Wordsworth's Poetry, 1814-1845 by Fulford Tim;

Author:Fulford, Tim;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2019-11-14T16:00:00+00:00

The Strata of the Poem

This, though, is not the poem’s final word on memory. “Enough of Climbing Toil” incorporates in its very form the poetry of Wordsworth’s past, for it includes fragments written long before and revised many times even before they appeared in this new context. Like the cave, it reveals, to those who know how to decipher, a history of layers. Indeed, the cave, as added to the poem in 1827, is to an extent a figure of the poem’s textual history, a history in which, of course, Wordsworth’s poetic past is deposited. The strata visible in the cave wall and the secret sounds heard from the earth represent textual strata too deep, too old, and too elusive to be set straight—fragments that might once have found their place in The Recluse but that were now redolent of the failure of that grand attempt to place spirit, nature, and society in philosophic order. The effect of assembling these fragments in the new, published, poem of 1827 was to encode in the poem traces of past events and past verse that could be known fully only to the poet and his intimate circle. “Enough of Climbing Toil” has a private, secret form that is inseparable from its public one: its lines, for those in the know, resound with their past, however present the tense in which they are written. But they do not retrieve that past completely; they are fragments of it, traces of memory, and of whole poems, which bespeak loss as well as recollection—mementos, tokens. They suggest on a formal level that the poet creates not an organic unity of past and present self, but a collection of fragments, a pieced-together self, a remaindered textuality in which Wordsworth finds consolation and acceptance, freeing himself from the struggle to fuse past and present, self and world—not rejecting that struggle but bracketing it as a quest he no longer has to perform.

The poem’s key episode appeared first in 1799–1800 manuscript fragments that were produced by his female transcribers and were published, in altered form, as “Nutting.” Wordsworth wrote thus:

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