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ELH 68.3 (2001) 655-677



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Signs of the Dead: Epitaphs, Inscriptions, and the Discourse of the Self

Dewey W. Hall


The 1805 and 1850 texts of The Prelude book 10 differ in their recollections about how Wordsworth came to visit William Taylor's gravesite. In 1805, the poet attributed the discovery of Taylor's grave to chance as though he happened upon it. This version of the memory expresses uncertainty and, ironically, identifies chance as the agent of self-revelation that initiates Wordsworth's entry as mental traveller into the static world of the deceased; however, in Wordsworth's poetics, self-contemplation of the "emotion recollected in tranquillity" leaves very little possibility for chance to have any sort of causal relation to the poetic production of lyrical ballads, and especially epic poetry. If chance does not seem to be the causal factor in Wordsworth's stumbling on Taylor's grave, then why does the poet claim that he "chanced to find" the gravesite? 1 The line uncannily echoes the opening stanza of "Lucy Gray" (1799). The poet claims: "Oft I had heard of Lucy Gray: / And, when I crossed the wild, / I chanced to see at break of day / The solitary child" (my emphasis). 2 Does the poet really see a "solitary child" before or after her death? If so, then the vision of Lucy Gray can either be that of the living child or her wraith. 3 My purpose here is not an attempt to assign determinacy to indeterminate lines; but rather to note that, interestingly, what appears in Wordsworth's poetics is this sense of spontaneity implied in the term "chanced," when, instead, the poet's sighting of Lucy Gray is really a self-consciously constructed and contrived memory here. 4 Chance is no more a significant index of identifying Lucy Gray than it is in leading the poet to rediscover William Taylor's gravesite at Cartmell Priory.

In ThePrelude (1805), Wordsworth's use of the term "chanced" is just as equally suspect in masking not only a premeditated recollection, but also an elision--a mental blind spot--within the poetic consciousness. Wordsworth's mind remains thwarted by the "fulgent spectacle" (1805, 10.486), what Neil Hertz calls a "moment of blockage," until the poetic "fancy more alive" (1805, 10.488) activates impulses to induce a change in direction to search for Taylor's tombstone. 5 In effect, the power of the [End Page 655] imagination, not chance, performs as the causal agent in Wordsworth's mind which suppresses the crisis in his moral nature regarding his disillusion with the French Revolution. M. H. Abrams's "English Romanticism: The Spirit of the Age" posits: "It is not irrelevant, I believe, that many seemingly apolitical poems of the later Romantic period turn on the theme of hope and joy and the temptation to abandon all hope and fall into dejection and despair; the recurrent emotional pattern is that of the key books of The Excursion, labeled 'Despondency' and 'Despondency Corrected,' which apply specifically to the failure of millennial hope in the Revolution." 6 Specifically, Abrams's comment on the "turn" which occurs in the poet's mind from hope to despair identifies not only a "recurrent emotional pattern," but also the compulsion to repeat pleasurable experiences and repress unpleasurable ones. For Wordsworth, book 10 of ThePrelude (1850) reveals his mind turning inward, once again, from the "failure of millennial hope" to poetic inspiration from the past:

       On the fulgent spectacle,
Which neither changed, nor stirred, nor passed away,
I gazed, and with a fancy more alive
On this account--that I had chanced to find
That morning, ranging through the churchyard graves
Of Cartmell's rural town, the place in which
An honored teacher of my youth was laid. (1805, 10.486-92, my emphasis)
       On the fulgent spectacle,
That neither passed away nor changed, I gazed
Enrapt; but brightest things are wont to draw
Sad opposites out of the inner heart,
As now their pensive influence drew from mine.
How could it otherwise? For not...

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