At his best Wordsworth makes syntax, rhythm and enjambment do most of the work, and here, ending one line on the word ‘pause’ and another on the word ‘hung’, he enfolds us too, as we read and feel the weight of the words and the rhythm, in the magical reciprocity: ‘a gentle shock of mild surprise/Has carried far into his heart the voice/Of mountain-torrents’. The body — of the boy, of the poet, of the reader — becomes more than a thing, it itself becomes a landscape, a place of depths and secret springs and rivers as the forward drive of the syntax in the last part of this extraordinary sentence curves back on itself to mimic the description. There is much that could be said about the placing of ‘uncertain’ here: is the sky uncertain because it is reflected (though Wordsworth prefers the more human and affective term, ‘received’) in the lake? Because the sky does not have a surface like the lake? Or because the whole scene is already in some sense lodged in the mind and body of the boy — and of the reader?
The poem is not over, though. Wordsworth, as always, wishes to convey a visionary experience, but also, like Proust, to place that experience in the context of life. His poet is a man speaking to men, not the unacknowledged legislator of the world. The context in which this experience, this habitual experience (‘many a time’), is placed, is as powerfully shocking as the experience itself: ‘This boy was taken from his mates, and died/In childhood, ere he was full twelve years old.’ And the poet goes on to describe the place where he is buried, bringing back the word ‘hangs’, disturbingly, also in enjambment:
Pre-eminent in beauty is the vale
Where he was born and bred: the churchyard hangs
Upon a slope above the village-school…
But the sentence, like that which ended the main part of the poem, changes direction and we are left with a final surprise:
And, through that churchyard when my way has led
On summer-evenings, I believe that there
A long half-hour together I have stood
Mute — looking at the grave in which he lies!
This part of the poem might look at first as though it were merely anecdotal and sentimentaclass="underline" this wonderful boy with his ideal relationship to the world in which he grew up died tragically young. But the poem, like the late piano sonatas and quartets of Beethoven or the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, asserts a quiet authority, so that its eccentricities cease to be that and become as inevitable, as unquestionable and there as an outcrop of rock. The final image, of the poet silently contemplating the grave, in a curious way takes us back to the boy and the owls: the poet becomes the boy as the boy became the owls, by mimicking him in the very poem we have been reading. For, no less than Dante's Commedia and Proust's A la Recherche, this poem ends with the poet preparing to write what we have just been reading. To achieve that he too must be silent, must ‘hang listening’, in order to become a part of the landscape, a part of the cemetery, rather than intruding on it destructively, like the boy in ‘Nutting’. Only then can he reproduce, in language, that murmuring of the underground waters which is for him the sound of life itself.
To arrive at that point he must also have understood that dying in childhood, far from being a mere accident, was the boy's destiny; or, to put it more neutrally, that death and life form part of the same warp and weft and must be grasped as one. That this is what the poem, at its deepest, is saying is confirmed by another group of poems written in those miraculous years, the so-called ‘Lucy’ poems, especially the greatest and most compressed of them:
A slumber did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears:
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.
No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth's diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.
Lucy, we learn from the other poems in the cycle, died, like the Boy of Winander, while still a child. What this poem asserts and the others merely hint at is that by dying she fulfilled herself and that now in death she really is what the poet always sensed her to be, as mortal and immortal as the earth itself. Wonderfully, he conveys that this is a dynamic, not a static state: she is not beneath the earth but, like the rocks and stones and trees, ‘rolled round in earth's diurnal course’, the passive verb here strangely active, or rather, managing — and this is the heart of Wordsworth's genius — to escape the grammatical distinctions of active and passive in order to convey a state where our grammar no longer applies. It is only when he is sealed off from the world in a slumber that itself resembles nothing so much as death that the poet can grasp what Lucy really is. No less than Rilke, Wordsworth suggests that we diminish life by denying death.
Hence Wordsworth's solitaries, and the problems Wordsworth experiences in talking about them. The overt lesson of ‘Resolution and Independence’ is that simple poor people bring light to our complicated lives because they are contented with their lot. But the poem implies something quite different. It says that the Leech-Gatherer, first seen as resembling a stone lying in the landscape, is, like Lucy, a figure who touches the poet's heart because he exists beyond language, beyond most of what we think of as making up a man, and has started to merge with nature.
This figure of the solitary in Wordsworth takes many forms. Often he is an ‘old man travelling’, walking the country roads, or a lonely farm dweller. But sometimes the human beings who arouse a powerful feeling in the poet are very strange indeed. In Book VII of The Prelude, for example, once, when he was lost in some outlying part of London,
I was smitten
Abruptly, with a view (a sight not rare)
Of a blind Beggar, who, with upright face,
Stood, propped against a wall, upon his chest
Wearing a written paper, to explain
His story, whence he came, and who he was.
Caught by the spectacle my mind turned round
As with the might of waters; an apt type
This label seemed of the utmost we can know,
Both of ourselves and of the universe;
And on the shape of that unmoving man,
His steadfast face and sightless eyes, I gazed,
As if admonished from another world. (VII. 637–49)
We are in Beckett country here. But also in Hofmannsthal country. Remember Lord Chandos's:
For it is something that has never been named and that is probably impossible to name, which manifests itself to me at such moments, taking some object from my everyday surroundings, and filling it like a vessel with an overflowing torrent of higher life … A watering-can, a harrow left abandoned in a field, a dog in the sun, a poor churchyard, a small farmhouse — any one of these can become a vessel for my revelation.
These objects move him, we now see, precisely because they have somehow returned to the earth, because they do not belong to the unnatural human urge to use the world merely as a natural resource, are as far as it is possible to be from ‘civilisation’.
What causes the poet's mind to turn ‘as with the might of waters’ is not just the stillness of the man and his sightless eyes, but the combination of those eyes with the paper pinned to his chest. Why should this combination affect him in this way though? Wordsworth does not explain, or rather fobs us off with the trite observation that this is a kind of emblem of our condition, showing us ‘the utmost we can know,/ Both of ourselves and of the universe’. But is that quite right? It seems rather as though the image forces us to recognise our folly in thinking that we can understand who we are and control our own destinies. Our eyes are sightless and our stories are pinned to our chests, readable to the world but never to ourselves. There is a grandeur to the man which is close to that of Oedipus when, in Sophocles' last play, he goes to his death at Colonus. He moves the poet as does the sudden appearance of the moon as the clouds part or the vision of a mountain reflected in a lake, because, like them, he leads the poet out of himself and his thoughts and anxieties to a renewed and totally unsentimental understanding of his place in the universe.