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Paul Fry on William Wordsworth ("A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal")
2k Plays10 months ago
Some of the most profound insights I have ever had as a student of poetry occurred in the classroom of Paul Fry, and so this episode really is a dream for me. Paul Fry joins the podcast to talk about William Wordsworth's poem "A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal."
Just an eight-line poem, but it opens for us into some big questions: Where does Wordsworth fit into the history of autobiography and poetry? How should we think of his phrase "spots of time"? Who was "Lucy," the girl who seems to be memorialized in this and a handful of Wordsworth's other poems? What does poetry have to tell us about death? Can it console? Why do we read literature at all, and what does that have to do with the relation between "doing" and "being"?
Paul Fry is William Lampson Professor Emeritus of English at Yale University, where he has taught for many decades. He is the author of several books, most recently Wordsworth and the Poetry of What We Are (Yale Studies in English, 2008) and Theory of Literature (Yale UP, 2012), a book based on his brilliant Yale lecture course, which you can find online (and entirely for free!) here.
As ever, if you're enjoying the podcast, please follow it and leave a rating and review. Share an episode with a friend. And subscribe to my Substack, where you'll get occasional updates on the pod and on my other work.
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Transcript
Introduction of Paul Fry and Discussion Setup
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Close Readings. I'm your host, Kamran Javidizadeh, and it is my great honor and privilege today to have Paul Fry on the podcast.
00:00:12
Speaker
Paul was a professor of mine when I was in graduate school and is someone who has really been formative for me in my ways of thinking about poetry. And so for those reasons, he is someone that I, from the beginning of this podcast run, have been dreaming of having on.
00:00:36
Speaker
I'll say a little bit more about what it was like to be Paul's student back in those days in just a moment. Let me tell you first that the poem that Paul has chosen to discuss with us today is William Wordsworth's poem, which we refer to by its first line, A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal.
00:00:59
Speaker
That poem is often thought of as one of the so-called Lucy poems, and we'll get into all of that, of course, as the conversation goes on. Wordsworth is a poet who is important to me, was important to me,
00:01:19
Speaker
Paul's formative in my way of thinking about Wordsworth. And so when I asked him to come on the podcast, I said, let's do Wordsworth maybe. And I said, how about one of the Lucy poems? And I think it'll be interesting to talk in a moment about why this poem in particular seemed suitable for this occasion. Let me tell you first more about Paul Fry. He's the William Lamson Professor Emeritus of English at Yale University.
00:01:45
Speaker
and the author of several books. The first of those called The Poet's Calling in the English Ode, followed by The Reach of Criticism, Method, and Perception in Literary Theory. A book called William Empson, Profit Against Sacrifice.
00:02:00
Speaker
And then a book that I remember as being important to me in particular in the time when I was in Paul's class, a book called The Defense of Poetry, essays on the occasion of writing. And that book you may remember as one that has come up in an earlier conversation that I had with another of Paul's students, Eric Lindstrom. And actually, just as a brief aside, it occurs to me to note here that Paul Fry
00:02:23
Speaker
is the teacher of at least, I'm probably missing some of these, three guests on the podcast run. So, Anahid Nersesian was a student of Paul's, Eric Lindstrom, and Jehan Ramazani also.
Influence of Fry's Lectures on Javidizadeh
00:02:40
Speaker
Paul was the editor of a critical edition of the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, Coleridge's great ballad
00:02:47
Speaker
And then most recently, well, depending on how we categorize these things, but Paul
00:02:54
Speaker
wrote and published his Wordsworth book, Wordsworth and the Poetry of What We Are. I mean, Wordsworth is in the other books, but here Wordsworth was central, and that came out from Yale Studies in English in 2008. Many of you might know Paul not from his books, but from his brilliant and accessible and so generous, these lectures he gave,
00:03:19
Speaker
as a part of a course at Yale University on literary theory. So if you simply Google Paul Fry introduction to literary theory, you'll find it on the open Yale website, a series of lectures that Paul gave on the history of literary theory.
00:03:35
Speaker
that I have to say, though it wasn't a class. I mean, in fact, I did take that class as an undergraduate, but not from Paul, from someone else. And without naming names, I'll just say, I wish I'd taken it from Paul. It made a lot more sense to me when I listened to those lectures.
00:03:53
Speaker
And I've gone back to them over and over again over the years for my own teaching. My students, were they here right now and able to confirm this, would readily confirm that I'm frequently sending them to Paul's lectures on literary theory because he explains things so beautifully. He's had such a distinguished career that I think it would be foolish for me to try to take measure of its full scope here. But I'll just say that as a scholar of poetry, of romanticism,
00:04:19
Speaker
of literary theory. He's made major contributions to the ways we have of thinking about literature. Paul was not himself a student at Yale, but he's clearly in some sense an heir of the rich history of romanticism and Wordsworth studies at Yale. And perhaps we'll talk some about that critical tradition, that scholarly tradition here today.
00:04:41
Speaker
Like I said, I didn't find myself in his classroom until I was in graduate school, at which point this is true for Yale English students, or at least was in my day. I had read most of Wordsworth more than once by the time I got to Paul's classroom, but it was in his classroom that I found in Wordsworth, and then it seemed really most everywhere I looked, something else, something both familiar and strange. Paul was helping me to see
00:05:11
Speaker
not exactly beneath, but prior to the meaning of poems, something else, something he's called the hum of literature.
00:05:21
Speaker
something he's also called the Ostensive Moment in literature, something that Eric Lindstrom and I talked about with respect to Schuyler's poem, February. And that something is both simpler, radically simpler and more thrilling than what we thought we knew about poetry or what we thought we knew about Wordsworth or about romanticism or
00:05:43
Speaker
In the case of Wordsworth in particular, for instance, what we thought we knew about those moments in Wordsworth's prelude, his long autobiographical epic poem that Wordsworth himself calls Spots of Time, how to think about those moments. Paul forever changed my way of thinking of those moments.
00:06:04
Speaker
I think much of that will come up today.
Wordsworth in the Poetic Tradition
00:06:09
Speaker
But I just want to conclude by saying that one of the things I took away from Paul's seminars, and I took a seminar on Wordsworth and Coleridge with him, and then won the following semester on Byron, Shelley, and Keats. And then the year after that, I was a teaching fellow for Paul in a lecture course on romantic poetry.
00:06:29
Speaker
One of the things I took away from those various classrooms was a new way of thinking about what poetry might have in particular to do with death, or with the state of not being alive, which both proceeds and follows the state of being alive, and maybe is something we carry along with us even while we're alive. And I've returned to those lessons
00:06:57
Speaker
when death has encroached on my life as it does on every life. And, um, and I've been grateful in those moments for having been Paul's student. And I'm especially grateful to have him here today. Paul Fry, welcome to my podcast of all things. How are you? How are you doing today? I'm doing well. Thank you very much for your eloquent, uh, an undeserved introduction.
00:07:26
Speaker
I will proceed to undermine anything your audience might have taken away from those wonderful remarks about me. But I suppose that's the way these things do sometimes go. I suppose so. Already you're hearing the genial Paul Fry that I'm so happy to have on. I should also say to the audience, I don't know if it's audible, but let the record show that your host
00:07:56
Speaker
has finally caught COVID. And so I'm doing all right. But if I cough or if I seem a little under the weather, that's why. I hope it'll come through OK. It might even seem relevant to the kind of conversation we have today. I don't know. Don't worry. He's in Philadelphia. I'm on the Connecticut shoreline. That's right. We are appropriately distanced.
00:08:20
Speaker
Paul, one thing I talked about in the intro was how by the time I got to be your student, I had read Wordsworth over and over again, but it's quite possible. We have all kinds of listeners to this podcast, and I know that I could say to you, well, tell us about who Wordsworth was, and an hour later, the episode would be over.
00:08:42
Speaker
But in brief, Paul, I mean, how would you explain to someone who is, say, interested in contemporary poetry, has heard of Wordsworth, but hasn't really read him, where does he sort of fit into your mental map of the history of, let's say, English poetry? Well, one way to put it is that, and this is not original with me,
00:09:12
Speaker
is that he belongs in a continuum that perhaps takes its origin in Milton, and then perhaps passes through Wordsworth himself as a most significant heir, and then perhaps culminates for the reader interested in more recent poetry in Wallace Stevens, and also in the ways that has served
00:09:40
Speaker
ramifies outward and influences certain other poets like, well, for example, John Ashbury, maybe James Merrill. And so, and you can find, you can find Wordsworth comfortably looking both backward and forward in that tradition. And I have so often during the course of my thinking about Wordsworth found myself simultaneously thinking about Stevens that I would
00:10:10
Speaker
in particular, compare those two authors. Yeah. So that's a really helpful sense of a kind of across time, let's say, a diachronic kind of tradition that Wordsworth belongs to. Can you say in a sentence or two, Paul, what are the terms of affiliation that would lead someone to group those, say, Milton, Wordsworth,
00:10:36
Speaker
Stevens, Ashbury, like what is it about those poets that makes them seem affiliated?
Exploration of Wordsworth's 'Prelude'
00:10:44
Speaker
Well, perhaps I should begin by putting it negatively, at least according to a certain tradition. The critic, roughly contemporary with Wordsworth's name, William Haslett, who is actually a character in one of the two lyrical ballads, he's the figure Matthew, to whom
00:11:05
Speaker
William responds in a couple of companion poems. Haslet grouped Wordsworth with Rousseau as the inheritor of Milton's way of turning everything in the world into a form of himself. In other words, Haslet imputed to those figures a kind of monstrous subjectivity
00:11:36
Speaker
And Hazlitt's disciple, John Keats, the poet, in one of his letters then spoke of the words worth in or egotistical sublime. Attempting by that means to summarize what Hazlitt had been saying in his broader argument about literary history. He contrasted these writers with Shakespeare whom he took to be impersonal, self-effacing,
00:12:06
Speaker
constantly embedded in the characters of his imagination and not in his own imagination. Now, I don't agree with that. It sounded compelling.
00:12:24
Speaker
Well, to a certain extent, I agree with it about Milton without its diminishing my admiration of Milton and the slightest. But I don't agree with it about Wordsworth because what I see his project aiming toward, and it's the project of the prelude, which is a monstrous, huge autobiographical poem that is usually the first thing that draws the ire of people who don't like subjectivity and literature.
00:12:53
Speaker
is not the suffusing everything with one's own self, but the disappearance of oneself into everything, the identification of those experiences in consciousness in which the self is least self-conscious, least prominent,
00:13:22
Speaker
and above all least argumentative and assertive. And I think that we'll see the way that works in Slumber Did My Spirits Heal. I think one can go anywhere in Wordsworth and find it. And so I see
00:13:39
Speaker
Wordsworth, and this is, by the way, not at all true of his personality. He was a person with whom conversation was considered to be impossible. It was just, it wasn't like Coleridge whose monologues were simply mesmerizing and you got, you know, were just overwhelmed by them. But Wordsworth would just talk on constantly pronouncing opinions about everything and nobody could really get a word in edgewise.
00:14:07
Speaker
And it was found quite irritating. People typically didn't like Wordsworth. I think this is what contributed, because Hazlitt was one of these people who was browbeaten by him. I think this is what contributed to Hazlitt's opinion. But I do not find that tendency actually at work in Wordsworth's poetry.
00:14:30
Speaker
the dynamic you've described, it's so interesting Paul, and I know this is, sorry, a figure that is meaningful to you in perhaps other contexts as well because I can remember you using this phrase. There's a kind of duck rabbit effect or something in the, in other words, the kind of optical illusion where you look at the picture one way and you see the figure, you look at it the other way, you see the ground.
00:14:54
Speaker
I take your point that Wordsworth's personality may have led to this foundational misreading of his poetry. This is, after all, a poet who wrote an epic
00:15:09
Speaker
whose subject was not the founding of a city or the fall from Eden or whatever, but instead what, the growth of a poet's mind, meaning his own. So it's an easy misreading to have. Partly meaning his own. That's one of the equivocal ways of needing to read Wordsworth. You can say, it's all about me. You can also say,
00:15:37
Speaker
that the experience of spots of time is something that everyone has in childhood. And I know, for example, that I myself certainly did. And I think it's very likely true. And there's absolutely no reason why, with my understanding of what the imagination does, the principle that sustains being a poet might not appear in everyone.
00:16:06
Speaker
In other words, Wordsworth is hoping that the genre of autobiography will be his means of tapping into something that he understands to be universal about human experience and human character.
00:16:23
Speaker
We have, I think I first and then you just now have referred a couple of times to the phrase spots of time.
Concept of 'Spots of Time' in Wordsworth's Work
00:16:32
Speaker
I wonder if it might be useful Paul to give just in brief sort of summary of like one example from the prelude of what a spot of time, I mean we don't need to get in, we don't need to get in necessarily to a reading of such a moment.
00:16:46
Speaker
But what kind of thing is a spot of time? What's the general misreading and what's the kind of gentle correction, if we were to be modest, that you're offering against that general misreading? Well, the tendency, in a way encouraged by Wordsworth, and I don't say that the mainstream readings of Wordsworth aren't somehow or another supported
00:17:12
Speaker
in any fundamental way by the poetry. I'm just suggesting that they're misunderstood in the atmosphere of another purpose or aim. The general misunderstanding of the Spots of Time is that they point toward moments of sublime transcendence, moments that are fraught with spiritual revelation and enlightenment.
00:17:43
Speaker
and moments that are important to remember for that reason. In other words, as he communicates them are like a set of spiritual guides. Yeah. Yeah. So that that's the typical way of understanding the spots of time. And what is fun? Like I'm thinking of Wordsworth, for instance, he's ice skating and something or that's the one I wanted to pick out. And the reason I wanted to pick it out
00:18:12
Speaker
is because it was composed at roughly the same time as a slumber did my spirit seal, and it contains an expression that you will immediately recognize from a slumber did my spirit seal. It's in the middle of book one of the prelude, and I hope I can put my finger on it quickly.
00:18:34
Speaker
Well, you can take your time, but I'll bet you can find it quickly enough. Yes. Take it away, Paul. Yeah. Not seldom from the uproar, I retired. I suppose I better supply a context. It's supper time. A group of children who are skating on one of the lakes in the Lake District, this is probably Windermere, a group of children are
00:19:02
Speaker
have decided they don't want to go home, they want to stay out and then they start pretending that they're horsemen chasing the hounds and hares and then they start they skate and they skate and they skate and they're very excited and the mountains echo with their joyous cries and
00:19:26
Speaker
And in the meantime, the orange sky of evening died away. And sorry, just as an additional bit of context setting, young William Wordsworth is among these children. Oh, he is. So this is a memory being offered by the poet. This is context. And then he goes on to say, not seldom from the uproar, I retired into a silent bay.
00:19:54
Speaker
or sportively glanced sideways, leaving the tumultuous throng to cut across the image of a star that gleaned upon the ice. And oftentimes, when we, in other words, he's still with a group of boys, when we had given our bodies to the wind and all the shadowy banks on either side came sweeping through the darkness,
00:20:22
Speaker
spinning still the rapid line of motion, then at once have I, reclining back upon my heels, stopped short, yet still the solitary cliffs wheeled by me even as if the earth had rolled with visible motion per diurnal round. Those of you who have been
00:20:48
Speaker
reading up on celebrity spirit seal. Does that sound familiar? Roll around. And ring a bell. And iron a course with rocks and stones and trees. And then it actually continues. And then a lonely scene, more lonesome among wood. I'm sorry, it continues. Behind me, the other children, they stretch in solemn train.
00:21:18
Speaker
feebler and feebler and I as I stood and watched till all was tranquil as a dreamless sleep. Now there's this moment of stillness in which the revolution of the earth can be felt and almost literally sensed is at the same time
00:21:47
Speaker
without any sort of activity or agency. It's like a dreamless sleep. It is, in other words, something that borders on an intimation about death and brings more closely into relation. The experiences of life, which notice are increasingly de-socialized.
00:22:16
Speaker
during the course of this spot of time. And this is characteristic of the spots of time. What do you mean by de-socialized here? At first, everything is sociable and accomplished for a social aim. Like, for example, the imitation of the chase, as Wordsworth puts it, the horse racing, right? All, you know, this is all the games children play. But then,
00:22:44
Speaker
As the experience deepens, the others start to trail back behind, feebler and feebler. He doesn't mean that they're becoming more and more tired and feeble. He means that their presence to him is feebler and feebler, and that finally he is absolutely alone with the whirling of the planet.
00:23:12
Speaker
And that this experience in turn becomes so profound that it's like a dreamless sleep. In other words, it is a deepening of solitude beyond what one even imagined solitude to consistent. Not for the purpose of getting away from everybody, although that is part of the structure of the thing, but for the purpose of discovering something about what it is.
00:23:43
Speaker
to have the thinghood of being non-human and whirling with everything within oneself. It's like hearing the still sad music of humanity at the moment when you are completely separated from the social order into internavity.
00:24:11
Speaker
you hear something that you don't hear within the social order. So that I think is what one might say about the skating episode. And if we took up a whole series of these spots of time, there are dozen, 15 of them in the prelude of various kinds, not all happening in early childhood, some of them happening in adolescence,
00:24:38
Speaker
And on a couple of occasions, a couple of the most famous occasions, happening with apparently a different end in view, and this is something that over the years I've quarreled with the great representatives of the Yale School about, happening in adulthood. The ascent of Mount Simplon, the ascent of Mount Snowden, both of which are strategically placed in the poem, Simplon halfway through, Snowden concluding the poem,
00:25:08
Speaker
and meant to carry a tremendous amount of interpretive weight.
00:25:16
Speaker
Those, I think, spots can be explained, too, in the ways that I incline to explain the spots.
Thematic Continuity in the Lucy Poems
00:25:24
Speaker
But it takes a little more work. Yeah. And we have other things to talk about. But I'm glad we took that detour just now, because I think much of the terms that you've just introduced will return in our conversation about the poem today.
00:25:45
Speaker
Maybe just one small, I think small, more bit of context setting there before we get to today's poem, which again is a slumber did my spirit seal. And I can remind listeners that there will be a link to the text of that poem in the episode notes. So you'll be able to read along as we discuss it.
00:26:05
Speaker
Paul, I said in the introduction that this poem is generally thought of as one of a small grouping of poems known by readers as the Lucy poems. Some of those poems name and seem to be about some kind of young girl, I guess, named Lucy. Other poems like this one don't have any names in them at all, and yet we grouped the poems together.
00:26:30
Speaker
What what should we know about the about the group of poems as a group? I mean, are you persuaded that this is a kind of coherent group of poems? In what sense? Yes. In what sense? No. What do they have in common? Who was Lucy? I don't know. Well, first, just logically, five of these poems were published in volume two of the Lyrical Ballads, 1800 and 1802.
00:26:55
Speaker
And three of them were published in sequence strange fits of passion. I have known Three years she grew I'm sorry She dwelled among on trodden ways and a slumber did my spirit seal. That's a sequence of three Lyrics all of them in ballad mater tetrameter tremeter ABA B and
00:27:18
Speaker
and all of them seemingly having to do with the departure of a female figure.
00:27:28
Speaker
Yeah. And let me just say, sorry to interrupt, Paul, but just one thing, lyrical ballads, for those who don't know, is one of the kind of transformative landmark book publications in the history of English poetry, published in two editions initially, as Paul just said, in 1800, 1802, if I got that right. Well, 1798, and then
00:27:51
Speaker
with revisions in 1802, it was republished in two volumes, and often two contained a great many new poems. Good, yes. And it was a book that was notably co-authored by Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and included, for instance, Coleridge's poem that we mentioned briefly a while ago, The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner.
00:28:20
Speaker
Yes. So there's lots and lots we could say about what was interesting about lyrical ballads, what was lyrical about them, what was ballad-like about them. But anyway, I just wanted to give it that bit of context. It's a fascinating title because it has an element of contradiction of terms in it. A ballad is supposed to be a fiction, a story, a narrative,
00:28:41
Speaker
Lyrical is supposed to be the imposition of an individual imaginative voice on fictive material. And that is, in fact, what Wordsworth is working toward in those poems that actually are lyrical ballads. He published other kinds of poems, Coleridge's The Nightingale, for example, and his own great poem, Tintern Abbey, in lyrical ballads.
00:29:10
Speaker
They're just not lyrical melons and there's no reason to pretend that they are.
00:29:16
Speaker
OK, so fascinating. But I pulled you away from helping us understand what the Lucy poems are. So three of those poems as a sequence in lyrical ballads gone. And then another poem also published in this volume called Lucy Gray, a much more conventional sort of ballad about a little girl who is sent to the town with a lantern to see her mother home from town, but instead gets lost in a snowstorm and
00:29:46
Speaker
turns out to have fallen off a bridge. And so she is then mourned. And that is published later in the sequence of poems. And then after that, there's the poem called Three Years She Grew in Sun and Shower, which is actually written in a six-line stanza, which is a variant on the ballad stanza. All the other poems are written in ballad stanza.
00:30:16
Speaker
But this is a poem about a little girl whom nature decided to take into her under her own tutelage and to rear as a being completely inspired by her nature. And she apparently grows into adolescence and then she disappears and the poet is once again bereft.
00:30:43
Speaker
It is possible, I think, to argue that with the exception of the story in Lucy Gray, all of these poems allow for a girl to have grown into adolescence and then to have died. We can see, I mean, Strange Fits of Passion is a very interesting poem because in, as a narrative, at the end of the poem,
00:31:13
Speaker
Lucy isn't dead. The poet says, oh, the poet has just seen the moon almost with incredible suddenness drop behind her house. Because he's riding on horseback and there's a little bit like frost stopping by the woods in the snow and the horse is going hoof by hoof going along.
00:31:37
Speaker
And the poet is in a dream, very similar to the dream that's evoked in the first line of A Slumber Did My Spirits Heal. It's the, how is it described? It's in one of those sweet dreams I slept. And in this dream, he has no notion of Lucy being susceptible of the touch of earthly years.
00:32:05
Speaker
But then this sudden dropping stone, the falling moon behind the house, makes a sudden thought come into his mind, oh mercy to myself, I cried if Lucy should be dead. The thing is though, in the middle of the poem it says, back when she was healthy, in June when she was still as vigorous as a rose, I used to visit her without a thought in my head.
00:32:34
Speaker
this suggests that she isn't healthy anymore. And even if she isn't dead at the end of the poem, and if she's still in this healthy condition at the end of the poem, we can read the poem, we have to read the poem really as a premonition of her coming death. Right. So I would argue that whatever the figure is, and there are thousands of critical pages on the question who Lucy is, what Lucy means,
00:33:04
Speaker
Right. There is a continuity with the exception of Lucy Gray, which is, I think, the hardest of five forms to fit together. A figure who is essentially the same, who's continuous from one to one, whatever that figure may be or represent. Now, we should speculate a little bit about Lucy. There's a kind of
00:33:30
Speaker
Philological Instinct, which came out with respect to that subject as every other, pointing out that Lucy was a very common name for the other ladies whom poets had lost. Oh, good. Well, we don't have to worry about that anymore. But it's true. There is such an article, which has been influential among scholars.
00:33:55
Speaker
my own view and then there is the opinion among a few derived from an important scholar of the 30s and 40s that Lucy was Wordsworth's sister Dorothy and that somehow or another
00:34:13
Speaker
this preoccupation with her death was just a kind of, well, as in Strange Fets' fashion, an intimation that she might die, right? Right. Or some kind of metaphorical act of mourning or something. Exactly, and then, well, what would that be like? How could I react to it? How could I live without her? And so on. And so that's been an opinion. My own opinion, I should just come right out and say, and it's by no means remarkable,
00:34:42
Speaker
is that Lucy means light or lucency, and that it has something to do with spirit. In other words, with that which is not just our material selves, so that it is something you could argue. And remember, Wordsworth writes a lot of poems from a very early age on the loss of his poetic powers. The Tintern Abbey and the Innovation's Oak can be read that way.
00:35:12
Speaker
And so you could argue that the Lucy poems is on the same subject. There's something in himself that he feels somehow or another has been lost. So that if you read the first line of a slumber did my spirit seal in that spirit, you would say to yourself, oh, spirit. He means something in himself, presumably. And after all, if Lucy is spirit,
00:35:42
Speaker
The first line is completely anticipatory of everything that's come, because her death sealed within him what had been a source of inspiration. My own tendency is to see Lucy in those terms.
00:36:03
Speaker
Good. Yeah, I was going to say, but I'm sure influenced by you in ways that I've forgotten. Right, her name etymologically is related to light in the same way, for instance, that the name Lucifer is, right?
00:36:19
Speaker
the light bearer. Lucy Gray sounds by those lights, like an oxymoronic name in a way. Philology again. In 1794, a poem called Lucy Gray, a ballad poem,
00:36:37
Speaker
That takes care of that. But I think before we get any further, Paul, we should have a reading of the poem. So would you read A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal for our audience?
Analysis of 'A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal'
00:36:52
Speaker
I will.
00:36:53
Speaker
And just a remark about the first line and other aspect of it, there's a very strange way in which from memory, when people recite this poem, they say, a slumber did my spirit steal, and not a slumber did my spirit steal.
00:37:10
Speaker
seal. There are lots of tricks like this in Wordsworth's poetry. He's a vague poet, quite by design. I think it's partly his vagueness that makes him so attractive to close reading. You know, you have to figure these things out, and the information's out. There's a line, the winds came to me from the fields of sleep.
00:37:36
Speaker
Now who can resist saying fields of sheep? It is, after all, a pastoral poem. And that's where the winds come from. What fields of sleep? What on earth does that mean? And he's constantly crossing you up.
00:37:54
Speaker
And this reminds me, in fact, of Ashbury, who does that kind of thing all the time. I think of phrases like the mooring of starting out, which one wants to read as the mourning of starting out and so on. All right, so yes. All right, I'll read it, Paul. Thanks. A slumber did my spirit seal. I had no human fears. She seemed a thing that could not feel.
00:38:22
Speaker
the touch of earthly years. No motion has she now, no force, she neither hears nor sees, rolled round in earth's diurnal course with rocks and stones and trees.
00:38:43
Speaker
Thanks, Paul. So for those who aren't looking and couldn't just hear it in their ears just now, two stanzas, two stanzas of ballad meter as you suggested before. So for those who don't know,
00:39:04
Speaker
alternating lines of tetrameter, meaning a four-beat line and trimeter, a three-beat line that rhyme A, B, A, B. Each stanza is a whole sentence. And I don't know, Paul, is there
00:39:31
Speaker
is there something, you know, ballads tend to go on longer than this. Yeah. It's one of the odd things about this one. Right. Um, one is drawn, I think perhaps initially to saying, okay, we have two stanzas. Let's think about how to read them in relation to each other. Absolutely. Um, so say something about how you would begin to do that or what possibilities present themselves to you in that enterprise.
00:40:00
Speaker
Okay, do interject when I've gone on because I can get back to these things. I'll do my best. And also, if there's a more profitable way by your lights of getting into the poem, feel free. No, no, no. I want to say that as you probably realize, and I've already said this in other aspects of thinking about the lyrical ballads and more particularly the Lucy poems,
00:40:29
Speaker
there's been a tremendous amount of confusion and critical elaboration about the meaning of this poem.
00:40:37
Speaker
It has inspired virtually every critic of any ambition of any kind to produce a reading of some sort, frequently quarreling with other readings, sometimes just producing a new reading. But there's a big, thick volume about
00:41:01
Speaker
this one poem, which is a summary of all the readings of the poem with lots of the author's own opinions thrown in. And so one can sort of drown in these readings. And so one challenge, it seems to me, is to try to figure out what in the simplest possible terms we might take this poem to be saying.
00:41:30
Speaker
Usually, that's where you begin. You begin with what, of course, the new critics didn't like, the heresy of paraphrase. You begin with a paraphrase. You say, well, this in plain prose is what it means. And you could say something like, I don't know, my intellect was asleep or kept asleep.
00:41:51
Speaker
A slumber did my spirit seal, my intellect was a seal. And that of course already puts a kind of a circumference around the notion of spirit because all you really want to say is, well, my power of reflection. Because I, you know, I didn't know what was going on. Hence, I was not concerned
00:42:14
Speaker
For now, human fears, if I'm going to do some sort of a simple reading of it, I have to anticipate what's in the next two lines. Because human fears in itself gives me no guidance. But if I read back from the next two lines, I can say, OK, I was not concerned about her mortality. In other words, I was not concerned about what inevitably will happen to her because she's human.
00:42:42
Speaker
And you seem supported in that reading, if by nothing else, then I had no human fears. The second line of the poem ends it with a colon as though what follows it in the third and fourth line is a sort of
00:42:56
Speaker
Yes. Elaboration of what it means to have had no human fear. No, I think the third and fourth lines reinforce the idea that human fears means I had no fears about her humanity. But keep in mind in the long run that we'll have to figure out what the relationship between the speaker and the subject is. Because as you read along, you could very easily read this line and here I anticipate I had no fears
00:43:25
Speaker
that had anything to do with my own humanity either. I was really oblivious to the condition of humanity. In which- Yeah, go on, sorry. Now if we're sort of lingering over something like a literal or positive reading, we can go on immediately and say, what he means is I thought that she was the kind of being
00:43:56
Speaker
that was impervious to the aging process, right? The touch of earthly years. It didn't seem to be possible to think of her in those terms. And this isn't such a strange idea when you look at a child, when you think, how could that person grow old?
00:44:18
Speaker
And so, I don't know, something like that, but notice all the complications we just can't even resist introducing, even in the course of giving such a reading, would be, to me, a common sense, let's just use that expression, way of reading the first four lines.
00:44:36
Speaker
Well, I'm going to resist making less common sense complications to that reading. But there's one. I'm biting my tongue about that. But because I think what you're doing is a very useful thing. Keep going with this kind of common sense reading. Now, this is structurally speaking. And the two stanzas are what land credence to the idea. We tend to read this as sort of
00:45:03
Speaker
Amazing Grace, a before and after poem, was blind but now I see. Before I was oblivious and now I'm enlightened. We just take it for granted that the structural relation between these two stanzas is of that sort. In other words, that we're on the verge of learning what the poet learns.
00:45:30
Speaker
And the gap between the two stanzas, and we love it because it's empty and silent, we take to be Lucy's death. That's just really almost impossible to get away from in readings of this poem. So, okay, she died. And before I had no notion that she would die because I didn't feel that she was subject to the aging process.
00:45:59
Speaker
Now, and this is strangely Newtonian, the line, no motion now. Has she now? No force. F equals ma. Force equals mass. And so she's she, she, mass, and motion is acceleration. There you are. There's the Newtonian formula. No motion now. No force. No force.
00:46:24
Speaker
And of course, this reinforces the idea that she's now a completely material entity. She's just an object in a world of objects, therefore subject to something like a Newtonian formula. And then, so fine, all good. And she has no power of perception. It just follows from that if she's such an object that she neither hears nor sees.
00:46:53
Speaker
So she has no power of perception. So I've described what her being dead is like in these lines. And now I see that in that condition, she spins daily. She is spinning daily together with all the material things that last, that keep spinning and spinning and spinning and spinning, rocks and stones and who knows, the trees.
00:47:24
Speaker
They certainly don't seem to have any sort of pantheistic capability. There's nothing emphasized about there being sentient beings or even alive. You almost think of them as a petrified forest. I mean, she is rotating and rotating and rotating with all these other essentially mineral things.
00:47:46
Speaker
Right, the trees there, I like what you say about the essentially petrified forest, but in a sense, one could say like, because the poem doesn't seem to care about individuating between trees, it's just like the earth has trees on it. And 100 years from now, they might be different trees, but from the perspective of this poem, they're just the same trees, you know?
00:48:10
Speaker
When I was young, I just was outraged by the lack of economy and the expression rocks and stone.
00:48:18
Speaker
I said, you know, this is a poem with as few words as a poem could possibly have. Why do two of those words have to be rocks and stones? Well, I remember from my seminar with you, Paul, you saying about that last line, the world is two-thirds mineral. Well, it is. And that is even given that I now accept that rocks are big and stones are smaller, right? Right.
00:48:46
Speaker
But that doesn't undermine the fact that the world is two-thirds mental. There's nothing at all about ocean, for example. Right. And it could easily have, it would have scanned perfectly well to have said something like, rolled around in Earth's diurnal course with rocks and lakes and trees. Yeah, you couldn't say seas and trees. That one works well.
00:49:10
Speaker
Well, I thought lake poet, I'll give him a lake. I'll give him a lake, exactly. And some of the second generation romantics can complain that he should have exchanged his lakes for ocean. That's right. Yeah. So you've walked us through this sort of plain sort of paraphrasing of the poem in a way that seems whatever objections the new critics might have had to it to be sensible.
00:49:40
Speaker
enough. Here is a kind of ordinary enough, though not necessarily not profound, experience of a kind of naivete about mortality.
00:49:57
Speaker
that gets corrected by life and death. And so there's a kind of a before in which the child looks impervious to mortality, and then after in which we know all too well that the child was not. And just quickly to remark two things in passing about the poem that still really are under the heading of interesting detail without contributing to anything like a big revisionary reading.
00:50:26
Speaker
At the end of the first stanza, you have the rotation of the Earth around the Sun, and you have the use of the word Earth. And so that's one form of rotation. At the end of the second stanza, you have the diurnal rotation, again of the Earth, because the Earth appears twice, just rocks and stones. Oh, why does he use them? I was much too sensorious about this when I was young. But it's very interesting.
00:50:56
Speaker
I'm not sure exactly why that in the first stanza, the rotation of time is annual. And in the second stanza, it's diurnal. It has in some sense sped up, but it seems to be simply in the register. Well, we don't know in what register example and the very fact that it's sped up, which is one of those things that one could also say must be intentional.
00:51:28
Speaker
is interesting. Yeah. Or even if not intentional, meaningful somehow. Yeah. Yeah. Well, time sped up and that's one of the many things I didn't realize. I'm imagining something like a, I'm making a gesture here with which listeners can't see, but like a figure skater, you know, going into a spin with her arms out wide at first and then tightening and accelerating into that spin.
00:51:53
Speaker
Yes. By the end, the poem has something of that energy with first imagining the earth going around the sun and then imagining the earth spinning on its axis. Oh, yeah. No, that's great. That's great. And just again, to call attention to one of the subtle details, which doesn't contribute itself in any way really to a reading, is that diurnal chorus. In that expression,
00:52:22
Speaker
You have the words dye, urn, and course, which of course, as you know, means corpse. Earth's diurnal course. That really, that really gives you a pretty grim picture of what happens where earth is. Yeah. And, um,
00:52:46
Speaker
And yet, well, it doesn't really add itself to anything like the reading that one might go on to develop. Quickly, my argument is that this is not a before and after poem. What? No, I know, I know, but I've been feigning ignorance. Now, let's hear it. How could that be, Paul? It seems so obviously to be one. Well, it does go back to the question
00:53:16
Speaker
whether Lucy and the spirit that is sealed can really be fully kept apart in their identity. But it also can simply hinge on verbal detail. In the first stanza, she seemed a thing.
00:53:40
Speaker
Now, there's actually been a feminist literature on that subject. Oh, well, you know, there's Wordsworth, the sweet thing. And the word thing is used very similarly in the poem called Lucy Gray and how objectifying and demeaning of, you know, how they argue. But for Wordsworth, the important thing about the word thing is thinghood. So she already,
00:54:08
Speaker
has some connection with thinghood and she could not feel. Right. In the second stanza, she neither hears nor sees. Where has the difference crept in here? Right, right. So in other words, in the second stanza,
00:54:31
Speaker
I was going to say, as you were paraphrasing the second stanza, that a kind of difference between the first line and the second line of the second stanza, in other words, the fifth and sixth lines of the poem, I'll read them again. No motion has she now no force, she neither hears nor sees.
00:54:48
Speaker
You gave such a lovely description of that first line as like Newtonian. But that would be a description of her as object, whereas the line that follows it is a kind of description of her no longer functioning as subject. She doesn't do the thing that people do anymore, which rocks never could do.
00:55:15
Speaker
which is to sense things. Well, right. Okay, so that was the first half of it, right? I'm saying that would be the before and after sort of premise. But then now we go back to look to the first stanza again, and she seemed a thing that could not feel
00:55:34
Speaker
Now, there's something, yeah, yeah, go on, yeah. No, no, no, you go on. Okay, I'll go on. There's something clever that happens there. That's the third line. She seemed a thing that could not feel. It's the only line that doesn't have any punctuation at the end. It's the most enjambed line in the poem, I think. It seems sort of clever to me because
00:56:02
Speaker
If you were to say, she seemed a thing that could not feel period, or if you were to, you would, the implication is that we're using that verb to feel, um, intransitively. Yes. Um, right. That is to her.
00:56:19
Speaker
Right. You might say to someone, perhaps if you were a jilted lover or something like, gosh, you seem like you don't even have any feelings. You can't feel. It'd be hard to get away from that meaning of the life if it had a period at the end of it. Absolutely.
00:56:38
Speaker
Right. But it doesn't, right? So perhaps that meaning is kind of raised. I mean, this would be a kind of ordinary way of reading around jamming, right? That sort of meaning is sort of raised, and then we realize in the fourth line that what she can't feel is not feeling in the transitive sense, but to get back to the kind of
00:56:59
Speaker
Plain-spoken, commonsensical reading you gave at the beginning what she can't feel is the touch of age. It's some kind of genteel figurative language here that means we can't imagine her getting wrinkles or gray hair. Exactly, the aging process. Yeah, yeah.
00:57:19
Speaker
Yeah, but if we just take that line on its own for a moment, it really does seem like even before the event that seems to be implied as having transpired between the two stanzas, she already was an object that could not feel in the same way that rocks and stones cannot feel. Or maybe she wasn't an object,
00:57:48
Speaker
Maybe she was, what we have to decide finally, maybe as materialists, Wordsworth wasn't yet, Coleridge had called him in 1796, but half an atheist. You know, maybe we have to realize that part of the trick of the poem is the supposition that spirit is something that doesn't somehow or another in here in the intense
00:58:17
Speaker
from the religious standpoint, depressing materiality with which the bomb concludes. I mean, if it's a before and after bomb, an amazing grace bomb, we expect uplift, you know? And the only uplift, I think we can... And once was blind, but now can see, right? Yeah, I know. I think the only uplift we get is something like insight, and that the
00:58:47
Speaker
Maybe Lucy isn't named because she was named. She has been in the sense that we conventionally ascribe to, let's say, poetic inspiration, just for example, dead all along. That might not even be necessarily a bad thing.
00:59:14
Speaker
But it sort of strips away from the eyes the illusion that there is duality, that there is the overwhelming materiality of the poem's conclusion and the lost, but at one point still there.
00:59:44
Speaker
spirituality of the poem's beginning. We don't know when the slumber set in. With respect to Lucy, there doesn't seem to be a before and after. The very delight with which reflection contemplates her would suggest
01:00:09
Speaker
that she never did feel the touch of earthly years insofar as she appeared to someone else. So it was just one of these wonderful beings concerning whom there was no before and after. Except that, and also, you know, if the speaker says,
01:00:40
Speaker
I was, in some sense, dead. I was dead to perception, let's say. One thing that might be implied by that first line, a stumber did my spiritual, I was dead. And what do I know? She seemed to be something. I just wasn't very clever. And now she is dead.
01:01:05
Speaker
And I didn't have the perceptive or reflective ability to understand that she would age just like any other living being in the world. And now she neither hears nor sees. It's very difficult to drive a wedge between the speaker and the object of his interest.
01:01:30
Speaker
He constantly finds within the incredible constraint of this tiny poem the need to say that they were really just the same. And might that now, in the event of her literal death, offer some kind of consolation? Well, that is a really good question.
01:02:00
Speaker
I suggested just now that it was hard to find consolation, but one could perhaps find insight. In other words, in the very awareness that nothing has changed after all, one can arrive at a new understanding of the relation between life and death.
01:02:22
Speaker
it's a strange thought. The idea would be that in some sense it was life that was the illusion or that was temporary or not fundamental. Well, after all, there's something very conventional.
01:02:39
Speaker
about, also true as far as we know, about the perceptions that are mentioned in a sense as somebody else's, because from my own point of view, I didn't see this, about the aging process, ho-hum, what else is new? Tell us something we didn't know before.
01:03:07
Speaker
In other words, to adhere to a literal reading, and by the way, I hope that the difficulty I had enunciating that reading shows how virtually impossible it is to adhere to such a reading, would, after all, result in an incredibly boring greeting card sort of a poem.
01:03:32
Speaker
Right. The poem is stranger and more wonderful than that. I found myself thinking as you were offering this revisionary reading, Paul, of a reading that I can remember you giving of another short Wordsworth poem, which I don't think we need to read aloud but can maybe just briefly
Themes of Unity and Perception in Wordsworth's Poetry
01:03:54
Speaker
summarize. I'm thinking
01:03:55
Speaker
of the poem, We Are Seven, in which, correct me if my memory is wrong, the sort of adult male poet, let's call him Wordsworth or something, somebody comes across a young girl who's tending to some tombstones in a cemetery.
01:04:14
Speaker
And he asks her how many brothers and sisters she has. And she says, as the title would have you think, well, we are seven. And then she begins to enumerate them. And among the siblings whom she counts as her siblings are ones whose graves she's cleaning at the time or standing by or whatever.
01:04:36
Speaker
And, um, the man corrects her, right? He says, well, you're five, you know, and the others aren't alive. I don't know. Maybe the rhymes are better than that. I can't, I can't remember. Um, no, five and alive, I think is not right. No. Okay. Good. Um, that's why I'm just a critic. And, um, but the girl insists we are seven. Um, now that,
01:05:05
Speaker
That's a poem, you know, some of the themes are similar, you know, of course, to the ones at issue here. And Speer could get very angry. He starts being rude to her at the end of the... Right. But they are dead. Don't you understand? They're dead. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Now, one way of taking the girl's insistence
01:05:28
Speaker
that, in fact, we are seven, would be, say, a kind of Christian theological reading in which, of course, my brothers and sisters, well, their bodies have died, but their spirits are alive and in heaven just as mine is alive and here for now, but we'll join them in heaven later, and nothing about what happens on Earth can change that.
01:05:54
Speaker
And yet, as I recall, Paul, that's not the
01:06:00
Speaker
position being staked out in your view by the girl there. And it seems to me to be quite related to the sort of question of the possibility of consolation in A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal. So what does the girl think? Well, the position you outline, which is, of course, a perfectly reasonable position and one that Wordsworth himself would have ascribed to within 10 years and for the rest of his life, is what the speaker insists on at the end of the poem.
01:06:31
Speaker
The girl doesn't see it that way at all. She sees the commonality of her six siblings as they're being bodies. Two of them are overseas. They're certainly not present, you know, and they can't just be summoned, right? Two are elsewhere and these two are underground. She, because the two underground are the closest,
01:07:00
Speaker
You know, they're at the bottom of her garden. They're the ones she actually pays the most attention to and remembers most vividly. She's absolutely without any illusions about their death. Like all children in cottages in Wordsworth's time, they witnessed those deaths. She witnessed those deaths. She was by the bedside when in agony they died. And she talks about it.
01:07:31
Speaker
The speaker's idea that she doesn't know anything about death is just totally absurd. What she doesn't prefer to say anything about or to take into account in her ontology and her sense of the being of all of her siblings is the notion of life after death, which is what the speaker, who is conventionally religious, is insisting on.
01:08:02
Speaker
Right. If we have that ontology, the Christian one, we'd say, well, they're not here anymore. They're in heaven now. These are just their bodies that they've left behind. Yeah, just their bodies. What are even just their bodies? You know, that's what I've got here. Right.
01:08:18
Speaker
Right. Okay, so am I right, Paul, in thinking that that sort of quick and dirty reading you've just offered of that poem has something now to tell us again about as we think in a sort of concluding way about A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal? Is something like the same logic at work here? I think it is completely.
01:08:39
Speaker
I think that what you've done and said brings into view the relationship between a consolatory structure and a structure of insight, which is, I mean, we are seven is a companion poem to another poem in lyrical values called anecdote for fathers, which the subtitle of which how the art or how the art of lying may be taught.
01:09:12
Speaker
And in that poem, the speaker, this doesn't have to do with religion or the afterlife, but it's once again a speaker who browbeats a child. The speaker is out walking with a child and he's just brimming with happiness. The speaker is just one of those days when, you know, the birds are singing, everything's perfect. And so he says to the child,
01:09:39
Speaker
Where would you rather be, Liswin Farm or Kilvay? And they happen to be at Liswin Farm. And the child says after a while, oh, I'd rather be at Kilvay. But he doesn't know why. And the speaker starts to say, oh, why would you rather be at Kilvay? Isn't it great here at Liswin Farm? So the child is just deaf because the speaker keeps bugging him about this.
01:10:08
Speaker
And the child looks around and he finally sees a weather vane, you know, in the pictorial frame of what they're, during their walk. And he says, oh, you know, because at Kilvay there was no weather car. That's why I like it better. That's the poem, you know. This speaker browbeats the child whose sense of the
01:10:38
Speaker
lack of difference among things, right? Live bodies, dead bodies, what's the difference? One place, another place, what's the difference? The speaker in both poems is trying to introduce a logic of difference
01:11:06
Speaker
to a child whose instinct is all for unity. And I would suggest that the before and after structure of slumber involves a conventional logic of difference and that the underlying message which subverts the before and after structure insists rather on the importance of unity.
01:11:37
Speaker
of the unity of beings, as Wordsworth puts it in the prospectus to the recluse, in widest commonalty spread. You don't need a weather vane to know which way the wind blows.
01:11:57
Speaker
I'm thinking Paul two of the the line and oh the difference to me from Yes, she dwelt among the untrodden ways. Is that have I got have I am I remembering that right? That's a fascinating form. Can I say a word? Yeah, say a word about it because I mean I I don't you know, obviously I'm sort of bringing it in because I think it's it's up You know some listeners ears might have perked up when they heard you talking about difference versus well Now this is a poem
01:12:26
Speaker
which begins with a very mysterious notion of an untrodden way, now a way as a path. How can a path be untrodden? In other words, the very first line involves a contradiction in terms. We know what he means. We'll know what he means throughout the poem because all of these are commonplace expressions, right?
01:12:50
Speaker
But at the same time, Wordsworth knows what he's doing. He was, by the way, an extremely good close reader. He read one of his own sonnets called With Ships the Sea Was Sprinkled in a Letter to Lady Beaumont. I think he was wrong about his sonnet, but he read it absolutely brilliantly with just the kind of attention to discriminatory detail that close reading involves.
01:13:18
Speaker
But I love that you think he was wrong. That's great. Well, we've read the intentional fallacy. I mean, he hadn't, but we have. In any case, then it goes on to say that she was like a violet half hidden by a stone. And again, the she here is Lucy, maybe. Gloriously shining in the sky. The star is not half hidden. She is.
01:13:47
Speaker
Now, there were very few to love her and none to praise. If they loved her, why didn't they praise her? Are they just waiting around for some poet to come along? And so goes the whole poem. And then, so finally, she dies. She disappears.
01:14:16
Speaker
And after all this, all these reflections on the dangers of the way in which language unintentionally introduces difference, because we know what all these expressions mean. We're not really pulled up short by them. And yet at the same time, they're all what the, what the rhetoricians call categories. They are rhetorical mistakes.
01:14:47
Speaker
And then at the end of the poem, the speaker sheepishly says, well, I realize the difference seems to be a mistake, but oh, the difference to me, because I loved her. And now the world seems empty to me. So that has, has that speaker not,
01:15:18
Speaker
absorbed the kind of insight that you feel sort of brimming in the poem that is our main topic. I think the insight is reserved for that poem, Slumber. But I will say that in that poem, and certainly too, and Strange Pits of Passion, which is all about a falling rock, there's no consolation.
01:15:47
Speaker
The very fact that the speaker says with pathos, oh, the difference to me, which is what anybody in mourning would say, you know, shows that this is not, you know, the traditional structure of elegy in which having passed through mourning, one finally arrives at a moment of revelation or consolation or religious transcendence or
01:16:15
Speaker
whatever the case may be, as I say, in the traditional structure of elegy. Right. Right. Paul, you've given us, you know, a kind of beautiful walking through of the poem in its, in as sort of
01:16:37
Speaker
a first pass that was as modest and kind of unassuming as we could be, and then that we had to work to get it, as you say. I mean, the poem is complex even at that level. Paraphrase of this poem is incredibly hard. Good, yeah.
01:16:56
Speaker
And then you've given us your own sort of revisionary reading of that paraphrase, which I for one find totally compelling. I wonder as a kind of concluding movement for this conversation, if you could just say a word or two about what is interesting. I mean, you referred earlier to that kind of thick volume of readings of this poem that has been collected.
01:17:26
Speaker
If you could say a word about what, if anything, sort of first thought for you is revealed, you know, if we could, in a sense, take an X-ray of that book, you know, what would we learn about
01:17:45
Speaker
what it is that criticism or close reading wants from poems and what it is that you want instead or something. I don't know. I don't know that I want anything instead, but I do feel
01:18:03
Speaker
Well, a couple of things can be said. First of all- And fine if you want to point out a couple of influential readers of the poem. If that matters to you. That would maybe complicate things in directions we don't want to go and don't have time to go in. Fair enough. But one thing one can say is that the greater the taciturnity and brevity of an utterance, the more open it is
01:18:32
Speaker
to a variety of interpretations. I mean, the longer an utterance and the more carefully articulated the utterance, the less subject it is to misunderstanding. Of course, there will always be misunderstanding. It's the nature of the relationship between language and speech, which is another subject, don't need to go there. But at the same time, it's undoubtedly true
01:18:59
Speaker
that the brevity of an utterance is part of its built-in obscurity. So that, and you know, this is a, Wordsworth wrote all of these Lucy poems while freezing next to a stove in Goslar, Germany with Dorothy. Dorothy was there with him.
01:19:22
Speaker
Coleridge had come over with him, but he'd gone off to Göttingen to study metaphysics. And they were alone in this place called Goslar, a kind of a walled, large town. And Wordsworth wrote some of the best poems he ever wrote, including the first draft of the prelude.
01:19:42
Speaker
Coleridge went to study metaphysics. They were stuck with physics. They were, Wordsworth wrote some very amusing poems actually about how cold they were. Yeah, good. But in any case, he wrote these poems there. And he, some people have actually said that they were an expression of homesickness. Some people, I mean, it has been argued that Lucy is England, for example.
01:20:12
Speaker
And the argument can be sustained. There is one poem which wasn't published in Lyrical Balance, which a lot of people considered to be a Lucy poem, which is about homesickness. And so, yeah, okay, that too. Anyway, one of the things that generates the infinitude of Close Readings is the poem's invitation to Close Reading
01:20:41
Speaker
by not really saying very much. I think it's our struggle to get it to say more than it says that has led to the richness of variety in interpretation of the poem. In some sense, perhaps if we do it badly, we're like the father in anecdote for fathers.
01:21:08
Speaker
wants the child to say more and sort of, you know. And also wants to say something more conventional. And I don't think he can accuse the critics of wanting to say something more conventional. That father's a bad critic, maybe we can say, or something. Yeah.
01:21:24
Speaker
I mean, the other thing that occurs to me too here is that the situation you describe in which the brevity and relative silence of the poem is what provokes or elicits the critical ingenuity and so forth, that line of argument
01:21:45
Speaker
is that it seems analogous to me in a way to the situation of the Lucy poems in which the brevity is not the brevity of the poetic utterance, but the brevity of the girl's life. That's very good. That is true. The other Lucy poems, while not long, are longer. They're not as long as a typical ballad. You pointed out earlier that ballads tend to go on and on, and that's definitely a feature of them.
01:22:14
Speaker
Yeah, but I mean, I guess the point that I'm making is that, you know, by this analogy that the critic might be something like the elegiac poet who sort of encountered the thing that was alive. It has passed. The poem is over. It won't keep talking to us. And so we as critics try to reanimate it somehow or to make something of it or to have it go on talking.
01:22:43
Speaker
And of course, one thing we can say is, well, this unsealed not only his spirit, but her spirit, and it's flown aloft. Everything else has whirled around an earth-diurnal course, but what was sealed at the beginning of the poem is released, right? I mean, you could say that. It's just that the poem doesn't say it.
01:23:11
Speaker
The poem doesn't say it. Anyway, just a word about why we, maybe an anthropological word about why we read. Yes, please.
Concluding Reflections and Final Reading
01:23:29
Speaker
And why we read Wordsworth, but why we read anything, really. I mean, literature seems always to be about
01:23:39
Speaker
conflicts of duty between public and private spheres. And I think whether you emphasize its fictive character or its dramatic character or its lyric character, there's always something concerning the relationship between one's sense of independence
01:24:10
Speaker
selfhood, and one's sense of commitment to community. Obviously, in epic and classical theater, we know the forms that this takes. But I think it's always there. And I think that it can be distilled into a way of thinking about the relation in all our lives between doing and being.
01:24:40
Speaker
Our our mission on Earth as defined by our nature as social beings is to do to act to Be engaged to be involved to make choices which of course are very much like making interpretations to to Give up as well as to seek and
01:25:09
Speaker
to find paths that coordinate with the paths of others and diverge from the paths of others. In other words, to be social animals is to be doing. But I think there's something in all of us, no matter how activist we are in our natures, that recognizes an interiority which has much more to do with being.
01:25:39
Speaker
and recognizes particularly in certain moments, let's call them spots of time, that one just is. Not that one is something, doing something, but that one just is. And my view is that literary experience gives us all the excitements
01:26:09
Speaker
vicarious excitements of doing and a profound understanding of the possibilities of doing and a kind of a temperate, temperate, appropriate distancing from the most aggressive forms of doing without dismissing them as unnecessary or impossible.
01:26:34
Speaker
but that it at the same and that it does this by largely formal means, hence the preoccupation readers have always had with matters that are formal, but that it does this while simultaneously providing us with intimations of being, of those moments in consciousness when somehow or another
01:27:03
Speaker
agency is stripped away and replaced by just being there, ontogeny, if you will. And I think that's the excitement of reading, is the acting out in one's own consciousness of the juxtaposition between doing and being.
01:27:28
Speaker
That's beautiful and profound. Do you think that literature does that especially, or would you say that all art does that to some extent, or is there something about linguistic art in particular that provides that kind of? Well, I think there's something about linguistic art in particular because, well, I am actually an amateur painter and my painting is non-representational.
01:27:57
Speaker
so that I don't actually use painting as a means of organizing the world for myself. But as somehow or another saying or doing something that doesn't involve representing. And somehow or in some instinct in me, although I virtually all art, some instinct in me suggests that this is a possibility open to painting. And I sort of follow that instinct.
01:28:27
Speaker
Music, I mean, if it isn't programmed music by Berlioz or somebody like that, you know, very difficult for me to take too seriously the notion that music is saying something. I always tell students it would be the wrong question to ask, having heard a song, you know, what did it mean? Yeah. I mean, there's certainly that dimension to music which can be explicated with interesting profundity.
01:28:57
Speaker
But to me that's not the main thrust of music And so on you know, and I sort of You can go through the other arts and and no, I I think that Literature is not necessarily the most important among the arts. I wouldn't want to get involved in that 19th century debate We don't need to but um, I do think that it is it is the most um
01:29:26
Speaker
expressive of human doings and longings among the arts.
01:29:35
Speaker
because it happens to sort of share as its fundamental tool, the thing that we all go on using every day of our lives, whether we're writers or not, namely language. Well, like I said, Paul, I was really wanting all along to have you on this podcast. I wanted to make sure I knew what I was doing before I asked you to join it.
01:30:02
Speaker
And I'm so glad that you were here. And I think maybe just by way of conclusion, I can ask you to read the poem, Slumber Did My Spirit Seal, one more time. Sure. What slumber did my spirit seal? I had no human fears. She seemed a thing that could not feel the touch of earthly years.
01:30:31
Speaker
No motion has she now, no force, she neither hears nor sees, rolled round in Earth's diurnal course with rocks and stones and trees.
01:30:48
Speaker
Well, that's Paul Fry reading Wordsworth for us. What a treat. Paul, thanks again. Listeners, thank you so much for joining us for this conversation. It was a real honor for me. It made me feel better today. Consolation enough. All right, Paul, I want to thank you again. And I'm wishing everyone out there good health. And we'll talk again soon. Bye now, everyone.