The Wordsworthian Acoustic Imagination, Sonic Recursions, and “that dying murmur”

This essay focuses on echoes and murmurs in William Words- worth’s verse as signs of loss or rupture. Acknowledging the overlap between the unavoidably dissipating songs of humanity and the muted reminder of our ephemerality encoded within the sounds of his verse, Wordsworth foregrounds the urgent chases of quest romance as a model for the enduring auditory patterns that inform Lyrical Ballads. Once-pursued murmurs become threnodic, fragmentary echoes, recalling the extralingual threads that bind balladic romances to lyric poetry. In Wordsworth’s resulting acoustic imagination, this nonsemantic expression of disquieting affect resides beneath and within a lasting, ongoing sonic genealogy.