William Wordsworth's

"A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal": A Folklorist's View.

A slumber did my spirit seal

I had no human fears

She seem'd a thing that could not feel

The touch of earthly years

No motion has she now, no force

She neither hears nor sees

Rolled round in earth's diurnal course

With rocks and stones and trees

William Wordsworth wrote this little poem while he was in exile from his poet friends, freezing in a poorly heated house in Goslar, Germany during one of the coldest winters of the century (Reed 45, 58). The meaning of this poem to a folklorist depends on the circumstances of its performance within a particular communicative community. Some communities included Wordsworth, and so part II of this paper includes more information about him. The two sections of the paper that follow are folkloristic interpretations of the poem as Wordsworth performed it in each of two different communicative contexts: when he entitled it "Epitaph" at the time of its

composition, and when he recast it as a "Poem of the Imagination" for the 1815 edition of his collected poems.

Some communicative communities in which this poem is performed, however, tend not to count Wordsworth as one of their numbers, and are divided about considering biographical details of Wordsworth's life in their consideration of his poem. One of these groups, a network of contemporary literary critics, is considered in part I and in the conclusion of this paper, where some implications of folklore theory for literary practice are considered.

I. The Critics

Ever since F.W. Bateson and Cleanth Brooks published contradictory theses about the meaning of "A slumber did my spirit seal," this poem has served as a proving ground for new literary theories. In the last half century, such luminaries as Karl Kroeber, E.D. Hirsch, Francis Ferguson, Michael Riffaterre, Paul de Man, and Geoffrey Hartman have argued for different interpretations of the poem. By l982, Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels were using this poem to declare all theory dead: since then, Gerald Graff has used it to declare that we must accept indeterminacy as its ultimate meaning, only to have Brian Caraher write a two-hundred-and-seventy page book developing a new interpretation of the poem as a "Lucy poem." (And then Mark Jones wrote a book proving that there is no such thing as a "Lucy poem.")

The central problem is the tension, first, between the New Critical idea that the precise meaning of the poem can be determined by a careful examination of the poem itself, and, second, the fact that no one can agree on anyone else's precise meaning. Graff's conciliatory notion that the difference between careful interpretations of the poem is itself an interpretation has proved unsatisfying. Critics now say things such as "The indeterminate circumstances of 'A slumber did my spirit seal' are a characteristic feature of Wordsworth's modernity; we work against the poems if we try to unravel them at the expense of responding to the 'feeling therein developed'" (Williams 103). Yet how can we respond to the feeling therein developed if we can't figure out what it is? How are we supposed to feel about a "sealed" spirit, the "human" fears, or the seemingly feminine "thing"? Why does a poet who professes to love the speech of common folk

choose to use the seemingly pretentious term "diurnal"? How are we supposed to feel about this "she" being rolled around inside the earth? There is an exclamation point, so it must be a strong feelingbut what is it?

Folklorists would want an answer to this question, but not the one "right" answer. Rather, we are interested in how this poem has meaning as expressive culture within a particular speech community, a community much smaller than the sorts of communities usually inferred in literary criticism. Instead, we would ask about particular cases in which an individual took responsibility for performing this poem for a community of people small enough so that face-to-face interaction would be possible.

Given that literary critics might qualify as such a community these days, I will discuss some of the performances of the poem they have enacted.

A prime "informant" for our investigations into norms for creating meaning when the poem is performed in the literary community would be Jonathan Culler. Culler has served in the past as a guru of literary theory, explaining every thinker from Levi Strauss to Derrida to his community. When he spoke recently to a gathering of literary critics at Harvard, Culler said that we need to have some kind of theory of interpretation in order to understand the implications of such things as constitutions and laws and sexual harassment, for example, but we have none (l997). He said that the strongest and most recent contender for evaluating meaning in texts, "cultural studies," has splintered into interest groups. These groups emphasize such things as queer studies, postcolonial studies, or race theory, and tend to lose their focus on texts while negotiating the impossible tangles of material that make up cultural contexts.

Literary critics are not used to making their way through endless cultural context. Yet, if the meaning of the text is determined by its enactment in performance, we can limit our attention to the conventions about communication relevant in the communicative community for whom that text is performed. (This is what folklorists do.) Furthermore, folklorists have borrowed from sociolinguistic theory ways to figure out what few conventions of making meaning are most important in a particular context. This method is outlined at length by Dell Hymes in his Foundations of Sociolinguistics, but for our purposes it is only important to know that it is a kind of general

hermeneutics of how to take local hermeneutics into account. In other words, it is a method for deciding which of the following aspects of communication are most important in a particular case: the setting of the performance, the persons involved, the performance event itself, the function of the performance, the emotional key involved, the instrumentalities of words, sounds, or other artistic means employed, the norms of interpreting this sort of performance, and its genre. In this case, given the critics' fifty year preoccupation with the tone of this poem, it is clear that the key of the poem is important in their communicative community: in addition, the general confusion as to the generic identity of this poem shows that is also important.

Since literary critics tend either to defer to the author's intentions, or to refer derisively to the fact that other critics foolishly defer to the author's "intentions," I am going to begin by discussing the meaning of the poem in the context of its composition, when Wordsworth called it an epitaph, in the context of the life of its author and immediate audience, William Wordsworth.

Folklorists, I should warn you, are not afraid of committing "the intentional fallacy." It is partly because we believe we cannot know the depths of Wordsworth's unconsciousness, much less his unconscious intentions, any more than we can entirely know our own, and so we limit our scope in biography. (In addition, particularly in the past thirty years, we have taken to sharing our biographies with the subjects of our work while we are living with them and their friends; this also has given us a tradition of caution.)

We are particularly interested in the public evidence of the way performers learn and use and change conventions to suit their purposes, but only insofar as they are successful in teaching their audiences to accept these new practices. We would therefore consider including Wordsworth's communicated intentions about the meaning of his work, intentions expressed in his Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, and in letters to members of his artistic community, if Wordsworth's communicative community showed signs of accepting these ideas. (And they did.)

In this case, Wordsworth's writings about his art reveal an emphasis on emotions similar to that of the literary critics of our time quoted above, and of the poetry readers of his time who were caught up in the celebration of sentiment sometimes called "a cult of sensibility."

Wordsworth, for example, in his Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, writes that "the feeling therein [that is, in the poems] developed gives importance to the action and situation, and not the action and situation to the feeling" (73). In addition, just before Wordsworth wrote "A slumber did my spirit seal" in Germany, he wrote that what he wanted to learn most about the German language was the unique set of emotions with which the language is infused: he wanted to enter a state of mind in which "the several German idioms and phrases without any thought or considerations should immediately excite feelings analogous to those which are excited in the breasts of the natives" (de Selincourt 219).

Wordsworth's concerns match current anthropological theories about feelings, which find that all complex emotions are cultural accomplishments, not natural endowments. Catherine Lutz, for example, characterizes emotions not as "unmediated psychobiological events" but as "cultural constructions made out of the raw materials of historically specific social experiences, received language categories and speech traditions, and the potentials of the human body" (210).

II. William Wordsworth, Architect of Feeling

Wordsworth did not succeed in learning German idioms and feelings in Goslar during that cold winter of l798. People were suspicious of the foreigner and his sister, the Wordsworths could not afford to entertain, and it was usually too cold to go outside. William and Dorothy had reason to shun the cold: their mother, Ann, had died of pneumonia when William and Dorothy were just eight and seven years old, after she slept in a cold, damp room while on a visit to London. A few years later, the children's father, John, died of exposure, while travelling on business for his boss, the much despised politician and landlord, James Lowther, after losing his way in a mist on a place called Cold Fell. John's death left the five Wordsworth children penniless, since Lowther owed four years's worth of back wages to William's father, but never chose to pay them.

Once orphaned, ironically enough, William and Dorothy experienced some of the happiest years of their lives. They were sent away to school in the Lake District, where they lived with a kindly country woman, and their teacher encouraged them to take long walks and to write poetry. During this time, they became acquainted with ancient

Celtic poetry which was all the rage: particularly James MacPherson's Ossian, a set of Fenian lays that dated from medieval Scotland and Ireland. These included many nature poems critical of Christianity, which inspired both Wordsworth's nature poetry, and his famous "half-atheism" (Kinsella 41 and Kinsella, n.p.).

Four years later, Wordsworth's uncle separated the pair, and sent William off to University, where William was supposed to prepare to become a Cambridge cleric. William generally ignored the studies prescribed for him, and spent his time reading popular literature and planning a walking tour of the Alps, which he took, on borrowed money, during the summer of l791. Upon graduation, he borrowed some more money and went back to France, which, two years after the storming of the Bastille, was alive with plans for implementing a new republican order.

Wordsworth loved politics: his uncle's hatred of Lowther had schooled Wordsworth in factionalism from an early age. Now, he fell in with the moderate Catholics, and fell in love with one of them: a twenty-four year old woman named Annette Vallon. When Annette became pregnant with his child, Wordsworth offered his services to the Girondins, a moderate faction ranged against the anti-clerical Robespierre. Finally, around the time of the birth of his daughter, Ann-Caroline Vallon in December of l792, as Robespiere systematically executed the defeated Girondins, and Wordsworth ran out of money, the young man retreated back to England.

Once there, Wordsworth's status as an unmarried father precluded him from the ministry, and his history as a defender of regicide barred him from political life, but his stories about France endeared him to his old friends. He found employment accompanying William Calvert to Northern Wales, and then took a job as companion to Calvert's brother, Raisley Calvert, who was dying of tuberculosis. Wordsworth took some time to write and publish poems about his travels and to make the acquaintance of the English radical, William Godwin, before he took another job as companion to a friend of Godwin's, Azariah Pinney, who was also dying of tuberculosis. Pinney left him a small inheritance when he died, which Wordsworth promptly lent to another young man who needed his help, Basil Montague, whose lover's death had left him the distressed and inept custodian of his own illegitimate son (also named Basil), then two years old. Montague arranged for William and Dorothy to live in his family's

country house in the Lake District rent-free, in exchange for caring for the little boy.

There in Bristol, the three of them lived on the dribs and drabs of money returned to them by Montague, supplemented slightly by Dorothy's sewing and selling white linen shirts, and on William's hopes for his poetry. The poems and shirts being slow to sell, William took on Azariah Pinney's son as a pupil, and taught him Greek and Latin, concentrating on the Roman epitaphs in classical collections, and then walking all over the countryside, looking at the epitaphs on English gravestones. They loved the long walks, and their little home: I imagine them as similar to an American back-to-nature family from the l960s living on crafts and tutoring in the Vermont woods. (It was conventional at that time for unmarried sisters to live with their [married] brothers. Since Wordsworth was sort of married to Annette, the arrangement may not have seemed as strange to the radical brother and sister as it does to us and to their neighbors. Or perhaps there was incest; none of this is germane, however, to the performances of the poem considered here.) Before long, however, the pressure of the poetry writing, and/or the parenting of the toddler, or perhaps the cold of winter, led Wordsworth in 1796 to have a nervous breakdown. Wordsworth was saved by Dorothy and then uplifted by a new acquaintance: Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Coleridge had been depressed himself, having planned to start a new society in America with a friend named Robert Southey, marrying the sister of Southey's wife for this purpose, but finding their plans for utopian community as well as for utopian marriages impossible to execute. Coleridge survived by patronage and by opium (I think of him as a Ken Keasey type), until he met Wordsworth, who shook him out of his torpor by telling him stories of the Alps and the Revolution. Coleridge brought Wordsworth up to live in his subversive poets' commune further upcountry, to the country cottages of Alfoxden and Nether Stowey, where they were joined by Southey, the poet Charles Lamb, and, fresh from imprisonment for treason, the radical republican John Thelwell.

The friends discussed philosophy and folk musicespecially the philosophy of the English epistemologist David Hartley and his forerunner, Bishop Berkeley. We know they discussed Spinoza because a clownish royal spy, hearing the discussion, reported that the poets were making fun of him by calling him "Spy Nosy." The

poets listened to ballads in kitchens and public houses as they were sung by ballad hawkers and country people in the lake district (Wordsworth Prelude, book 5, 207-210 and Friedman 27l). They dreamed of taking the best of the folk art they found and transforming it into improved forms for a people's republic: that is, in Wordsworth's words, to "produce songs . . . supplanting partly the bad with flowers and useful herbs to take the place of weeds" (Friedman 271).

The friends supported each other's work, and prepared to publish a joint volume called Lyrical Ballads in l798. Before their book came out, however, the Coleridges and the Wordsworths set out for Germany, Wordsworth said, in order to learn the German language, and make money translating German poetry. The real reason was perhaps because they were draft dodgers and radicals: they had to escape the draft as the Napoleonic wars developed, and they were in danger of being imprisoned on the basis of the reports of the aforementioned spy.

Coleridge loved Germany, and went to the University at Hamburg to study German philosophy. Wordsworth, however, couldn't afford to live in the city, and both his German and his philosophic background were inferior, so he withdrew to Goslar, where the living was cheaper, dragging a copy of Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, which contained several verses used as epitaphs, with him.

And so here he was, once again in exile, in the cold, pressured to write poetry, hounded by depression and chills, and thinking only of home: "A plague on your languages, German and Norse," he wrote, "Let me hear the song of the kettle" (Reed 154-56). But he wrote, and he wrote: most of the poems for the second volume of Lyrical Ballads, including a poem that began "A slumber did my spirit seal." This is the first performance of the poem that I will subject to folkloric investigation, a performance designed primarily as an exploration of his own feelings, and only secondarily, for Dorothy Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

III. Epitaph

The untitled poem we call "A slumber did my spirit seal" was originally entitled "Epitaph." Coleridge transcribed the poem with this title when he wrote it out for Thomas Poole, and, in another

place, he praised it as a "Most sublime Epitaph" in a letter to Wordsworth (Bernhardt-Kabish 512). Before we discuss reasons why Wordsworth dropped this generic identification for the poem, we can begin by testing the poem against Wordsworth's own descriptions of the nature of epitaphs.

In his work, "An Essay Upon Epitaphs," Wordsworth wrote that epitaphic inscriptions should, above all, be sincere; furthermore, they should "give to universally accepted truths a path and an expression which shall re-admit them into the soul like revelations of the moment" (61). These universally accepted truths included, he wrote, the notion that "some part of our nature is imperishable."

In Weever's book Ancient Funeral Monuments, Wordsworth found a great source of conventional epitaphs expressing these sincere expressions of belief in the afterlife; beliefs that Wordsworth wished to recast in such a way as to enter the souls of his readers in a new way. Although most of these epitaphs are easily deciphered, the collection includes one epitaph as mysterious in its expression of belief, and in its tone, as "A slumber did my spirit seal:"

Here lyeth wrapped in clay

The body of William Wray

I have no more to say.

(Weever 410: Written by John Louekin for his apprentice in 1350.)

In this case, we have a reference to death that uses the same burial motif found in Wordsworth's second stanza. The attitudes expressed here towards death and resurrection are, unfortunately, as unclear as those in Wordsworth's lines, "Roll'd round in earth's diurnal course / With rocks and stones and trees." Wordsworth's expressed intention in writing epitaphs, however, was that they be a recasting of conventional beliefs.

Most of the epitaphs recorded from country gravestones by Weever containing a burial motif more clearly express conventional Christian beliefs about death, burial, and the afterlife. The following epitaph is typical:

Richard Nordell lyeth buryed here.

Somtym of London Citizen and Drapier.

And Margerie his wyf, or her progenie,

Returned to erth and so sall ye.

Of the earth we were made and formed

And to the erth we bin returned

Have yis in mynd and memory

Ye yat liven lerneth to dy

And beholdyth here yowr destine

Such as ye arne sometym weren we.

Ye sall be dyght in his array,

Be ye nere so stout and gay.

Therefor Frendys we you prey

Make you redy for to dey

Yat ye be no for sin atteynt

At ye dey of Judgement.

(Weever 413, n.d.)

As Mircea Eliade points out in The Myth of the Eternal Return, the pivotal lines, "of this erth we were made and formed/ And to the erth we bin returned," are an echo of Christ's words that were traditionally repeated by priests as they marked the sign of the cross with ashes on the foreheads of their parishioners each year. Ash Wednesday began the forty days of Lent, during which Christians were encouraged to remember ritually Christ's death, and to contemplate their own. This contemplation was a mixture of solemnity and joy, since all knew that the forty days of Lent would culminate in Easter, when Christ rose from the dead. After a period on earth, Christ then was transported, body and soul, into heaven, an occurrence celebrated on Ascension Sunday. Christians were taught to expect that they would share in the experience of Christ: they would pass from lives full of trials and cares into a passive death from which, if they had striven to be free from sin, they would rise, body and soul, on the Last Day. This expectation of rebirth was symbolized with eggs and flowers, whose cyclical transformations into life from apparent death were commonly observed by the people.

Another conventional symbol of rebirth was the turning of night into day and back again, as in the following epitaphs from Weever's collection:

Like as the day his course doth consume,

And the new morrow springth again as fast,

So man and woman by Nature's costume,

this life to passe at last in earth are cast.

In joy and sorrow, which here their time do wast,

Never in one state, but in course transitions,

So full of change is of this world the glory.

(Weever 416. Stone of Robert Fabian, 1511)

This epitaph uses the image of the earth turning from day to night and back again, conflated with the image of the cycles of living things as a symbol of rebirth, an image that resonates with Wordsworth's notion of the earth's diurnal course that propels his subject into a new mode of existence, an image that indicates a tone of Christian acceptance and optimism in the face of death. Furthermore, the regular meter used in the Ash Wednesday sentiment: "Remember man that thou are dust/ and unto dust thou shalt return," and in the epitaph above is echoed by the regular rhythms of nature, where death and life, winter and summer, and darkness and light, replace each other in predictable rhythm. Just as the regular meter of poetry lends a pleasure to the sentiments it contains, so the predictable rhythms of the earth lend to humans a comfort and peace. In Christian traditions, as in Newtonian physics, the diurnal motions of the earth are beautifully benign.

In addition, Wordsworth's reference to "earth's diurnal course" points to a connection between soothing poetic meter and the rhythms of Nature, if one takes into account a particular meaning that "diurnal" carried with it in Wordsworth's time and region: "A diary, or daybook" (Oxford English Dictionary). Just as a poet inscribes sentiment into meter, so Nature inscribes her perceivable self into a great poem in her immense rolling rhythms. For a human being to become inscribed in "earth's diurnal course" as are rocks and stones and trees is, therefore, for a human to become part of a great peaceful poem.

And yet, if the poem is so positive in tone, it seems odd that Wordsworth would fill it with negatives, and pack it with loss: "no motion has she now/ No force." Cleanth Brooks's reading of the poem as one of shock and horror is not, after all, without grounds. The poem even seems to break Wordsworth's own prescriptions that epitaphs, unlike elegies, may mention only the sorrows of the mourners that are "directly excited by a distinct and clear conception of the individual who has died" ("Essay Upon Epitaphs" 33). We do not, however, have any distinct and clear conceptions of the dead "she" in

this poem. This has led critics to find "A slumber did my spirit seal" to be only half epitaph at best, since the first stanza seems so much concerned with the survivor's own feelings about his misconceptions of his "she" as immortal (cf. Hartman Poetry 168).

"A slumber did my spirit seal" does, however, fit perfectly into Wordsworth's description of a particular subset of epitaphic poetry that uses the figure "prosopopeia." In this kind of epitaphic poetry, as Wordsworth describes it, the speaker is made to "impersonate the deceased, and represent him as speaking from his own tomb-stone. The departed Mortal is introduced telling you himself that his pains are gone; that a state of rest is come; and he conjures you to weep for him no longer. He admonishes with the voice of one experienced in the vanity of those affections that are confined to earthly objects," and directs your attention to more lasting ideas.

The departed mortal here is Wordsworth himself; it is no surprise that he imagined himself dead, given the deaths of his parents and his friends as he shivered through the frigid winter in the poorly heated house at Goslar (Reed 45, 58). That Wordsworth felt the cold is evident in his poem "Written in Germany on one of the Coldest Days of the Century," in which he compares himself to a freezing fly. In addition, Dorothy writes extensively about Wordsworth's feeling ill in Goslar, with mysterious pains about his heart (de Selincourt, 236). Furthermore, Wordsworth wrote an epitaph for himself ("A Poet's Epitaph") during those months of isolation.

"She" in the poem refers, then, not to a woman from another poem, but to the poet's own spirit, here characterized as female. Indeed, Wordsworth often refers to his own soul, mind, and spirit as feminine entities. In Book II, line 316 of "The Prelude," for example, Wordsworth writes about his own soul as "remembering how she felt, but what she saw/ Remembering not." In Book XIII, lines 365-66 read as follows: "Each man's Mind is to herself/ Witness and judge." In addition, Book XIV, lines 228-29 read: "My soul too, reckless of mild grace had stood/ In her original self too confident." Again, Wordsworth uses the feminine pronoun for the soul when he writes in his "Essay Upon Epitaphs" that the soul travels until "she is brought back . . . to the land of transitory things . . . of sorrow and of tears" (124).