Wordsworth's Revisitings by Gill Stephen;

Author:Gill, Stephen;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2011-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 3. The Prelude, MS D. Dove Cottage MS 124. Reproduced courtesy of the Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere.

The young Wordsworth, fast becoming radicalized by the Pitt government’s response to events in France, shared Fox’s readiness to maintain faith in the foundational ideals of the Revolution, even when their lustre had been obscured by its actual course. It was Fox’s generosity of spirit towards the poor and the ‘constant predominance of sensibility of heart’ that moved him always to look upon men as individuals, that prompted Wordsworth to send him a copy of Lyrical Ballads (1800). Although Fox’s love of literature was well known, it was to more than this that Wordsworth referred when he told the statesman in the accompanying letter, that he was ‘dear to Poets’, adding, ‘if since your first entrance into public life there has been a single true poet living in England, he must have loved you’.32

On learning five years later that Fox was close to death, Wordsworth paid tribute in ‘Loud is the Vale’ to one who had been the ‘glory’ and the ‘stay’ of ‘many thousands’. When published in Poems, in Two Volumes in 1807, this finely restrained acknowledgement that with Fox’s ‘dissolution’ a ‘Power is passing from the earth’ was printed appropriately in sequence with ‘Elegiac Stanzas … Peele Castle’, Wordsworth’s lament for his brother John, and the ‘Ode: Intimations’. But ‘Loud is the Vale’ also fits appropriately with another body of work in the collection, the ‘Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty’.

These poems were written during the period in which Wordsworth was brooding most intensely over what he had come to recognize as the formative years of his life and in particular over his experiences in France, in England in the immediate aftermath of the outbreak of war in 1793, and in the turbulence that followed once the French had become ‘oppressors in their turn’ (X, 791). The Prelude evolved into its thirteen-book form over 1803–5 as Wordsworth’s strenuous grapple with recalcitrant material and painful memories yielded a way of understanding how he had come to the conviction that he had been called to be the poet of The Recluse. In the sonnets he was, at the same time, registering his anxieties and hopes for his nation, now. The sonnets written in 1802–3 are the troubled utterances of one still in the Foxite camp—hostile to Pitt, scornful of the conduct of the King’s ministers, fearful for the moral health of the country, convinced, nonetheless, that ‘Earth’s best hopes all rest with Thee!’ (‘England! the time has come …’). The sonnets belong with ‘Loud is the Vale’. The poem on Fox does not mention history or politics once, but in honouring him as one of ‘the Mighty’ it insists that he has been one of the beacons of the age.33

In the 1831 drafting Fox is presented as the ‘British Pericles’, but this allusion to the great Athenian law-giver is without imaginative life and remains undeveloped. Again one can see why. It was a generous attempt at

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