Buried Communities: Wordsworth and the Bonds of Mourning

2. Grief and Dwelling in the Cambridge Poems, including An Evening Walk

An unknown power connects him with the dead. —Descriptive Sketches As Mary Moorman observes, Wordsworth’s leather-bound Hawkshead notebook (MS. 2) “went with him to Cambridge” (WW 86). So did his developing sociology. Tucked in his bags with the notebook was The Vale of Esthwaite (MS. 3) and likely a few pages containing other of his Hawkshead works, including “On the death of an unfortunate Lady,” “Sonnet written by Mr _______ immediately after the death of his Wife,” and “Ballad.” We cannot know just how much Wordsworth continued to work on The Vale of Esthwaite ; his dating of the poem to “Spring and Summer 1787” (EPF 76) attests at least to its relative completion. But his interest in the poem clearly continued as he now set about reducing the long narrative to a series of “extracts.” His interest in death and mourning continued unabated, as well, as writings in the leather notebook evince: notably “Dirge Sung by a Minstrel ” (for a boy), one of two such dirges composed during his first months at Cambridge. In the notebook he also recorded “A Tale” (whose grief-maddened woman anticipates figures of the Salisbury Plain poems and The Ruined Cottage), the previously completed “Ballad,” two epitaphs, and the bulk of Various Extracts from the Vale.1 In two other contemporary manuscripts , he translated Virgil’s “Orpheus and Eurydice” (MS. 5) and Moschus’s elegy, “Lament for Bion” (MS. 7). 47 2 Grief and Dwelling in the Cambridge Poems, including An Evening Walk As this list of titles suggests, the sense (and the sensibility) of grief that had dominated Wordsworth’s Hawkshead poetry continued to shape his poetic and social vision at Cambridge. And this list does not include the most important, and surely the most impressive, of the poet’s college-era writings: his four so-called Evening Sonnets and his first significant published poems, the topographical diptych An Evening Walk (1788–93) and Descriptive Sketches (1792–93). Taken together, they and his other Cambridge works reveal signs of Wordsworth’s poetic maturation and of the development of his social views. Notably, there is now an increasing emphasis upon a social desire for dwelling—not so surprising, perhaps, given Wordsworth’s recent departure from the Tyson cottage and his brothers’ company, his disappointment with school life at Cambridge, and political events on the world stage. Yet, in a period rife with talk of revolution and of reform, Wordsworth’s Cambridge poems have little to say about politics, excepting An Evening Walk’s mention of the past war with America and a few such lines in Descriptive Sketches. Although almost certainly inspired by the French Revolution, the latter poem’s decrial of oppression and its praise of liberty, freedom, and justice noticeably skirt recent continental history, and may be read as suggesting the impact more of Wordsworth’s reading than of the explosion of revolution. At the same time, however, the decrials and social interests of the Cambridge poems suggest their timeliness: the extent to which they respond to ideas and problems both in Wordsworth’s personal life and in British society. These college writings focus upon isolated human figures affected by the era’s economic and social changes, upon landscapes that promise to heal the wounds of alienation and melancholy, and, finally, as an emerging and increasing concern, upon the foundations of society. In these works, Wordsworth’s desire to articulate fundamental bonds of social cohesion really begins to make itself felt, advancing from the shadows of the poems’ picturesque landscape details— from the Lakes to the Alps—to glimpse the first “social rays” of mourning. I. THE EVENING SONNETS’ “MAGIC PATH” Likely composed between 1789 and 1791, the four Evening Sonnets2 follow in the sonnet and nocturne traditions, echoing William Bowles’s recently published Fourteen Sonnets and in fact borrowing the poems’ rhyme scheme. They also reveal the influence of Charlotte Smith’s popular Elegiac Sonnets (1784–89), Helen Maria Williams’s vogue sonnets in Poems (1786), Milton’s Il Penseroso, Thomson’s The Seasons, and William Collins’s and Joseph Warton’s respective odes to evening (EPF 676)—to list only the most prominent literary works. But as much as the sonnets show Wordsworth glancing behind, they also show him looking ahead. 48 Buried Communities Wordsworth’s Evening Sonnet IV, “How rich in front with twilight’s tinge impressed,” is best known in its revised form in Lyrical...