Weird Wordsworth

Timothy Morton has his fascinating Romanticism class at Davis available for podcast download here (link will open iTunes). Particularly good are the sessions on Wordsworth. Morton's sense of the poet is pitch perfect, and while he stresses all the essential characteristics, he also makes them interesting--not just by infusing them (or rather, as is the case in his amazing book on Shelley's vegetarianism, revealing them to be infused) with the profound (but really wonderfully levelheaded) ecological concerns for which he is perhaps more widely known (that is, outside literature). No--he also makes these features interesting by doing that great thing you simply have to do with Wordsworth, which is show how unbelievably weird his poems really are. His reading of "Old Man Travelling" (later called merely by its subtitle "Animal Tranquility and Decay," but with some of its most crucial lines cut out) is particularly excellent, since it labors over so many of the pauses and negatives, which are so prevalent that they appear (if they can appear) even in the first (shockingly abrupt) sentence (line 2):

The little hedge-row birds,
That peck along the road, regard him not.
He travels on, and in his face, his step,
His gait, is one expression; every limb,
His look and bending figure, all bespeak
A man who does not move with pain, but moves
With thought--He is insensibly subdued
To settled quiet: he is one by whom
All effort seems forgotten, one to whom
Long patience has such mild composure given,
That patience now doth seem a thing, of which
He hath no need. He is by nature led
To peace so perfect, that the young behold
With envy, what the old man hardly feels.
--I asked him whither he was bound, and what
The object of his journey; he replied
"Sir! I am going many miles to take
"A last leave of my son, a mariner,
"Who, from a sea-fight has been brought to Falmouth,
"And there is dying in an hospital."

It is a wonderfully ironic, even bitter piece--but it is also just extremely weird (in ways the "Old Cumberland Beggar," say, from which Wordsworth said "Old Man" is merely an "overflowing," isn't). The irony is easy to detect: "insensibly subdued/ To settled quiet," when he is indeed making the "effort" of--precisely--traveling. Then there is--and this is more bitter--the fact that he is "by nature led/ To peace so perfect" (again on the second syllable, preceded by [almost building up a mental inversion even as the stress is regular] a directional indicator [in a poem teeming with prepositions and indeed prepositional oppositions: look at "by whom" and "to whom" in l. 8-9] horribly misapplied or mistaken: the speaker does not really know the way the man is subdued or traveling, what he is is subdued or where he is traveling to), when he is precisely going to meet the result of a "sea-fight": his dying son. All this is there, but then there is just the sheer weirdness that comes from the almost overbalance (to use a Wordsworthian term) of this irony, and which Morton's focus on the speaker's use of negative perception (the birds "regard him not," and he is presented as "a man who does not move with pain") really excellently underscores. In other words, more striking even than the irony is the way the ironic misperception of the speaker is built up so excessively: in the second instance that I noted especially ("To peace," and I should stress that there are many more instances), the irony shades into a bitterness so intense that it is hard not to attribute even a sort of cruelty to Wordsworth--perhaps the single quality that that is most thoroughly un-Wordsworthian (even though Wordsworth could be cold, his poetic voice is constructed so as to make cruelty almost impossible: a sympathy so profound that it is too deep for tears--or perhaps so profound that it seems a thing "of which/ he hath no need," a sympathy that is not even sympathy--pervades his work). So we are left with not just the irony but its weirdness, something precisely like--because this is perhaps most ironic--its "poetic justice." Why? Penetrating to this level of unanswerable questioning (if I can say that) is what reading Wordsworth is all about.