Aspects of Wordsworth's Poetry in the "Elegiac Stanzas"

William Wordsworth’s late poem “Elegiac Stanzas” brings together a number of ideas and motifs that had already been present in his poetry up to that point: the nature of memory and perception, the theme of substitution, and Wordsworth’s preoccupation with joy and pleasure. These ideas appear in various forms in Wordsworth’s poetry preceding the “Elegiac Stanzas,” sometimes in ways that seem contradictory, and which moreover are set forth in ambiguous language that allows for multiple interpretations. There is, in other words, no point in his prior writings in which Wordsworth definitively explains these ideas. Any attempt to present, for example, Wordsworth’s conception of memory as something uniform and complete unto itself, must necessarily be an abstraction, something constructed out of the common strands that underlie the different appearances of this idea in his poetry. Nonetheless, the “Elegiac Stanzas” attest to a change in Wordsworth’s poetry. They definitely form, as the title suggests, an elegy, although to multiple things rather than one thing in particular, and one of the things being elegized is Wordsworth’s old way of writing poetry.

“Elegiac Stanzas” was inspired by a painting by Sir George Beaumont of Peele Castle - which Wordsworth lived by briefly - in a storm. Wordsworth begins the poem by noting how different his own memory of the castle was from Beaumont’s. In contrast to the tumult of Beaumont’s painting, Wordsworth remembers Peele Castle in a state of unshakeable peace. He describes how, had he been a painter, the painting he would have produced would have been very different:

Ah! THEN, if mine had been the Painter’s hand

To express what then I saw; and add the gleam

The light that never was, on sea or land,

The consecration, and the poet’s dream;

I would have painted thee, thou hoary Pile

Amid a world how different from this!

Beside a sea that could not cease to smile;

On tranquil land, beneath a sky of bliss (13-20).

The fact that Wordsworth adds “the gleam / The light that never was, on sea or land, / The consecration, and the poet’s dream” to his painting suggests that something as it is retrospectively represented in an image is not the same as that thing when it was perceived. An image of something is not identical to that thing as it was when it was initially experienced, but a reconstruction in which selected aspects of it are woven together in a new way, guided by “the poet’s dream.” Peele Castle as depicted in Wordsworth’s hypothetical painting is therefore not a representation of it in a particular moment in time, but a representation of it as it never actually existed, a little like Wordsworth’s own description of a painting that never was or will be. This does not mean, however, that Wordsworth is trying to make an argument for the primacy of perception over subsequent memory. On the contrary, throughout the poem refers to his own impressions of Peele Castle as he was observing it as though they were already “images”: he notes how whenever he would look at it, the “Image” (8) of the castle would still be there, and says that it seemed to be “A picture…of lasting ease” (25). These lines seem to suggest that our perceptions of objects are always already “images,” that our senses do not give us immediate access to things but rather represent them us to in a way that is different from how they are in themselves. Our perceptions, then, also show us things as they never were.

The idea that our senses alter the objects they perceive is not new to Wordsworth’s poetry. An earlier poem, “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour,” makes a similar argument to the “Elegiac Stanzas”:

Therefore am I still

A lover…of all the mighty world

Of eye, and ear, - both what they half create

And what perceive; well pleased to recognize

In nature and the language of the sense

The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,

The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul

Of all my mortal being (102-111)

In these lines, Wordsworth acknowledges that our senses “half create” the objects they perceive, but in such a way that points to earlier experiences. The fact that Wordsworth recognizes aspects of an earlier, now inaccessible phase of his life in the present creates a sense of continuity in his life that protects against feelings of fragmentation and loss. The feeling of relief Wordsworth experiences is also a moment of truth, reinforcing the link between these two things that recurs throughout the poem: he says, for example, that “with an eye made quiet by the power / Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, / We see into the life of things” (47-9), implying that joy gives us a more true perspective on things, or that knowledge of the truth produces happiness. In “Tintern Abbey,” then, our senses do not give us immediate access to things, but reconfigure them in a way that guides us toward a higher understanding of our own lives, one perhaps that is beyond sensory perception, and that integrates its disparate parts into a unified whole. This is not the case in the “Elegiac Stanzas,” in which Wordsworth refers to his perception of Peele castle as a “fond illusion” (29), and seems to disavow his former self: “Farewell, farewell the heart that livers alone, / Housed in a dream, at distance from the Kind! / Such happiness, wherever it be known, / Is to be pitied; for ‘tis surely blind” (53-6). In the “Elegiac Stanzas,” our tendency to form “images” of the objects we perceive leads not toward a higher understanding, but to further confusion.

The way in which Wordsworth is preoccupied with images rather than things in themselves is symptomatic of a tendency in his poetry toward a kind of substitution. The central event in the “Elegiac Stanzas” is ostensibly the death of his brother, the cause of the change in worldview the poem describes. It would therefore be reasonable to expect that the “elegiac” mode promised in the title would be borne out in an elegy to him. Yet, aside from one reference – “Then, Beaumont, Friend! Who would have been the Friend, / If he had lived, of Him whom I deplore” (41-2) – Wordsworth’s brother is not mentioned at all in the poem. Instead, Wordsworth spends the entire poem lamenting the fact that he no longer views the world in the way he once did. In other words, one result of the death of his brother comes to stand in for that death itself, and is mourned in its place. This sort of substitution occurs constantly in Wordsworth’s poetry. Often it occurs when Wordsworth is attempting to recapture something he is no longer capable of doing, for example in these lines from “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”:

Ye blessed Creatures, I have heard the call

Ye to each other make; I see

The heavens laugh with you in your jubilee;

My heart is at your festival,

My head hath its coronal,

The fullness of your bliss, I feel – I feel it all (36-41).

In these lines, Wordsworth does not take part in the joy that the animals around him are experiencing. He “sees” them laugh without laughing himself, and he does not identify the bliss he feels as “his,” but distances it from himself by referring to it as “your bliss.” This is in keeping with his emotional state throughout the poem, which is at odds with the world around him: earlier in the poem, while observing some animals, he says that “To me alone there came a thought of grief” (22). The pleasure he feels is vicarious, a kind of happiness by proxy derived from the observation of joy in others – maybe even the “image” of the joy of others - rather than any firsthand experience of joy on his part. The experience of happiness in others, then, in a sense acts as a substitute for his own happiness. In the “Elegiac Stanzas,” however, the relationship between the death of Wordsworth’s brother and the thing being substituted for it, the death of Wordsworth’s old way of seeing the world, is more ambiguous. Rather than being simply something put in the place of the death of his brother that functions in its place, the passing away of Wordsworth’s visionary capacity becomes, to some extent, conflated with it: in lines like “A deep distress hath humanised my soul” (36) and “The feeling of my loss will ne’er be old” (39), it is impossible to say which of these two “distresses” and “losses” he is referring to. Far from being a simple relationship of something’s result standing in for its cause, the two losses of the “Elegiac Stanzas” become indistinguishable, not so much substituted for one another as amalgamated into one entity.

Another distinct feature of Wordsworth’s poetry is the way he is preoccupied to a large extent with, as we have seen, pleasure, and more generally physical sensation, rather than abstract things. This is apparent in the “Elegiac Stanzas” in the way Wordsworth talks about his loss in terms of strength: he says that “A power is gone, which nothing can restore” (35) and acknowledges that his loss may have some value in that it will bring him “fortitude” (57). The preoccupation with the question of strength is in keeping with Wordsworth’s earlier poetry, but in those poems strength is always associated with pleasure, often experienced on a visceral level, that induces a state of calm in him. It is difficult to say what exact relationship Wordsworth is positing between these things, but they are always grouped together. In his poem “Resolution and Independence,” for example, Wordsworth speaks about “the might / Of joy” (22). Moreover, in the “Intimations” ode he talks about a “timely utterance” that gives his despair “relief” (23), with the result that he is “strong” (24) again, and in “Tintern Abbey” he describes how memories give him “sensations sweet / Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart; / And passing even into my purer mind, / With tranquil restoration” (27-30). In other words, pleasure for Wordsworth is not experienced as an excess of powerful sensation, but rather as a low or constant level of bodily stimulation – he is always striving toward a state of “relief,” or of “tranquility,” which always restores his strength. The “Elegiac Stanzas,” however, represent a turning away from Wordsworth’s earlier drive toward relief experienced on a sensuous level, as shown in the last stanza: “But welcome fortitude, and patient cheer, / And frequent sights of what is to be borne! / Such sights, or worse, as are before me here. - / Not without hope we suffer and mourn” (57-60). Whereas previously Wordsworth strove only toward a state of pleasurable equilibrium, in the “Elegiac Stanzas” Wordsworth begins to see value in “suffering” and “mourning,” a “fortitude” against sights like those depicted in Beaumont’s painting. What is available to him now is not a tranquil suspension of tension, but a kind of serene yet sad acceptance of tension.

However, what Wordsworth’s newfound acceptance of “mourning” will be like, and what kind of poetry it will produce, ultimately remains ambiguous and not yet fully formed. The poem, as we have seen, relies heavily on the old motifs of Wordsworth’s work, but in such a way as to show that they are no longer adequate for his purposes, or at least will have to be changed. The poem is situated at a transitional point. It laments the passing of what Wordsworth used to think, and the way he used to write, while at the same time welcoming a new way of seeing the world, albeit one he can not yet fully articulate: it grieves an inaccessible past while welcoming a future that is half-understood. It is simultaneously an elegy to Wordsworth’s old writings and his first attempts at creating a new kind of poetry, but one that is still in the process of constructing itself from the remains of his old work.