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"Soundings of Things Done": The Poetry and Poetics of Sound in the Romantic Ear and EraCaptivation and Liberty in Wordsworth's Poems on MusicAdam Potkay, The College of William and Mary |
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Notes1 Cf. Herder (1769) on poetry
as "the music of the soul" (quoted in Abrams 93) and, ultimately,
Plato on lyric poetry as the means of introducing harmony into the soul
(Protagoras 326a, Republic 400c-403c).
2 The essayist is not
identified in Jackson, Contributors and Contributions to The Southern
Literary Messenger. The essay appears eleven months after Poe
had been sacked as editor of the journal on account of heavy drinking.
3 Henry Reed's first
American edition of Wordsworth's poems (1837) contains two headings of "Sonnets
dedicated to Liberty" ("Part First" and "Part Second"),
211-223, also included in Wordsworth's Poems, in Two Volumes (1807).
4 A phrase from
the 1800 Preface to Lyrical Ballads, in Prose Works 150.
5 Cf. Caesar
on the subversive potential of Cassius: "he hears no music" (Julius
Caesar 1.2.204).
6 See, e.g.,
Prior, "Down-Hall: A Ballad" and "For his own Epitaph";
Montagu, "The Lover: A Ballad" (a poem much admired by Byron);
John Cunningham, "Newcastle Beer"; Blake, "Chimney Sweeper" in Songs
of Innocence.
7 The iambic-anapestic
stanza, chiefly used for comedic verse in the eighteenth century, was
applied to moralistic or didactic subjects in two poems that Wordsworth
most likely read after completing "The Power of Music" and
the 1807 Poems in Two Volumes: Scott's "Hellvellyn," published
in William Whyte's miscellany A Collection of Scottish Airs (1806-7)—a
stanza from which Wordsworth singled out for praise in the Fenwick
note to his own poem on the same topic, "Fidelity"—and
Cowper's "Poplar Field," published in Southey's 15-vol. Works
of William Cowper (1835-37), but not in eighteenth-century collections
of Cowper's poems. Thus Adela Pinch may be mistaken in attributing
the meter of "Poor Susan" to the moralizing model of "Poplar
Field" (101).
8 Wordsworth
used a strict ballad stanza for two pieces in the original Lyrical
Ballads ("We are Seven" and "The Tables Turned");
four out of his five Lucy poems ("Strange Fits of Passion," "She
dwelt among the untrodden ways," "I traveled among unknown
men," "A slumber did my spirit seal"); three other poems
in the enlarged 1800 Lyrical Ballads ("Lucy Gray," "The
Two April Mornings," "The Fountain"); one poem in the
1807 Poems, in Two Volumes ("To the Cuckoo");
and in a few later, minor works (e.g.. "George and Sarah Green").
9 In the 1798 Lyrical
Ballads see also "Goody Blake and Harry Gill," "It
is the first mild day of March," "Simon Lee," "Anecdote
for Fathers," "The Thorn," and "Expostulation
and Reply."
10 Peter Manning
comments incisively on the importance of sequencing in Poems in
Two Volumes and in particular in the section "Poems written
during a Tour in Scotland" (258-68). I would question only
Manning's claim that in "Rob Roy's Grave" Wordsworth defuses
the radical charge of "liberty" by associating it with "traditional
society" (264). Wordsworth's Beau Monde reviewer,
by contrast, is clearly made nervous by the poem's "Jacobin" implication
that the poor would be justified in violently seizing their rights,
or having rights seized on their behalf.
11 Of course,
Wordsworth's speaker briefly describes the lost thing not explicitly
as freedom but simply as "some natural sorrow, loss, or pain." Inasmuch
as this might (also) reflect the reaper's own pain, we might say of
this poem what Adela Pinch says of an episode of The Vale of Esthwaite: "Hearing
others' cries of pain produces a spontaneous music independent of the
minstrel's will" (93).
12 Wordsworth's
translations from Virgil's Georgics, dating back to his Cambridge
years, include portions of the Orpheus and Eurydice story, although
the line in which Virgil expresses Orpheus's power over brutes and
the wilderness—he mourns, mulcentem tigris et agentem carmine
quercus, "charming the tigers and moving the oaks with song" (Georgics IV.510)—is
rendered by Wordsworth freely, "The solemn forest at the magic
song / Had ears to joy" (Early Poems 642).
13 The Pantheon
was built in 1770, designed by James Wyatt after the Hagia Sophia in
Constantinople. It burned in 1792 but was re-built. Later
converted to a theater, and still later to a bazaar and warehouse,
it was demolished in 1937.
14 This charge
is still more applicable to Wordsworth's late poem, "The Power
of Sound," in which music mitigates the sufferings of slavery
and forced labor—and thus, by extension, helps to preserve these
institutions (stanza 4, ll.49-64); even here, however, music as possible
opiate is counter-balanced by music as the engine of "civic renovation" and "of
Freedom" (ll. 65-71).
15 Cf. Coleridge's
1819 Philosophical Lectures: "Music . . . produces infinite
[or 'infantine'] Joy—while the overbusy worldlings are buzzed
round by night-flies in a sultry climate" (168).
16 Wu suggests
that Wordsworth read The Life of Samuel Johnson in August 1800
(27).
17 I would
like to thank Kim Wheatley and Erin Minear for their comments on an
earlier draft of this essay.
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