CSULA ENGL 560: Spring 2013

Wordsworth and Naming Places

Wordsworth’s “Poems on the Naming of Places” touch upon themes of culture and nature, the same themes that figure in Paul Fry’s article “Green to the Very Door? The Natural Wordsworth.” There Fry finds that the opposed positions that either nature or language is prior are not so absolutely distinct. Instead, in each position there is some overlap with the other. Those who believe Wordsworth is a nature poet acknowledge that he has “blank misgivings” about the reality of the sensible word, while those who believe him to be an anti-naturalist acknowledge that his language stumbles upon these blanks and abysses that are engendered from the sensible objects that are supposed to not really exist.

It seems like a better approach to accept that, in Wordsworth, understanding or consciousness emerges from a dynamic relationship between language/mind on the one hand and nature on the other. This mingling and interpenetration contribute to our conceptions of nature and to the development of culture (in the sense of living, dwelling, and making meaning in a place). The first poem begins with the poet’s perceptions of and responses to a spring morning. He closely observes the sights and sounds and attributes human feelings to them, committing what the New Critics called the pathetic fallacy. He humanizes the world around him even as he carefully notices its particularities. The rivulet that flows with the melted snows of winter “ran with a young man’s speed,” but its “voice … was softened down into a vernal tone,” anticipating the diminishing of the water’s rush that spring will bring (3-5). The poet senses a “spirit of enjoyment and desire” that he compares to “a multitude of sounds” (6,8). The spirit of enjoyment can only be an emotion of the poet that he is projecting onto the place, yet there really is a multitude of sounds circling in the air that he will later describe. Wordsworth is aware that the mind, to paraphrase lines from “Tintern Abbey,” both half-creates and perceives. He notices the “budding groves” of early spring, but when he assigns intentionality to them, he says they “seemed eager to urge on the steps of June” (my emphasis) (9).

The poem explores an interplay between culture and nature that parallels this interplay between sense perception and imagination. The “ardent” stream, when it turns in the glen, suddenly becomes calmer, making a “glad sound”; all sounds contribute to make a “a voice of common pleasure” (22-25). The rushing of the stream has become a “voice,” something which characterizes living creatures. In their turn, the animals' intermingled voices make a “song,” which is an element of human culture (27). Yet the speaker compares this song to something wild: “[it] seemed like the wild growth or like some natural produce of the air” (28-29) There is a complex mutual interpenetration of nature and culture so that the one cannot be easily separated from the other – they each can transform into the other. While on a summit in this secluded dell, the speaker views a “mountain-cottage”; his position and perception mediate between or unite the cultural and the natural (36). The speaker's subsequent statement is puzzling: “Our thoughts at least are ours” (38). It indicates an awareness of being a stranger, in a place not one's own. Indeed, he calls the nook “wild” (38). However, once he names the place after Emma, he humanizes it, incorporating it into human culture through language. Now the spot becomes so intimate and familiar that it is “my other home, / My dwelling” (40-41). The dell further is woven into human culture through the fact that its naming and the event which occasioned it pass beyond the speaker to the local shepherds and potentially to the entire community. The “wild place” has been given a story and a name through which others will know it (46). It is not simply that the name has made the wild place knowable or been substituted for its “reality,” as some might argue. Conversely, through the place and the human experiences attached to it – through the place's housing of memory in the name – humans are connected to each other across time, and so, in some way, it helps them understand themselves.