Commentary
Sex and the single man: Wordsworth's Descriptive Sketches (1793) -- by David S. Miall
Reading Wordsworth's Descriptive Sketches (1793) with its somewhat unfamiliar late-eighteenth century diction, I find my progress snagged at times by certain lines or words that seem especially odd. In this commentary I want to mention two such moments. In 1817 this poem was praised retrospectively by Coleridge as having a distinctive power, announcing "the emergence of an original poetic genius above the literary horizon," yet it also possessed "an harshness and acerbity connected and combined with words and images all a-glow" (I, 77). It is, in Coleridge's phrase, "the knotty and contorted" language that I want to examine.
The opening paragraph of the poem provides a first example, showing Wordsworth struggling with the conventions of the topographical poem and running into difficulties almost at once. If I understand it, Wordsworth is both saying that "holy ground" untouched by pain was given by God to man -- a way of celebrating the innocent attractions of Nature -- while at the same time this ground includes "Unfathom'd dells and undiscover'd woods" (10). The dells and woods are thus both possessed by man yet unknown to him. While it is possible to make a narrative out of this -- as though this were an account of Eden, given by God to the first couple for them to discover -- it seems on the evidence more likely a mistake: Wordsworth did cut these lines in later editions or radically revise them, eliminating the contradiction.
What seems probable to me is this: that Wordsworth feels an ownership of the scenery he is about to describe (he has walked it, after all), yet the meaning of what he has felt continues to baffle him. This comes, I think, from our sense of beauty: we want to possess what we have been moved by (so we take photographs of the scene, as de Botton has recently pointed out: 220). And one of the points of travel to a locality is to take possession of it, whether by sketching, photography, writing a poem, or simply in memory. But this makes Wordsworth (and us) like the new-made husband who "owns" his bride yet has not "possessed" her. The "unfathom'd dells" invite conquest, all the more so as we will be the first on the scene. Metaphors of sexual temptation or conjugation occur in the poem rather frequently, beginning with the next few lines, where the traveller is "Wooing" the charms of nature.
My second example of odd language extends this theme, here prompted by just one word. While in transit along the shores of Lake Como enchanted by the various sights of the pathway, Wordsworth describes the traveller as "The viewless lingerer" (92). While viewless is defined in my modern dictionary as "not having or affording a view," as though Wordsworth could see nothing beyond the vines that overhang the path (see the word used in this sense in line 36), this is apparently incorrect, since he "sees / From rock-hewn steps the sail between the trees" and, tending their gardens, "fair dark-ey'd maids" (94-5). It seems that the word is being used as Keats was to use it 25 years later, when he referred to the "viewless wings of Poesy" in "Ode to a Nightingale." What Wordsworth means is that he was invisible.
The Como section of the poem makes quite a play of invisibility. Just before this line, some of the little towns along the lake are described as lurking "in woody sunless glens profound" (87); and later we find that "Pale Passion, overpower'd, retires and woos / The thicket" (118-9), and that the poet continues to celebrate "lone retreats" (121). So what is the traveller doing as he lurks unseen? As I have mentioned, he is viewing women: he seems to be a kind of voyeur of the maids and their "Lip-dewing Song and ringlet-tossing Dance" (99). In this early, and perhaps rather unguarded poem, Wordsworth's language is surprisingly sexualized, suffused with desire -- resonant with the 20-year old Wordsworth's real experience of "virgin hearts" (40), or at least his "voluptuous dreams" (157) of them.
In the judgement of Kenneth Johnston (in The Hidden Wordsworth), there is enough evidence here in this poem and elsewhere (e.g., Book 6 of The Prelude) to assert that "passing along the lakeshore on August 21 and 22, Wordsworth found himself increasingly attracted by the girls he saw, until, sometime between the mornings of the 22d and 23d, he parted company with Jones and went to seek one out. What happened then is a matter of conjecture . . ." (214). Johnston refers to the girls' "easy availability" (217), which seems improbable to me, given the remote and rural setting. Yet there is no doubt that Wordsworth sexualizes the scene in a way he would never do again, mixing his responses to the scene and to its female inhabitants in strange collocations: "warbling notes" (96) that prove to be not birds but women singing; the "bosom'd cabin" (101); "the restless spire" (108). The Como lines repeatedly swerve into an erotic zone where Wordsworth hardly seems in control: "Soft bosoms breathe around contagious sighs" (114). Who is lusting after whom here?
January 3 2003 (846 words)
Works cited
Coleridge, S. T. Biographia Literaria, 2 vols. Ed. Walter Jackson Bate and James Engell. London: Routledge, 1983.
de Botton, Alain. The Art of Travel. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2002.
Johnston, Kenneth. The Hidden Wordsworth: Poet, Lover, Rebel, Spy. New York: Norton, 1998.
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Document prepared January 3rd 2003