Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century (31 page)

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Authors: Laurence Lerner

Tags: #History, #Modern, #19th Century, #Social Science, #Death & Dying, #test

BOOK: Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century
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Page 78
Here once again, remote from human noise,
I sit me down to think of former joys;
Pause on each scene, each treasured scene, once more,
And once again each infant walk explore:
While as each grove and lawn I recognise,
My melted soul suffuses in my eyes.
This writing is emotive in the most immediate sense: "Pause on each scene, each treasured scene" is directly mimetic of the breath being caught in a sob. Sobs and sighs are prominent:
Yet e'en round Childhood's heart, a thoughtless shrine,
Affection's little thread will ever twine;
And though but frail may seem each tender tie,
The soul foregoes them but with many a sigh
The religious terminology in these passages, as all through the poem, is not religious in function. The soul, conceived theologically, cannot melt; but here it signifies the faculty of being moved by tender emotion, just as the "shrine" of childhood's heart has no otherworldly purpose. However much we may be assured of Kirk White's piety (the memoirs are deferentially insistent on this), there is nothing Christian in this writing. Neither is death otherworldly:
For thou art gone, and I am left below
Alone to struggle through this world of woe.
The ambiguity of "gone" is wholly appropriate: it does not really matter whether George is dead or merely absenthis companionship has been lost. The possible deaths for George with which the poem toys ("Methinks I see thee struggling with the wave," "Forlorn and sad thou bendst thy weary way," etc.) are aestheticized possibilities, brief scenes unfolded not for their possible truth but so that the melted soul will suffuse in the eyes. George's death, in other words, has nothing to do with George: attention is not on the fact that he is saved from the world but on the world deprived of himor rather, of the generalized idea of him. Poems, as I remarked earlier, are not about people.
Kirk White's talents were certainly moderate, and he has here written a conventionally touching poem. I have little doubt that this poem is the sort
 
Page 79
of thing Jeffrey wanted when he read "There was a boy." He clearly found Wordsworth's poem trivial; yet there seems to be a reluctant admiration wrung from him by the description of the mimicry. If we compare his comments to Coleridge's more famous responselin which he picked out the "Uncertain heaven received / Into the bosom of the steady lake" and wrote, "had I met these lines running wild in the deserts of Arabia, I should have instantly screamed out 'Wordsworth!'"
47
we can see that although Coleridge's enthusiasm contrasts strongly with Jeffrey's coolness, there is no great difference in their perception of what the poem is doing. It is not really a poem about childhood; it is a poem about the relation between subjective experience and the external world. After participating in the boy's awareness of the world around him, it moves to the curious act of concentration when, listening for one thing, he perceives another with heightened awareness. Wordsworth's own note, in the 1815 Preface, explains why the poem was chosen to stand first among the Poems of the Imagination: "Guided by one of my own primary consciousnesses, I have presented a commutation and transfer of internal feelings, co-operating with external accidents, to plant, for immortality, images of sound and sight, in the celestial soil of the Imagination." The phrase "primary consciousnesses'' must be an echo of Coleridge's primary imagination, and may well derive from their conversations (
Biographia Literaria
had not yet been published); both expressions refer to sense perception, and both suggest that an understanding of sense perception provides the basis for understanding the imagination.
"For the sake of this one accomplishment," writes Jeffrey contemptuously; the opposite critical response is found in De Quincey's comment on these lines:
Then sometimes, in that silence, while he hung
Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise
Has carried far into his heart the voice
Of mountain torrents.
I have often asked readers of the poem to pick out the one word in these lines that gives the clearest indication of Wordsworth's genius. The answers always show that Jeffrey is still riding. In general, they are surprised that these lines should be singled out, for are they not just a straightforward description of a childish accomplishment; and their choice of words ("hung," "shock," "torrents") is usually half-hearted, revealing a (correct)
 
Page 80
impression that there is no obvious verbal felicity in the lines. Or not till De Quincey reads them:
The very expression "far" by which space and its infinities are attributed to the human heart, and its capacities of re-echoing the sublimities of nature, has always struck me as with a flash of sublime revelation.
48
This is, surely, one of those rare critical observations that seem a creative act equal to, perhaps even surpassing, the poet's own: it registers an awareness that a central concern to Wordsworth's poetry is to give to the inner world the same quality of extension that the outer world possessesor, in other words, it presents Wordsworth as the poet of the primary imagination.
49
And death? A lively critical discussion is possible about why the child has to die, which can be attached to the milder scholarly discussion of who the child was. The fact that in a manuscript draft the passage is in the first person may make it clear that Wordsworth is drawing on personal memory here (though it is always possible that a skill he had admired in William Rainock or John Vickersthe possible originals for the boyhad been transposed into the first person). Another verbal trace of the fact that the child is assumed to be still alive is the use of the present perfect tense, "has carried" (it would have been easy enough to write "would carry"). When the poem was first published in
Lyrical Ballads,
it ended with the boy's death and Wordsworth standing by his grave. How far this was intended as an inevitable outcome and how far as a justification for treating the episode as an entire poem, we cannot know. When placed in, or restored to,
The Prelude
, it keeps the death, but the context it now belongs with is that of education and the superiority of natural growth over intellectual training; and what is education for if not for life? Its placement in
The Prelude
has the effect of suggesting that the truly important link is not with death but with childhood, and not childhood in its association with loss and absence but childhood as a time of intense concentration. Of course the ingenious critic will always manage to find justifications for making alternative connexions: the two themes, Nature's influence and death, are so resonant that it is unimaginable that they should not overlap. But if death is appropriate, it will be for reasons very different from Kirk White's.
50
Is Wordsworth himself claiming that the death is appropriate when, in his 1815 note, he asserts that transfer of inward feelings plants the images

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