No More Learning

Many of Wordsworth's allusions to Place are obscure, and the exact
localities difficult to identify. It is doubtful if he cared whether
they could be afterwards traced out or not; and in reference to one
particular rock, referred to in the "Poems on the Naming of Places,"
when asked by a friend to localise it, he declined; replying to the
question, "Yes, that--or any other that will suit! " There is no doubt
that, in many instances, his allusions to place are intentionally vague;
and, in some of his most realistic passages, he avowedly weaves together
a description of localities remote from each other.

It is true that "Poems of Places" are not meant to be photographs; and
were they simply to reproduce the features of a particular district, and
be an exact transcript of reality, they would be literary photographs,
and not poems. Poetry cannot, in the nature of things, be a mere
register of phenomena appealing to the eye or the ear. No imaginative
writer, however, in the whole range of English Literature, is so
peculiarly identified with locality as Wordsworth is; and there is not
one on the roll of poets, the appreciation of whose writings is more
aided by an intimate knowledge of the district in which he lived. The
wish to be able to identify his allusions to those places, which he so
specially interpreted, is natural to every one who has ever felt the
spell of his genius; and it is indispensable to all who would know the
special charm of a region, which he described as "a national property,"
and of which he, beyond all other men, may be said to have effected the
literary "conveyance" to posterity.

But it has been asked--and will doubtless be asked again--what is the
use of a minute identification of all these places? Is not the general
fact that Wordsworth described this district of mountain, vale, and
mere, sufficient, without any further attempt at localisation? The
question is more important, and has wider bearings, than appears upon
the surface.

It must be admitted, on the one hand, that the discovery of the precise
point in every local allusion is not necessary to an understanding or
appreciation of the Poems. But, it must be remembered, on the other
hand, that Wordsworth was never contented with simply copying what he
saw in Nature. Of the 'Evening Walk'--written in his eighteenth year--he
says that the plan of the poem

"has not been confined to a particular walk or an individual place; a
proof (of which I was unconscious at the time) of my unwillingness to
submit the poetic spirit to the chains of fact and real circumstance.
The country is idealised rather than described in any one of its local
aspects. "[13]

Again, he says of the 'Lines written while Sailing in a Boat at Evening':

"It was during a solitary walk on the banks of the Cam that I was
first struck with this appearance, and applied it to my own feelings
in the manner here expressed, changing the scene to the Thames, near
Windsor"; [14]

and of 'Guilt and Sorrow', he said,

"To obviate some distraction in the minds of those who are well
acquainted with Salisbury Plain, it may be proper to say, that of the
features described as belonging to it, one or two are taken from other
desolate parts of England.
" [15]

In 'The Excursion' he passes from Langdale to Grasmere, over to
Patterdale, back to Grasmere, and again to Hawes Water, without warning;
and even in the case of the "Duddon Sonnets" he introduces a description
taken direct from Rydal. Mr. Aubrey de Vere tells of a conversation he
had with Wordsworth, in which he vehemently condemned the
ultra-realistic poet, who goes to Nature with

"pencil and note-book, and jots down whatever strikes him most,"
adding, "Nature does not permit an inventory to be made of her charms!
He should have left his pencil and note-book at home; fixed his eye as
he walked with a reverent attention on all that surrounded him, and
taken all into a heart that could understand and enjoy. Afterwards he
would have discovered that while much of what he had admired was
preserved to him, much was also most wisely obliterated. _That which
remained, the picture surviving in his mind, would have presented the
ideal and essential truth of the scene, and done so in large part by
discarding much which, though in itself striking, was not
characteristic. _ In every scene, many of the most brilliant details
are but accidental. "

The two last sentences of this extract give admirable expression to one
feature of Wordsworth's interpretation of Nature. In the deepest poetry,
as in the loftiest music,--in Wordsworth's lyrics as in Beethoven's
sonatas--it is by what they unerringly suggest and not by what they
exhaustively express that their truth and power are known. "In what he
leaves unsaid," wrote Schiller, "I discover the master of style. " It
depends, no doubt, upon the vision of the "inward eye," and the
reproductive power of the idealising mind, whether the result is a
travesty of Nature, or the embodiment of a truth higher than Nature
yields. On the other hand, it is equally certain that the identification
of localities casts a sudden light in many instances upon obscure
passages in a poem, and is by far the best commentary that can be given.
It is much to be able to compare the actual scene, with the ideal
creation suggested by it; as the latter was both Wordsworth's reading of
the text of Nature, and his interpretation of it. In his seventy-third
year, he said, looking back on his 'Evening Walk', that there was not an
image in the poem which he had not observed, and that he "recollected
the time and place where most of them were noted. " In the Fenwick notes,
we constantly find him saying, "the fact occurred strictly as recorded,"
"the fact was as mentioned in the poem"; and the fact very often
involved the accessories of place.

Any one who has tried to trace out the allusions in the "Poems on the
Naming of Places," or to discover the site of "Michael's Sheepfold," to
identify "Ghimmer Crag," or "Thurston-Mere,"--not to speak of the
individual "rocks" and "recesses" near Blea Tarn at the head of Little
Langdale so minutely described in 'The Excursion',--will admit that
local commentary is an important aid to the understanding of Wordsworth.