Buried Communities: Wordsworth and the Bonds of Mourning

6. Grieving and Dwelling in the Five-Book Prelude and Home at Grasmere

What dwelling shall receive me? —The Prelude In the long cold winter at Goslar, during which Wordsworth composed the Lucy elegies and other poems published in the second volume of Lyrical Ballads , he was tentatively drafting a few autobiographical fragments. These narratives , including some of the well-known “spots of time,” would soon help form the two-part Prelude of 1798–99, a poem whose concerns are much in keeping with the social views of his contemporary works in the Lyrical Ballads of 1800. The Prelude’s enigmatic spots of time and certain other of its scenes indeed attest to the endurance of the paradigm of mournful community in the darker passages of Wordsworth’s art in these years (to draw upon Keats’s wording). Much like the poet’s poems in Lyrical Ballads, these memory fragments engage and investigate the parameters and permutations of his Orphic sociology of the Dead, despite the considerable pressures being exerted by the impending Recluse to cast himself as a “chosen Son” of nature. For “the poem to Coleridge,” as Wordsworth frequently called his stop-gap “prelude” to the philosophical opus, provided yet another opportunity to digress as well as to revisit the sources of his poetical and social powers. Those sources were especially to be enlisted in the new poem’s insistent quest for dwelling, sparked no doubt in part by William and Dorothy’s current lack not just of a home but of a clear plan about where in England they would live. One of the cornerstones of The Recluse, the topographical poem Home at Grasmere depicts Wordsworth’s search for a home in that vale. More specifically, 163 6 Grieving and Dwelling in the Five-Book Prelude and Home at Grasmere this foundation narrative explores the manner in which death and grief promise to sanctify dwelling and inclusion in Grasmere. Despite the poem’s clear place in the larger plan of the magnum opus, as its first part’s own first book, and its intent to represent nature’s social and healing powers, Wordsworth seems throughout its narrative to be unable to imagine community otherwise than by enlisting the powers of mourning as its foundation. Home at Grasmere’s elegiac, at times notably eucharistic, verse of desired dwelling thus revisits much the same dead-oriented basis for cohesion that underlay the communities of the Salisbury Plain poems and The Ruined Cottage. But in conceptualizing Grasmere ’s vale as a community, Wordsworth’s poem does more than reiterate past schemes of social bonding. It also broadens those sources of cohesion beyond the human realm of vagrants, pedlars, travelers, soldiers, and poets to include animals. Mourning these animals promises to form a “unity entire,” but it also curiously and unexpectedly threatens to undermine such social cohesion and along with it the poem’s foundational project. I. SUPERSTITIOUS COMPANY: ENCOUNTERING THE DEAD IN THE FIVE-BOOK PRELUDE And I do not doubt That in this later time . . . unknown to me The workings of my spirit thence are brought. —Book 5 The communitarian importance of the dead persists in all the versions of The Prelude: in the two-part poem, in the five-book Prelude of 1804, and, in a proportionally diminished state, in the thirteen-book 1805 text and the authorized , fourteen-book edition of 1850. The paradigm in this way haunts the opus, even in that work’s less dead-focused later incarnations. And it does so in part because this “Anti-chapel” to the gothic church-like Recluse (Ex ix) was to serve its author as a “pleasant loitering journey,” a “sabbath” not to be bended to the “servile yoke” of that onerous task (5P 1.112–14). The poet’s holiday was instead to be employed finding some other means of social utterance until he could develop the philosophical voice to undertake his and Coleridge’s grand and taxing “determined aim” (124). Wordsworth tellingly explains away his vocational lassitude as but a poet’s “unruly times,” when “less quiet instincts, goadings-on,” drive the mind “as in trouble through the groves” (144, 151–52). Yet in representing his vexed poetical faculty as a mythic hunter turned hunted, driven not by higher moral proddings but by hounding lower “instincts,” Wordsworth’s text reveals just such counter-aims to be operative. 164 Buried Communities The poet enlists Actaeon’s mythic tale of ill fortune or hubris1 to allegorize his less lofty...