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StevenKnapp
I mightadvert
To numerousaccidentsin floodor field,
Quarryor moor,or 'midthewintersnows,
Distressesand disasters,
tragicfacts
Of ruralhistory,thatimpressedmymind
Withimagesto whichin following years
Far otherfeelingswereattached-withforms
That yetexistwithindependentlife,
And,liketheirarchetypes, knowno decay.
Of sicknessfeltbyhimin timeslongpast,
A morethanhumanweightupon hisframehad cast.
XI
Himselfhe propped,limbs,body,and pale face,
Upon a longgreystaffof shavenwood:
And,stillas I drewnearwithgentlepace,
Upon themarginof thatmoorishflood
Motionlessas a cloud theold Man stood,
That hearethnottheloud windswhentheycall;
And movethall together, ifit moveat all.
to lookintotheclear
SmoothLake, thatto me seem'danotherSky.
As I bentdownto look,just opposite,
A Shape withinthewat'rygleamappear'd
Bendingto lookon me,I startedback....
Wordsworth'svariationson this Ovidian motifare of course end-
less, but two instances seem to me especially close to the Leech-
Gatherer'sfixed gazing into the pond. When Peter Bell suddenly
glimpsesa drowned man's corpse beneath the watersof the River
Swale, the narrative explodes into a grotesquelycomic series of
hypotheticalexplanations of his terror.The narratormentions-
but only in passing-the possibilitythat Peter has merelyseen his
own reflection:
Is itthemoon'sdistortedface?
The ghost-like imageof a cloud?
Is ita gallowsthereportrayed?
Is Peterof himselfafraid?
Is ita coffin,-ora shroud?
The listgoes on througha seriesof increasinglyGothicpossibilities,
including,in a notorious stanza that Wordsworthremoved after
appalled reactionsto the firstpublished versionin 1819, the image
of "a partyin a parlour,"
Cramm'djust as theyon earthwerecramm'd-
Some sippingpunch,somesippingtea,
But,as youbytheirfacessee,
All silentand all damn'd!
(PWW,II, 354 app. crit.)
The episode is clearly a violent parody of self-reflexivegazing:
one's own image is merelyone in a series of possible occasions for
a pointlesstheatricalterror,an occasion possessingno more or less
personal interest than the actual source of Peter's vision, the
corpse, which Peter will soon extractfromthe riverbywindinghis
staffin its hair. The relevance of this episode of skewed and tri-
vialized narcissismto the figure of the Leech-Gatherer becomes
clear when Peter's gaze, like the Leech-Gatherer's,is compared to
an act of reading:
Neverdid pulseso quicklythrob,
And neverheartso loudlypanted;
He looks,he cannotchoosebutlook;
baby's face? Has the viewer seen what he thought was a baby's
face-but was in fact his own face-and only imagined a baby's
body to go withit? Or is the entireimage, body and face together,
required to match the size of an adult countenance?
This lack of a satisfactoryfitbetween the self and what is sup-
posed to reflectit extends to the strangelittleclusterof images-
the thorn,the pond, the mossyheap, and the mad woman Martha
Ray herself-that seem huddled togetherin an otherwisevastand
emptylandscape. Introduced one by one over the course of the
firstsix stanzas, these objects are arranged, or more exactlydepos-
ited,in a space beginning no more than five yards, the narrator
tells us, from the mountain path from which one "espies" them.
The closestobject,the tree,is "Not higherthan a two years'child";
next comes the "beauteous heap, a hill of moss," which is "like an
infant'sgrave in size" and is "Justhalf a foot in height." In lines
thatwere present in the original version but removed after 1815,
the narrator tells us that the farthestobject, the "little muddy
pond," the siteof the narcissisticgazing already discussed,is "three
feetlong, and two feetwide"-and he assures us thathe has "mea-
sured it from side to side." Martha herselfsits between the heap
and the pond, whichis located only "threeyardsbeyond" the tree.
Adding three feetfor the lengthof the pond, and another footor
so for the diameter of the tree itself,gives a maximum extension
of roughlythirteenfeet for the entire scene. At one point in the
poem, the extreme disproportion between the cluster of images
and the surroundinglandscape is emphasized by a bizarre optical
illusion that parallels the spatial ambiguitiesinvolvingthe Leech-
Gatherer.The narratorrecalls being caught in a fiercestormand
seeking shelter beneath what he thought was a 'jutting crag";
he ran
Head-foremost, throughthedrivingrain,
The shelterof thecragto gain;
And,as I am a man,
Insteadof thejuttingcrag,I found
A Womanseatedon theground.
XIX
While he was talkingthus, the lonely place,
The old Man's shape, and speech-all troubled me:
In my mind's eye I seemed to see him pace
About the weary moors continually,
Wandering about alone and silently.
While I these thoughtswithinmyselfpursued,
He, having made a pause, the same discourse renewed.
This time the Old Man's pausing and renewing of the same dis-
course is spontaneous: no question from the speaker has inter-
vened to break off his account and startit over. The patternof
pausing and renewing has drifted away from its dramatic moti-
vation,in the same way that the hauntingimage of the wandering
Leech-Gatherer has slipped free of the stationaryfigure by the
poet's side. In Wordsworth's
PoetryGeoffreyHartman devotes an
intriguingparagraph to this production of what he calls an after-
image:
An after-imageof thiskind plays an importantrole in manyof Words-
worth's poems. It expresses the possibilityof the renewal (or at least
recurrence)of a certain experience by including that possibilityin the
very structureof the experience. As a mental reflex, the after-image
elongates the encounter, and as an image of something,it may also
suggestan indefinitelyextended action. Not any action, of course: it is
the image, itselfrepeated, of a repeated and persistentaction which
movesthe Leech-gatherer
closerto the figureof the WanderingJew
and bringsaboutWordsworth'srecognitionof hisfirmness.
(p. 269)
theme, such analogies are difficultto assess. For now I will only
indicate,verybriefly,two major ways in which the analogy can be
said to break down. First,it is not primarilyhis self-absorptionthat
makes the Leech-Gatherer a personificationof the poetry'sindif-
ferenceto its speaker's concerns. What gives the figurehis power
is his assimilationto the recurrentebb and flow of Wordsworth's
distortedSpenserians-an effectthatbelies his staticplacementat
the edge of the bare pool. Second, it is not self-absorptionbut a
doublefailureof self-presence-on the part of the speaker, who is
unable to focus,and on the part of the Old Man, who cannot, for
all his debilitatedinnocence, hold still-it is this double failureof
stabilitythat seems to count, for Wordsworth,as a formal token
of what he calls "Imagination." In thissense Wordsworthremains
whollycommittedto the aestheticsof the sublime-that is, to the
allegorizingof failure as the revelationof a higher power. Words-
worth'sversion of the sublime is no more or less "thematic"than
the versions it resists. But the power indicated by Wordsworth's
failureis not exactlyGod, or the self,or even the poem. It is the
power itselfof poetic representation,conceived by Wordsworthas
the repeated dislocationof attentionfromparticularimages of the
self.
University
ofCalifornia,Berkeley
WORKS CITED