After Tintern Abbey, recollections of childhood became a method for
Wordsworth to establish his mature subject. The distinction between the past self and the present one relies on the disparate interactions with nature: the boy interacts with nature following his instincts and bodily experience; the adult experiences nature with the mind. The designation of bodily interaction, as seen in Tintern Abbey, has two major functions: in the notification of Dorothy’s state of mind as corporeal, Wordsworth draws the line the between different states of mind to consolidate his status; in his declaration of sublime mind, the body is metaphorically rejected as the representative of the material world. The sublimation of the body is the force both for the demarcation of mind/body and the denunciation of socio-historical reality. In 1799, the animal spirit of the boy and the bodily sensation of the girl were
transformed into two types of narratives that circled around death, the decease of the body. While the symbolic death of the boy leads to transcendence of mind and announces the end of the period of bodily sensation, the death of the girl only replicates the idea of male-dominance, leaving no room for any possibility of transcendence.
Later incorporated in The Prelude (1805), There Was a Boy functions as one archetypal story of a boy who later grows into a mature man. The boy is depicted as one who freely interacts with nature through his animal instinct. Every day “when the earliest stars began/ To move along the edges of the hills,” he would “stand alone,/
Beneath the trees, or by the glimmering lake” (Poems I, 3-6). The instinct for nature
is reciprocal and self sustaining, and the boy’s interaction with nature is mainly through his body language:
with fingers interwoven, both hands Pressed closely palm to palm and to his mouth Uplifted, he, as through an instrument,
Blew mimic hootings to the silent owls, That they might answer him. (7-11)
The whistling, with no artificial “instrument,” hypothesizes a basic form of communication between man and nature. With no immediacy or intervention of culture, the boy’s imitation of the voice of owls represents the prototype of one’s unity with nature. Nature in turn welcomes and affirms his calling, as the “silent owls”
would shout,
Across the watery vale, and shout again, Responsive to his call, --- with quivering peals, And long halloos, and screams, and echoes loud Redoubled and redoubled. (12-15)
Instead of being subsumed into the realm of culture, the response of the owls is an endorsement of the male child’s similarity through mimicry. It is through mimicry that the male child, with his instinct, identifies himself with natural creatures. This transformation arouses sympathy as seen not only in the “long halloos” of the owls, but also, the “echoes” of nature, of which the sound “[r]edoubled and redoubled”
again and again, sending the message of her endorsement. However, the seeming infinity of communication between the boy and nature is suddenly interrupted by the silent pause along with the gradual disappearance of the echoes, which, when the boy carefully listens, come as “a gentle shock of mild surprise” that “carried far into his heart the voice / Of mountain-torrents” (19-21). The silence, one type of Longinian
rhetoric of silence, erupts into the no less sublime “visible scene” that “enters
unawares into his mind / With all its solemn imagery” (21-23). The sublime aspect of nature, or Lacanian symbolic order, interpellates the boy to adopt a new subject position by sowing the seed in the mind of the boy, then waiting for his recognition of the meaning in “solemn imagery.” This new form of interaction between man and nature, as in Tintern Abbey, demands the separation of immortal mind from material body as well as a distinction between subject and object. In his The Tables Turned, Wordsworth observes:
Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
Misshapes the beauteous forms of things:―
We murder to dissect. (Poems I, 25-28)
Ironically, the separation into different levels of nature that correspond to different levels of the human organism is itself the dissection that murders Nature as well as a man’s possible unity with nature. It is this “meddling intellect” that recognizes the voice of “mountain-torrents” as “solemn imagery” in the mind and foreshadows later distinctions. The introduction of “solemn imagery” reveals the superior form of nature beyond a phase that the boy cannot now reach but will one day when he grows up.
In the original version, There Was a Boy was voiced by the first-person speaker.
The later change to the third-person, in retrospection, betrays the symbolic meaning Wordsworth intended to express in the original version. At the end of the poem, the boy died “ere he was full twelve years old” (27), and, when the speaker passes where the boy died, he would stand “Mute--- looking at the grave in which he lies!” (33-34).
Death, from the aspect of the original version, is not so much the real death but the symbolic one, the death of childhood. When the character is changed from
first-person to the third, from “I” to “he,” the death becomes not just an end to a story but the inheritance from which another boy rises to a higher level of bodily
disposition. The gaze on the grave therefore presents a confrontation between two boys in the Lacanian mirror stage: seeing the wholeness of body the reflected in the mirror, the boy in front of the mirror recognizes his incapability in wielding his fragmented body. The autonomy of the specular image results in the boy’s
aggressiveness and his alienation from himself, leading up to his distinction from the
“other.” In the case of Wordsworth, this recognition of a fragmented body, a body that is no longer capable of free movement in interaction with nature, either
mimicking the howl or running “like a roe,” forces him to leave the imaginary order of nature and advance into the symbolic stage of culture, in which the “solemn imagery” of “mountain-torrents” directs us to the rule of the symbolic. To use the term of Arnold Van Gennep, it is Wordsworth’s “rite of passage,” an indicator of transition, in which the body is mortified and mutilated in order to signal a change of status. The decease of the body gives rise to the birth of the mind. Commenting on the death of the boy, Marlon B. Ross notes that “his reversion to a ‘purely natural’
state is tragic because he had a claim to an identity beyond nature” (“Naturalizing Gender” 100).
The mutability of a male child before nature is radically changed in The Nutting, in which Wordsworth recollected his childhood experience. Different from the innocence of the boy and benign nature in There Was a Boy, the confrontation between boy and nature ends in the boy’s relentless ravaging of nature. Out of his animal instinct, the boy leaves the “cottage-threshold, sallying forth/ With a huge wallet o’er [his] shoulders slung, / A nutting-crook in hand” (Poems I, 5-7). While the “cottage-threshold” marks the boundary between culture and nature, the
“nutting-crook in hand” foretells the exploitation of nature. Like a colonizer
searching for virgin land, the boy finds a spot unvisited, in which, “not a broken bough / Drooped with its withered leaves, ungracious sign / Of devastation” (18-19).
This peaceful land displays the double face of a feminine (“[a] virgin scene”) as well as a masculine authority (the hazels “Tall and erect”) (21; 20). The feminization of nature anticipates its development as a sex object waiting to be conquered and
dominated, the boy “[b]reathing with such suppression of the heart / As joy delights in;
and, with wise restraint / Voluptuous, fearless of a rival, eyed / The banquet” (22-25).
The suppressed desire at the beginning in “wise restraint,” projected as food, but toward the end of this poem, after the male child fully enjoyed the scene through his senses (“played,” “saw, ” “heard” [26; 34; 38]), he suddenly rose up and attacked the imaginary “rival” relentlessly, he
dragged to earth both branch and bough, with crash And merciless ravage: and the shady nook
Of hazels, and the green and mossy bower, Deformed and sullied, patiently gave up Their quiet being[.] (44-48)
The ravaging of nature out of animal violence, or the Freudian death drive, repeats the
“devastation” any place of nature experiences when humans enter it. The ravaging that worked to destroy a spot leaves behind the marks of human intervention and human conquest. The “rival,” symbolized in the hazels “[t]all and erect” is overcome. After the destruction, the boy “felt a sense of pain when [he] beheld / The silent trees, and saw the intruding sky” (52-53), the sublime image of which represents the Name of the Father, inculcating the importance to respect the rule of the symbolic and the necessity to regulate human desire. This experience constitutes his final exhortation to his “dearest Maiden” to be gentle in heart because “there is a spirit in the woods” (54; 56). As in Tintern Abbey, the function of exhortation is to keep
the female figure (presumably Dorothy) in her state of bodily interaction, while the deployment of “a spirit in the woods” is not so much a warning to himself but the recognition of the symbolic order projected onto nature waiting to be reached and conquered by the boy when one day he grows up. As Marlon B. Ross points out, that the exhortation “reinscribes that sexuality in such a way that the boy asserts his freedom from nature while the maiden is instructed by the mature male how to move within nature” (“Naturalizing Gender” 97). The “spirit” implies a sublimity rooted in the symbolic, as well as the mind that seeks to overcome the rule of the symbolic to create one’s own sublimity.
In contrast to the initiative of the boy, the female child in Wordsworth’s poems in this period figures as passive puppet silenced and manipulated. In
Three Years She Grew in Sun and Shower, the girl is described as a sex object to be desired. Through the voice of “Nature,” the destiny of the girl is decided:
‘A lovelier flower On earth was never sown;
This Child I to myself will take;
She shall be mine, and I will make A Lady of my own. (Poems I 2-6)
Under the guise of the voice of Nature, patriarchal authority objectifies the girl as a
“lovelier flower” to be possessed, a “lady” that is the property of the male. Under the patriarchal imperative of “law” and out of the instinct of sexual “impulse” (8), this patriarchal voice claims the right of property and rationalizes its sexual desire as law.
In his exacting power and control over the girl, in the following years the girl “shall”
enjoy the beauty of nature: she “shall feel an overseeing power,” “shall be sportive as the fawn,” “shall lean her ear / In many a secret place” (11; 13; 27). In a word, she will enjoy added pleasure thanks to male domination and manipulation. In a Godlike
gesture, to the girl are ordained privileges to enjoy, but all of these enjoyments, rather than stemming from her own will, further the girl’s passivity in this “naturalized”
environment. As Marlon B. Ross notes, “Lucy is being taught more how to be an object of appreciation than how to appreciate” (“Naturalizing Gender” 102). She is being molded into the form of an ideal sex object for man, until “[t]he work was done” and then her “race was run” (Poems I, 37-38), which leaves to the speaker only the “memory of what has been” in “[t]his heath, this calm, and quiet scene” (40-41).
She has no freewill nor voice of her own, and “just at the point at which she may be allowed to speak, she is silenced with death” (Ferguson 189). They “do not exist as independent, self-conscious human beings with minds as capable as the poet’s”
(Mellor 19).
In the other three “Lucy poems,” the female child, Lucy, is either put to death or implied to be dead at the end of poem. In She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways, Lucy is described as a country girl who lives “[b]eside the springs of Dove,” among those “whom there were none to praise / And very few to love” (Poems I, 2-4). As in Three Years, she is objectified as a flower, a “violet” “[f]air as a star” (5; 7-8).
However, she is known only to a few, and even when “Lucy ceased to be and was” “in her grave,” it makes a difference only to the speaker (10-12). In Strange Fits of Passion Have I known, Lucy is “a rose in June” living in a cottage. The speaker, Lucy’s lover, has “strange fits of passion” and of thought one day when he is riding his horse to where Lucy lives. When he arrives “behind the cottage roof” while “the bridge [where] moon dropped,” he has a “fond and wayward thought,” a premonition which “will slide / Into a Lover’s head” that ‘Lucy should be dead” (23-28). In A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal, the speaker shows “no human fears” about the death of Lucy, when “[s]he seemed a thing that could not feel/ The touch of earthly years,” no
longer fated to be “[r]olled round in earth’s diurnal course, / With rocks, and stones, and trees” (7-8).
In a letter to Thomas Poole on 6 April, 1799, Coleridge remarks A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal that: ‘some months ago Wordsworth transmitted to me a most sublime epitaph…. Most probably, in some gloomier moment he had fancied the moment in which his sister might die” (qtd. in Poems I, 955). Composed during 1798 and 1799, the figure of Lucy in the “Lucy poems” is without any question to be identified with Dorothy. The reason why Lucy is always put to death, according to Coleridge’s letter, may be explained as the compulsive repetition to reduce his anxiety about the death of his sister. However, from the description of the lover from the first-person speaker in these poems, Lucy/Dorothy is seen as an object of sexual desire. This implication of incest is hidden in the name of Lucy. In the “Lucy poems,” F. W.
Bateson suggests that Wordsworth solved the “threatening” relationship with his sister
“by killing her off symbolically.” Her symbolical death, placed as a barrier to incest, explains why Lucy never grows into a mature woman. All the Lucies in these poems are depicted as pre-pubic girls, kept in the role of virgins and put to death before their
“virgin bosom swell[s]” (Three Years 33). The growth of Dorothy into a mature woman both makes her a possible sex object and poses a threat to the unmarried brother. Before they left Alfoxden, the relationship between Wordsworth and Dorothy had aroused suspicion (Stephen Gill William Wordsworth: A Life 156).
Creating Lucy as the boy’s double, Wordsworth is able to memorialize the childhood he shared with Dorothy and portray it in a sympathetic light. As mutual sympathy leads to the threat of incest, a symbolic killing becomes the imperative demand of this universal taboo. As Alan Richardson suggests:
The Romantic poet is drawn to mingle the two kinds of love [erotic love and sibling love] by a fascination with the power of sympathy, but that power is
broken by the unconscious horror of incest, and the fascination turns to guilt or revulsion shortly before or shortly after the union is consummated. (“Incest in Romantic Poetry,” 744)
As suggested above, killing Lucy symbolically reveals the desire to confine Dorothy to the role of a pre-pubic girl, therefore killing her preserves her in her natural state;
being devoured by Nature prevents her from becoming a threatening sex object.
Leaving her to nature at the same time fulfills the natural desire for sexual
consummation, since this nature is personified as male. Therefore, what her death means is the fulfillment of sexual desire through the devouring of nature, Lucy Dorothy being taken as a lady and mistress of nature. Besides resolving his hidden sexual desire for Dorothy, the transfixing of Lucy in nature duplicates the binary opposition of man/culture/sublime and woman/nature/beauty. As Marlon B. Ross points out:
In Wordsworth’s developmental scheme (in which the poetical mind [his] is metonymic for the intellectually mature and socially responsible man), the female becomes a mediator between man and nature, and in her mediatory role she becomes delimited (arrested) by nature so that man can attempt to achieve human fulfillment. (“Naturalizing Gender” 95)
By preserving Lucy/Dorothy in nature, Wordsworth is capable of transcending his sexual desire and ensuring his dominance of both woman and nature.