Thought's Wilderness by Greg Ellermann;

Author:Greg Ellermann;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

For Wordsworth as for De Quincey, then, “There was a Boy” presents a hiatus in appropriative perception that is the condition for any accidental revelation. In Wordsworth’s poem, this is a matter of form as well as theme. Recall the well-known description of the boy as “he stand[s] alone / Beneath the trees, or by the glimmering Lake” (V.393–94):

And there, with fingers interwoven, both hands

Pressed closely, palm to palm, and to his mouth

Uplifted, he, as through an instrument,

Blew mimic hootings to the silent owls

That they might answer him.—And they would shout

Across the wat’ry Vale, and shout again,

Responsive to his call, with quivering peals,

And long halloos, and screams, and echoes loud

Redoubled and redoubled; concourse wild

Of mirth and jocund din!

(395–404)

The poem lingers for three full lines on the image of fingers and hands brought together, then raised to the mouth like “an instrument.” The boy resembles a kind of musician, playing on the world as well as his hands. Often supposed to figure an immediate identity with nature, the boy is actually a skilled manipulator. He acts and expects a reaction from a world he has learned to imitate. Regardless of the passage’s shifting tenses and moods, the grammatical voice is appropriately active: “he . . . / Blew mimic hootings to the silent owls / That they might answer him.” Then, the birds “shout / Across” the vale and “shout again, / Responsive to his call.” Nevertheless, it is the boy who initiates this interchange by “exerting [him]self upon . . . the external universe.” There is no echo, no “concourse wild” without him. Even at the level of the line, where enjambment (“shout / Across”) suggests separation as much as unification with nature, the poem refuses the claim to immediacy.32

So the Winander boy’s imitative action is not necessarily a sign of his identity with nature. In fact, his bearing toward the world is basically instrumental—a point made clearer by Wordsworth’s revisions, which introduce the image of the instrument sometime after 1798.33 This is not to say that the poem presents us with a scene of violence (though another “poem of the imagination,” “Nutting,” also from 1798, does just that). Nonetheless, it does insist on the distance between the boy and his surroundings, without which neither imitation nor manipulation would be possible. While Hartman sees the Winander boy as expressing a “joyfully unselfconscious mode of being” and a potential “absorption by nature,” and Paul de Man finds in the image of echo “an intimate and sympathetic contact between human and natural elements,” I understand the boy’s call as at least a latent acknowledgment of nature’s difference.34 At the same time, the boy seeks to overcome that difference—to master it, even—through creative imitation.

From the poem’s start, therefore, the Winander boy is a figure of reflective consciousness, defined by distance from the world. While “the mind of man,” as Wordsworth writes elsewhere, may “naturally [be] the mirror of the fairest and most interesting qualities of nature,” the capacity to “mirror”—and thereby to apprehend—presupposes reflective distance.

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