Wordsworth's Michael and the Pastoral Tradition

RICHARD LESSA Wordsworth's Michael and the Pastoral Tradition When William Wordsworth called Michael a pastoral poem, he pOinted to a literary tradition that seems at first glance far removed from this tale ofa Lake-country shepherd. What has his poem in common with Marlowe's 'Passionate Shepherd,' for example, or with the sort of pastoral written by Pope or Ambrose Philips a century earlier? Its opening lines evoke anything but a sense of delicate pastoral charm and tranquillity. Instead there is a 'tumultuous brook' and the prospect of a struggle on an 'upright path' that would challenge an experienced climber. And surely 'Courage!' had never before been demanded of one who would enter the pastoral world. It may be that Wordsworth used the term 'pastoral' with intentional ambiguity here. He gives some indication of this when he speaks of the 'pastoral mountains' that are an important element of the poem's setting. On the one hand, these are literally mountains where herdsmen pasture their sheep, and they are part of a poem whose principal character is indeed a keeper of flocks and not a poet in shepherd's clothing. On the other hand, they are the setting of a poem that has enough of the traditional genre about it that the literary sense of 'pastoral' also applies. Wordsworth does make use ofat least those conventions of the genre that fit his purpose. The poem is set in the country rather than the city; it offers an idealized version of the countryside; and its characters, if not Daphne and Corydon, are shepherds none the less. But in a special sense, as I hope to show, Michael reflects a profound change in the conventions of the pastoral. In the end itbecomes a more traditional poem, butonly when its shepherd-hero's life has lost virtually all meaning. The paradoxical nature of the poem's relationship to pastoralism will be made more clear, I think, when I come to discuss the final image of Michael sitting immobile beside the unfinished sheepfold at Green-head Ghyll. The poem's initial sense of tumult and struggle- itself an inversion of the conventional pastoral- is soon dispelled as the imposing mountains give way to the peace and solitude of 'a hidden valley: Again, like so much in Michael, this valley reflects both the literal and the literary sense of pastoral. It contains 'a few sheep' still, although not as many as in Michael's day. At the same time, it might easily be that locus amoenus in which a shepherd-poet would sing of Delia's love or of Thyrsis who will UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 53, NUMBER 2, WINTER 198)14 182 RICHARD LESSA not return. In fact, Wordsworth hints at the customary mood of leisured tranquillity that caIls forth such a shepherd's song when he first mentions the story that might be told of the place: A story - unenriched with strange events, Yet not unfit, I deem, for the fireside, Or for the summer shade. (Lines 19-21)t Where but in 'the summer shade' would a shepherd-poet sing? The use ofan external speaker as a frame for the story of Michael further ties Wordsworth's poem to the pastoral tradition. Such a frame, acting as an introduction to a lyric poem within a poem, was used by Pope, for example, in three of his four Pastorals. Of course, it is not a conventional song of love or a lyric lament that is being framed in Michael, but rather a narrative. At the same time, Wordsworth's speaker may be distinguished from more traditional speakers as weIl as from those of such eighteenthcentury versions of the pastoral as Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard and The Deserted Village in that he acknowledges an audience which he addresses directly. He is not overheard, as are the speakers of the poems by Gray and Goldsmith. The difference between these poems and Michael is the difference between solitary meditation and an audited narrative, and between subjective personal observations and a story obtained at second hand. And it is a 'story' that is narrated in Michael, an aesthetic construct, just as a song, sometimes...