Wordsworth’s Sonnets
I’ve finally caught up with the first episode of Owen Sheers’ series for the BBC poetry season, A Poet’s Guide to Britain, and was enjoying his brief but informative trawl through the thinking and history behind Wordsworth’s sonnet Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, right up until the point that Sheers began to wonder about the detail of what Wordsworth might have been thinking during the month he spent in France arranging to disentangle himself from the mother of his illegitimate child.
Sheers bemoans the lack of detail in Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal: “she’s frustratingly quiet on the things we really want to know about,” he said. “What was it like for William and Annette to see one another again? Was there still any spark? How was it for William to meet his nine year old daughter for the first time?”
I was disappointed – Sheers had seemed sensible and subtle until this point. Why is this “what we really want to know about”? Why can we not be trusted to get a clear idea of the state of Wordsworth’s mind from the sonnets written in and around that month-long beach holiday? Why must everything be reduced to tittle-tattle?
Sheers mentions the sonnet that refers to Wordsworth’s daughter, which begins “It is a beauteous Evening, calm and free”, and suggests that there is a sense of detachment in the closing lines:
‘Dear Child! dear Girl! that walkest with me here,
If thou appear'st untouch'd by solemn thought,
Thy nature is not therefore less divine:
Thou liest in Abraham's bosom all the year;
And worshipp'st at the Temple's inner shrine,
God being with thee when we know it not.’
There is, but Sheers doesn’t connect this back to his earlier, tediously populist question – he is yearning for dirt on the holiday in Dorothy’s journals, as if she were some sort of paparazzi diarist, when he should have been looking to the poems for answers. However oblique they may be, the answers are in there, in the fond detachment of Wordsworth’s connection with his daughter, in the fact that the second set of sonnets is dedicated to liberty and look often longingly back at England and in this extract from To A Friend, Composed Near Calais: “Yet despair/I feel not: happy am I as a Bird:/Fair seasons yet will come, and hopes as fair.”
One can draw plenty of conclusions from Wordsworth’s sonnets and his sister’s journals without ever submitting to the peculiarly modern need for a prosaic ‘he said, she said’ dialogue. But we are living in an age that demands such minute detail of private lives, gossip and scandal at the expense of subtlety, as everything from the hoo-ha surrounding the Oxford Poetry Professorship to the latest issue of Heat prove; an age of celebrity and personality at the expense of art and artfulness. It is depressing to find that Sheers is as eager as a gossip columnist for clinical details of the arrangements.
I’m not suggesting that we should divorce poet from poems entirely – it is instructive to know that Wordsworth was arranging the freedom to marry Mary Hutchinson whilst he was writing these sonnets in 1802. What I would really like to know, however, is what conclusion readers of Wordsworth’s 1802 sonnets, given the barest biographical detail surrounding the writing of them, would come to as to his state of mind.
WRITTEN IN LONDON,
September, 1802.
O Friend! I know not which way I must look
For comfort, being, as I am, opprest,
To think that now our Life is only drest
For shew; mean handywork of craftsman, cook,
Or groom! We must run glittering like a Brook
In the open sunshine, or we are unblest:
The wealthiest man among us is the best:
No grandeur now in nature or in book
Delights us. Rapine, avarice, expence,
This is idolatry; and these we adore:
Plain living and high thinking are no more:
The homely beauty of the good old causeIs gone; our peace, our fearful innocence,
And pure religion breathing household laws.
