Читать книгу The English Poetic Mind - Charles Williams - Страница 6

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For ever to be hallowed;

Of words in tuneful order (v. 556),

sweet

For their own sake, a passion, and a power;

Of the shell that was poetry (v. 107),

The other that was a god, yea, many gods,

Had voices more than all the winds, with power;

and so also (v. 595):

Visionary power

Attends the motions of the viewless winds,

Embodied in the mystery of words.

Of imagination (vi. 592)

here the Power so called,

Through sad incompetence of human speech,

That awful Power, rose from the mind’s abyss:

and there are other instances.

This Power, Wordsworth held, was of the first importance to man. He left the statement unaltered, or, if anything, slightly enforced, through all the modifications of the Prelude. Some things he unsaid, but that he never unsaid. In Book V is the vision of the Arab, carrying geometry and poetry, escaping on a camel from the deluge and the floods that are to destroy mankind; and to this vision Wordsworth says that he often deliberately returned, consciously changing the Arab to a ‘gentle dweller in the desert’, seized with a noble madness; consciously regarding him and his quest of salvation for poetry with reverence, and identifying himself with him. In such a madness, such a dream, is reason. There are enough people on earth to take in charge

Their wives, their children, and their virgin loves,

Or whatsoever else the heart holds dear.

Wordsworth himself, in such a catastrophe will, with his own dreamed fanatic, abandon everything else to save poetry.

This, for the solemn, the conventional, Wordsworth is pretty good going; and might make us wonder whether we have not overmuch subdued that violent young poet who wrote ‘we murder to dissect’. But it fits in very well with the continual use of the word ‘power’. It is in that power which is poetry that ‘darkness makes abode’; it is in poetry that ‘forms and substances’