Responsibility in Verse: William Wordsworth and J.H. Prynne
p. 231-249
Résumé
This essay argues that ‘responsibility’ is a state and a fact that pertains to aesthetics as much as to ethics; below I try to show how this proposition is manifest and conceptualised by Wordsworth as a kind of ‘owing’ and, much later, by J. H. Prynne as a variety of ‘debt.’ Such ‘responsibility’ is explicitly concerned with questions of perceptual care. I take Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’ and Prynne’s early (aptly titled) poem ‘Responsibilities’ as my primary exhibits. I suggest towards the end that Wordsworth’s poetry is partly constitutive of Prynne’s natural scene, and that Prynne’s re-engagement with certain patently Wordsworthian questions might at once challenge and model a ‘responsibility in verse.’
Texte intégral
1In ‘Symbolic Landscape in Wordsworth and Yeats,’1 Paul de Man writes that ‘[i] n the case of a “natural” romantic like Wordsworth, who urged “at all times, to look steadily at the subject”, one might be tempted to think of the poet as a painter, whose language merely records and imitates sense perceptions’ (125–126). Submitting to such temptation (not to mention supposing painting is itself an act consisting of mere recordings) would be wrong because, de Man continues, his ‘urge to keep the eye on the subject is only Wordsworth’s starting point, and that, perhaps more than any poet, he appreciates the complexity of what happens when eye and object meet’ (126). De Man defines Wordsworth’s visual encounters with the phenomenal world as the ‘delicate interplay between perception and imagination,’ which are nowhere ‘more intricate than in the representation of a natural scene’ (126). Against de Man’s quite positive account, Wordsworth himself frequently conceptualises such ‘visual encounters’ more negatively. Though the concept of imagination is to Wordsworth’s poetry and our subsequent interpretations of his work both central and problematic, it is found usually to be an unambiguously constructive superaddition to the plainer act of simple looking (whatever that might be). The deficits and distortions that emerge from a persistent discrepancy between the things perceived and their representation, in which the poet throws ‘over them a certain colouring of imagination’2 are easily set aside. Below, I attempt to identify and then think through some of the ‘negative’ aspects of imaginative representation in Wordsworth.
2It is hard not to hear a note of commendation in de Man’s phrase ‘delicate interplay’: whatever this interplay consists in, it is somehow successfully resolved: ‘Wordsworth’s landscape of tranquillity symbolizes in fact the complex act of pure vision’ (133), de Man concludes. Recently Simon Jarvis has critiqued an associated suggestion, made by de Man in ‘Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant,’3 that there is something like a ‘Wordsworthian economy,’ which Jarvis describes as a ‘continual and profitable exchange between mind and nature’;4 ultimately Jarvis finds this notion only partly applicable, and instead contends that ‘Wordsworth’s poetry often pushes against this inherited ontological opposition’ as well as against the implicit idea that he was concerned with overcoming it (Jarvis 76). The extent to which Wordsworth regularly bemoans his poetic failings and states an inability, despite his literary accomplishments, to attain a proficiency adequate to the gifts nature has bestowed upon him indicates this curious imbalance is something essential to the poet’s own understanding of the poetic vocation per se. Many of Wordsworth’s most poignant auto-referential ruminations on writing poems construe the poetic act as loss, confusion or failure rather than as gain, achieved clarity or ‘self-presented truth.’ Such utterances support Jarvis’s contention that Wordsworth often does not overcome the ‘ontological opposition’ between mind and nature.
3In Book I of The Prelude, perhaps the nineteenth century’s rumination on the poetic vocation par excellence, Wordsworth writes of his yearning towards the composition of ‘some philosophic Song/ Of Truth that cherishes our daily life’ but admits a lack of ‘skill to part/ That vague longing.’ As Derek Attridge notes, ‘calculating, apportioning and satisfying all responsibilities [would mean] an end to responsibility as such.’5 Wordsworth remains responsible to the natural scene before him insofar as he cannot find in himself adequate responsiveness. Indeed, Wordsworth continues:
This is my lot; for either still I find
Some imperfection in the chosen theme,
Or see of absolute accomplishment [265]
Much wanting, so much wanting, in myself,
That I recoil and droop, and seek repose
In listlessness from vain perplexity,
Unprofitably travelling towards the grave,
Like a false steward who hath much received [270]
And renders nothing back. (381)
4In The Ethics of Romanticism Laurence S. Lockridge notes that there are many passages like this one in The Prelude, i.e., that variously treat nature as ‘giver’ and poet as ‘receiver’ (239). This arrangement was for Wordsworth, in other words, a constant cause for concern and contemplation. Such mono-directional transmissions, inducing the poet to admit an incapacity to be worthily in possession of nature’s gifts, leaves Wordsworth owing what he cannot repay. ‘False steward’ names this condition rather well since it implies that stewardship is itself inherently flawed, and, such impropriety notwithstanding, that this particular poet ineffectively executes the various duties required of him. The economy of this arrangement, which leaves the poet in a position of permanent receipt, is unprofitable because what nature gives are not gains in any usual sense. The more nature gives, the more the poet feels the weight of responsibility for what has been given and received. Nature makes Wordsworth responsible because it throws up injunctions to respond in ways that he regularly finds he cannot.
5Lockridge also points out that Wordsworth construes nature’s gifts in two distinct ways: emotion and calmness. He cites in support of this the opening lines of Book XII of The Prelude, wherein Wordsworth writes:
From Nature doth emotion come, and moods
Of calmness equally are Nature’s gift,
This is her glory; these two attributes
Are sister horns that constitute her strength;
This twofold influence is the sun and shower [5]
Of all her bounties, both in origin
And end alike benignant. Hence it is,
That Genius, which exists by interchange
Of peace and excitation, finds in her
His best and purest Friend, from her receives [10]
That energy by which he seeks the truth,
Is roused, aspires, grasps, struggles, wishes, craves,
From her that happy stillness of the mind
Which fits him to receive it, when unsought. (569)
6‘Emotion’ (gift one) and ‘calmness’ (gift two) are each constitutive of the two elements of Wordsworth’s extremely famous and by now rather exhausted comments on poetry itself, i.e., that poetry originates in ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity,’ first made in the 1800 preface to Lyrical Ballads. After Wordsworth describes how emotion is contemplated in a state of mental tranquillity until this tranquillity, germane to the contemplation of emotion, actually transforms into a species of this original emotion, he makes the following, less-quoted statement:
if Nature be thus cautious in preserving in a state of enjoyment a being thus employed, the Poet ought to profit by the lesson held forth to him, and ought especially to take care, that, whatever passions he communicates to his Reader, those passions, if his Reader’s mind be sound and vigorous, should always be accompanied with an overbalance of pleasure.6
(611)
7The modal verb ought, as in the poet ‘ought to profit by the lesson held forth to him,’ signals at once a poetic duty or obligation and, though perhaps only by tacit implication, an admission that he has not yet complied with this directive. Words like ‘lesson,’ ‘should’ and ‘care’ press home the ethical nature of the poetic enterprise, while those like ‘employed,’ ‘profit’ and ‘overbalance’ point to the economic analogies by which these responsibilities are tacitly conceptualised.7
8 The pre-eminent poem in the tradition of loco-descriptive poetry is Wordsworth’s ‘Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey on revisiting the banks of the Wye during a tour, July 13, 1798.’ As the full title of the poem suggests, Wordsworth wrote this piece upon the occasion of his revisiting a site about which he retains memories that have, we are told in the poem, provided him with moral and psychological succour.8 But a particularly salient feature of Wordsworth’s poem—and one which I find distinctly related to the question of ‘responsibility’ as a species of perceptual engagement—is how relatively little he properly perceives. Distance and obscurity are, in a sense, conditions central to the poem’s perceptual action, as well as elements in its emotional drama, best expressed in Wordsworth’s address to his sister, which comes toward the end of the poem:
Nor, perchance,
If I should be, where I no more can hear
Thy voice, nor catch from thy wild eyes these gleams
Of past existence, wilt thou then forget
That on the banks of this delightful stream
We stood together. (135)
9In ‘Tintern Abbey,’ the prevalence of diminished perception is striking not least because it is a poem ostensibly occasioned by the contemplative observation of natural surroundings.9 Wordsworth opens the poem by reporting a mere ‘murmur,’ that is, an indistinct sound heard at a distance verging on the inaudible; great distance also inflects the beholding of ‘lofty cliffs.’ Oddly, it is the lofty cliffs themselves which actively impress unattributed ‘thoughts’ of a correspondently ‘more deep seclusion’ on the ‘wild secluded scene.’ The poet’s diminished agency here is corroborated further by the idiosyncratic use of the semi-colon after ‘seclusion,’ making the subsequent, quasi independent clause ‘and connect / The landscape with the quiet of the sky’ strangely without a human subject. Though not quite silent, the sky is as barely audible as the river. Here is the first verse paragraph in full:
Five years have passed; five summers, with the length
Of five long winters! and again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
With a sweet inland murmur.—Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs, [5]
Which on a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect
The landscape with the quiet of the sky.
The day is come when I again repose
Here, under this dark sycamore, and view [10]
These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard-tufts,
Which, at this season, with their unripe fruits,
Among the woods and copses lose themselves,
Nor, with their green and simple hue, disturb
The wild green landscape. Once again I see [15]
These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines
Of sportive wood run wild; these pastoral farms
Green to the very door; and wreathes of smoke
Sent up, in silence, from among the trees,
With some uncertain notice, as might seem, [20]
Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods,
Or of some hermit’s cave, where by his fire
The hermit sits alone. (131–132)
10As though reactive to or cognisant of a lack of detail reporting the natural scene, the syntax enacts a kind of corrective longing for what is so partially described, as though demonstrating a desire for a fuller account. This first verse paragraph is composed of four complete sentences, each progressively longer than the one that came before it so that the paragraph as a whole develops according to a logic speculative extension. As such, Wordsworth goes out of his way not to see anything in the phenomenal world definitively. Take, for instance, the lines ‘Once again I see / These hedgerows....’ This seemingly straightforward declaration is immediately qualified this with the re-description ‘hardly hedgerows’; and then by the even further qualification ‘little lines / Of sportive wood run wild.’ Its increasingly extended depictions notwithstanding, this passage’s progressively longer descriptions admit to less rather than more detailed views. In the equation ‘hedgerows’ = ‘hardly hedgerows’ = ‘little lines of sportive wood,’ detail belongs not so much to the scene but to a sense of uncertainty and conjecture germane to Wordsworth’s act of looking so that what is not clearly seen comes to constitute this part of the poem.10 In the passage we have before us, there are other more conspicuous instances of this special, poem-making negativity: ‘the woods and copses lose themselves’; smoke, properly silent, rises from the distant trees ‘[w] ith some uncertain notice, as might seem’; the ‘hermit’ and ‘vagrant dwellers’ are imaginative conjectures not actually seen but based on the indexical sign of ‘smoke.’ Here, the phrase/image ‘vagrant dwellers,’ historically amongst the most important and contentious of observations in the whole first verse paragraph, shows how spatial disconnections between the speaker and what he sees make for problematic disagreements between what is observed and what is represented. Evidence for this exists in the fact that the dwellers the poet cannot see are concretised by a descriptive adjective that distorts its noun. A vagrant dweller is an inherently contradictory entity: vagrancy is not dwelling.
11It is important, I think, to consider more carefully what might have been intended by what Wordsworth reveals and what he occludes. There is a fairly robust historicist tradition that seeks to criticise Wordsworth for not seeing. Marjorie Levinson famously argued that the poem directs ‘a continuous energy toward the nonrepresentation of objects and points of view.’11 Jerome McGann picks up on Levinson’s thesis to argue that Romantic texts in general (and Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’ most evidently) ‘occlude and disguise their own involvement in a certain nexus of historical relations.’12 Behind both arguments lies Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City which seeks, amongst much else, to uncover ‘social reasons’ for such ‘way [s] of seeing.’13 I do not really wish to dispute these criticisms, which indict Wordsworth as being in many respects evasive, but at the same time I would concur with Kenneth R. Johnston who, whilst alert to troublesome omissions in the poem (the ‘actual’ scene before the poet would have likely included views of wide-spread industrialisation and human dispossession), nevertheless suggests that ‘Tintern Abbey’ is equally legible as an attempt to ‘establish the connection between landscape viewing and social responsibility.’14 What Levinson calls the poem’s ‘patterns of displacement’ (56) and what McGann calls its ‘act [s] of replacement’ (87) can be read as failures of a certain accuracy of perception, ones determined by the poet’s accommodating his verse to dominant social structures. That said, this averted concentration also tacitly admits the invariable failure of such transcendent visions, however strenuously Wordsworth asserts them; furthermore, the various distortions, partial views and general uncertainty of the poem can be read as signatures of the poet’s inability to properly repress the human suffering he must have known was there and yet does not actually articulate. What the poem does not mention is not entirely excluded. Or, as Anthony Easthope puts it, ‘when reading Wordsworth’s poetry we should remember that its rhetoric of pathos always aims to recuperate, to make good the loss it admits.’ Easthope calls this process ‘Wordsworthian mourning’; it ‘originates in the failure of his social hopes.’15
12The poem contains, of course, other kinds of displacement as well. Foremost amongst them are the various shifting temporal frames that characterise the poem’s diachronous movement. In these shifts we find Wordsworth again attempting to articulate nature’s capacity for moral amelioration conceptualised using a language of debt which also, at the same time, suggests the worth of what was not seen. In the second verse paragraph of ‘Tintern Abbey’ Wordsworth writes, ruminating on his long absence from the scene he again beholds, that
Though absent long,
These forms of beauty have not been to be me,
As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye: [25]
But oft, in lonely rooms, and mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart,
And passing even into my purer mind [30]
With tranquil restoration: —feelings too
Of unremembered pleasure; such, perhaps,
As may have had no trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man’s life;
His little, nameless, unremembered acts [35]
Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust,
To them I have owed another gift,
Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight [40]
Of all this unintelligible world
Is lightened. (132; emphases added)
13Debt is incurred by a prior perception of forms, which led, so Wordsworth claims, to a quite unambiguously ethical demeanour, inducing ‘little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love.’ Though this outcome was quite positive, the poet here apportions value to unremembered pleasures and mysterious states of levity lifting up weighty unintelligibility. The extent to which these perceptual-ethical debts remains outstanding is registered in the diction Wordsworth chooses to express them. The whole passage is loaded with negation and doubt: ‘beauteous forms have not been’; they gave respite not always but ‘oft’; pleasurable feelings were ‘unremembered’ as were the acts of kindness and of love; ‘perhaps’ they may have had ‘no trivial influence,’ but that remains unclear; ‘little’ is diminutive and ‘nameless’ uses a subtractive suffix form; “Nor less” does the speaker ‘trust’ that he ‘owes’; the ‘weary weight’ of the ‘unintelligible’ world was only ‘lightened’ not alleviated. Whatever benefits the speaker’s claims are tempered by tentative circumspection.
14In the fourth verse paragraph, Wordsworth describes the present loss of his youthful capacity for natural observation. Announcing that now he ‘cannot paint / What then I was’ he proceeds to speak about
the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colours and their forms, were then to me
An appetite: a feeling and a love,
That had no need of a remoter charm,
By thought supplied, or any interest
Unborrowed from the eye. (133)
15We are, for better or worse, brought squarely back to the idea that natural observation is akin to owing a debt. Wordsworth, unable to recover these riches, nevertheless owes them. That said, an inability to properly represent his younger self’s appreciation of the natural world is itself only partly genuine, since the purpose of the passage is in fact precisely to represent his former self in which an important claim for an independence from the mature poet’s own responsibilities is made. Yet the idea of interest ‘unborrowed’ from the eye states a kind of innocence while quietly admitting that even the ‘pure’ perception of youth—during which time the meddling intellect capable of misshaping the beauteous forms of things is still developing—does nevertheless still function by ‘borrowing.’
16‘Tintern Abbey’ is a poem most interesting for specifically—and here I agree with Levinson et alia—what the poet cannot see. ‘The dark sycamore’ from which the speaker assumes a vantage is not in all likelihood either upon an eminence or right along the valley floor, though quite possibly he is proximate to both. Probably Wordsworth is only part-way up, somewhere in an indeterminate middle distance. This bears directly upon the poet’s problematic conjectures about the ‘vagrant dwellers’ and ‘hermit’ Levinson and McGann find so ideologically suspect. On the face of, it Wordsworth’s exalted position facilitates a ‘reading’ of the landscape consistent with a kind of bad egotistical idealism, one which presumes a connection where there might be grounds for none, yet this strikes me as precisely Wordsworth’s point. In this respect the word ‘seem’ at the end of line 20 takes on a crucial relevance, meaning both a sense impression of a particular quality and a tentative description of one’s thoughts. Wordsworth’s view is knowingly incomplete. He explicitly admits the sufficient partiality of his view. The extent to which the word ‘seem’ is a term of central importance to the Wordsworthian lexicon has not yet been properly acknowledged; it operates right at the threshold between feeling and thinking, perception and representation.
17The scope of this paper does not afford me enough space or time to introduce J. H. Prynne (b. 1936) with anything like the proper treatment his rich and fascinating oeuvre deserves. Though one would hardly find any of Prynne’s poetry to be like Wordsworth’s in the sense his work shares with its illustrious precursor’s superficial similarities, Prynne does work through some recognisably Wordsworthian problems of perceptual care, which are themselves conceptualised in comparable ways. The time around which Prynne wrote the poems that would comprise his first book of published poetry, Force of Circumstance,16 was a highly transitional one for him; his significant interest in new American poetry of the 1950s and 1960s was, I want to suggest, in part an expression of an anxiety over Wordsworth’s influence. In a 31 December 1962 letter to the American poet Ed Dorn, Prynne calls a halt to some preliminary musings on a Gary Snyder poem because
I have another lecture to write, on Wordsworth’s Prelude: there is a kind of shattering utterance that you don’t have right behind you, and which is maybe too relevant to be comfortable. Olson is right to go so far afield since at least it leaves the present less cluttered. One can move without treading on someone else’s poem.17
18Here, Wordsworth’s presence being announced as ‘right behind you’ nicely summarises his relation to Prynne: the former applies to the latter an immediate but not necessarily obvious pressure. In a subsequent letter to Dorn, Prynne writes: ‘if you want to know who we are, just read Wordsworth’s Prelude.’18 Wordsworth’s poetry, like the countryside it often (problematically) represented, is for better or worse part of Prynne’s natural scene; for Prynne, looking upon it invariably demands the ‘ethical attention and self-consciousness’ modelled in so many of Wordsworth’s own early poems.19 One aspect that characterises Force of Circumstance is the way in which looking at nature is also always a distinctly poetic enterprise.
19Prynne’s early poetry is everywhere concerned with investigating the possible responsibilities involved in loco-descriptive observation, so much so that we might also reasonably characterise many of Prynne’s first-published poems as almost compulsively concerned with the complex act of poetic perception. A statement like this one, in a poem from Force of Circumstance called ‘Even in Broad Daylight,’ shows a poet committed to the questioning of habituated observation:
But if we cannot read, still we can see
What stands before our image-coining eyes, [10]
Enter the stillness, let the sunlight play
With close ascription and no wild surmise.
Enclosed within the tree’s own equipoise
We watch it furl the limits of the day.
Distinct it stands, and this we cannot use; [10]
It cannot mean the thing it cannot say. (31)
20Though nothing in the stanzas quoted here necessarily suggests that the antecedent of ‘it’ is ‘the poem,’ nothing makes this ascription impossible either. It is by virtue of that ambiguity that Prynne does here as elsewhere moot the idea that activities like looking out over a scene and writing a poem are largely inter-engaged. In Force of Circumstance, whenever Prynne writes about looking at trees he is also usually meditating on the difficulties latent in perception and (poetic) language. In a 26 November 1961 letter to Charles Olson, Prynne writes:
Once the noun is won and the right to the pro-noun earned, the simple declarative sentence becomes kinetically feasible. Not simply the locative gesture, SEE OVER THERE A TREE, but all the implicit passion of I SEE A TREE or EVEN I DO SEE THIS TREE, NOW, FROM WHERE I AM STANDING; the poet has won his first melody, is singing.20
21Though this particular passage is not explicitly about poetic language (itself a dubious enough category anyway), it forms part of a larger critique of Ernest Fenollosa’s The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry. In the poem ‘Before Urbino,’ Prynne makes some of these concerns explicit. He writes:
House next to house; tree next to tree; a wall
Tokens a winding road. The air across
The distant slope is palpable with light,
A clarid flood of silence. The heavy fruit
That weighs upon the olives can’t be seen [5]
But must be there. There must be people too
Perhaps beneath the olives in the shade. (3)
22The scene construed is reminiscent of Wordsworth’s description of the landscape before him in ‘Tintern Abbey’ in all but locale. (I wonder, in this respect, if Prynne is here actually looking at a painting). At any rate, like Wordsworth, Prynne makes a kind of indexical supposition, qualified only by ‘perhaps,’ itself a hesitation correlate to Wordsworth’s penchant for ‘perchance.’ What is more, Prynne thinks about the scene before him in terms of its legibility, so that for him scenes like poems are things to be read (though in this poem, Wordsworth’s ‘little lines of sportive wood’ has become ‘lines’ we can read between):
Such tokens are a ready currency: [10]
And we are thus too liberal in their use
Who read a landscape so between the lines,
And take what is before us as a sign
Of what is mere conjecture. (3)
23This passage, I want to suggest, might feasibly be taken as a direct riposte to Wordsworth’s own imaginative tendencies (though the poem as a whole does not adopt this position so much as ventriloquise its complaint). Prynne is worried as Wordsworth seems not to be about taking signs as conjecturally significant of things which remain obscure (as in the lonely hermit of ‘Tintern Abbey’).
24In another poem, ‘To Petrarch, On Mount Ventoux,’ Prynne takes aim at what could be described as the commodification of the prospect view, an endless promise of ‘ultimate perfection.’Positioned like Wordsworth is in ‘Tintern Abbey,’ i.e., not properly standing atop an eminence but rather mid-way up the side of one,
from here
The prospect though immense is clearly partial,
Spoiled by those trees, and only just a hint
Of what’s to come, once we are higher up, [10]
Or further on; or anyway, not here.
Yonder it lies, that matchless colour print
For which within our minds we bear the frame,
And which, debauched with wonder, we assign
To what we shall not see. [15] (8)
25Though a phase like ‘debauched with wonder’ might be in part an implicit attack on Wordsworth’s highly speculative assertions, especially in ‘Tintern Abbey’ where value is assigned to what is not seen (a consequence of its occlusion expressed as debt), the poem as a whole prefers to criticise the impulse for a ‘complete’ prospect, which ‘Tintern Abbey’ also refuses; ‘To Petrarch’ concludes by apostrophising the pines that obscure the picture-postcard prospect—‘true we do you wrong / To treat you so; only the lowered gaze can give / Can give you life here, who do not amaze’ (8). There is one poem by Prynne, also from Force of Circumstance, which brings the convergence of these considerations into particular focus, all the while taking some trees to be amongst its various test-subjects.
RESPONSIBILITIES
Afterwards a light mist came down over the trees
Though it was still only morning; across the fields
Of glistening turned earth, the single elms
Dissolved into clumps of chromatic outline, and the rooks
Grew distant. The morning dripped in the hedges, where [5]
The grasses sagged with moisture, heavy with bloom;
The elms were grey now, and the rooks were silent,
And it was still morning across the breathing fields.
I could have wished it away, the mist, as iridescence
Is an elusive enhancement that we must look on with care [10]
If the elms are not to be damaged, and the sudden gate
To carry more than it can bear. For the further distance
Is no longer ours, and the vanished horizon no longer
Marks off what exists over there from the willingly possible.
Elms surrender precision and grow trustful; this free confidence [15]
Is precious, and will support a brilliant afternoon. (18)
26Keston Sutherland has recently suggested that ‘the central preoccupation’ of Force of Circumstance might be summarised as follows: ‘if the imagination is truly proof of the outside world’s existence, how then ought we to perceive the world which imagination can augment for us?’21 He continues: ‘in Force of Circumstance, our responsibility to language is defined for us by a conceptually prior responsibility to perception and to the perceptibility of the world defended against our impulse to make it into a sign’ (121). A poetry working responsibly under such pressure will, I believe, temperamentally refuse to make clear distinctions between the objects in the scene it presents as the shifting movements of attention and intention, which, enmeshed in the scene, become what the poem ‘says.’22 Specifically, our responsibility to the natural scene is here to resist un-interrogated shifts between what it is we perceive, and what it is we conceive to say as a result or in consequence of looking. The poem’s central statement comes in the second line of the second stanza: ‘we must look on with care.’ Though this poem by no means offers any explicit schedule for careful looking, it is everywhere concerned with doing so.
27There is, for example, an implicit but consistent consideration of the interaction between what is merely there, and how what is there is conceived and reported. The superabundance of descriptive terms gives less detail than one might initially suppose, making their usefulness at once uncertain and questionable: the mist is ‘light’; fields glisten; earth is ‘turned’; elms are ‘single’; their outline ‘chromatic’; rooks are ‘distant’; morning ‘drips’; grasses sag; their blooms are ‘heavy’; elms then become ‘grey’ and rooks ‘silent’ as fields breathe; morning is ‘still’ adverbially, as in continuing to be and as in motionless. But what strike me as vital about this first stanza are the recurrent and shifting appearances of things. ‘Trees’ feature once and ‘elms’ twice; the ‘fields’ which are also the ‘earth’ is mentioned three times; the ‘rooks’ recur twice; ‘morning’ is triply-mentioned. These recurrences—curiously numerous—are temporally framed by past tense verbs, so that the scene takes place in the implied speaker’s recollection. These recurrent and continual rearticulations of the scene suggests that we as readers are not witnessing a speaker beholding a natural scene, but rather one beholden to it.
28Even the setting of the poem in a ‘breathing field’ is a self-conscious if oblique reference to poetry as such, since by the early 1960s Prynne was deeply conversant in Charles Olson’s poetics, in particular his 1950 essay ‘Projective Verse,’23 in which Olson argues for ‘composition by field’ (239). In late 1961, Prynne writes to Olson for the first time, having by his own account been profoundly impressed by the latter’s poetry. Prynne writes in his introductory paragraph:
reading your various things was like reading for the first time the back of my own hand. IN COLD HELL, IN THICKET speaks for me out of the fast centre, I know the traceries and knots and topology of the imagination, the arching spaces, the instant that flows, the law of outward and object, the care and the use of one’s eyes, I know why they turn as they must, fill out the necessary & musical spaces: you cannot imagine the intense excitements I have been drawn to—RECOGNITION.24
29In a subsequent letter, Prynne hopes for a ‘high and various quality in the verse itself, where readers will have to earn their insights,’ implying an established resistance to what is easily given, and in this particular instance, the pre-furnished explanations of ‘prose theory.’It also indicates a knowing refusal of the natural gift economy Wordsworth felt at once so grateful for and so overwhelmed by. Here also and in consequence are raised larger questions about the concept of the ‘given.’
30In the second stanza of ‘Responsibilities’ we can read a present tense reworking of the first stanza’s past perceptual events, a shift structurally similar to the larger temporal movements of ‘Tintern Abbey.’25 This stanza is where the self-reflexive work of thinking and writing about seeing and meaning is made definite. Another key term appears with due prominence at the end of the first line, namely that ‘elusive enhancement’ Prynne calls ‘iridescence’—which means ‘the glittering or flashing of colours which change according to the position from which they are viewed’ (OED Online). As Prynne later put it, ‘in the great aquarium of language’
the light refracts variously and can bounce by inclinations not previously observed... thus the iconic boundary features declare, by difference and by movement of intense register, shifts of focus that will skim and can turn about on the smallest coin.26
31Iridescence challenges careful looking and careful writing, and tacitly proposes an ethical model as a perceptual problem (the poem is not called ‘Responsibilities’ for nothing). It could be ‘we’ have a responsibility to look at something from multiple vantages, to see it in its different lights. But if so, how can ‘we’ properly and accurately look at something in view to gaining a proper sense of it if the thing that ‘we’ are looking at seems different depending on either where we are, or on what weather conditions happen to intervene (as a descending mist might) between the observer and the thing observed? Furthermore, how could ‘we’ together take up the same vantage? In other words, an ideal of ethical pluralism realised in a multiplicity of vantages actually might be incompatible with an aesthetic ideal of precision and truth achieved through a single, stable and consistently defined subject position.
32The mist itself occasions such problematic iridescence. It is important to sustain the difficulty of the impasse, to keep seeing an enterprise fraught with uncertainty rather than one funded by what Prynne called in ‘Even in Broad Daylight’ ‘our image coining eyes’ (31).27 Otherwise elms, seen from what has been allowed to become a vantage point made familiar through the insufficient care of habituated looking will lose their precision, which Prynne aligns, however counterintuitive it sounds, with mutability rather than stable measures, and ‘grow trustful.’ Is it the firmness of belief inherent in trustful seeing that Prynne has in mind when he talks about ‘damage,’ a letting-become established through inattention to iridescence, so that not wishing away iridescence is a means also of wanting a kind of perceptual indeterminacy? Could it be that ‘care’ is a means towards preserving the mutability of appearances rather than a means by which a thing’s ‘true’ nature can be discovered? Maybe. But the injunction to ‘look on with care’ is embedded within a specific semantic and syntactic context, so that it is precisely the elusive enhancement of iridescence that we must look on with care if the elms are not to be damaged. ‘Elusive’ implies a hard-to-find quality, and enhancement its enrichment, but the sentence suggests we must work to find the enhancement of which I am speaking only then to look on it with care. Whatever gains are made by virtue of iridescence are cause for scrupulous concern. Responsibilities thus consist in more than ‘too liberal’ agreements upon a multiplicity of vantages in which each is equally valid or valuable, becoming tokens of perceptual currency too readily exchanged.
33In this respect ‘[i] mage-coining eyes’is a curious phrase that might be somewhat explained if, knowing as we do that the poems of Force of Circumstance were composed by a poet deeply ‘absorbed in continental phenomenology’ (Sutherland 121),28 we look into Heidegger’s Being and Time29 and find that in chapter 58 ‘Being-guilty’is defined ‘in the sense of “owing”’ where ‘One is to give back to the Other something to which the latter has a claim’ (327).30 This ‘Being-guilty’ is like ‘having debts,’ and is ‘a way of Being with Others in the field of concern’ (327). The sense of ‘Being-guilty,’ Heidegger says in a qualification important to my current reflections, ‘also has the signification of “being responsible for” [ “schuld sein an”]—that is, being the cause or author of something, or even being the occasion for something’ (327). ‘Having debts’and ‘having a responsibility for something’can ‘go together and define a kind of behaviour which [Heidegger] will call “making oneself responsible”’ (327).
34For Heidegger, responsibility is a debt that remains outstanding, just as for Prynne, we stay responsible so long as we can keep our eyes from coining images of the world we seek to both perceive and represent. Responsibility, in this sense, is a debt we must not pay. The ongoing failure to do so should have some palpable effects on our behaviour. As Heidegger says of responsibility-as-‘owing,’ it is not necessarily related to possessions, but, instead, ‘can regulate the very manner in which we are with one another publicly’ (327). Again: ‘This kind of lacking is a failure to satisfy some requirement which applies to one’s existent Being with Others’ (328). The quick pronoun shift (itself so casual it almost goes unnoticed) in the second stanza of ‘Responsibilities’ from ‘I’ to ‘we’ is involved in the ethical, public dimensions of the poet’s project: ‘I’could have wished the mist away, but do not, so that ‘we’may be afforded the opportunity to look on it carefully.
35Prynne’s second stanza is dominated by the palpable language of incompletion, partiality and deficit: ‘I could have wished’away the mist (but did not); iridescence is an ‘elusive enhancement’; elms, ideally, are ‘not to be damaged’; the gate remains undamaged only if it does not carry ‘more than it can bear’; ‘further distance’is ‘no longer ours’; the ‘vanished horizon no longer / Marks’; ‘what exists over there’is only ‘willingly possible’; et cetera. There is, I want to suggest, in all this a kind of determined negativity akin to Wordsworth’s own; it exists in Prynne’s poem in the way the speaker means ultimately to refuse the ‘free confidence’that is ‘precious’ and the really memorable afternoon it could provisionally support. The term ‘precious’ itself is a deeply-compromised word meaning both something of great value to be treated carefully and, especially when applied to conduct, an affected concern for certain superficial refinements.
36I think it is at least feasible that Prynne’s reflections on ‘iridescence’ are actually reconsiderations of Wordsworth’s idea that it is the business of the poet to ‘chuse incidents and situations from common life’ (Wordsworth 596) and then to ‘throw over them a certain colouring of the imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual way’ (597). Wordsworth can be said to have called for a poetic iridescence in which, in order to approach due and proper respect for things or other people, the poet needs to reassess his own subject position. This is by no means either a coherent ethical system or a moral disposition (nor is it, upon the evidence of ‘Tintern Abbey,’ one immune to flights of egocentric transcendence), but it seems to me hopeful of laying the groundwork necessary for the emergence of both. It is, perhaps, a particular contribution of Prynne’s own poetic deliberations that we, as readers (or this reader at least) can also go back to Wordsworth and see him from appropriately different vantages. In particular, ‘Tintern Abbey,’ a poem extremely well-known to students and scholars of English literature, can be re-inspected from a Prynnian vantage as a poem retrospectively capable of saying something about the affective structures of our own (possibly damaging) familiarity with it. But even this risks if not sentimentalism then mistaking the elusive enhancement of whatever ‘new light’ Prynne can shed on Wordsworth’s poem as something transparently useful and not also a kind of iridescence that must be looked upon with care or conceived of as a gift that, once given, cannot be returned.
Notes de bas de page
1 Paul de Man, ‘Symbolic Landscape in Wordsworth and Yeats,’ The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984) 125–143.
2 William Wordsworth, ‘Preface to Lyrical Ballads, with Pastoral and Other Poems,’ William Wordsworth: The Major Works, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford and New York: 2000) 595–615. 597. All further citations from Wordsworth refer to this collection. Line numbers of poems are given in the margins; the numerals in parentheses are page references.
3 Paul de Man, ‘Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant,’ Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrej Warminski (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996) 70–90.
4 Simon Jarvis, Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) 76.
5 Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature (New York and London: Routledge, 2004) 137.
6 This quote is taken from the 1802 preface to Lyrical Ballads, which contains all the text of the earlier 1800 preface (with minor revisions), plus some important additions. I am following the normal custom of quoting from this later version, not just because my edition, like many others, foregoes the shorter 1800 preface, but because it is Wordsworth’s most complete single statement on poetry and poetics.
7 I say ‘tacitly’ because unlike Ezra Pound, for example, Wordsworth does not mean for the analogy between writing and economics to be a conspicuous part of his poetics. Nor, actually, are the ‘economic’ inflections of his conceptualisations of the poetic vocation something I wish to pursue beyond very limited bounds, as below.
8 The relevant lines are 50-58, which appear in the pivotal third verse paragraph: ‘If this / Be but a vain belief, yet, oh! how oft, / In darkness, and amid the many shapes / Of joyless day-light; when the fretful stir / Unprofitable, and the fever of the world, / Have hung upon the beatings of my heart, / How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee / O sylvan Wye! Thou wanderer through the woods, / How oft has my spirit turned to thee!’ (133). Note the recurrence of the word ‘unprofitable.’ It is not merely the natural world that the poet cannot profit from.
9 I am taking a cue here from John F. Danby who argues that in large part Wordsworth’s poetry is not predominantly visual. See: John F. Danby, The Simple Wordsworth: Studies in the Poems 1797-1807 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960) 97.
10 For a longer discussion of this brief but quite important passage that includes useful summaries of other critics’ readings—which variously argue for the total accuracy or the complete obfuscation of the scene—see David S. Miall, ‘Locating Wordsworth: “Tintern Abbey” and the Community with Nature,’ Romanticism on the Net 20 (December 2000): n.p. pagination. www.erudit.org/revue/ron/2000/v/n20/005949ar.html. Accessed 18 June 2011.
11 Marjorie Levinson, ‘Insight and oversight: reading “Tintern Abbey”,’ Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) 14–57; 38.
12 Jerome Mcgann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983) 82.
13 Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973) 31.
14 Kenneth R. Johnston, ‘The Politics of “Tintern Abbey”,’ The Wordsworth Circle 14.1 (Winter 1983): 6–14; 9.
15 Anthony Easthope, Wordsworth Now and Then: Romanticism and Contemporary Culture (Buckingham and Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1993) 32.
16 J. H. Prynne, Force of Circumstance and Other Poems (London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1962).
17 J. H. Prynne, ‘Letter to Ed Dorn’ [31 December 1962], Edward Dorn Papers, Archives & Special Collections at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, UConn Libraries.
18 J. H. Prynne, ‘Letter to Ed Dorn’ [6 November 1964], Edward Dorn Papers, Archives & Special Collections at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, UConn Libraries.
19 I borrow this phrase from Robert Pott’s brief review of J. H. Prynne’s Field Notes: The Solitary Reaper and Others (Cambridge: privately printed, 2007). See Robert Potts: ‘Beneath the Surface of Wordsworth,’ The Guardian 15 October 2007, www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2007/oct/15/howtoreadapoem, accessed 19 July 2011. Field Notes is a book-length commentary on Wordsworth’s thirty-two line poem ‘The Solitary Reaper.’ The work is paradigmatic of Prynne’s exhaustive hermeneutic approach, one which finds a complimentarity between the often opposed disciplines of close reading and an historicism comprehensive enough to include insights offered by the latest developments in fields like anthropology, musicology and ethnography. Prynne’s study finds Wordsworth’s poem at once demonstrates an extraordinary care and attention and (as Prynne’s study itself exemplifies) solicits from its readers related species of such vigilant regard. Though this paper focuses on Prynne’s early poetry, his interest in Wordsworth has been consistent. Recently, Prynne wrote a commentary called “‘Tintern Abbey” Once Again’ Glossator 1 (2009): 81–88. And in a published lecture called ‘Mental Ears and Poetic Work,’ Chicago Review 55.1 (Winter 2010): 126–157, he writes of ‘Tintern Abbey’: ‘I have loved this poem deeply, almost since childhood’ (134).
20 J. H. Prynne, ‘Letter to Charles Olson’ [26 November 1961], Charles Olson Research Collection, Archives & Special Collections at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, UConn Libraries.
21 Keston Sutherland, J. H. Prynne and Philology (University of Cambridge: Unpublished PhD Dissertation, 2004) 115.
22 Prynne has always been suspicious of any attempt, however contingent or conceptual, to create usable distinctions between world and word, more suspicious than Wordsworth certainly, who criticised the ‘philosopher’ for fitting ‘things to words’ when he should be fitting ‘words to things.’ See: William Wordsworth, ‘Essay on Morals,’ The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Smyser and J. W. Owen, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarenden Press, 1974) 103. For a later and rather detailed demonstration of Prynne’s suspicions, see his critique of the ‘arbitrariness’ principle of Ferdinand de Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale in Stars, Tigers and the Shape of Words (London: Birkbeck College, 1993), in which he argues against Saussure (and also against John Locke in Essay Concerning Human Understanding) for the possibility of ‘motivated’ signification.
23 Charles Olson, ‘Projective Verse,’ Collected Prose, Ed. Donald Allen and Benjamin Friedlander (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997) 239–249.
24 J. H. Prynne, ‘Letter to Charles Olson’ [4 November 1961], Charles Olson Research Collection, Archives & Special Collections at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, UConn Libraries.
25 Though as R. A. Aubin notes, the ‘here-I-am-again’ feature of this verse is itself a common convention of 18th century topographical poetry. See: R. A. Aubin, Topographical Poetry in XVIII-Century England (New York: MLA, 1936) 238.
26 J. H. Prynne, ‘Afterword,’ Parataxis 7 (Spring 1995): 121–124; 121.
27 There is an implicit criticism here, I think, of Ezra Pound; Pound was as enthusiastic as Prynne is sceptical about possible analogies between poetics and money, particularly gold/coins, which Pound saw as more trustworthy (another of Prynne’s bug-bears) than paper currency. In ‘Canto XCVII’ for instance Pound writes: ‘If a penny of land be a perch / that is grammar / nummulary moving towards prosody.’ See: Ezra Pound, The Cantos (New York: New Directions, 1998) 691.
28 Evidence of this is abundantly clear in letters to Charles Olson and Ed Dorn in the early to mid 1960s. Prynne, for example, quotes from Heidegger’s ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ in his 26 November 1961 letter to Olson, quoted above.
29 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1962).
30 In ‘Quality in that Case as Pressure’ from The White Stones (1969), Prynne seems to be still thinking through the interconnected problems of debt, guilt and responsibility when he writes: ‘The / reciprocation of fault and inversion, / poverty the condition, of which I am so clearly / guilty I can touch the pleasure involved. / For such guilt is the agency of ethical fact: we feel shame at the mild weather too.’ See J. H. Prynne, Poems (Highgreen, Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 2005) 79.
Auteur
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Michael Kindellan
University of Bayreuth
Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence Licence OpenEdition Books. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.
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