From the Archive (2003): Fixed Subjectivity

Bill Schraufnagel

February 11, 2003

English 438b, Alderman

Mini Paper # 2

The Fixed Subjectivity

To some extent, Wordsworth’s Prelude of 1799 endeavors to illustrate to his reader (Coleridge) how Nature, in all its various forms, “with its steady cadence tempering / Our human waywardness, composed my thoughts” (First Part, 11-12). In so doing, however, he wishes to eschew the constricts of human logic, “that false secondary power by which / In weakness we create distinctions” (Second Part, 251-2). Wordsworth thus faces the challenge of honoring the “steady cadence” of nature while working within a form (poetry) that necessarily “creates distinctions” by packaging meaning in discrete units such as words, lines, stanzas, etc. and following certain established conventions. In the face of this challenge, Wordsworth relies on his own subjectivity. He turns himself into an object upon which the forms of nature are free to work. He keeps himself passive and points to the “steady cadence” mentioned in the invocation, but indirectly: through its effects on him as he remembers them in various episodes from his childhood.

An example of this comes during the Second Part of the 1799 Prelude as he and some friends ride home from an island across a lake, having left one of their companions behind. Wordsworth describes his memory of the event:

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. (210-4)

The two aspects of the poet apparent in this passage are his “mind” and his “heart.” He arranges them rather conventionally in relation to each other. He begins with the mind and moves to the heart. Visually, in the stanza, the brain appears “above” the heart. The two primary natural forms in the stanza are “water” and “the sky.” The water “lay upon” his mind and the sky “sank down into” his heart. The resulting picture is a vertical progression from top to bottom of water, mind, sky, and heart. The expected hierarchy of sky-above-water becomes inverted, while the hierarchy of mind-above-heart remains in place. “Sky” and “water” are the subjects syntactically, while “mind” and “heart” function as passive objects. The entire system resolves itself in the final verb phrase: “held me like a dream.” This image of stillness echoes the “calm” from line 210. Thus we see how the poet encapsulates a series of counter-intuitive images and inversions (“water upon mind” and “sky down into heart”) within two cases of stillness. The first case being the “calm” of the water as observed from the outside; and the second case being “held like a dream,” the subjective experience of the poet’s form interfused with the natural forms.

Wordsworth’s fidelity to his own passive subjectivity allows him to write about this process. If the natural forms appear to behave in bizarre or counter-intuitive ways, it is only because he sees them (or writes them) through his own human and “wayward” perspective. This perspective, and an acknowledgment of its deficiencies, frees the poet to pay homage to the forces that shaped him without claiming to understand them.