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Justin Chen The Evolution of Imagination in Wordsworth’s The Prelude The faculty of imagination has always been intricately tied to the productive work of poets and artists, and perhaps nowhere more so than during the early 19th-century Romantic period. Indeed, according to The New Princeton Handbook of Poetic Terms, “Since 1800, and to some degree before as well, poets and critics have considered imagination the chief creative faculty, a ‘synthetic and magical power’ responsible for invention and originality” (120). (i) Wordsworth’s autobiographical poem, The Prelude, certainly reflects these prevailing feelings of respect (and even reverence) for the powers of imagination. At the same time, though, as the poem—and Wordsworth’s life—gradually unfold before the reader, there is an unmistakable evolution in the poets’ relationship with this most fundamental of creative forces. It is only after Wordsworth overcomes his fear of being consumed or overwhelmed by imagination that he can truly embrace its tremendous productive capabilities and ultimately decide that its timeless power surpasses even the glory of the Nature that he so cherishes. Wordsworth first encounters his own imagination at a young age. He writes, “I had known / Too forcibly, too early in my life, / Visitings of imaginative power” (XII.201-3; 345). (ii) Indeed, much of the first three books of the Prelude is devoted to recounting the growth of Wordsworth’s own poetic spirit during his childhood. His early encounter with the moon demonstrates an innate Romantic impulse: “The moon to me was dear; / For I could dream away my purposes, / Standing to gaze upon her while she hung / Midway between the hills…” (II.191-94; 211). This passage also anticipates a later scene in which Wordsworth climbs to the summit of a hill and is transported by the beauty and majesty of the scene: “Instantly a light upon the turf / Fell like a flash, and lo! As I looked up, / The Moon hung naked in a firmament / azure without cloud” (XIV.38-41; 357). He further refers in this passage to the moon’s “sovereign elevation” in a conscious invocation of royalty. Wordsworth’s early fascination with the moon, a uniquely Romantic symbol, demonstrates a precocious recognition of the link between nature and imagination, as well as a deep-seated fascination with the symbols of nature that surround him. But while Wordsworth writes that his encounters with nature were characterized by a “spirit of religious love,” he hastens to add, “I still retained / My first creative sensibility; / That by the regular action of the world / My soul was unsubdued” (II.359-62; 215). Thus, Wordsworth seems to emphasize a certain resistance against the natural world’s confining influence on his mind, a struggle that remains important throughout his life. He continues, “A plastic power / Abode with me; a forming hand, at times / Rebellious, acting in a devious mood; / A local spirit of his own, at war / With general tendency, but, for the most, / Subservient strictly to external things / With which it communed” (II.362-8; 215). Wordsworth’s word choice in this passage is interesting to consider; the phrase “plastic power” implies some sort of interior impulse over which he does not possess complete control, and which is indeed constantly changing and interacting with nature. Yet this power is also “subservient” to the very natural world with which it interacts. At this point in his life, then, Wordsworth’s imagination is still immature, and mostly derivative of his surroundings and his senses. At the same time, though, Wordsworth recognizes that his imagination does at least have a certain enhancing power: “An auxiliar light / Came from my mind, which on the setting sun / Bestowed new splendour” (II, 368-70; 215). From this statement we can gather that the imagination is not simply passive; it interacts with the natural stimulus with which it is presented—in this case, the setting sun—and adds constructively to it. Yet Wordsworth’s frustration with the inadequacy of his surroundings continues to plague him. Though he claims to be “most rich,” stating, “I had a world about me— ’twas my own; / I made it, for it only lived to me,” (III.143-5; 220-1), he nevertheless also laments, “The bodily eye / Amid my strongest workings … Could find no surface where its power might sleep; / Which spake perpetual logic to my soul, / And by an unrelenting agency / Did bind my feelings even as in a chain” (III.158, 165-8; 221). Thus, Wordsworth’s central tension resurfaces. On the one hand, we witness the tremendous power of his imagination, now capable of creating whole internal words. But Wordsworth also senses the gap between the inner production of his own mind and the natural world that surrounds him. No longer can he enjoy nature with the same carefree spirit that he once possessed, and this fundamental disparity influences him profoundly, making him feel somehow imprisoned (“in a chain”). Wordsworth even regretfully recalls near the end of the poem “a time / When the bodily eye, in every stage of life / The most despotic of our senses, gained / Such strength in me as often held my mind / In absolute dominion” (XII, 127-31; 343; his emphasis). This description of the senses as despot is not new for the Romantics. For instance, in his poem Dejection: An Ode, Coleridge bemoans the fact that he is only passively seeing beauty in the objects of the natural world around him: “I see them all so excellently fair, / I see, not feel, how beautiful they are!” (38). The image of the poet as slave to the senses is a powerful one, for it demonstrates a genuine concern with some inner power which is completely separate from, and therefore capable of exerting an appreciable influence on, mere outward appreciation of natural beauty. Wordsworth’s dissatisfaction is finally put into words when he cries, “Oh! why hath not the Mind / Some element to stamp her image on / In nature somewhat nearer to her own?” (V.45-7, 242). It is at this point that the gulf between imagination and the natural world achieves its widest span. In a way, Wordsworth is simply struggling with the ages-old dilemma of mortality and the transience of human influence on the world around it. At the same time, he seems to be appealing for a means of transcending these corporeal limitations, for some sort of timeless element upon which to permanently fix the “stamp” of human intellect. The previous, rather desperate-sounding, passage is purposely juxtaposed with the scene in which Wordsworth encounters the Bedouin in a rocky cave. This mysterious interloper bears a stone and a shell, both of which are positively laced with hidden significance. Wordsworth discovers that the stone represent “Euclid’s Elements,” but that the shell, according to the Bedouin, “is something of more worth” (V.89; 243). It is crucial to note that the stone and the shell are certainly linked to Wordsworth’s reflections, just prior to the Bedouin’s appearance, “on poetry and geometric truth, / And their high privilege of lasting life, / From all internal injury exempt” (V.65-7; 243). The phrase “lasting life” suggests that these two objects possess exactly that enduring quality which had evaded Wordsworth in his previous lament. If we imagine that the stone corresponds to geometric truth—or more generally, the field of science (represented by Euclid)—then the correlation which naturally follows is that between poetry, or art, and the Bedouin’s shell. It appears that Wordsworth’s view of poetry and art, then, can be discovered through his description of the shell. First, the object is characterized in terms of its physical appearance—it is “beautiful in shape” and “in color resplendent” (V.90-1; 243). More important, though, is Wordsworth’s description of the sounds that are produced by the shell: “I… heard that instant in an unknown tongue, / Which yet I understood, articulate sounds, / A loud prophetic blast of harmony; / An Ode, in passion uttered, which foretold / Destruction to the children of the earth / By deluge, now at hand” (V.92-8, 243). It appears, then, that although art is beautiful on the outside, and a poem may have an aesthetically pleasing external structure (meter, rhyme, and so on), the content of the poem possesses at the same time an overwhelming, and perhaps even sublimely destructive, force. The fact that this raw power is represented by the ocean is not a coincidence. For Wordsworth (as will be shown shortly), the image of water is often associated with the power of imagination, perhaps in part because of the parallel between water’s essential life-giving capacity and the indisputably creative function of human imagination. Wordsworth’s encounter with the Bedouin shell is the first example of a sort of fear of this uniquely human power—and we know that Wordsworth’s primary emotion is fear, for he dreams that the prophecy of the shell is fulfilled and the world is being consumed by “the waters of the deep” shortly before “wak[ing] in terror” (V.138,140; 244) with the sea before him. Nor does Wordsworth’s anxiety concerning the unbridled power of imagination permit him to return to nature for solace. In the very next book of the Prelude, he describes viewing the summit of Mont Blanc, a spectacle for which he had apparently held great hopes, with utter disappointment. Specifically, he “grieved / To have a soulless image on the eye / That had usurped upon a living thought / That never more could be” (VI.525-8; 266). This scene closely resembles the instances earlier in Wordsworth’s life when nature is not equal to his imagination—only this time, the disparity is presented so starkly as to be utterly clear and avoidable. The actual manifestation of nature to the senses is represented as destructive of a cherished mental image representing human thought. Wordsworth goes on to analyze this feeling of failure by writing, “Imagination… That awful Power rose from the mind’s abyss / Like an unfathered vapour that enwraps / At once, some lonely traveller. I was lost” (VI.592-6; 268). In comparison to the rapidly shrinking agency of nature, imagination seems to have swelled to almost mythic proportions, rising unbidden and unengendered from nothingness and threatening to annihilate the poet himself. It is at this height of tension between nature and imagination that Wordsworth finally steps in with a redemptive thought: “But to my conscious soul I can now say— / ‘I recognize they glory’” (VI.598-9; 268). This curious inversion is illustrative of what Wordsworth would consider a “spot of time,” a notion which he describes as having “A renovating virtue, whence… our minds / Are nourished and invisibly repaired” (XII.210, 214-5; 345), continuing, “This efficacious spirit chiefly lurks / Among those passages of life that give / Profoundest knowledge to what point, and how, / The mind is lord and master—outward sense / The obedient servant of her will” (XII, 219-23; 345). Wordsworth’s moment of recognition after crossing the Alps is just such a passage of life, for as the “light of sense / Goes out in his mind, it emits a “flash that reveal[s] / The invisible world” (VI.600-2; 268). That is, the mental, or inner, destruction of the natural world upon which he relied for so long yields a brilliant flash of insight. And that insight represents Wordsworth’s coming to terms with his powers of imagination, his “conscious soul,” for he now realizes that the imagination does indeed represent a power that surpasses the raw beauty of nature, but that this power is glorious and awesome, not terrifying and awful as he had once believed. Furthermore, if the episode in the Alps is indeed a “spot of time,” his crucial recognition must have been confirmed by the conviction that “outward sense” is subordinate to the human mind, which ultimately is “lord and master.” Thus, Wordsworth’s early premonitions of the dominance of imagination over nature are affirmed, and the faculty of productive internal thought is revealed to be a powerful tool, not a destructive beast. After having the reader struggle through this rather convoluted journey toward an understanding of his feelings about imagination, Wordsworth concludes the poem with a number of profound statements on the subject, particularly with regards to imagination’s power and scope. He even finally defines the troublesome term in the following passage: “Imagination… in truth, / Is but another name for absolute power / And clearest insight, amplitude of mind, / And Reason in her most exalted mood” (XIV, 189-92; 360). This definition neatly relates the concept of unbridled power (which once so concerned Wordsworth) to faculties of the human intellect, such as reason, over which the poet can exercise a certain measured control. That is, the passage confirms the imagination’s function as a tool which lends the poet extraordinary abilities. Again, the shift in Wordsworth’s relationship with his fundamental creative drive is evident. He continues, “This faculty hath been the feeding source / Of our long labour: we have traced the stream / From the blind cavern whence is faintly heard / Its natal murmur; followed it to light / And open day; accompanied its course / Among the ways of Nature, for a time / Lost sight of it bewildered and engulphed: / Then given it greeting as it rose once more / In strength, reflecting from its placid breast / The works of man and face of human life; / And lastly, from its progress have we drawn / Faith in life endless, the sustaining thought / Of human Being, Eternity, and God.” This is an incredibly rich passage in terms of both imagery and implication. First, as mentioned above, the element of water is often used in The Prelude and other Romantic works to symbolize imagination. (1) Although Wordsworth does not actually use the word “water” here, the passage is clearly meant to evoke the image of a river which originates in a cavern and emerges in sunlight. The allusion to some sort of flowing body of water is accomplished by the use of such words as “cavern,” “murmur,” “course,” “engulphed,” and “placid” (the final word being one often used to describe the surface of a lake or other body of water). It is also interesting to note that the “river” disappears momentarily, “bewildered and engulphed,” perhaps an allusion to the scene in the Alps during which Wordsworth feels lost, like “some lonely traveller.” Finally, the passage ends on a philosophical note, with Wordsworth speculating that the end product of imagination is some sort of faith in eternal life. This statement resounds strongly of the scene in which Wordsworth laments the absence of “some element to stamp [the mind’s] image on.” This dilemma has thus been solved, for the ultimate result of the imagination is apparently some sort of metaphysical expression of eternity, perhaps reminiscent of the Bedouin’s shell and its own claims to immortality. Wordsworth’s continually evolving relationship with the faculty of imagination drives much of The Prelude. In the early stages of his life, Wordsworth derives equal satisfaction from the natural world that he worships and the powers of imagination that mediate his interactions with nature. But as he ages, the relationship between these two conflicting spheres becomes increasingly problematic. Though he experiences the common Romantic aversion to becoming ruled by the senses, at the same time, he begins to sense the overwhelming and potentially destructive capacities of his unbridled imagination. It is upon crossing the Alps that Wordsworth is finally faced with an unavoidable crisis, the eventual resolution of which is the affirmation of mental thought over nature. Ultimately, according to Wordsworth, “The mind of man becomes / A thousand times more beautiful than the earth/ On which he dwells” (XIV, 448-50; 366). Like the sound of the ocean in the Bedouin’s shell, man’s internal faculty of imagination is capable of adding a timeless and wonderful dimension to the external beauty of nature.
1. For the connections between water, imagination, and creative/procreative powers, it may be instructive to refer to lines 8469-87 in Act II, Part II of Goethe’s Faust, the scene in which Homunculus attempts to achieve corporeal being by uniting with Galatea’s shell in a sort of explosive elemental fusion of fire and water. The parallel between water and the imagination is to be found in other Romantic works as well i) “Imagination.” The New Princeton Handbook of Poetic Terms (Ed: TVF Brogan). Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ. 1994. Citation is in the form of a page number reference. ii) Wordsworth, William. Selected Poems and Prefaces (Ed: Jack Stillinger). Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston. 1965. Citation is in the form (Book.Lines; page in the edition). |