Most of “Michael” reads like an
embedded narrative; the narrator devotes the first 40 lines to introducing his
tale, and then the next 451 lines to recounting it. But what’s absent is the
after-story wrap-up, so to speak, in which the narrator places what we read
into perspective, like the omniscient narrator in Ancient Mariner who relates the wedding guest’s
delayed-till-the-morrow-morn response to the mariner's story. During Michael's
introduction the narrator leads us off the “public way” and “in bold ascent” of
the “pastoral Mountains” until we reach the opening of the hidden Dell. But
then he discloses that he’s only telling us about this secluded, uninhabited
location in case we happen to go there someday and “see and notice not” the
“heap of unhewn stones.” Come again, sir? If we don’t know about this secluded location, how are we
ever going to encounter the stones in the first place? Continuing on, the
narrator says there’s a story attached to the stones that he heard as a boy,
when he was enamored of nature, pastoral farms, and shepherds. Although the
tale is “ungarnish’d with events” and “homely and rude,” the narrator will
relate it “for the delight (my
emphasis) of a few natural hearts” and especially for the next generation of
poets that succeed him. But I question the narrator's description of his purpose as to delight his readers—regardless of what Horace says. Michael’s story is dark.
Critics have accused Michael of choosing the land over his son (relax Scott, there are
no footnotes), but, if Michael were so land hungry, why would he pledge his
property as surety for his brother’s son? Furthermore, although Michael’s plan
to make Luke the financial rescuer of the farm fails (due to Luke being
corrupted by the evil ways of the city), Luke stood in the not-so-distant
future to inherit the land from his eighty-year-old father, so Luke would have
been the plan's chief beneficiary. Michael himself acknowledges this when he says:
“Our Luke shall leave us, Isabel; the land/Shall not go from us, and it shall
be free,/He [Luke] shall possess it, free as is the wind/That passes over it.”
This is not to suggest that Michael is altogether blameless. Despite admitting his mistake—“I have liv’d to be a fool at last/To my own
family”—Michael makes a “covenant” with Luke that he never agrees to, or even ask him to agree to. What’s more, the covenant is made over a
symbolic sheepfold that doesn't even exist. After Michael and
Isabel die, and the farm is sold to a stranger, for some unknown reason the new owner tears down the Evening Star cottage and leaves the land deserted, except for “a
few sheep, with rocks and stones, and kites that overhead are sailing in the
sky.” Could this be why the narrator finds the story delightful?
In “Tintern Abbey” the confusion is
not over the narrator’s message but his audience. Although I've read the poem
many times over the years, I never realized this until my current reading. For
the first 112 lines, it seems that the narrator is addressing the reader, until
the second section when he abruptly addresses his “dearest Friend,” whom has apparently been his audience all along (okay, I know it’s
Wordsworth's sister Dorothy). Maybe I'm over-sensitive, but I feel slighted. This may explain why in
the past I usually drifted away towards the end of the poem. I am also distracted by the feeling that, by the time Dorothy appears, I've
already read two false endings—“We see into the life of things” on line 50 and
“Of all my moral being” on line 112. To my untrained eye, the poem would not suffer any if it concluded with the statement that Nature is the anchor, nurse,
guide, and guardian of all the narrator's moral being.
Moreover, it's unlikely that Dorothy
is in a position to even benefit from her older brother’s exhortations. If
she’s in the same mental state that Wordsworth was at her age, in which Nature
“had no need of a remoter charm,” then his message falls on deaf ears, because
she is ontologically incapable of understanding Nature in any other way than
as a profusion of “dizzy raptures.” And when the time comes that she can
respond to Nature with “lofty thoughts,” those “aching joys” will be “no more.”
In other words, they're not coming back. So why “disturb” the poor child with
the “presence . . . of
elevated thoughts” until she is “mid the din of towns and cities” and ready to receive them?
Bill: I thought you did an excellent job of interrogating the two poems, but you might find them less perplexing if you consider that Wordsworth creates ironic space between him and his narrators.
ReplyDeleteBill, I like your typically tough reading of Wordsworth--he needs your skepticism and benefits from it. You raise more questions than I can address, though, I don't wish to imply that I can remedy everything with a response. Let me just suggest a few tid-bits. With Michael you wonder about the opening. Yes, you should. You might also note that he calls the poem a pastoral--it isn't one in the traditional sense, so he's clearly up to things here. He calls it delightful; again, he's up to something. Certainly one way is to put the two together--maybe this is a modern pastoral, a poem about the relationship between the human and the landscape, or more specifically, between the human and the idyllic landscape to which he used to belong but from which he has been estranged. We learn at the end of the poem (there is a bit of a wrap-up) that years have passed so all this rural tragedy is softened into distance especially when the very lifestyle the loss of which the poem laments has already been lost. The opening also takes us off the public way--so we are like literary tourists, and we have to work for it. But if we go, and if we look, and if we understand then maybe, maybe, we'll be the poet's second self--poets ourselves perhaps. So the narrative becomes our inheritance passed down to us by the poet--and the narrative of course is about inheritance and the difficulty of passing on. One problem of the poem then is transmission--how do you transmit land, meaning, marked landscape, named trees, narratives that adhere to stones, moral qualities, education, narratives, poetry? And what happens to pastoral in an age of banks, mortgages, and fortunes made overseas? Okay, I didn't even make it out of the opening, but I think you get the idea--every one of your concerns is legitimate and is an opening in the surface of the poem that demands our considerations.
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