Romanticism & Ecology
Wordsworth's "The Haunted Tree" and the Sexual Politics of Landscape
Tim Fulford, Nottingham Trent University
Notes
1 Although the park is not named within the poem.
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2 See Levinson, and see Liu; also McGann, p. 91.
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3
The discussion appears in book II, chapter 27 of Locke (pp. 330-31).
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4
This political tree-symbolism is discussed in Schama, pp. 53-74.
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5 Wordsworth's line echoes lines 50-52, 103-4. See the discussion in Fulford (1995).
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6 See Fulford (1995 [a]) and (1998).
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7 Letter of 21 June 1820, from Princess Lieven to Prince Metternich, quoted in Smith, p. 40.
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8 "The bill thrown out, but the pains and penalties inflicted" (15 November 1820), reproduced in Smith, p. 142.
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9 The word appears in Paradise Lost, where its ambiguity reveals the fallen Satan's vulnerability and his harmfulness as he enters Eden ready to tempt Eve: "Who aspires must down as low / As high he soared, obnoxious first or last / To basest things" (IX, 169-71). Wordsworth's use of the word here makes his tree possibly Satanic, possibly one vulnerable to an occupation by the evil spirit of Satanic desire. But in the poem as a whole the temptation to know good and evil and the sexual fall that ensues is refused. There is no serpentine rape of Eve, no sublime pursuit of knowledge and power by the male narrator to its independent but bitter end.
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