Praxis Series
Romantic Circles

"Soundings of Things Done": The Poetry and Poetics of Sound in the Romantic Ear and Era

Captivation and Liberty in Wordsworth's Poems on Music

Adam Potkay, The College of William and Mary

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Notes

1 Cf. Herder (1769) on poetry as "the music of the soul" (quoted in Abrams 93) and, ultimately, Plato on lyric poetry as the means of introducing harmony into the soul (Protagoras 326a, Republic 400c-403c).
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2 The essayist is not identified in Jackson, Contributors and Contributions to The Southern Literary Messenger. The essay appears eleven months after Poe had been sacked as editor of the journal on account of heavy drinking.
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3 Henry Reed's first American edition of Wordsworth's poems (1837) contains two headings of "Sonnets dedicated to Liberty" ("Part First" and "Part Second"), 211-223, also included in Wordsworth's Poems, in Two Volumes (1807).
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4 A phrase from the 1800 Preface to Lyrical Ballads, in Prose Works 150.
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5 Cf. Caesar on the subversive potential of Cassius: "he hears no music" (Julius Caesar 1.2.204).
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6 See, e.g., Prior, "Down-Hall: A Ballad" and "For his own Epitaph"; Montagu, "The Lover: A Ballad" (a poem much admired by Byron); John Cunningham, "Newcastle Beer"; Blake, "Chimney Sweeper" in Songs of Innocence.
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7 The iambic-anapestic stanza, chiefly used for comedic verse in the eighteenth century, was applied to moralistic or didactic subjects in two poems that Wordsworth most likely read after completing "The Power of Music" and the 1807 Poems in Two Volumes: Scott's  "Hellvellyn," published in William Whyte's miscellany A Collection of Scottish Airs (1806-7)—a stanza from which Wordsworth singled out for praise in the Fenwick note to his own poem on the same topic, "Fidelity"—and Cowper's "Poplar Field," published in Southey's 15-vol. Works of William Cowper (1835-37), but not in eighteenth-century collections of Cowper's poems. Thus Adela Pinch may be mistaken in attributing the meter of "Poor Susan" to the moralizing model of "Poplar Field" (101).
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8 Wordsworth used a strict ballad stanza for two pieces in the original Lyrical Ballads ("We are Seven" and "The Tables Turned"); four out of his five Lucy poems ("Strange Fits of Passion," "She dwelt among the untrodden ways," "I traveled among unknown men," "A slumber did my spirit seal"); three other poems in the enlarged 1800 Lyrical Ballads ("Lucy Gray," "The Two April Mornings," "The Fountain"); one poem in the 1807 Poems, in Two Volumes  ("To the Cuckoo"); and in a few later, minor works (e.g.. "George and Sarah Green").
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9 In the 1798 Lyrical Ballads see also "Goody Blake and Harry Gill," "It is the first mild day of March," "Simon Lee," "Anecdote for Fathers," "The Thorn," and "Expostulation and Reply."
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10 Peter Manning comments incisively on the importance of sequencing in Poems in Two Volumes and in particular in the section "Poems written during a Tour in Scotland" (258-68). I would question only Manning's claim that in "Rob Roy's Grave" Wordsworth defuses the radical charge of "liberty" by associating it with "traditional society" (264). Wordsworth's Beau Monde reviewer, by contrast, is clearly made nervous by the poem's "Jacobin" implication that the poor would be justified in violently seizing their rights, or having rights seized on their behalf.
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11 Of course, Wordsworth's speaker briefly describes the lost thing not explicitly as freedom but simply as "some natural sorrow, loss, or pain." Inasmuch as this might (also) reflect the reaper's own pain, we might say of this poem what Adela Pinch says of an episode of The Vale of Esthwaite: "Hearing others' cries of pain produces a spontaneous music independent of the minstrel's will" (93).
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12 Wordsworth's translations from Virgil's Georgics, dating back to his Cambridge years, include portions of the Orpheus and Eurydice story, although the line in which Virgil expresses Orpheus's power over brutes and the wilderness—he mourns, mulcentem tigris et agentem carmine quercus, "charming the tigers and moving the oaks with song" (Georgics IV.510)—is rendered by Wordsworth freely, "The solemn forest at the magic song / Had ears to joy" (Early Poems 642).
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13 The Pantheon was built in 1770, designed by James Wyatt after the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. It burned in 1792 but was re-built. Later converted to a theater, and still later to a bazaar and warehouse, it was demolished in 1937.
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14 This charge is still more applicable to Wordsworth's late poem, "The Power of Sound," in which music mitigates the sufferings of slavery and forced labor—and thus, by extension, helps to preserve these institutions (stanza 4, ll.49-64); even here, however, music as possible opiate is counter-balanced by music as the engine of "civic renovation" and "of Freedom" (ll. 65-71).
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15 Cf. Coleridge's 1819 Philosophical Lectures: "Music . . . produces infinite [or 'infantine'] Joy—while the overbusy worldlings are buzzed round by night-flies in a sultry climate" (168).
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16 Wu suggests that Wordsworth read The Life of Samuel Johnson in August 1800 (27).
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17 I would like to thank Kim Wheatley and Erin Minear for their comments on an earlier draft of this essay.
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Romantic Circles Praxis Series
Series Editor: Orrin N. C. Wang
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