lines, as it came from me in such a torrent that I was unable to remember it.”[15] It comes as no surprise that the first effect of John’s death on The Prelude was that Wordsworth stopped working on it, for several months was incapable of working on it.

Yet he did not forget his resolve to finish his poem before May. Indeed, on May 1, 1805, he wrote Beaumont that felt that he must complete it to keep up his end of a bargain with his brother.[16] He reported that in late April he had began to write again and that he had “added 300 lines to it in the course of the last week. Two books more will conclude it. It will be not much less than 9000 lines . . . an alarming length!” I count 8486 lines in the surviving 1805 poem, so Wordsworth must have been trying to finish his poem in the length we have it now—or possibly a little longer. He wove together the material he had saved for his conclusion wrote more than 300 new lines to finish his work in mid-May--almost on time.

If it were not for John’s death, would the poem have been longer? (The three books of 1805 are its shortest.) Would Wordsworth have told more of his story? Kenneth Johnston in The Hidden Wordsworth argues that John’s death caused the poet to wind up matters as quickly as he decently could.[17] Johnston argues that even though some mentions of later events are present in the poem’s closing books, Wordsworth essentially stopped telling his story with the events of 1792-1793. It is pleasant to speculate about what Wordsworth might have written about if he had kept on writing with the fluency he showed all through 1804! We could have had accounts of how Dorothy helped him revive—accounts, not just thanks. We could have had a description of meeting Coleridge, instead of just expressions of friendship and concern. I especially would like to have a poetic description Coleridge’s arrival at Racedown in June of 1797 (in prose, “He did not keep to the high road, but leaped over a gate and bounded down a pathless field”).[18] Wordsworth could have written lines describing the year at Alfoxden. It would be a joy to read about his walking trip with Dorothy and Coleridge that resulted in “The Ancient Mariner” and “Kubla Khan.” Perhaps Wordsworth could have described the Man from Porlock. If Wordsworth was eloquent on the horrors of London, I wonder what he would have said in verse about Goslar. I could go on with these speculations. My point is that Wordsworth had much more experience to draw upon, even if he wanted to end his poem on the positive note of his experience on Snowdon. He probably would have had to stop no later than his Goslar months in 1798-1799, for a version “Home at Grasmere,” dealing with his early Dove Cottage years, had already been written to begin The Recluse.[19] I cannot resist the fancy that Wordsworth might once have considered prolonging The Prelude as far as Goslar, so that it would lead chronologically right into the first book of The Recluse. I will return later to what might have been.

John’s death may have caused Wordsworth to stop writing about these experiences and hurry his poem on to its conclusion. As I noted, he had many passages in hand. When he took up his poem in late April, 1805, he probably had he general plan of his last three books already worked out, and he must have realized he could wrap it up with only a little extra work. He told Beaumont he had added 300 lines in late April—but what lines? And what lines were written or revised in Ma--lines John’s death could be said to have influenced?

To answer such questions, I have consulted many authorities: the photographs of the manuscripts and their transcripts in the monumental Cornell edition, books by Mark Reed, Duncan Wu, Jonathan Wordsworth, and most importantly the Norton Critical Edition of The Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850.[20] I will follow most closely the conclusions of the Norton editors in their essay “The Texts.” They tell me that in his late spurt of activity in April and May of 1805, Wordsworth probably wrote the opening of Book XI, the opening one hundred eleven and the concluding hundred lines of Book XII, and four passages from Book XIII. He also heavily revised passages that were incorporated into Books XI and XIII.[21]

The Prelude never mentions John by name, probably because, although the brothers were close in age and had been at school together, they had not seen much of each other as adults until John lived at Dove Cottage in 1800, a year the poem’s story does not reach. But John’s death appears to be alluded to twice in lines written in 1805. William may have had his “silent poet” brother in mind when he asserts the value of humble, inarticulate men (XII 264-274).[22] The reference to John is unavoidable when Wordsworth addresses Coleridge as he winds up his last book. He writes that the days during which he “prepared” these “last and later portions” of his poem “have been, my friend, / Times of much sorrow, of a private grief / Keen and enduring . . . .” (XIII 411-417).

II

These allusions are hardly enough to justify this article. Scholars and critics have made several other suggestions as to how John’s death affected this poem. Let us look at Book XIII. Wordsworth in lines dating from early in 1804 describes his ascent of Snowdon and what he saw: clouds usurping on the real sea, the moon shining down in glory, and a gloomy and breathing blue chasm from which issued the roar of waters. He follows the description with an 88-line (XIII 77-165) meditation on its meaning.[23] He tried to define an ultimate state of mind towards which he had been moving since childhood. He asked in Book I “Was it for this”? (I 271). Now he gives his implied answer: It was for this. In 1805, Wordsworth added a short preface (66-76) and a longer coda (166-184) to the meditation.

The question of the influence of John’s death rises most forcefully in the coda, where Wordsworth calls the ultimate state of being or man’s highest “faculty” a kind of trinity: “love,” which is the same as “imagination,” which is the same as the “clearest insight, amplitude of mind, / And reason in her most exalted mood” (XIII 166-171). Wordsworth then sums it up. The Prelude is the story of this faculty working in him from birth, though bad times, to the happy present,

Reflecting in its solemn breast
The works of man, and the face of human life;
And lastly, from its progress have we drawn
The feeling of life endless, and the one thought
By which we live, infinity and God.

(XIII 180-184, italics mine)

In his Borders of Vision, Jonathan Wordsworth comments that these lines show that the poet’s development “leads directly, and without hesitation, to a Christian immortality.”[24] In a later chapter, he writes that “in February, 1805, belief in an afterlife was to become [for the poet] a matter of urgent personal need.”[25] This same idea is found in a note to these lines in the Norton edition: “`Life endless’ [is] a reference to the afterlife which emerges very suddenly in the context of the poem as a whole, but which is explained by Wordsworth’s urgent need to believe in the survival of his brother John . . . .”[26]

The idea, then, is that John’s death influenced the ending of The Prelude by impelling Wordsworth to insert in 1805 a reference to his newfound belief in the afterlife. I will return to “life endless” after two short detours.

The question of the exact nature of the poet’s religious beliefs has always puzzled critics, and it is unlikely ever to be answered. He described himself as being an extreme idealist as a child.[27] As a young man Coleridge called him “at least a Semi-atheist.”[28] Yet in “Tintern Abbey” from 1798, many people have found a divine force in the “sense sublime / Of something far more deeply interfused. . . .”[29] In the many years he lived after 1805, there is much evidence that, even if not completely orthodox, he eventually harmonized his religious nature with the terms and practices of the Church of England.[30]

Back to 1805. One document that has often been cited to show his ideas about the afterlife in 1805 is his letter to Sir George Beaumont about a month after he got the news:

Why should our notions of right towards each other, and to all sentient beings within our influence differ so widely from what appears to be his {God’s] notion and rule, if everything were to end here? Would it be blasphemy to say that upon the supposition of the thinking principle being destroyed by death, however inferior we may be to the great Cause and ruler of things, we have more of love in our Nature than he has? The thought is monstrous; and yet to get rid of it except upon the supposition of another and a better world I do not see.[31]

Here we come to what may be the first great effect of John’s death on The Prelude. Yet although Wordsworth seems to argue here for the afterlife and to evoke it in The Prelude, I am not sure that it is accurate to say John’s death caused him to embrace the idea.[32] First of all, arguing theoretically that we must suppose the existence of “another and better world” is not at all the same as saying we believe in it. Moreover, there are plenty of people who have simply wished that the afterlife existed, and Wordsworth may have been one of them. I doubt if there are many who have reached my age who have not wanted ardently to meet once more a beloved person who has died. But to wish this kind of wish, which Wordsworth may have done, is not necessarily to believe.

Now let us look again at the coda that Wordsworth added in 1805 to the meditation on his ascent of Snowdon. The passage says that from the progress of his “moving soul” he has “drawn / The feeling of life endless.” Getting a feeling, however important, is not the same as belief, as implied by the poet’s later revision of the line to make it more orthodox: “Faith in life endless” (1850 version, 205). If you regard the coda as a statement of belief, I think you would have to call it ambiguous. What appositives are in parallel with what? The phrase “The feeling of life endless” is somehow equated with “the one thought / By which we live”—that is or seems to be the state of mind, the “faculty” whose progress is being traced. Then “The feeling of life endless” is equated with “infinity and God.”

I would like to suggest that to explicate the coda, we must look at the other passage Wordsworth wrote in 1805 to add to the 1804 mediation—the preface. After the account of Snowdon, Wordsworth inserts this memorable and striking image: the complex scene is

The perfect image of a mighty mind,
Of one that feeds upon infinity,
That is exalted by an under-presence,
The sense of God, or whatsoe’er is dim
Or vast in its own being . . .

(XIII 69-73)

By this time in The Prelude, the poet is moving toward a conclusion. In both 1805 additions, the preface and the coda to the 1804 meditation on Snowdon, Wordsworth is trying once again to define the nature and development of the state of mind that is at the heart of the poem. As I said before, he is answering his earlier question by saying It was for this. As is often the case, his strategy of definition is to present the reader with many words and phrases, no one of which is sufficient in itself, but all of which together evoke what he is talking about. In the preface we find “infinity,” “the sense of God,” and “whatsoe’er is dim or vast in its own being” (XII 68-73). In the coda we find the “feeling of life endless” and “infinity.” I submit that these words are not used theologically, but expressively. They define Wordsworths’ central experience of being for a wonderful moment outside of ordinary life, experienced as outside of ordinary time.[33] Perhaps this experience is what people refer to when they say “time stood still.” His is not a scientific method of definition, but it is probably the only way to define what he has spent his poem trying to define. This sort of moment is not an impenetrable mystery: Wordsworth describes it most famously in “Tintern Abbey” where “we are laid asleep / In body, and become a living soul”(45-46).

III

Another theory of how Wordsworth’s spiritual life is related to John’s death has recently been offered by Duncan Wu in Wordsworth: An Inner Life. Like Ernest De Selincort before him,[34] Wu does not think John’s death affected the last books of The Prelude in many direct ways. But Wu thinks that when Wordsworth in April and May of 1805 confronted his task of finishing his poem,

he found himself increasingly out of sympathy with the self that had written it. Much of it has been composed in a mood of proud hope, spurred on by the irrevocable knowledge that he was the poet-prophet of “The Recluse.” In the wake of John’s death that hope seemed empty . . . .[35]

Wu goes on to define what Wordsworth’s ideas were at this time. In several elegiac poems he wrote in June, 1805, on John’s death, Wordsworth felt “subject to the chastening hand of a stern master. . . . The elegies for John establish the chastening rod of the Almighty as a reality, brought to bear on a sensibility that had forgotten the value of humility. . . . [He attempts] to express genuine meekness towards a divine power whose acts he cannot understand.”[36]

I don’t think “meekness” is quite the right word. In a passage that I think is often overlooked even though it is placed near the very end of The Prelude, perhaps as a kind of climax, Wordsworth tells Coleridge that that “this song, which like a lark / I have protracted, in the unwearied heavens / Singing, and often with more plaintive voice / Attempered to the sorrows of the earth-- / Yet centring all in love, and in the end / All gratulant if rightly understood” (XIII 380-385, italics mine). The OED defines “gratulant” as “Expressing pleasure, joy, or satisfaction; congratulatory.” Coleridge had used the word this way in 1794. Back to the Prelude passage: I think we must read it as “All”—that is, my song, which included singing of the sorrows of the earth, by centering on love is all “gratulant,” all expressive of pleasure joy and satisfaction. Even though Wordsworth has come a long way from the joys he once had and the hopes he once held, he seems to have accepted God’s chastising rod and finds the world’s woes “All gratulant, if rightly understood.” That sounds to me like a theodicy, a justification of God’s ways to man, albeit in a minor key. In a way, after proclaiming his independence, Wordsworth has come back to Milton.

I would add that the way these passages may hang together is that one can rightly accept that “the sorrows of the earth” are “all gratulant” if one sees them from the perspective provided by those moments outside of time, as defined by words like “the feeling of life endless,” “infinity,” “the sense of God,” and “whatsoe’er is dim or vast in its own being,” or elsewhere, famously, the “intimations of immortality.”

One last, less happy, note: besides acknowledging God’s chastening rod, Wordsworth also admits that his own powers were diminishing, perhaps as an effect of his despondency after John’s death. To the earlier account of the gibbet spot of time, Wordsworth had added in 1804 that “the hiding places of my power / Seem open, I approach, and then they close.” In 1805 he added, more pessimistically, “I see by glimpses now, when age come on / May scarcely see at all” (XI 335-338).

IV

So John’s death affected the ending of The Prelude in many demonstrable ways. I think it affected also the poem in several other ways as well. First of all, the haste with which Wordsworth rushed his poem to a conclusion, as well as his state of mind, may well have caused many of the sections he wrote in 1805 to be not so good as they might have been. The poet himself was dissatisfied when he wrote in MS Z above the page on which he had started what would be Book XI of the 1805 poem: “This whole book wants retouching [;] the subject is not sufficiently brought out.”[37] After he had finished the whole poem, he told Beaumont of a “sense that which I had of this Poem being so far below what I seem’d capable of executing, [that it] depressed me much.”[38]

Perhaps Wordsworth saw what I think I see. When I read these last three books of The Prelude, I find they are often repetitious. He goes over several times what I will call his Bad Years (those between returning to England and his stay at Racedown, roughly late 1792 into 1796). Dorothy and Coleridge are thanked repeatedly. And he obfuscates. Now what Wordsworth is talking about is difficult, but many times ideas and details could have been made more clear without losing the elevation of style he needed for his poem. Unraveling the poet’s syntax can be maddening; even his editors occasionally seem defeated.[39]

If Wordsworth’s sentences are difficult, so is his chronology. Few readers object to his placing the climactic passage about spots of time (referring to events of 1775 and 1783) after his account of the French Revolution (1790-1792). He orders ideas, not events. But many readers find the story of Wordsworth’s life confusing. We are not sure when the story ends. The last time the story seemed progressing in an orderly way is when Wordsworth hears of Robespierre’s death in August, 1794. As the poem draws to a close, the poet admits he is conscious that after that, “where I lived, and how, / Hath no longer been scrupulously marked” (XIII 336-337). Until he was reunited with Dorothy, he spent three years leading “an undomestic wanderer’s life. / London chiefly was my home” (343-344), though he traveled elsewhere. Finally, toward the end of Book XIII, Wordsworth refers to “The Period which our story now has reached” (223), which the Norton editors gloss here as 1796-1797 and later as 1796-1798.[40] Perhaps if he had had the time, Wordsworth could have made the chronology of his poem more clear.

V

Earlier on, I enjoyed speculating on what Wordsworth might have included in The Prelude if he were not hurrying it to a close. I would like to conclude with a few more speculations that ask “what if?” They may be fanciful, but I think they point at the nature of the ending of this poem.

Perhaps if John had not died, Wordsworth might have retold and improved upon the story of his Bad Years. We know that from late in 1792 until well into 1796-97, Wordsworth suffered from a mental state that made him discontented and unhappy, and that in The Prelude he celebrated his escape from his Bad Years and the restoration of his former self.

Before we look at these years, we must look back to Book X, when Wordsworth was still in France. Wordsworth’s troubles began when he entered the adult world, the world of adult love with Annette Vallon and real politics with Michael Beaupuy. Annette will not concern us here; Beaupuy introduced him to the ideals of the French Revolution (Equality, Liberty, Fraternity). Although Wordsworth suffered because ideal social conditions did not yet exist, he was convinced the ideals would be realized soon. Likewise, he tells us (X 666) that his idealized view of human nature had yet to be disproved. After he returned to England late in 1792, his pain increased. His hopes for his own country were dashed when France and England declared war (X 233-235). His hopes for France were similarly dashed when after Robespierre’s death the ideals of the Revolution were not realized (X 535).

Now begin the Bad Years—just when the chronology becomes murky. In Books X and XI, the poet goes over similar materials several times in different words that do not communicate distinctly different ideas. I will try to summarize what I think Wordsworth tells us about his Bad Years: I was not totally responsible for the way I began to think. Times were bad; Britain’s opposition to the French and the cause of Liberty “soured and corrupted upwards to the source / My sentiments” (X 761-762). I was “goaded” (X 863) by the “over-pressure of the times / And their disastrous issues” (XI 46-47). Moreover, I was not totally responsible in that I did not originate the ideas that took over my mind. “Wild theories” were about (X 774), and for want of any better ones, I took them up (X 790). I welcomed (X 809,) the chief of these, Godwinism [though it is never named]. It “promised to abstract the hopes of man / Out of his feelings” and base them on reason—not every-day reason (XI 124), but a different reason, a reason based on “the freedom of the individual mind” (X 825), my “independent intellect” (X 828), to question everything, to lay bare man’s frailties (X 820), to doubt the achievements of heroes and sages (XI 60-66) and even poets (XI 67-73). I demanded mathematical proof and evidence for all assertions (X 903-904). “I took the knife in hand, / And, stopping not at parts less sensitive, / Endeavored with my best of skill to probe / The living body of society / Even to the heart. I pushed without remorse / My speculations forward, yea, set foot / On Nature’s holiest places” (X 872-878). I dragged “all passions, notions, shapes of faith, / Like culprits to the bar” (X 889-890). I “cut off my heart / from all the sources of her former strength [and] so did I unsoul / As readily by syllogistic words / (Some charm of logic ever within reach) / Those mysteries of passion which have made, / . . . One brotherhood of all the human race” (XI 77-88).

The results of such probings were not happy. I was “endlessly perplexed” (X 893); “I lost / All feeling of conviction, and, in fine, / Sick, wearied out with contraries, / Yielded up moral questions in despair” (X 897-900). I experienced “unhappiness and guilt / . . . sorrow, disappointment, vexing thoughts, / Confusion of the judgment, zeal decayed-- / And lastly, utter loss of hope itself / And things to hope for” (XI 1-7). I indulged in enjoying superficial, picturesque visual effects, and even may have let myself be free sexually (XI 155-194).

After I sorted all these passages out, I understood what Wordsworth suffered: He had been led to disregard his feelings and beliefs and to question everything and everyone, including the “mysteries of passion” and “holy places” of life—I’d gloss those phrases roughly and inadequately as the mysteries of human love, human sexual love, human brotherhood, and much more. I also looked down this last page in my manuscript and marked the references to passages I had quoted. They went back and forth from Book X to Book XI back to Book X and then back to Book XI again, etc. In short, Wordsworth had told the story of his Bad Years once in 1804 in Book X and then once again in Book XI in 1805.

If Wordsworth had had the time and the will in April and May of 1805, perhaps he could have conflated his two versions. More importantly, he might have rendered these experiences in more memorable poetry. Wordsworth was aware that he had not dramatized the events of his later life. He tells Coleridge that

Time may come
When some dramatic story may afford
Shapes livelier to convey to thee, my friend, What then I learned . . .

(X 878-882)

Wordsworth knew that he had not told his later story with the same force as before. Remember the immediacy of the passage in which Wordsworth and Beaupuy meet “ a hunger-bitten girl / Who crept along fitting her languid self / Unto a heifer’s motion.” Beaupuy then says to the poet “`Tis against that / which we are fighting’” (IX 512-520). Remember too the entire spot of time (too long to quote here) when Wordsworth, walking on the Leven sands, is told “Robespierre was dead” (X 535), and then is energized both by his hopes and his memories of another experience on that very spot about ten years before. These are moments which are in the same league as stealing the boat, skating on Esthwaite, walking home early in the morning after a dance, or crossing the Alps—the unforgettable moments that produced the great poetry Wordsworth is known for. He might have done the same with his Bad Years.

G. Wilson Knight once complained that what kept Wordsworth from equaling Shakespeare’s place among English poets was that Wordsworth did not deal with sex.[41] I’m not sure if any poet could have incorporated sexual ecstasy into the kind of ultimate experience Wordsworth most valued. But I wish Wordsworth could have dramatized his Bad Years, and sex played a part in them. When he had a hero going through a crisis somewhat like Wordsworth’s, Shakespeare dramatized the experience (and pardon my conflation) by having his hero say:

How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
. . . . That it should come to this!
But two months dead, nay, not so much, not two.
So excellent a king, . . . so loving to my mother
That he might not beteem the winds of heaven
Visit her face too roughly. . . . Why, she would hang on him
As if increase of appetite had grown
By what it fed on. . . . [But now] to post
With such dexterity to incestious sheets . . . .

(Hamlet 1.2.134-157)[42]

Here is setting foot in “Nature’s holiest places”—your mother’s bed--with a vengeance, not in the abstract, but with jarring particulars.

To sum up, Wordsworth’s practice in The Prelude, well into Book X, was to render his important youthful experiences in precise evocative local detail. The result is great poetry. But after the death of Robespierre to the end of the poem--that is, once the Bad Years begin--the poet changes his tactics. The Wordsworth of 1805 presents in a somewhat garbled fashion what the young Wordsworth thought in general, but the lines do not associate the younger man’s experiences with any particular place, in the manner of his earlier “spots of time,” or in the manner of all his family when they named places for each other. The lines of 1805 do not render dramatically what the younger Wordsworth was experiencing. What exactly was going though the younger Wordsworth’s mind when he was setting foot “on Nature’s Holiest places”? When he cut his heart off from the mysteries of passion? If the Wordsworth of 1805 in full possession of his power had written about these experiences, what poetry would we have!

I wish that the Wordsworth of 1805 had rendered the younger Wordsworth’s Bad Years with the immediacy of the best passages of Books I through X. Or to put it another way, I wish that the understandable and wholly human grief and depression that Wordsworth suffered after John’s death had not kept him from developing the closing books his poem to the fullest.

So Wordsworth is not Shakespeare. But, to end on a more positive note, Wordsworth shows that even after John’s death he can write great poetry—a kind that is as wonderful as the Bard’s, but one that shows a more modern sensibility. Later on in 1805, he wrote “The Solitary Reaper,” which evokes a distant real place with real sounds: the voice of the Reaper singing and the voice of a cuckoo-bird “Breaking the silence of the seas / Among the farthest Hebrides”—a poem which shows a modern sense of the drama of real Scottish history, when the girl’s “plaintive numbers [may] flow / For old unhappy, far-off things, / And battles long-ago.”[43] In its depth of sympathy, this poem reflects the deepening of Wordsworth’s own heart after John’s death. In its profound calm, “The Solitary Reaper” shows that by November two hundred years ago the poet had learned to live with his grief.