In 1818 Hazlitt called poetry "the music of language, answering to the music of the mind" (23).[1]  Within the next twenty years, as melomania swept across the Atlantic, American readers found the music of language in Wordsworth's stanzas. Let me here single out the anonymous essayist on Wordsworth in Richmond, Virginia's Southern Literary Messenger for December 1837.[2]  Setting out to write on Wordsworth's Sonnets dedicated to Liberty,[3] he gets waylaid by general considerations of Wordsworth's "eminently lyrical" genius. "There is no poet," he writes, "who seems to have a more exquisite ear for the musical qualities of language, which he selects and combines for his varied purposes, with an instinctive sense of melody and harmony truly admirable." As an example of Wordsworth's "music-breathing mellifluence," the essay quotes "The Solitary Reaper" in its entirety, asking of it: "Is not this the very music of language?  Do not these words float in airy waves, until the sense is charmed and lulled into delicious reverie, as by the 'lascivious pleasings of a lute'?" This last phrase comes from the opening soliloquy of Shakespeare's Richard III, in which Richard conjures the once forward-marching figure of "War" who now "capers nimbly in a lady's chamber / To the lascivious pleasing of a lute" (1.1.9-13). The quotation, which appears to drift into our reviewer's reverie, aptly recalls him to a sense of purpose: "But we have been irresistibly seduced into these general remarks. We must now proceed to the more immediate subject of this paper." He then turns, dutifully, towards a discussion of Wordsworth's sonnets, in which the poet is said to "speak with the voice of a sage" in inculcating "the cause of freedom and of man." In short, our Richmond reviewer, having briefly succumbed to the siren-call of Wordsworth's music, regains his liberty and turns to his task of popularizing Wordsworth's sonnets on behalf of "an erect and republican spirit."

Emerging from this review is a theme that I'd like to develop in this paper: the Orphic power of music to seduce and distract—to wring the will of its freedom—in a way that is not incompatible with civic liberty. To flesh out this theme, I'll look at two poems from Wordsworth's 1807 Poems, in Two Volumes: the entrancing "Solitary Reaper" and the poem in which Wordsworth directly addresses the allurements of sound, "The Power of Music." In these poems, "the music of harmonious metrical language"[4] mimics the power of vocal or instrumental music to distract from both meaning and purposeful activity. But music, for Wordsworth, is no mere drug; still less is it a threat to society. Although sound may induce reverie, it nonetheless brings individuals together, apart from an over-busy world. The immersion of musical pleasure serves as a counter-force to the commercial spirit over which Wordsworth no less than many of his American reviewers worried. It is a commonplace from Shakespeare's best-known plays of Rome and Venice that the unmusical person is a threat to the state: in The Merchant of Venice, for example, Lorenzo, while addressing "the sweet power of music," contends: "That man that hath no music in himself, / Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, / Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils" (5.1.79-85).[5]  Wordsworth's concern with the unmusical man is not, however, with the restiveness of faction, but rather with the restlessness and isolation of economic man. Absorption in melody and rhythm make for solidarity in a present moment that is political insofar as it harkens back to an imaginary past of primitive equality and ahead to a future of equality restored.

The more familiar type of ballad stanza, with its alternating line lengths of 8 and 6 syllables (and/or 4 and 3 stresses) is one that Wordsworth rarely employed in its standard form.[8] He more often modified it for his purposes, as, for example, in "Lines written in Early Spring."[9]  Wordsworth works both within and against the phonic expectations of the form, and does so with a craftsmanship that involves by his own account "a more impressive metre than is usual in Ballads" (Prose Works 150). The modified ballad stanza of "Lines written in Early Spring," a stanza of 8, 8, 8, and then 6 syllables, draws attention to the last line by having it come up short. The thematic surprises of this poem unfold in stanzas that end on notes of mystery—what are those "sad thoughts"? What "has man made of man?" These successive mysteries unfold in curtailed lines of six rather than eight syllables, so that as we come to the end of each stanza, we have a rhythmic as well as semantic sense of something missing.  

This modified ballad stanza returns as the first half of the 8-line stanza of "The Solitary Reaper," where it is followed by two tetrameter couplets. "The Solitary Reaper" is arguably as much about its own stanza-music as about anything else: form here is almost co-extensive with content. The poem testifies to the power of metrical arrangement and long vowels ("profound"/"sound"; "bore"/"more") to distract pleasurably from the very words that formulate a speaker's response to a song with no known meaning. Material signifiers gain aria-like ascendancy over immaterial meanings. "The Solitary Reaper" is, like "Early Spring," a poem of "semantically rich craft," as Susan Wolfson has shown (111-13). The careful reader may trace the junctures of sound and sense in the poem's stanza structure: here, for example, we first stop short on the hexasyllabic line, "Stop here, or gently pass," our progress further impeded by its opening trochee. But thinking through the poem's artifice is only one way into it, and on the poem's own terms it is not necessarily a better path than the one pointed to by the rhetorical question of the Southern Literary Messenger: "Do not these words float in airy waves?" As words convert to waves, their very signification is what gets left behind. It is hearing the word "sound" as sound that appears to have attracted Dorothy Wordsworth to the end of the poem's first stanza: she writes, "There is something inexpressibly soothing to me in the sound of those two Lines . . . I often catch myself repeating them in disconnection with any thought" (Letters 650). The poem's overflowing sound invites the evacuation of sense. The Beau Monde reviewer of Wordsworth's Poems of 1807 strikes a chord with his bald assessment: "Solitary Reaper and Stepping Westward are poems both innocent of all meaning" (Reiman 1:43).

But of course there is also a false note in this review. The poem means at several different levels, and this reviewer helps us to see one of them by adverting to the sequence of poems in Wordsworth's 1807 volumes. "The Solitary Reaper" is followed by "Stepping Westward," another poem about "a sound"—here, "Of something without place or bound." It is preceded by "Rob Roy's Grave," a poem still more clearly about the sound of liberty. "Rob Roy's Grave" ends with an image of the faces of the Scottish poor that "kindle, like a fire new stirr'd, / At sound of ROB ROY's name"—that is, at the name of their Robin Hood-ish hero, a man whom we are told "didst love / The liberty of Man," who "battled for the Right," who protected "the poor man" from the depredation of the rich. The name stirs in herdsmen and reapers sentiments of loyalty and liberty, and in the narrator nostalgia for the old days in hope that they will become the future days. The reviewer who called "The Solitary Reaper" "innocent of all meaning" did so in relation to what he perceived as the criminal or radical tendencies of this first piece in Wordsworth's sequence of Scottish poems, which he nervously dismissed: "the strains of this poem might be dangerous if it were not so foolish." But within a poetic sequence no poem is innocent of the poem, and so here the "dangers," that have come before.   Sound carries, and with it meaning.[10]  For the sequential reader of Wordsworth's 1807 Poems, the sound of liberty overflows into the sound of the reaper's song, as well as into the speaker's reflection on time, the unspecified lost thing—call it freedom—"that has been, and may be again."[11]  Meaning may retreat in reverie, but like the repressed it always returns.  Wordsworth's poems ask us to negotiate between surrender to musical form and the recuperation of meaning both within and between the individual pieces he ordered with care.

The last piece I would consider, "The Power of Music," suggests the social meaning of music's suspension of practical sense. Music here figures as a fiddler who captivates a humble London crowd. In Wordsworth's Poems, in Two Volumes "The Power of Music" follows another poem of London life, "Star Gazers," but in his 1815 Poetical Works it is placed in the "Poems of the Imagination" after a poem with which it is more closely connected: "Poor Susan" from the 1800 Lyrical Ballads. Both "Poor Susan" and "The Power of Music" are written in the ballad stanza of iambic-anapestic tetrameter, a showy meter associated with comic ballads that Wordsworth generally reserved for his lighter compositions and, in the case of these two poems, his treatment of urban themes.  "Poor Susan" and "The Power of Music," which may best be described as tragic-comic, both address the power of song—the thrush's song or the fiddler's—to distract from the dreariness of labor, poverty, and urban displacement. (Wordsworth's Highland reaper, by contrast, is distracted—as we the readers are distracted—only from her labor, the "reaping" that ever gives way to "singing.") 

In an irony that unfolds during the course of "The Power of Music," the street-corner fiddler is identified in the poem's opening line as "An Orpheus! An Orpheus!," as though he were an avatar of the legendary pre-Homeric poet with the power to civilize animals or brutal humans. Horace, in his Ars Poetica, recounts: "While men still roamed the woods, Orpheus, the holy prophet of the gods, made them shrink from bloodshed and brutal living; hence the fable that he tamed tigers and ravening lions; hence too the fable that Amphion, builder of Thebes's citadel, moved stones by the sound of his lyre" (ll. 391-96, Loeb trans.).[12]  The familiarity of Horace's lines is attested by their appearance in the homely verse of William Brimble, described on his title page as "of Twerton, near Bath, Carpenter":

Brimble thus begins a couplet ballad the narrative of which is largely summarized in its title: "On TWO MUSICIANS of BATH being attack'd by a Highwayman, who, on their presenting a FIDDLE, rode off without his Booty"—the comic twist being that it is not the fiddle's music that deters crime but rather the notorious poverty of fiddlers (Poems, 11-13). The mock-Horatian strain of a ballad such as Brimble's—as well as the rude artfulness of its making—may lie behind the opening lines of Wordsworth's poem on music's power: 

Orpheus is alive and well, but not in the Pantheon, the masquerade-hall named after the Roman seat of all the old gods,[13] but rather on the street, among those whose unsophisticated receptivity is offered as something of an ideal:

The poor boy gives his all to the fiddler who enchants him for a brief while: the image is like a bell that tolls us back to the new historicist critique of Romantic writing. This scene invites a Marxisant objection not only to "The Power of Music" but also to Wordsworth's larger corpus of poems on the pleasures of sound. Somewhere, someone must, I suspect, have written or lectured on this poem in search of a victim, and from a certain angle victims are here a-plenty. The poor boy parting with his coin may seem a comment on art's ability to mystify material relations, to distract the poor from their needs and rights. Music is here the opiate of the masses.[14]  Just as the fiddler stupefies his audience with sound so would Wordsworth stupefy his in poetic numbers, blinding them to revolutionary imperatives.

From a certain point of view these objections are unanswerable. But at least for a moment we might consider a different point of view, which I believe to be Wordsworth's, according to which the blessing of verse as well as violin is precisely the ability to forget about money and the economic base of all relations—about "getting and spending," to quote from the 1807 Poems' best known sonnet. Music brings together a community in pleasure that matters more than the material. However, the power of music is lost on a genteel audience that believes only in acquisition. This audience enters Wordsworth's poem as the adversarial figures of the poem's final stanza—though it has been present all along in the poem's early nineteenth-century and a fortiori its contemporary-academic readership. The "you" of its final stanza cuts several ways, and it includes us:

The fiddler's street-corner auditors don't care because they alone in this scene are absorbed in present pleasure; all around them, busy worldlings fly from the past or pursue an uncertain future.[15]  And, to illustrate that flight through formal means, Wordsworth trots his reader along through the headlong rhythms of anapestic verse. Wordsworth's meter here does not, as in "The Solitary Reaper," reproduce a sense of his lyric speaker's entrancement; rather, it exhibits its own theatrical power to whisk us past the scene it describes. As we come to the end of the poem's comic prance we are left with a criticism of the pace we've pursued.   

Wordsworth's critique is of commerce, luxury, and propulsion itself insofar as these things threaten the bonds that constitute community. Our Southern Literary Messenger author, writing in 1837—the year of Reed's American edition of Wordsworth, and also of a financial crisis in America—invokes Wordsworth's power to counter-act "the progress that luxury has made in these United States," and one feels the weight in this line of "progress" as well as of "luxury." He laments his countrymen's "vain efforts to emulate the ostentation and parade of European society, by which we have impaired our stern republican virtues" (710). In "The Power of Music," the people's temporary trance is hardly stern but it is a civic event or even a civic religion: they stand apart, together, in a concentrated present. In contrasting their ritual presence to the differance of purposive endeavor, Wordsworth seems to hearken back to an anecdote in Boswell's Life of Johnson: "'Sir, you observed one day at General Oglethorpe's, that a man is never happy for the present, but when he is drunk.  Will you not add,—or, when driving rapidly in a post chaise?'  JOHNSON. 'No, Sir, you are driving rapidly from something, or to something'" (3:5).[16]

Those in chaises and chariots are in at least one way like political critics, of either the 1830s or our own day: they look before and after, and pine for what is not.  Music is now, while politics is always braced in time. But to understand Wordsworth fully is to understand him dialectically: for he too is a politician, not just an ear in a crowd. Some of Wordsworth's sympathetic nineteenth-century readers saw in Wordsworth's backward glances—to the idealized past of Rob Roy's Scotland, say, or perhaps to an absorbed crowd passed by on the street—a blueprint for a future that wouldn't need a future: that is, a utopia. As the American critic Edwin Percy Whipple wrote in 1844, Wordsworth's heart lies in "a period when universal benevolence will prevail upon the earth"; he "is emphatically a poet of the future . . . .  His England of a thousand years past is the Utopia of a thousand years to come" (381-83).  

The final ironies of "The Power of Music" are political, involving both a transformation of the mythic role of Orpheus's music, and the narrator's detached view of the new Orphic role he describes. Traditionally, Orpheus had figured the benevolent ruler who brings order and hierarchy to the base elements of nature; he has stood for the ordering power of music, in opposition to the Dionysian power of music to whip maenads into a lascivious frenzy (Keilen 32-88). But Wordsworth's story is not one of social order imposed by an Orpheus figure on a discordant mob; on the contrary, this Orpheus, or Orpheus-Dionysus hybrid ("he abates not his din"), (re)calls his hearers to a once or future state of life and bliss outside the social order as it is presently constituted. This Orpheus supplies salubrious retreat from a commercial metropolis that has lost all sense of, to use two of Wordsworth's favorite words, being and breathing:

Yet what the fiddler does to his passers-by is what Wordsworth does not do to his reader: immobilize, assuage, and band together ("O blest are the Hearers and proud be the Hand / Of the pleasure it spreads through so thankful a Band"). Wordsworth, rather, hurries us onward in anapestic strides, imaging successive auditors (the apprentice, the newsman, the lamplighter, et al.), and ending with "pursue!" There is irony, of course, in the apprentice's "time run to waste," for here Wordsworth pictures time redeemed, kairos rather than chronos. The irony, however, is not entire. The reader of "The Power of Music" is suspended, finally, between content and form, absorption and theatricality, arrest and bustle, civic unity and commercial profit. Our guide through this scene of captivity, who has simulated the liberty of motion, has perhaps shown us as well the freedom that may lie in music's chains, as well as the enchainment of a purely market liberty.[17]