'The Words He Uttered ...': A Reading of Wordsworth

In The Excursion Book VII, a book much possessed by transience and decay, Wordsworth's Pastor concludes his eulogy for a still-living 'Priest' by imagining the latter's tombstone-to-be: The passage, with its air of hearing itself, of shaping itself into a self-entranced movement, rehearses hopes and fears central to Wordsworth's view of writing poetry. Against it one might set Marvell's invocation of his 'ecchoing Song' in 'To his Coy Mistress': 'Thy Beauty shall no more be found, / Nor, in thy marble Vault, shall sound / My ecchoing Song' (25-7). Here the invocation is at the service of a sharply controlled play of attitudes: Marvell subjects his present 'Song' to time's indignities, yet he suggests the song's persistence; persistence, however, is treated with irony in that the 'ecchoing' mimed by the movement of the couplets speaks of hollowness as well as endurance. By contrast with 'To his Coy Mistress', where self-consciousness adroitly tightens the screw of the lyric argument, The Excursion's absorption in the fate of words can eclipse the ostensible narrative. In the passage quoted above, desire that a name will last is bound up with trust that words will enable it to last; 'perchance' admits a note of uncertainty before the iambic solidity of 'A century shall hear his name pronounced' strikes a time-defying attitude, the poet hoping that an inscribed tombstone will give rise to 'images attendant on the sound' of the name it contains. 'Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning, / Every poem an epitaph', T.S. Eliot would write in 'Little Gidding', V, over a century later. There, the first line sees poems as enmeshed in yet resisting mortality by virtue of containing within themselves 'an end and a beginning'; the second line emphasises the epitaphic nature of poems. Paradoxically the fact that poems seek to give linguistic life to experience concedes that the poetic process is bound up with awareness of death. If Wordsworth's passage suggests that poems aspire to the condition of epitaph, it implies, too, that epitaphs share in the nature of poems. What activates awareness of this two-way exchange is the close where the lines describe their own life and death; 'this breath' challenges the notion that all writing is ineluctably textual and sets off its own 'images attendant on the sound', including an image of the breath drawn by the poet composing the lines which his character speaks and the breath drawn by the reader re-shaping the lines. 'This' collapses the gap between the dramatic moment and the reading moment. By means of guileful rhythms the reader is lured to retrace the way 'this breath' 'shapes itself in words / To speak of him, and instantly dissolves'. Inevitably, or such is the impression created by the regular stresses, purposeful utterance shapes itself and 'dissolves'. The preceding lines have swayed between trust that something might endure of a good man's name and recognition of the temporal erosion that will remove all 'cognizable vestiges' of his existence. At the end of the passage, that journey between hope and despondency grows more inward. Behind these concluding lines is the fear that the poet's own words may dissolve; yet this fear is artfully mitigated by the fact that it can only be known so long as the poet's lines continue to be read. The artfulness cannot, however, exclude the fear, a fear that shows itself in a moment of self-consciousness and has wider implications. The Excursion is haunted by a wish to preserve written memorials of goodness and suffering; its characteristic posture is that of the poet, or his surrogates, …