Romantic Moods: Paranoia, Trauma, and Melancholy, 1790-1840 (review)

Speaking in valediction to his son, the old shepherd in Wordsworth's 'Michael' bids him retain as an emblem of the life of his forefathers, and hence as an 'anchor and … shield', the plan of a sheepfold whose first stone the boy now lays. The conspicuously absent and imaginary sheepfold ('A work which is not here') forms, in Michael's mind, 'a covenant / … between us'. His self-imposed duty to complete what his son has symbolically begun is the corollary of the duty imposed upon Luke to redeem for his father his own 'patrimonial fields'. But the putatively natural 'covenant' is rapidly denatured when transplanted with Luke into the 'dissolute' world of the city. Chosen by Michael as the solution to a financial crisis rather than the sale of any 'portion' of his subsistence farm, the 'covenant' was in fact always as unnatural as what Paine called Burke's sacrifice of the substantial good of the present generation to a fetishised patrimony. Removed from anything more than an imaginary connection to his father's hastily invented tradition, Luke 'slacken[s] in his duty' and gives himself over to 'evil courses'. And Michael, whose ability to endure this catastrophic loss of posterity depends, as Thomas Pfau argues powerfully in the fourth chapter of Romantic Moods, precisely upon evading the kind of (socio-economic) self-awareness that first motivated the sacrifice of his son (201), works compulsively at the non-building of the palliative emblem of ancestry that is not there.

The unfinished sheepfold is a quintessentially Wordsworthian image of desolation that echoes the evocative remains of earlier poems like 'The Ruined Cottage' and 'Tintern Abbey'. Figured as both a fragment and as a ruin that memorialises a traumatic failure, it also anticipates the decay of Wordsworth's intended master-work The Recluse from the 'gothic Church' under construction in The Excursion (1814) to the 'thing incomplete' that, in the Fenwick notes of 1843, made 'sadder transits o'er thought's optic glass / Than noblest objects utterly decayed'. Pfau's Romantic Moods similarly views 'Michael' – along with a wide range of other works by other writers – as representative of one phase in a larger historical and emotional trajectory spanning the 1790s and the 1840s. But rather than focusing upon the explicit themes and ideas of such literary artefacts, Pfau reads them as formally innovatory responses to the period's allegedly prevailing 'moods' of paranoia, trauma, and melancholy. Pfau's treatment of 'Michael' provides perhaps the best example of this method in action.

Wordsworth's development of the pastoral poem in 'Michael' constitutes, for Pfau, a formal strategy for registering and recovering from the socio-historical 'trauma' of the late 1790s by making the unconscious conscious, the accidental intentional, and the ballad lyrical (217). The poem's staging of Michael's slow awakening to – or, rather, his faltering remembrance of the missed evidence of – his implication in macrocosmic historical shifts (207–208) is, thus, an attempt not to escape but to realise the historical 'situatedness' (7) of the subject. Pursuing his broader argument that lyric poetry 'encrypts' in its formal and rhetorical properties a 'holistic knowledge of historical existence' originally experienced as 'mood' (69), Pfau sees Wordsworth's rendering of 'the indeterminate gestalt of the sheepfold' (218) as an emblem of the poet's lyrical 'redemption' of the social knowledge locked up in the rude form of the ballad. In evidence he quotes the following draft passage from DC MS. 31:

There is a shapeless heap of unhewn stones That lie together, some in heaps and some In lines that seem to keep themselves alive In the last dotage of a dying form At least so seems to a man that stands In such a lonely place.

From this Pfau extrapolates the proposition that the poem's 'speaker' inhabits a liminal space, caught 'between reproducing the inchoate rustic locutions of a "shapeless crowd" and attempting to reproduce a coherent outline that...