Wordsworth and the Poetry of Posture

I stay here, sitting, if I'm sitting, often I feel sitting, sometimes standing, it's one or the other, or lying down, there's another possibility, often I feel lying down, it's one of the three, or kneeling. What counts is to be in the world, the posture is immaterial, so long as one is on earth.

—Samuel Beckett, Texts for Nothing

"Oh is she prostrate, you mean?"—he had his categories in hand. "Why yes, she's prostrate—just as Sally is. But they're never so lively, you know, as when they're prostrate." "Ah Sarah's prostrate?" Strether vaguely murmured. "It's when they're prostrate that they most sit up."

—Henry James, The Ambassadors

In his 1914 essay "The Moses of Michelangelo," Sigmund Freud offers what was a startlingly new interpretation of the gigantic eight-plus feet tall statue of Moses which is found in the church of San Pietro in Vincoli in Rome. Freud cites a list of venerable names, including both Jacob Burckhardt and Heinrich Wölfflin, who agree that Michelangelo portrayed Moses at a particularly dramatic crux in the story of Exodus: the moment when Moses's anger "waxed hot" as the Israelites are discovered worshipping an idol (Exodus 32:19). Having cooled the waxing heat of God's anger a few verses earlier on Sinai, as their idolatry was reported to him, Moses's own ire is raised by the sight, or maybe by the sound, of the idolatrous worship itself. The authors Freud cites understand Michelangelo to have situated Moses, who is portrayed seated, just before he takes action, at what Freud calls a "moment of hesitation, of calm before the storm."¹ Moses is about to spring to his feet; his left foot is already raised at the heel, as if he were preparing to put pressure on the ball of the foot in order to hoist his powerful form upright. That form, for Burckhardt, "is animated by the inception of a mighty movement and the physical strength with which he is endowed causes us to await it with fear and trembling" (M, 216). Wölfflin's interpretation of the posture of the statue as one of "inhibited movement" has Michelangelo depicting Moses, as Freud summarizes it, at "the last moment of self-control before he lets himself go and leaps to his feet" (M, 217). Moses has his head turned to the left, as if he looks over to the Israelite camp or has just caught the sound of the singing that Exodus records as he is resting, or so Freud surmises, on his way down Sinai. This moment of hesitation or delay precedes the sudden onrush of energy that, in two other readings of the statue that Freud cites, will cause the Tables of the Law pressed under Moses's right arm to slip unnoticed to the ground and smash, as his enraged body suddenly rises up.

But Freud is unconvinced. Why, he asks, if Michelangelo had wished to represent this particular moment from the biblical narrative, would he have portrayed Moses as seated? The statue had been produced as part of an ambitious design for the tomb of Pope Julius II of two rows of three seated figures, which were intended as what Henry Thode calls "types of human beings—as the vita activa and the vita contemplativa" (M, 219). Freud's contention is that both this abstract humanist typology and the decision to represent Moses seated "excluded a representation of a particular historic episode" (M, 219). For Moses or any of the other figures to be represented "as about to take violent action" would disrupt the harmony of the whole by permitting the illusion that each was about to "abandon its role in the general scheme" (M, 220). The figure of Moses, then, "cannot be supposed to be springing to his feet; he must be allowed to remain as he is in sublime repose" [er muß in hehrer Ruhe können] M, 220). What looks like stern anger in Moses's countenance—as if the spectator, like the Israelites, were about to be...