On my journey back from Nottingham yesterday, I listened to a podcast of In Our Time about William Wordsworth’s The Prelude. Whilst listening to one of the panel talking (Stephen Gill) I was struck by his reading of a particular passage and what he said about it thereafter. The passage was from Book II of the poem and is as follows:
The garden lay
Upon a slope surmounted by the plain
Of a small Bowling-green; beneath us stood
A grove; with gleams of water through the trees
And over the tree-tops; nor did we want
Refreshment, strawberries and mellow cream.
And there, through half an afternoon, we play’d
On the smooth platform, and the shouts we sent
Made all the mountains ring. But ere the fall
Of night, when in our pinnace we return’d
Over the dusky Lake, and to the beach
Of some small Island steer’d our course with one,
The Minstrel of our troop, and left him there,
And row’d off gently, while he blew his flute
Alone upon the rock; Oh! then the calm
And dead still water lay upon my mind
Even with a weight of pleasure, and the sky
Never before so beautiful, sank down
Into my heart, and held me like a dream.
Stephen Gill said of this passage: “look at the language of this, it’s all about your body being taken over by the outside world, the dead still water lays upon thy mind, the sky sinks down into my heart and the pleasure of it all is a weight.”
I was struck by this passage and commentary as it seems to parallel the notion of the embodied mind; a corporeal consciousness engaging with the world through the physical body.
I bought a copy of The Prelude and read the first few lines which served to illustrate this point further:
Oh there is a blessing in this gentle breeze
That blows from the green fields and from the clouds
And from the sky: it beats against my cheek
And seems half conscious of the joy it gives.
The following passage is a lovely description of the act of wayfaring:
Whither shall I turn
By road or pathway or through an open field,
Or shall a twig or any floating thing
Upon a river, point me out my course.
In a piece I wrote on my website about history, I wrote the following:
In his book The Materiality of Stone, Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology, Christopher Tilley writes: ‘The painter sees the tree and the trees see the painter, not because the trees have eyes, but because the trees affect, move the painter, become part of the painting that would he impossible without their presence. In this sense the trees have agency and are not merely passive objects. Dillon comments: “The trees ‘see’ the painter in a manner comparable to that in which the mirror ‘sees’ the painter: that is, the trees, like the mirror, let him become visible: they define a point of view on him which renders visible for him something that otherwise would remain invisible – his outside, his physiognomy, his carnal presence… The trees and mirror function as Other.”’
I am interested in how the landscape remembers the people it ‘sees’ and I find this ‘Other’ everywhere in Wordsworth’s poetry. Again in Book I of The Prelude.
How Wallace fought for Scotland, left the name
Of Wallace to be found like a wild flower,
All over his dear Country, left the deeds
Of Wallace, like a family of Ghosts,
To people the steep rocks and river banks
In Lines Written A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, Wordsworth addresses his sister Dorothy with the following words:
Therefore let the moon
Shine on thee in thy solitary walk;
And let the misty mountain-winds be free
To blow against thee: and, in after years,
When these wild ecstasies shall be matured
Into a sober pleasure; when thy mind
Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms,
Thy memory be as a dwelling-place
For all sweet sounds and harmonies; oh! then,
If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief,
Should be thy portion, with what healing thoughts
Of tender joy wilt thou remember me,
And these my exhortations! Nor, perchance,
If I should be where I no more can hear
Thy voice, nor catch from thy wild eyes these gleams
Of past existence, wilt thou then forget
That on the banks of this delightful stream
We stood together
I like to think of this poem and this passage as addressing nature herself, that great ‘Other’ which remembers those whom she has seen.