Wordsworth's 'Are There no Groans?': Source, Meaning, Significance

James Butler and Karen Green's recent Cornell edition of Lyrical Ballads included a previously unpublished Wordsworth fragment of spring 1798: Their text, given here, poses several problems. First, Damian Walford Davies has pointed out that the ambiguous word is probably 'loophole' (Wordsworth actually wrote it 'loop hole'). Secondly, the manuscript indicates a line break between lines 4 and 5. Finally, the punctuation, which with the exception of the final question mark is editorial, forces a strange reading - 'Is every glimmering of the sky (and every loophole/lamphole in the world) an eye?' - which affords no very obvious connection with the previous lines. Textual issues quickly lead to interpretive questions. In 1979 James Butler noted that the lines were 'probably related' to another fragment of the period, 'Away, away, it is the air' (Butler 1979, p. 125), and in 1992 he improved on the suggestion: The tendency of this is to associate 'Are there no groans?' with 'The Thorn' (either directly or via its satellites) while essentially avoiding the question of what it means; in this reading the fragment is of slight interest. In the present article, however, 'Are there no groans?' is considered on its own merits, and it is argued that it is both more interesting and more significant than may at first appear the case. It is also, except in very general terms, dissociated from 'The Thorn'. It may be as well to begin by reviewing Butler's case, which essentially rests on four points: The fairest way of summarising all this would be to say that it leaves the proof to the pudding. If 'Are there no groans?' can be shown to be thematically linked to 'The Thorn' and its satellites these other details would all slide into place; otherwise they make no sort of argument, whether read singly or cumulatively. Damian Walford Davies has made a brave attempt to establish such a thematic link: 'brave', because he recognises that in the concluding 'Has every star a tongue?' Wordsworth was alluding to a religious poem by Anna Laetitia Barbauld and that the allusion (Walford Davies even calls it part of a 'dialogue') carries with it issues that would appear to have little to do with 'The Thorn'. 'Are there no groans?', he suggests cautiously, 'might ... be related in some way to the anguish of Martha Ray ... who ... is "known to every star"'. So she is, but there is a lot of ground to be covered between the lines that Walford Davies refers to - - which is just a ballad-like way of saying Martha Ray is out-of-doors a lot, and his reading of 'Are there no groans?' as 'Is every glimmering of the sky / [And] every loophole in the world an eye?' Attempting to relate the two, he imagines the speaker of 'Are there no groans?' rejecting Barbauld's reassuring view of the world as a 'transcript' of God: The final idea - 'heaven['s] countless eyes to view men's acts' - could possibly be accommodated to an embryonic 'Thorn' project; the sentiment is not typical of Wordsworth, but may have been intended for some such narrator as he finally employed. In terms of Walford Davies' overall analysis of the fragment, however, this comes across as a saving manouevre designed to keep Martha Ray in the picture. His previous sentence carries 'Are there no groans?' a long way from the world of the superstitious ballad, and in that movement, it is argued here, he was going in essentially the right direction. Barbauld's presence in the fragment is a fact that interpretation needs to take account …