Architectural Absence and Presence in the Poetry of Wordsworth

Retrospectively considering his corpus of poetic works, William Wordsworth

likened his autobiographical epic The Prelude to an anti-chapel of The

Excursion, which was like the "body of a gothic Church." His "minor pieces,"

the revolutionary short lyrics of his career, he went on to say, when

properly arranged could be perceived as "the little Cells, Oratories, and

sepulchral Recesses ordinarily included in those Edifices." His first major

narrative, The Ruined Cottage (1797), which was to become the first book of

The Excursion, images the woeful, psychological decline and demise of an

abandoned mother and wife in the remnants of her wasted cottage, reduced to

"four naked walls / That stared upon each other" In other words, from the

beginning to his most monumental poetic achievements, Wordsworth thought in

terms of architecture for visualizing both internal states and the

construction of his corpus. Most meaningfully, however,  architecture

in-and-out-of-view can be seen to represent the spiritual center of his

poetic vision.

Wordsworth began his great decade with Lyrical Ballads, and Other Poems

(1798), the volume of poetry generally credited with inaugurating British

romanticism. Contemporary reviewers acknowledged that the most significant

of the "other poems"--indeed the most ground breaking poem of the whole

volume-- was "Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey."  The worship

of nature intensely infused in the poem set the agenda for modern poetry's

exploration of the mind's relationship with the external world. Curiously,

although included in the title, the Cistercian Abbey at Tintern does not

appear as an image in the poem, which has evoked the thesis of suppression

and bad faith of the New Historicist, Marjorie Levinson and the rebuttals of

scholarly humanists, such as Thomas McFarland and M. H. Abrams, and students

of literary geography, such as David Miall. Apart from these arguments pro

and con about how and why the missing Abbey can mean or ought not to mean,

the Abbey cannot be ignored as a meaningful architectural absence at the

center of Wordsworth's early poetic vision and its nature worship.

Wordsworth closes his great decade with Poems, in Two Volumes (1807), which

includes "Elegiac Stanzas," a poem that disowns the vision of nature

promulgated in Lyrical Ballads and "Tintern Abbey." As if he sought an

architectural symbol to set against the missing medieval Abbey of his

earlier volume, Wordsworth now introduces into his renunciation of youthful

idealism the medieval castle of Piel Island, a manmade edifice he once lived

near but now views on the canvas of Sir George Beaumont's painting, "Peel

Castel in a Storm." Having suffered a recent domestic tragedy, the death of

his brother John at sea, Wordsworth admires Beaumont's consolatory image of

the castle "standing here sublime / . . . Cased in the unfeeling armour of

old time / [against] the Light'ning, the fierce wind, and trampling waves."

Death and Beaumont provoked the poet's change of heart towards his past and

its famous renunciation of his earlier poetic vision: "A power is gone,

which nothing can restore; / A deep distress hath humaniz'd my Soul." This

appearance of an architectural image at the sad and stoical center of where

once there was joyful absence captures the entire narrative of the rise and

fall of nature worship in the poetry of Wordsworth and its extension into

the poetry of his literary disciples.

                                    Richard E. Matlak

                                    Holy Cross