Wordsworth and tautology

Lyrical Ballads exploits the tendency for repetition dominating the ballad’s form, or what we might call the ballad's easy lapse back into refrain. This repetition does not necessarily have to happen in a chorus: it is something that we can find even in the middle of stanzas, like the “(an’) a’ that” in Robert Burns’ “Is there for honest poverty:”

Is there for honest poverty
That hings his head, an’ a’ that?
The coward slave, we pass him by—
We dare be poor for a’ that!
For a’ that , an’ a’ that,
Our toils obscure, an’ a’ that,
The rank is but the guinea’s stamp,
The man’s the gowd for a’ that.

In "The Thorn," Wordsworth is picking up this tendency and playing with its effects on time (through speed, as we’ll see). He tends to take this tendency and make it into one of narrative (or descriptive) dilation, as Walter Scott somewhat does in his ballads--“Lord Randal” for instance. Take these lines from the first and second stanza of "The Thorn," describing the thorn:

I
There is a thorn; it looks so old,
In truth you’d find it hard to say,
how it could ever have been so young,
It looks so old and grey.
Not higher than a two-years’ child,
It stands erect this aged thorn;
It is a mass of knotted joints,
A wretched thing forlorn.
It stands erect, and like a stone
With lichens it is overgrown.

II
Like rock or stone, it is o’ergrown
With lichens to the very top…

"It stands erect," comes up twice, as well as the simile "like a stone / With lichens… overgrown,” with that nice inversion at the beginning of the second stanza. There are other instances, of course, of varying importance. In some cases it seems to be the very slight act of versification whereby the line is filled out with another syllable under the aegis of emphasis (“A cruel, cruel fire, they say” (129)). In other cases, it is more like the refrain, and takes up a large space (the cry of the Martha: “‘Oh misery! oh misery! / Oh woe is me! oh misery!’” (65-66)). I think that all these actions can be seen as part of what Wordsworth is doing, such that they become functions of the tendency in ballad that he is exploiting (rather than the other way around: that is, it is not the case that the ballad here is a function of the regular acts of versification).

What Wordsworth is doing, then, is taking the sort of dilating function of the balladic refrain and distributing it around the poem, so that the unfolding of the poem is caused by this function and less by other traditional poetic devices. The meter, for example, gets taken up into this much larger rhythmic work of the poem: that is partially why, in the line “A cruel, cruel fire…” it does not matter as much what the metric stress, in itself, isolated from what I am calling this rhythmic work, actually is (despite what prosodists might say); while in Elizabethan poetry or even Pope, perhaps, this might be less common (there it is not isolated either, of course, but connects rhetorically with a syntactic, not rhythmic work). What this means is not that form is done away with, but that something formal (refrain) is elevated beyond the sphere in which it perhaps normally worked in earlier poetry, such that it becomes one of the motors of the poem.

This is still a bit abstract and hazy in my head, but I am getting it all from what Wordsworth says in his crucial note to the poem:

It was necessary that the Poem, to be natural, should in reality move slowly; yet I hoped, that, by the aid of the metre, to those who should at all enter into the spirit of the Poem, it would appear to move quickly.

In other words, Wordsworth sees two things at work in the poem’s movement or what I am calling (and I’m not sure this is totally synonymous) its unfolding. First, the work of the meter, which is “Lyrical and rapid,” as he says right before the above quote (400). Second, the slow work of the natural voice of the speaker or narrator (or, as we said above, describer: this is a an elegy, a story, and a locodescriptive poem all wrapped in one, so unfortunately I can’t be as precise as I should be about this). This speaker is, as Wordsworth says, one who is “credulous and talkative” has “slow faculties and deep feelings,” and it is the aim of the poem to represent this passion in him. So meter speeds the speaker up and the speaker slows the meter down. Or rather, meter works with and against the speaker: it might be more accurate to say that we just have two different speeds at work, each of which only indirectly effect each other by the fact of their occurring simultaneously (there is a complex experiment in time going on here, I think—that’s the ultimate thing Wordsworth seems to be playing with). And on the side of the speaker (this is what I’m claiming in the paragraphs above) we have the dilation that his voice produces as he loquaciously but passionately tells the story—a dilation that has its origin in the rhythms or particular rhythmic tendencies of ballads. The work of the ballad is the slow work, the passionate work aligned with the voice. And (Wordsworth seems to claim) we cannot understand the meter and in fact the work of versification in general without this passion and voice—unlike in earlier poetry, perhaps.

This is why he then makes the odd turn in the note towards defending repetition, and tying this repetition together with the essential function of poetry, which is to be passion (“poetry is passion,” Wordsworth says here, reiterating the claims of his famous Preface). If we see repetition as a certain rhythmic aspect of the ballad, a certain tendency to slip into refrain, as well as being the mere repetition of a set of words, then we can defend it when it occurs in our poetry—for it is then not words that get repeated so much as passions or feelings of a (perhaps talkative) speaker which get represented:

There is a numerous class of readers who imagine that the same words cannot be repeated without tautology: this is a great error: virtual tautology is much oftener produced by using different words when the meaning is exactly the same. Words, a Poet’s words more particularly, ought to be weighed in the balance of feeling [...] For the Reader cannot be too often reminded that Poetry is passion…

The meaning of the words emerges not out of each word’s individual work (and their individual stress or lack of stress, say, as might be more the case in Elizabethan and Early Modern verse (according to Wordsworth): a lack of stress is, by itself and insofar as it is disconnected from a passionate voice, less likely for Wordsworth to be something that signals how the word should be interpreted), but out of their connection to a feeling, to a passionate speaker. What this means is that when a word is repeated, it might have more meaning and in fact a different meaning than if it had only appeared once. Thus, for Wordsworth, it is through repetition that tautology is avoided--a conclusion that might seem paradoxical at first.

Moreover, this is how tautology is defended in the cases in which it actually applies—that is, in cases where “different words” mean “exactly the same,” which is in fact the precise classical rhetorical definition of tautology, or tautologia. Wordsworth might here be a defender of classical rhetoric, in other words, which would only strengthen the case I’m making: that he retains form as he elevates some formal elements into something like principles of composition, thus enlarging our idea of form while transforming it.

All this, of course, connects with what he says in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads about rhythm allowing us to endure pain and redirect it towards an experience of pleasure. It might also connect to the title of the collection, as "Lyrical Ballads" is a famously huge oxymoron: a ballad is a communal or folk tale, while a lyric is an individual song. At the heart of this might be a paradox concerning the relation of the poet to the community not unrelated to this one concerning repetition and tautology--especially if repetition is seen as a quality particular to the ballad.