William Wordsworth's

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

Understanding the poem as a prosopopeic epitaph, as Wordsworth first designed it, governs its interpretation for the poet in the situation when he first wrote the poem, and for the people with

whom he shared it as an "epitaph": Dorothy Wordsworth and Coleridge. In this manifestation of the poem, Wordsworth used traditional conventions as he did the language of common people: he referred to them, so as to raise their expectations that they might interpret his poem as they would a commonplace example of the genre, and then he frustrates their expectations slightly, in order to produce authentic emotions in them; that is, to "readmit" traditional belief and feelings "into the soul like revelations of the moment." What follows is a close reading of this performance of the poem.

"A slumber," the poem begins, "did my spirit seal." The speaker here is using "slumber" as it was conventionally used in gravestone epitaphs: it is a euphemism for death (as in, for example, "My flesh shall slumber in the ground" (Sortore 48). In his own essay on epitaphs, Wordsworth again uses sleeping as a euphemism for death: "death as a sleep overcoming the tired wayfarer" (125). Wordsworth also refers toand pointedly avoidsthe commonplace formula of slumber "stealing" upon the weary (see, for example his "a slumber seems to steal" in "Lines Written in Early Youth"). Instead, the slumber "seals" the spirit in a way that is only explained in the second stanza: she is cut off, or sealed away from the experience of earthly objects through the bodily senses of sight, hearing, motion, and touch. The speaker has passed through death, finding it as gentle as slumber, and reports that he felt no fears that his spiritual self might be as mortal as his human body: hence, no "human fears." Instead he reports that she seems to him to be an immortal thing (and spirits, like souls and minds, are conventionally referred to as things), who cannot feel the passage of time.

In the second stanza, the dead speaker describes the inaccessibility of "earthly objects" to the spirit, which cannot see, hear, or touch them. This is not, however, a lament for the loss of his perceptions of these objects. It is, instead, an admonishment to those people, whom Wordsworth mentioned in "An Essay Upon Epitaphs," "whose affections are confined" to such objects, to think about the possibility of higher forms of attachments with creation.

In addition, Wordsworth stresses the joyful nature of this new state by making a play on our expectations about the emotion death should elicit. He refers to, but avoids, the old formula "she neither sees nor hears" and its traditional match "with sorrow and in tears" although he himself had used this formula in other places. In the

quote above, for example, the soul "is brought back to the land of transitory thingsof sorrow and of tears" ("Essay" 124). Here, however, Wordsworth begins by switching the senses in the first line to "She neither hears nor sees," and completes it, not with a reference to transitory emotions, but with a transcendental experience: "Roll'd round in earth's diurnal course/ With rocks and stones and trees!" In other words, instead of carrying about a sensing human body occupied with perceptions of transitory things, this spirit is now being moved by the rhythms of the larger vessel that is the earth itself. Yet, she is not experiencing a loss of free will or of control. Instead, the living spirit finds that her motion is now joined to the diurnal rhythms of the earthly sphere that includes all natural things: rocks and stone and trees. This natural abode is not a limited one; it is instead, as the popular seventeenth century theologian Paley suggested, the very essence of God.

Wordsworth, therefore, in exile from his country and his friends, failing at his aim of learning German philosophy and German poetry, short of money, and fearful of the cold, wrote "A slumber did my spirit seal" while imagining his own death. His reasons for hiding the identity of the deceased and the genre of the poem were several: Wordsworth later declared that prosopopoeic epitaphs were inferior to those written by friends of the deceased. Furthermore, Wordsworth had already written an epitaph for himself, and he was understandably reluctant to be accused as he had been of being self-centered. Most importantly, Wordsworth knew that the complexity of his newly scientific explanation of a transcendent union with God could be understood only in light of his concept of the imagination, a concept that had its source in the epistemological psychology of the English philosopher, David Hartley. For that reason, for his later poetry collections, Wordsworth classified the poem as a "Poem of the Imagination."

IV. A Poem of the Imagination

Wordsworth discusses imagination in Book 14 of The Prelude, writing that it "in truth/ Is but another name for absolute power/ And clearest insight, amplitude of mind,/ And reason in her most exalted mood" (189). In this passage, however, Wordsworth praises imagination more clearly than he defines it. The meanings behind his

panegyrics are rooted in the thinking, not of the German philosophers whom he had hoped to study, but of the English philosopher Hartley, whose work had inspired Wordsworth and Coleridge just before they left for Germany. Coleridge, for example, in a letter to Southey written in 1794, wrote that he considered himself "more Hartleyian than Hartley himself" (Huguelet xvii). And Coleridge, as he was apt to do, named the son who was born to him while he was enamored of Hartley's philosophy Hartley Coleridge.

Unlike Coleridge, who was successful in learning German philosophy during the trip, Wordsworth, isolated, lonely, and homesick, kept his thoughts on English philosophy as well as on English ballads (c.f. Brett and Jones xxxiii and xxxiv). Of course, it is unclear how much of Wordsworth's understanding of Hartley was filtered through what Coleridge called his "more-Hartleyian" interpretations and how much was bent by Wordsworth's own philosophical proclivity (Hugulet, xvii). Nevertheless, much in Wordsworth's Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, much in his letters and much in the poems themselves reveal close correspondence to Hartley's Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty, and His Expectations, particularly, Wordsworth's idea of imagination.

In this book, Hartley defines imagination as one of a set of mental powers, all ultimately derived from sensations of natural objects. Through sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste, he reasoned, aspects of external objects are communicated to the brain, where they are received as "simple ideas". When we are young, we are able to experience directly the sensations we receive from nature; some persons who are usually attentive to nature may be able to hold on to this relatively direct way of experiencing the world through their adulthood. Sooner or later, however, most sensations are accompanied willy nilly by a set of "associated remembered emotions" (28). A hillside, for example, will conjure up in us memories of other times in which we have seen similar sights, associations with other things from these experiences, and with how we felt during these earlier times, and how we now feel about our earlier experiences and feelings, and so on, until the hillside becomes obscured by our personal associations. As Hartley puts it, "when the pleasure or pain attending sensations and ideas is great, all the associations belonging to them are much accelerated and strengthened . . . for the violent vibrations excited in such cases, soon over-rule the natural vibrations,

and leave in the brain a strong tendency to themselves, from a few impressions" (22). The hillside itself is now almost beside the point. In this process, which he calls imagination, "ideas, and trains of ideas, occur, or are called up, in a vivid manner, and without regard to the order of former actual impressions and perceptions" (iii). Hartley, surprisingly enough, exalted this process, saying that "The Pleasures of Imagination are the next remove above the sensible ones, and have, in their proper place and degree, a great efficacy in improving and perfecting our Natures" (244). Wordsworth, as I will show, shared Hartley's sentiments about all this: in, for example, his evaluation of imagination as "clearest insight" and "amplitude of mind."

Hartley, unlike Wordsworth, did rank another mental process, that of the "generation of social, moral, and religious affections"that is, the personal experience of these truthsabove that of imagination. Wordsworth conflated these two states for two reasons: first, because imagination is the realm of poetry. As Hartley put it, "we think in words; both the Impressions and the Recurrences of Ideas will be attended with words; and these words from the great use and familiarity with language, will fix themselves strongly in the fancy" (376). In addition, Wordsworth thought that poetry had the power to generate social, moral, and religious truths, by expressing the effects of perceptions and ideas on human sensibilities in words that could shape the ideas of the future.

Wordsworth records his own transition from direct sensation to imaginationfrom experiencing Nature to writing about herin "Tintern Abbey" (another "Poem of the Imagination") which he wrote just before he left England for Germany.

Wordsworth begins by describing how, five years before, his mind had been in a state of perception: when the sound of the mountain springs, and the sight of the woods and fields, orchard tufts, and pastoral farms had come to him unmixed with obscuring associations. He writes: "They had no need or a remoter charm/ By thought supplied/ Or any interest Unborrowed from the eye." The time of direct perception of nature, however, "is past . . . all the coarser pleasures of my boyish days . . . all gone by." Wordsworth has grown into another kind of mental power, and now the physical aspects of the site are half-obscured for him by emotional associations and memories.

Wordsworth does not mourn this replacement in himself of direct perception with imagination. Instead, he, like Hartley, feels that the

gifts of memory and imagination are "abundant recompense" for the loss of perception. In his new state of mind, Nature is only "the anchor of my purest thoughts," and both the ideas that are directly caused by her and those which the mind "half-creates" from perceptions altered by thoughts and associations, are equally pleasing to him.

Dorothy, however, is still in a state of perception. Her brother writes: ". . . in thy voice I catch/ The language of my former heart, and read/ My former pleasure in the shooting light/ Of thy wild eyes." Her ability to perceive nature directly will also change in time, as nature leads "from joy to joy":

. . . and in after years,

. . . these wild ecstacies shall be matured

Into a sober pleasure, when thy mind

Shall be as a mansion for all lovely forms,

Thy memory be as a dwelling place

For all sweet sounds and harmonies.

Wordsworth's use of the metaphor of the mansion here is an allusion to the Christian idea, stemming from Christ's words "In my Father's house there are many mansions," which was interpreted as meaning that those who experienced God in heaven would know Him according to their varying capacities. (This was the idea amplified by Milton in creating his various levels of ascension in paradise.) This metaphor is quite in keeping with Hartley's theory of "theopathy," an idea (similar to Paley's) by which God is seen as inscribing Himself in Nature, to be read there "either in an explicit and distinct manner, or in a more secret and implicit one" by those who contemplate His works (Hartley, 420). The development of imagination, for Wordsworth as for Hartley, meant a capacity for a fuller experience of God unmediated by the senses; an experience of a "presence" he is able to feel with

. . . a sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused,

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

And the round ocean, and the living air,

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man,

A motion and a spirit that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

And rolls through all things.

This is the same godly spirit that impels Wordsworth's soul, full of thoughts, unencumbered by sights or sounds, "in earth's diurnal force/ With rocks and stones and trees."

Wordsworth experiences this spirit yet again in another Goslar poem called "Influence of Natural Objects in Calling Forth and Strengthening the Imagination in Boyhood and Early Youth." Here, Wordsworth remembers skating along the surface of an icy stream and then stopping suddenly, only to find that "the solitary cliffs/ Wheeled by meeven as if the earth had rolled/ With Visible motion her diurnal round." Those who remember whirling around in circles as children to get this same feeling of the earth as it turns know that such awareness only comes when our eyesight and hearing are lost in a dizzy blur. Once again, the sublime is identified with the rolling movement of the earth, which is only experienced in a moment when the senses are kept from ordinary perception: "Thou Soul, that art the Eternity of thought!/ And giv'st to forms and images a breath/ And everlasting motion!" In the same way, Wordsworth's "spirit," freed of mundane perceptions, feels herself "roll'd round in earth's diurnal course," a situation Wordsworth infuses with a metaphysical joy matured by thought into a "sober pleasure."

The symbolic death of perceptions, and the occurrence of death itself are conflated in a third poem from Goslar, "The Boy of Winander"another "Poem of the Imagination." This boy entwines his own voice with that of nature in a jocund din, but he still has the capacity to hear nature's voice directly, as "with a gentle shock of mild surprise," he finds that the sound of mountain torrents is being carried straight into his soul. The perceiving child, the speaker tells us, is dead: on his grave stands his transformed self: the poet, who builds his mind and his poetry on the basis of the perceptions he once experienced in mute tranquility. The poet stands, perhaps able, again, to hear the sound of rushing water, but that sound is now obscured from him by his memories and associations about his childhood experience of that sound; memories and associations that have become, for us, a poem.

A similar image occurs in another poem written in Goslar: "A Poet's Epitaph." Here, the dead poet addresses six types of men who might pass by his grave: politicians, lawyers, scholars, soldiers,

physicians, and moralists. All these are asked to pass by his grave quickly (except for the soldier, who might stay should he leave his sword aside, and once more "lean upon a peasant's staff"). The seventh passer-by resembles the poet himself before the full growth of his imagination: like Lucy he is modest and retiring; and like the Boy of Winander, he is acutely aware of natural objects; and yet he is already able to shut his eyes to nature and turn a quiet eye into "his own heart." The dead poet invites the young man to draw strength from his grave; to rest upon it, or even to build a house there. The words of his epitaph, carved into natural stone, have the means of carrying the boy into a higher life of imagination, giving him words with which to lose his perceptions, and to shape his imagination. The symbolic death of one's ability to perceive nature directly is only a precursor to actual death, which is nothing but an entry into a higher realm of imagination. As Hartley put it, "death, or the shaking off of the gross body, may not stop our progress [in knowing God], but rather render us more expedite in the pursuit of our true end. . . . Ultimate happiness appears to be of a spiritual, not corporal nature" (28).

Interestingly, the poem with which Wordsworth replaced "A slumber did my spirit seal" in what scholars have called a group of "Lucy" poems, in later editions of his collected poems, has a similar motif. In "I travelled among unknown men," Lucy's death has the effect of transforming the speaker's perceptions of his home county when he was absent from that place, sitting in Goslar by a scanty cold fire: yet his experience of England in his imagination was one of a higher, poetic nature. The poem that precedes "A slumber did my seal" in the 1815 edition, "Three years she grew in sun in shower," also makes a new kind of sense in the context of Hartley's philosophy. The death of Lucy, that aspect of Wordsworth that can still experience nature directly, is once again a transformation of his perceptions of nature: "She died, and left to me/ This heath, this calm, and quiet scene." The language resonates with traditional beliefs: Nature has taken Lucy "to herself" just as God is conventionally said to take His Creatures "unto Himself" in order to experience His Presence unmediated by perception: the "shooting light" of Dorothy's wild eyes is a synecdoche for the action of all her senses. Lucy is also the perceiving aspect in Wordsworth who must die so that other forms of mental power might be born. The death of Wordsworth's sensing self in "A

slumber did my spirit seal" brings to birth his spirit's capacity to free thoughts from encumbering perceptions, and to attune them to the unmitigated poetic masterpiece that is God.

Wordsworth, like Hartley, was not rejecting religion as he tried to explain the death of perception and the growth of imagination in human experience. Instead, Wordsworth was finding scientific evidence that proved beliefs about death that Christians had traditionally held on faith. The great debate about whether Wordsworth was a pantheist or a Methodist misses the subtleties that affect the quality of belief in all thoughtful people, and especially in Wordsworth. Although Coleridge, early in their friendship, wrote that Wordsworth was " a republican, and, at least, a semi-atheist" (Harper 220), the evidence suggests that Wordsworth was drawn to the old tenets of Christian belief, and set about rationalizing them through the medium of Hartley's rational psychology (Brantley x, 144).

In this context, "A slumber did my spirit seal" is a poem about the transformation of experience, as the spirit is sealed away from direct perception into a new life of participation in the mind of God. The identity of "She" includes the iconic Lucy, the young Wordsworth, little Basil Montague, and all young people insofar as they are in a state of perception. The "human" fears are fears about the loss of childhood perceptions, and about death; fears that are transformed to a calm joy once the redeeming nature of imagination is understood. As Wordsworth writes in The Prelude, the loss of hearing, seeing, feeling is an entry into a new state wherein "sanctified by reason, blest by faith," the mind becomes

a thousand times more beautiful than the earth

. . . above this frame of things. . .

In beauty exalted, as it is itself

Of quality and fabric more divine.

As a "Poem of the Imagination," then, "A slumber did my spirit seal" explores a symbolic death: the death of direct perception that takes place as people accumulate memories and imaginative ideas. It was a triumph. Far away from the perception of lovely natural things, isolated from the universities full of philosophical speculation, Wordsworth achieved an artistic expression of these ideas that could make them alive for philosophers of perception, and that integrated them with Christian ideas. Wordsworth's immediate audience for the

poem was that little coterie of intellectuals who discussed Hartley with Samuel Taylor Coleridge and himself in those idyllic days in the Lake District, who could interpret the poem according to their shared knowledge of Hartley's philosophy. That immediate communicative community was expanded upon with Wordsworth's new labeling of "A slumber did my spirit seal"; now anyone schooled in philosophy who recognized the issues involved in questions of "Imagination" could be part of its interpretive community.

And so we see that the meaning of the poem, from a folklorist's point of view, depends on the circumstances of each performance of that poem. "A slumber" carries different images when it is seen as an epitaph than when it is seen as a poem of the imagination: it refers, in one case, to an imagined death, and, in the second, to a symbolic death and rebirth. Nevertheless, in both performances of the poem by William Wordsworth, its central tone remains the same: one of tranquil joy.

For some contemporary literary critics, these performances of "A slumber did my spirit seal" by its author are considered essential to interpreting the poem "correctly." Other critics see themselves not only unfettered by the cultural context of the poet, but living under postmodern conditions, where no one narrative is held sacred, and no one metanarrative lends guidance for interpreting that narrative. The realization that "A slumber did my spirit seal" has become a de facto sacred narrative for English-speaking literary critics is a beginning: next we can decide if we do, indeed, wish to become one communicative community, and only then choose interpretive conventions to govern our understandings of our expressive culture under the different sorts of circumstances in which it is performed.

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Mary Ellen Cohane's research is in the intersection of folklore and mythology with literary theory. She has written and presented numerous papers on literature, principally focusing on James Joyce. Her articles have appeared in the Journal of American Folklore and The New Jersey Folklore Quarterly. Her story, "The Gift of the Falcon," for the Spring 1998 Mind's Eye, is part of a work in progress: one of five stories and a mummers play called A Christmas Book. Professor Cohane has taught in the English and Communications Department at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts since 1986.