Cather Studies, Volume 7: Willa Cather as Cultural Icon

Recollecting Emotion in Tranquility: Wordsworth and Byron in Cather’s My Ántonia and Lucy Gayheart

119 Recollecting Emotion in Tranquility Wordsworth and Byron in Cather’s My Ántonia and Lucy Gayheart J O N A T H A N D . G R O S S Matthew Arnold judged Wordsworth and Byron “first and pre-eminent in actual performance, a glorious pair, among the English poets of this century. . . . When the year 1900 is turned,” he added, “and our nation comes to recount her poetic glories in the century which has then just ended, the first names with her will be these” (“Byron” 236–37). Arnold’s influential preface to Poetry of Byron (1881) helped create icons, literary figures who would become touchstones for future generations . For Arnold, Wordsworth and Byron operated as emotional shorthand: the reflective Wordsworth contrasting with the tempestuous Byron. By creating characters who are by turns Wordsworthian and Byronic in My Ántonia and Lucy Gayheart, Willa Cather engaged in a dialogue with the British icons who preceded her. My Ántonia exemplifies this engagement, for Cather portrays Jim Burden as a man who has closed his Byron and opened his Wordsworth.1 My Ántonia celebrates Wordsworth’s values as expressed in “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey,” though the theme of nature never betraying the heart that loved her is colored, curiously enough, by allusions to Byron’s “When We Two Parted.” In Lucy Gayheart, Cather turned to the theme of Byronic pessimism, and this particular lyric, in earnest. She 120 jo n at h a n d . g ro s s showed just what can happen when someone gives way to Byronic passions without the sustaining influence of the land (Clement Sebastian) and what can happen when he does not (Harry Gordon). My Ántonia ends on a note of Wordsworthian hope, with Jim Burden exalted by the picture of Ántonia that revives again, much as Wordsworth drew sustenance from the “wild eyes” of his sister, Dorothy. Lucy Gayheart ends with the heroine’s drowning and Harry Gordon’s meditation on the meaning of her death and his own, quite passionless, life. For Jim Burden and for Lucy Gayheart, as for many in the nineteenth century, Byronism is both an inspiration and a disease. If the Wordsworthian impulse is centrifugal, inclined toward nostos (home-bound), the Byronic is centripetal, marked by nomadic wandering. Lucy Gayheart summarizes these twin impulses as she contemplates the Byronic influence of Clement Sebastian on her life: “she had lost it as one can lose a ravishing melody, remembering the mood of it, the kind of joy it gave but unable to recall precisely the air itself,” Cather’s narrator notes. “If only one could lose one’s life and one’s body and be nothing but one’s desire; if the rest could melt away and that could float with the gulls, out yonder where the blue and green were changing !” (103). Cather’s characters express a similar wish to cast off restrictions on their artistic vision, an allegory, perhaps, for Cather’s own literary career in which she achieved iconic status, in part, by rejecting American forms of parochialism. W O R D S W O R T H A N D B Y R O N I N M Y Á N T O N I A In his preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth wrote that “poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility” (126). Five years had passed since he first visited the Wye valley in 1793, and “Tintern Abbey” begins by recording this fact: “Five years have passed; five summers, with the length / Of five long winters!” (ll. 1–2). Wordsworth contrasts chronological time (clock time) with felt time. In the year 1793 (five years before 1798), he stood with his sister and Annette Vallon in Calais, having visited France shortly before the outbreak of the French Revolution. England 121 Recollecting Emotion in Tranquility declared war on France in February 1793, and in January of that month Louis XVI was beheaded. So important is the passage of time for Wordsworth that he includes the date of July 13, 1798, in the very title of the poem, using the word “again” (“Once again / . . . again repose”) in order to chart his mental development from what he once was to what he now is, to what he will one day become.2 Specifically, Wordsworth charts his movement from...