2/26/18
This is fun.
An exchange born of a subthread here on the last line of Wordsworth’s A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal.
Hang on to your hats and wigs: it’s a thrilling, roller coaster of a ride and it’s not over yet.
——————
A Slumber did my Spirit Seal
A slumber did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears:
She seemed a thing that could not feel
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.
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Me:
Why “Rocks, and stones, and trees” exactly?
R:
The speaker is so deeply moved that he is indifferent to the redundancy? The two ands is very good. There is a debate about whether the poem is pantheistic and Lucy is now part of the divine whole or whether she is now a thing. Or something like that.
Me:
It’s the redundancy I don’t totally get.
I wonder if “stones” suggests gravestones but even if it does I can’t work out why “rocks, and stones.”
I’m in the pantheism school; and she is a thing: all things are shot through with divine spirit.
R:
It expresses the speakers abcorption in his state of mind and indifference to eloquence, though of course eloquent in the Worsworthian manner, the power of common speech to express what standard poetic eloquence cannot. That was Wordsworths great invention and still dominates poetry. Many readers in his day found him clumsy, simply unpoetic. Which in their terms he was.
Me:
What I wonder about when I ask myself “why ‘stones’” is whether any number of words could have been used, seemingly, in place of “stones,” which then suggests an arbitrariness to “stones” that dispels the idea of perfect placement, that only that word can do.
Why not “Rocks, and bones, and trees”?
Arbitrariness seems to me to take away from what I might call the “aesthetic authority” of the artist and any particular work. But that may be my naïveté about these matters, as though there isn’t an element of the arbitrary always in all works, good, bad or indifferent, as long as the choice, however arbitrary, works. But “stones” being a smaller brother of “rocks”doesn’t work necessarily.
R:
Bones is bad because of the rhyme, and the morbidity. You want some sort of meaning, and I think Wordsworth wants the words to express the speakers state of mind, in this case the impact of a death that numbed him. The speaker should not sound sophisticated, poetic, intellectually subtle or deep. Neither the pantheism nor her becoming a thing is intellectually deep. It expresses a feeling, the emotional “slumber” induced by her death, and the redundancy helps express that.
Me:
....A slumber did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears:
She seemed a thing that could not feel
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 bones, and trees...
I wonder if you aren’t making my point.
What if Wordsworth had said “bones”?
And what if there were 170 years of literary criticism expounding on the vivid sharpness of “bones,” its counterweight to any gentle sentimentality over death, its emphasizing “dead is dead” sitting in brilliant tension with the life of “trees,” emphasizing Wordsworth’s sure sense of the implacability of her absence, and expounding on the effectiveness of the stark physicality of “bones” breaking so meaningfully, even shockingly, so remarkably with the tone of the rest of the poem?
Then what if, against all those years of explication and the question of a mere thing against a pantheistic vision, someone had ventured “stones” instead of “bones”? Wouldn’t we then be inclined to say “No, “stones” is bad. It’s the same as “rocks,” and, so, redundant, a wasted word that erases all the complex, striking effectiveness of bones?”
P.S. “Diurnal” doesn’t register too much numbed impact to me. It’s a learned word that cuts against the idea of numbness shown by the slight redundancy in the last line.
P.P.S.S. I don’t get “the rhyme” as one reason why “bones” is bad. “Stones” has the same rhyme.
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