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T H I N K I N G T H RO U G H P O E T RY
Thinking through Poetry
Field Reports on Romantic Lyric

MARJORIE LEVINSON

1
 1
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
© Marjorie Levinson 2018
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First Edition published in 2018
Impression: 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
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You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
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Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and
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contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
This book is for my children. First and last and midst and without end.
Olivia Anne Harris
Cecily Gwyn Harris
Daniel Levinson Harris
 Acknowledgments

Earlier forms of the following chapters have previously appeared in print or online.
Chapter 2: Rethinking Historicism, ed. Marjorie Levinson (Oxford: Blackwell,
1989), 1–63 by permission of Wiley; Chapter 3: ‘Romantic Poetry: The State
of the Art’, MLQ, Vol. 54:2, pp. 183–214. Copyright 1993, University of
Washington. All rights reserved. Used by permission of the publisher, Duke
University Press; Chapter 4: Cultural Critique 31 (1995), 111–27 by permission of
the University of Minnesota Press; Chapter 6: ELH 73:2 (2006), 549–80.
Copyright © 2006 The Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted with permis-
sion by Johns Hopkins University Press; Chapter 7: What’s Left of Theory, ed. Judith
Butler, John Guillory, and Kendall Thomas, English Institute Essays (New York:
Routledge, 2000), 192–239; Chapter 9: Studies in Romanticism 46 (2000), 367–
408; Chapter 10: Studies in Romanticism 49 (2010), 633–57 by permission of the
Trustees of Boston University; Chapter 11: Romantic Circles, Praxis Series (2013);
Appendix: PMLA 122 (2007) 557–69.
Permission was granted to quote excerpts from the following texts: Remnants of
Song: Trauma and the Experience of Modernity in Charles Baudelaire and Paul Celan
by Ulrich Baer. Copyright © 2000 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford
Jr. University. All rights reserved. Used by permission of the publisher, Stanford
University Press, sup.org; ‘The Poems of Our Climate’ in Collected Poems by
Wallace Stevens (2006), Faber and Faber Ltd.; Romantic Weather: The Climates of
Coleridge and Baudelaire by Arden Reed (1983), for Brown University Press by
University Press of New England; Foucault by Gilles Deleuze (2006), Continuum
Publishing, used by permission of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

The largest share of my personal thanks goes to Richard Harris for all the reasons
he knows and some that I hope this note may convey.
The colleagues and dear friends who have been with me and for me throughout
are Geoff Eley, Andrea Henderson, Alice Levine, Jerome McGann, Anita Norich,
David Simpson, and, coming on later but no less dear, Sonia Hofkosh.
I offer thanks beyond measure to the many graduate students who kindled to
my ideas, as I to theirs, from 1978 to 2018. A few who count for many are Rachel
Feder, Rebecca Porte, and Adam Sneed. If thanks can be wishes, let mine be for the
survival of a discipline as intellectually serious and therefore as inspiring and life-
sustaining as this one has been for me. And in that discipline of the mind in the
world, let the scholars of this generation find their proper, honored place.
To Walter Cohen, who pushed me to finish this book and whose confidence in
me made that happen, the thing speaks for itself.
 Contents
List of Illustrations xi

1. Introduction: Crooked Lines and Moving Targets 1

PA RT I . T H E O RY: M AT E R I A L I S M A G A I N S T I T S E L F
2. The New Historicism: Back to the Future 33
3. Romantic Poetry: The State of the Art 67
4. Pre- and Post-Dialectical Materialism: Modeling Praxis without
Subjects and Objects 93
5. A Motion and a Spirit: Romancing Spinoza 105
6. What is New Formalism? 140

PA RT I I . C R I T I C I S M : F I E L D T H E O R I E S O F F O R M
7. Of Being Numerous 169
8. Notes and Queries on Names and Numbers 193
9. Parsing the Frost: The Growth of a Poet’s Sentence in
“Frost at Midnight” 208
10. Still Life without References: or, The Plain Sense of Things 235
11. Conclusion: Lyric—The Idea of this Invention 254

Bibliography 297
Index 319
 List of Illustrations

1. Frost (Ieva Geneviciene/Shutterstock.com; Gheorghe Popa/

Shutterstock.com). 214
2. Speech balloon script from International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). 219
3. Diagram of the opening sentence of Paradise Lost. 230
4. Lines 24–43 of “Frost at Midnight.” 231
5. Sentence diagram from Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog by
Kitty Burns Florey, pp. 4–5. By permission of Houghton
Mifflin Harcourt. 232
6. Dendrite stones (Matteo Chinellato/Shutterstock.com;
Zbynek Burival/Shutterstock.com). 233
7. 18th-c fire grate, journal page, musical staff,
window frost, Aeolian Harp. 234
 1
Introduction
Crooked Lines and Moving Targets1

1
Thinking through Poetry: Field Reports on Romantic Lyric is intended for two
audiences. First, it addresses readers familiar with the field of Romantic study
and interested in its development. Nearly every chapter—but especially those in
Part 1—considers the field’s changing ideas and methods and ponders the relation
between the two at various moments from the late 1980s through the present. In
addition to assessing these critical movements, each chapter invites viewing as a
kind of physical deposit left by a definable era of that thirty-year fieldwork. Like a
geological core sample of that field—a deep-drilled cylindrical section of a his-
torically layered domain—the book as a whole indexes an intellectual evolution
rather than narrating it. Perhaps at a slight cost of overall stylistic consistency,
I have retained the original voice and critical gestures of each chapter as markers of
its place within a thirty-year history of a disciplinary sector. Second, however, inso-
far as Romanticism has often served as the profession’s laboratory for research and
development of new topics, methods, and critical aims, Thinking through Poetry
can claim a degree of synecdochal status with respect to broader disciplinary work
in literary study. My own shift from a historical to an ontological materialism,
from epistemic to metaphysical interests, from a notion of literary production
reflecting and resisting regimes of commodity production to a more complex and
dynamic systems theory framework (wherein text and context, entity and environ-
ment, and therefore form and history are seen ceaselessly to engender and redefine
one another) dovetails with movements of thought in the field of Romantic studies,
which anticipates ideas and methods now current in the discipline at large. Similarly,
the themes that this book explores—for example, nature, agency, thought, singu-
larity, form—can lay claim to an independent general interest. Although these topics
arose from and, in each case, remain anchored to my readings of particular poems

1 “If there are obstacles, the shortest line between two points may be a crooked one.” Bertolt Brecht,
Life of Galileo (New York: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 1980), 106. Brecht’s phrase is, for me, a
double allusion—the more proximal reference being the title of my beloved colleague’s work: Geoff
Eley, A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society (Ann Arbor, MI: University of
Michigan Press, 2005). It was Geoff ’s intellectual presence within Michigan’s interdisciplinary work-
shop—Comparative Study of Social Transformations (CSST), 1987–2001—that shifted my lifeworld
from Philadelphia to Ann Arbor. It is Geoff’s friendship that, more than anything else, has enriched
my life here for nearly thirty years.
2 Thinking through Poetry

(in all cases but one, British Romantic poems), my treatment of them speaks to a
general readership, or solicits this way of reading by specialists in other periods and
perhaps other languages as well.
Thinking through Poetry accordingly has two independent sources of coherence.
One is the narrative arc, spanning, as I have noted, some thirty years of study in
the field of British Romanticism. That narrative traces the migration of theory from
philosophy, politics, and linguistics to the sciences. My subtitle—Field Reports on
Romantic Lyric—with its resonance to both natural history and to physics, seeks
to capture the book’s conceptual center of gravity, its other source of coherence.
Indeed, one way to specify the migration I reference is from one kind of field to
another: from a field that is organized on a vertical model of relational dynamics
wherein the depth term exercises structural and genetic priority, to a model based
on part–whole and entity–environment relations, with field conceived as a surface
favoring recursive and self-organizing dynamics.
This conceptual structure (exemplified primarily in Part 2: Criticism: Field
Theories of Form) follows from the book’s core problematic. I use that term in its
classic sense, derived from French structuralist thought,2 where it means a matrix of
(a) topics, (b) axioms, and (c) either interests or aims that generates a distinctively
organized and interrelated field of problems or questions. All of these (topic, axiom,
aim) may be understood by reference to the migration of theory just summarized.
The key topic within the problematic of Thinking through Poetry is materialism,
conceived as both a philosophical term and as a widely shared desideratum for the
dominant strains of literary and cultural criticism of the past thirty years. Closely
related to the topic of materialism is that of nature (or rather, natures), in the sense
of constructs of materiality and otherness enabling (and more recently, and in real
time, so to speak, disabling) projects of human self-fashioning.
The key axiom is that the material (and/or nature)—its provenance, locus, con-
tent, and effects—is neither an essence nor a social construction (as in, either a
hegemonic or consensual projection) but a historically conjunctural phenomenon
in the sense of an objective convergence of historical forces. That being the case,
every act of materialist critique must first labor to determine what matters (which
is to say, how matter materializes) within a given conjuncture. As prolegomenon
to the work of reading, one asks what sphere, scale, and organization of life and
thought does the category-work of materiality at that moment and for that exer-
cise. What makes this a conjunctural rather than a presentist exercise is a concept
of the punctual intertwining of particular presents with particular pasts (a historical
logic tracing to Benjamin, taken up as a topic in Chapter 2). Although a quasi-
mystical aura sometimes attaches to that notion in Benjamin, in this book the sudden
conjuncture is seen as a function of uneven historical development, unexpected
convergences, and time-release effects.
The key interest making up this three-fold problematic is poetry: more narrowly,
lyric poetry and more narrowly yet, the kind of lyric that crystallized as the norma-
tive instance of that form in the Romantic period and that continues to dominate

2 Especially from the writings of Louis Althusser. See n. 12 below.

 Introduction 3

the cultural field. That lyric kind might be summarized as a drama of interiority
(of feeling thinking and of thinking feeling) figured as both combat and collusion
between, in Wordsworth’s phrase, “the mind of man and Nature,” with both of
those master-categories made present, exclusively so, in the verbal and rhetorical
fabric of the text.3 Here as throughout the book, I treat Wordsworth’s poetry as a
paradigm instance of this lyric kind, in hopes of contributing to knowledge that
may in addition prove useful in the study of other poetic or literary kinds. In biol-
ogy, such instances are called “model systems,” defined as “an object or process
selected for intensive research as an exemplar of a widely observed feature of life or
disease.”4 What the model-system method forfeits in sampling breadth it seeks to
balance out in depth of focus and in historical depth, in the sense of data accumu-
lation about one well-defined subject over a long period of time. Wordsworth satis-
fies both criteria; no modern poet has been the subject of critical study—particularly
of a formalist, rhetorical, and, as it were, grammatological kind—for as long and
as intensively as Wordsworth, and no other single-author set of lyrics concentrates
within itself as many of the defining features of the genre (of that lyric “kind”
described above) as Wordsworth’s.
A number of questions arise from the problematic just stated and circulate
throughout in the following chapters. They treat of: (1) dialectics (especially nega-
tive dialectics)5 as a model of individuation and as a method of inquiry; (2) pre-
modern pictures of mind and matter (in Spinoza’s terms, thought and extension)6,
and of the many and the one; (3) constructions of entity and environment, mind and
body, part and whole, and cause and effect developed in the physical, biological, and
computational sciences of the twentieth and twenty-first century; (4) the aesthetic
as a category of both resistance and absorption; (5) constructs of the human and of
the subject that are not defined by labor, desire, reflective self-awareness, or sociality
(in the sense of either the polis or its cultural and demographic subdivisions,
e.g., race, class, gender, sexuality); (6) the uses and status of models and metaphors
for exploratory purposes (over and above their explanatory function); (7) the
relevance of analytic scale (and of relations between different scales) to interpretive
validity; and (8) the concept and conduct of immanent critique.
The results of those inquiries coalesce as an argument—an argument for the kind
of thinking enabled by lyric poetry. This argument represents a strong, sharp alter-
native to what might, on the face of it, seem like a kindred study: namely, Simon
Jarvis’s 2007 monograph, Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song. For Jarvis, poetry’s special
resources for thinking lie exclusively in its acoustic and sensuous properties, its “song”
as he puts it.7 He argues that this body language, unique to poetry, properly repels

3 Wordsworth, The Five-Book Prelude, ed. Duncan Wu (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), “Appendix 1:
The Analogy Passage,” l. 28.
4 Mary Poovey, “The Model System of Contemporary Literary Criticism,” Critical Inquiry 27 (2001),
408–38 (quote on p. 408).
5 In the sense developed by Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York:
Continuum, 1973).
6 For Spinoza, see Chapter 5.
7 Simon Jarvis, Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
4 Thinking through Poetry

all interest in “philosophical system,” a term of opprobrium for him (reductive,

mechanistic, opportunistic, etc.).8 I count as one central achievement of Thinking
through Poetry a rescue of the term “system” from the negative associations with
which Jarvis loads it, and a reinstatement (and demonstration) of the intellectual
dimension of poetry. The argument is for an enlarged notion of thinking, one that
activates the strange and special materiality of poetic language for a knowledge-
based but imaginative activity undreamt of in Jarvis’s philosophy. Studies by Daniel
Tiffany, J. H. Prynne, Sharon Cameron, and Branka Arsić are the gold standard for
this kind of work.9 All are instances of “beautiful work,” the title of an earlier
monograph by Cameron,10 and, like that study, as concerned to invent a discourse
for opacity as they are to perform, deliver, and explain the movements of thought
propelled by encounters with radical innocence, or, “what resists symbolization
absolutely.”11

2
My title phrase, Thinking through Poetry, seeks to capture the deepest aims and
most sustained procedures of this book while Field Reports, my subtitle, names the
critical genre on offer and identifies its sources of coherence. Despite my earlier
linking of Field Reports with the overall narrative arc (and Thinking through Poetry
with its conceptual structure), readers will note in the following discussion how the
two dimensions converge. The overlap, complicating what I described as the book’s
two-part, diachronic/synchronic format, is deliberate, and I signal it by loading
each of my title phrases with a threefold reference indexing both ideas and methods.
I draw on the multivalence of my key term, “field,” and of my hinge-term, “through”
(both discussed below) to explain a critical practice that imitates the book’s abiding
interest in models of form and becoming that surpass the structure/history, formalism/
historicism binaries which, in our discipline, are still hard to escape. Because crit-
ical genre (over and above critical aim) is something of a topic or at the very least
a leitmotif within this study, I lead my discussion of what this book is by saying what
it is not. My contrastive examples are meant to heighten awareness of the available
choices and also to highlight the coordinates of this study upon a disciplinary map.

8 Ibid. 4.
9 Daniel Tiffany, Toy Medium: Materialism and Modern Lyric (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2000); J. H. Prynne, Field Notes: “The Solitary Reaper” and Others (Cambridge: privately
printed, 2007); Sharon Cameron, The Bond of the Furthest Apart: Essays on Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Bresson,
and Kafka (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017). In this latest monograph, Cameron’s study
texts are cinema and prose fiction, not poetry. Her critical practice here, however, as in all her earlier
work, is as intellectually serious and ambitious in its address to the sensuous dimension of language
as is the best work in poetry criticism. The same holds for Arsić’s Bird Relics: Grief and Vitalism in
Thoreau (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016).
10 Sharon Cameron, Beautiful Work: A Meditation on Pain (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2000).
11 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953–1954, trans.
John Forrester (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
 Introduction 5

Thinking through Poetry is not driven by an overarching and unifying argument,

topic, or period-interest, nor does its coherence lie in the development of a new
theoretical paradigm or in the sustained application of an existing one. To state the
obvious, this book, like all critical studies, has topics, makes period-specific claims,
and draws on the discourses of critical and cultural theory. Its defining character as
a whole, however, is independent of those offerings. Similarly, although readers will
find this study attached at all times strongly and sometimes fiercely to the making
of arguments, the genre is not that of the intervention, either within one well-defined
set of debates or in relation to a loose general consensus about a particular topic,
field, or approach.
The primary materials provoking critical exercise throughout this book are all
standard items within the repertoire of British Romantic poetry and, in one case,
its afterlives. In other words, this is not an archivally driven project in the sense of
recovering never published or long neglected texts, or of contriving new groupings
for renewing familiar works or for making fresh claims about intertextuality and
influence.
Balancing the narrow bandwidth of the primary texts, the conceptual resources
in play in this study are many and various, especially with respect to their disciplinary
provenance. (In a few cases, these resources can be considered innovative, sampling
analytic frameworks rarely or never used in literary and cultural study.) However,
while I treat such frameworks as objects of interest in their own right, all are
brought on in the service of practical criticism undertaken at the level of individual
works and of the poetic form comprising them all: namely, lyric. Reading—the
core exercise of this study—is what generates and is made, in the end, to justify
what are often lengthy detours into bodies of thought that offer themselves as aids
to reflection. In other words, and as I said above, theory—in the sense of applying
or developing a particular paradigm borrowed from another discipline—is not the
source of the study’s coherence.
My subtitle, Field Reports on Romantic Lyric, condenses several references. First,
it indicates a location and a history. As I have said, this is a book that issues from
and reports on the field of British Romantic poetry and poetics in its development
over three decades—the span of a single biological generation and of several aca-
demic ones. My phrase, “field reports,” underscores the difference between a his-
tory of critical taste and an internal history of critical thought. Of course, all critical
work inhabits and is inhabited by its scholarly field and the history thereof. My
claim goes farther. Some of the chapters that are based on published articles, con-
tributions to edited collections, and lectures delivered at large conferences have
had an influence on the developing field of Romantic studies. Moreover, because
the procedure is, loosely speaking, longitudinal (where a population of primary
texts, selected for their possession of certain properties, is subjected to regular trials
over time), I have been able to turn that influence into a critical feedback loop,
generating reflections on the very changes prompted by my own and likeminded
work. Not just passively “of its moment(s)” and field, this is a study that, from
beginning to end, draws its institutional and intellectual situation—regarded as, in
the strongest sense, its condition of possibility—into its topical purview. Moreover,
6 Thinking through Poetry

it works its conditions of historical being into its method, converting the fact of
that inescapable entanglement into a practice of immanent critique.12 To be sure
(and, as is consistent with the foregoing claim), my understanding of both imma-
nence and of critique has changed considerably through the years, but what has
held constant is the goal of coordinating my epistemic premises and equipment
with their historical moments. If there is any “wise passiveness”13 in this book, it
lives in the recurrent relinquishment of earlier positions following their interroga-
tion by the movements of critical, institutional, and general history. To be clear, if
crude, the distinction is between an intellectual history conducted from within
and a history of taste.
In other words, the feedback loop described above is not just a happy accident
of what I called the longitudinal character of this study. Neither is it the sign of
either an ethical or a subjective commitment to a practice of repeated self-study.
Instead, the commitment is to the practice of historical materialism, which, fol-
lowing Perry Anderson’s isolation of the key feature of that practice, is not just a
theory of history but also a history of theory. Here is Anderson’s fuller statement:
historical materialism, “unlike all other variants of critical theory” (including those
that try to factor into their development the “wider movement of history”), “differs
in its ability—or at least its ambition—to compose a self-critical theory capable of
explaining its own genesis and metamorphoses.” A self-critical theory is one that
repeatedly plots its own “internal history, of cognitive blindnesses and impediments,
as well as advances or insights” (emphasis his).14 At the same time, it coordinates
this internal history with the changing field of external and objective determinations,
just as it rediscovers its political objectives in “the real movement of things,” redefining
those aims as required.15 Thinking through Poetry tells a tale neither of collective critical
progress nor of individual enlightenment or intellectual Bildung (self-cultivation,
education); it traces a deepening and widening spiral of dialectical thought, even—
or especially—when it struggles to move beyond dialectics.
For a helpful contrast, consider The Limits of Critique (2015), Rita Felski’s excel-
lent mapping of the discipline’s many turns over the past thirty years. The clarity
of Felski’s survey (and her disabused view of “crrritique”) is a function not just of
her critical acumen and her skill as both observer-participant and narrator, but also

12 For an extended treatment of this method, see Chapters 2 and 3. I intend a Sartrean resonance
to my word, “situation”: that is, a degree of constraint or unfreedom (arising from the histories that
are sedimented in the “practico-inert”) and at the same time, an opportunity for freedom to be realized
within and against this particularized experience of intransigence. The situation is never a raw contin-
gency nor is it utterly individual, despite its presentation as such to our awareness. Situation, as Sartre
conceives it, is always an effect of collective human action in the past or present, which is to say, it
represents a unification and totalization rather than a bare presentment. The term, “situation,” is
prominent throughout Sartre’s writing, showing continuous evolution from Being and Nothingness
(1948), through Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960). Situations is the title of the essay collection
series (initially from Les Temps modernes) that Sartre began to compile and publish in 1947 with newly
augmented editions appearing regularly during his life and posthumously as well (Situations IX, 1972
consisting of interviews from 1965–70).
13 Wordsworth, “Expostulation and Reply,” l. 24.
14 Perry Anderson, In the Tracks of Historical Materialism (London: Verso, 1983), 12, 14.
15 Ibid. 11.
 Introduction 7

of her overall retrospective and external stance.16 A view from the present is a view
from above, and the advantages of that view for the purposes of mapping are obvi-
ous. The view throughout Thinking through Poetry is, however, neither presentist
(the rear-view mirror gaze) nor radically historicist (viz., the fantasy of becoming
one with the past so as to channel its own self-understanding). As explained most
centrally in Chapter 2, the viewpoint in this book is, as I have indicated, conjunctural,
in the manner described by Benjamin.17
The word “field” has a substantive dimension as well as a situational one. It
names a conceptual impulse working through Part 1 and surfacing as an explicit
topic in Part 2. (See Chapter 11 for the most concentrated treatment.) The diverse
intellectual frameworks recruited throughout that section’s problem-solving exer-
cises share a common goal: the attempt to displace both classical and intuitive
pictures of subjects and objects, entities and environments, forms and histories,
singularities and multiplicities, and causes and effects with models of dynamic,
self-organizing, and recursive fields of spatial, temporal, and logical kinds. Thinking
through Poetry, insofar as it is a series of field reports, reports on field-theories of a
peculiarly “holistic but non-totalizing kind”18 developed in the study of ontogeny,
dynamic systems theory, neurophysiology, set theory, evolutionary biology, physics,
computer science, and (closer to home), textual studies.19
A third resonance intended by my subtitle is with the genre of ethnographic
field-notes and its now customary attention to the mix of embeddedness and alien-
ation obtaining between the cultural observer and her objects of study, as well as
its discursive etiquettes for incorporating that awareness into its knowledge-claims.

16 Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 117–50.
17 See also above, Pierre Macherey’s contrast of “moment” and “conjuncture”: In a Materialist Way:
Selected Essays, trans Ted Stolze (London: Verso, 1998), 10.
18 William E. Connolly, A World of Becoming (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); “holis-
tically but nontotalistically”: Mark Taylor, Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture (Chicago,
University of Chicago Press, 2001), 12; “a general science of wholeness, which until now was considered
a vague, hazy, and semi-metaphysical concept”: Ludwig von Bertalanffy, quoted ibid. 140; “Unlike the
idealistic holism that sees the whole as the embodiment of some ideal organizing principle, dialectical
materialism views the whole as a contingent structure in reciprocal interaction with its own parts and
with the greater whole of which it is a part. Whole and part do not completely determine each other”:
Richard Levins and Richard C. Lewontin, The Dialectical Biologist (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1985), 136.
19 See Chapter 11 for a field-theory model in the domain of textual studies, organizing the rela-
tionship between work, version, and text. For a sample of the language of fields, a conceptual para-
digm that, in biology, dates to the late nineteenth and early-to-mid-twentieth century (e.g., William
Bateson, D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, Hans Driesch), consider this, from Brian Goodwin: “A field,
that is, a spatial domain [in fact, on their own account, a spatio-temporal domain] in which every part
has a separate structure determined by the state of the neighboring parts so that the whole has a spe-
cific relational structure. Any disturbance in the field . . . results in a restoration of the normal relational
order so that one whole spatial pattern is reconstituted.” See “Field Theory of Reproduction and
Evolution,” Beyond Neo-Darwinism: An Introduction to the New Evolutionary Paradigm, ed. Mae-Wan
Ho and Peter T. Saunders (London: Academic Press, 1984), 228. And from Gerry Webster and
Goodwin: “Fields, conceived as dynamical systems and genetic or environmental factors, are supposed
to determine parametric values in the equations which describe the structure of the field. Such factors
therefore act to ‘select’ and stabilise one empirical form from the set of forms which are possible for
that type of field.” See Form and Transformation: Generative and Relational Principles in Biology
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 99.
8 Thinking through Poetry

Related to that, the phrase, “field reports,” is also a homage to one particular study that,
like this one, actively invites the ethnographic reference. That study, self-published
in Britain and unavailable commercially, online, or in my own research library or
its regional consortium, came to my notice only after my all-but-finishing this book
and thinking about its title. The serendipity is immensely gratifying. I refer to
J. H. Prynne’s Field Notes: “The Solitary Reaper” and Others, a study that weaves the
figure and concept of field into its form and content.
Prynne’s 134-page monograph takes as its sole study-text Wordsworth’s “The
Solitary Reaper.” The title’s reference to that poem (which stands “single in the field”
of Prynne’s monograph—“single,” but dispersed across it) and the poem’s own
narrative prime us for a certain kind of critical practice: one that stops, looks,
imagines, reflects, and then, “gently pass[es],”20 leaving the poem undamaged by the
critic’s meddling intellect. Readers who recognize Prynne as a major contemporary
poet are even more likely to anticipate what is sometimes called a poetic criticism,
wherein a performative mimesis stands in for research and argument. On this read-
ing, the “notes” referenced by Prynne’s title would be seen to imitate—“remediate”
is the more precise term—the musical notes of the reaper and of the poem that
itself remediates her song. Prynne’s study, framed by these expectations, promises
a knowledge-form for our times, one that leaves only a modest footprint, setting
no obstacle to overcome, no normative achievement for subsequent travelers anx-
iously or eagerly to reckon with, and involving no rebarbative critical gymnastics.
Both title and format of Field Notes (a numbered format, gesturing toward both
outline notes and textual footnotes) cue a descriptive, meditative, noninvasive prac-
tice of thinking with or literally alongside the poem (as in a marginal note or run-
ning commentary rather than a footnote) rather than about it—a procedure to which
I will return.
Yet this is not at all what happens. Quite the contrary: Field Notes is a tour de
force of intellectual curiosity, critical energy and edge, and wide, deep, erudition.
The numbered notes that make up the text come from the field, or rather fields
(they are legion) of academic, expert knowledge: general, cultural, and literary his-
tory as well as sociology, musicology, economics, and anthropology. Prynne works
these scholarly fields as a professional, doing serious and exacting research as pro-
voked by and brought home to textual particulars, and generating clear, sharp argu-
ments about the workings and import of both primary and secondary texts. There
is nothing of either the humble amateur or the facile dilettante about this labor—a
labor of highly skilled and selective excavation, not gleaning. The academic fields
mentioned above are the first-order “others” named in Prynne’s title, and, through
that field work, second-order others, in the sense of nonfocal persons, come to fill
the scene. Some of them belong to groups and categories that have formed the
traditional subject matter of modern anthropology (figures from premodern or
preindustrial cultures; or, contemporary instances of either incomplete modern-
ity or marginality). As I said, however, many others who lack that primitivist

20 Wordsworth, “The Solitary Reaper,” Wordsworth’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Nicholas Halmi (New York:
Norton, 2014), p. 411, l. 4.
 Introduction 9

cachet (i.e., high-cultural expert voices) also occupy the space of inquiry. Between
these two groups of subjects and interlocutors, Prynne “chooses not choosing.”21
Finally, I use the word “field” in my subtitle to signal a caution that has long
been foundational for students of hermeneutics (but that, with hermeneutics being
in bad odor, has been forgotten or rejected outright). By analogy to a visual field,
textual fields do not merely contain blind spots, they come into being in relation
to some particular blindness, peculiar not to a person but to what I called above a
situation (or, a conjuncture).22 Paradoxically, the existence of this blind spot (this
seeing from a certain position that can itself never be fully seen, or not until one
vacates the position) is the condition of seeing at all. If there is an ethical dimen-
sion to this book, this is its content—this stated and enacted insistence on the
interdependent blindness and insight peculiar to one’s moment of writing. Recent
challenges to this basic fact of cognition object to its presupposition of a textual
“repressed”—a defining secret that calls forth and explains the text itself as nothing
but the elision, masking, displacement, etc. of that deep truth. They also reject
what they see as the presumption of epistemic superiority on the part of the critic.
These challenges stem from a fundamental misunderstanding of the uncon-
scious as defined throughout the psychoanalytic literature, beginning with Freud’s
famous revision of his structural theory of mind into a dynamic account. On the
dynamic account, the unconscious is not a deep truth trumping the false con-
sciousness of consciousness itself. It is instead one element in a dynamic process
through which different kinds and degrees of knowledge (more precisely, affective
representations) are related to each other. The goal of analysis is, very precisely, the
work or working of analysis, in the sense of generating this network of knowing in
a context where, for the first time, it can be seen, seen as (in Wittgenstein’s phrase)
one’s “form of life,”23 and therefore seen as potentially and to some extent change-
able. The correct figure of speech for capturing this kind of seeing is not “penetrat-
ing” but “planar,” or better (on account of the dynamism of the term), “topological.”

21 This is Sharon Cameron’s title phrase for the thought-style of Emily Dickinson, in Choosing Not
Choosing: Emily Dickinson’s Fascicles (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). For conceptually
and procedurally kindred projects (i.e., critical experiments that combine searching and often technical
research with procedural and aesthetic alignment, and sometimes mimesis, of values marking their
object of study), see Branka Arsić, Passive Constitutions, Or, 7 ½ Times Bartleby (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2007); Sharon Cameron, Thinking in Henry James (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1991), and Impersonality: Seven Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); T. J. Clark,
The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006);
Anne-Lise François, Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experience (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2008); Mary Jacobus, Romantic Things: A Tree, A Rock, A Cloud (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2012); Jacobus, Reading Cy Twombly: Poetry in Paint (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2016). See also n. 9 above.
22 Conjuncture, from Althusser: “The central concept of the Marxist science of politics (cf. Lenin’s
‘current moment’); it denotes the exact balance of forces, state of overdetermination of the contradic-
tions at any given moment to which political tactics must be applied.” Ben Brewster, Althusser Glossary,
1969. https://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/althusser
23 “. . . the word ‘language-game’ is used here to emphasize the fact that the speaking of language is
part of an activity, or of a form of life” (Philosophical Investigations, I: 23). Language functions due to
“agreement not in opinions, but rather in form of life” (PI 241). https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/
wittgenstein/#GramFormLife.
10 Thinking through Poetry

Topology is the study of “properties of space that are preserved under continuous
deformations, such as stretching, twisting, crumpling, and bending.” The only dis-
allowed operation is tearing; everything must touch everything in the topological
field.24 I prefer the term topological reading to surface reading for topology’s
emphasis on the depth of the surface itself, when that two-dimensional manifold
undergoes the kinds of deformation just described.25
Similarly, in Althusser’s extrapolation of psychic process to the realm of the social
and political, ideology (that is, the scaled-up equivalent of the Freudian ego, or of
consciousness itself, and, in terms of writing, counterpart to the textual surface) is
the way that individuals live their relation to the Real, a Real that materializes,
however, only in that relationship. Freud, Lacan, and Althusser firmly and repeat-
edly reject the notion of a Real (“metaphysics of presence”)26 that stands apart
from and prior to this process of mediation, the name for this work of representa-
tion and realization. Denial, splitting, and projection, by contrast, are names for
the defense mechanisms that generate the fantasy of an original, authorizing, and
independent Real.
A related error is made by those who allege that suspicion reading claims
epistemic superiority to its objects of study: namely, their own projection of a
double-standard for literature and criticism. The inescapable logic of a “horizonal”
(cf. Gadamer, “fusion of horizons”) and dialectical (blindness/insight) hermeneutics
is that it applies to all genres of knowledge production, the scholarly and/or critical
as well as the imaginative.27 Obviously, there are better and worse examples of the
method—that is, reflexive and reductive ones—but that has nothing to do with
the method’s validity. For Gadamer’s “horizonal” as a description of historically
and causally intertwined interpretive constraints and opportunities, I would sub-
stitute “field.” In place of suspicion hermeneutics, we might posit a field-theory of
reading.

3
Above, I designated Thinking through Poetry’s first source of coherence as a narra-
tive arc. As already suggested, read in this way the book tracks a major shift in the
study of British Romanticism, and, in parallel, it plots two distinctive phases in a
developing project—a project pursued individually but in ways that have always had
fellow travelers. The book’s section headings, explained below, signal this field-wide

24 Eric W. Weisstein, “Topology.” From MathWorld—A Wolfram Web Resource. http://mathworld.

wolfram.com/Topology.html.
25 See Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Sean Hand (London: Bloomsbury, 1988): “Foldings, or the Inside
of Thought (Subjectivation),” 78–101.
26 Originally used by Heidegger but associated with Derrida and poststructuralism more generally:
roughly, the assumption of a grounding, self-identical presence or primacy anchoring representation.
27 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd edn. (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1989). See n. 33
below.
 Introduction 11

shift as it intersects with my own interests. Not surprisingly, given what I have
already said, the shift (considered at both institutional and individual levels) per-
tains to concepts of materiality, especially as these concepts bear on ideas of nature
and the human, agency and value, practice and theory. This shift offers itself to
both subjective and objective description. The inner standpoint and the outer one
complement each other rather than coinciding or coalescing into one.
I give to Part 1: Theory (Chapters 2–6) the subtitle “Materialism Against Itself ”
to signal a focus on the internal contradictions emerging from roughly a decade of
historically materialist readings. The chapters in this section take their rhetorical
point of departure (and, at a higher level of generality, their governing problem)
from the debates that polarized critical agendas in the field of Romantic study
beginning in the late 1980s and extending through to the early years of the new
century. Formalism versus historicism is one such debate; humanist versus posthu-
manist orientations is another, as is what came to be called environmentalism versus
ecopoetics (roughly, thematic versus formalist, and conservationist versus radically
transformative approaches to nature thinking). At some level, all these debates
worry the politics of knowledge; all wrestle with the dialectic of enlightenment28—
too often, with no awareness of that fact. Is critical knowing a form of domination
and absorption fundamentally opposed to the aesthetic impulse? Or, is it an agent
of redemption, a release of the aesthetic from the frozen forms in which it has been
encased? Does critique flatten (reduce and traduce) the artwork’s human dimen-
sion, or does it realize it, as only a recovery of the poem’s struggle with and against
its original conditions of fallen social being can show? Rather than engage those
debates from the outside (from either a parti pris position or a neutral stance),
these chapters, which grew from ambivalence about and reflection on my own
critical practice, internalize the arguments on both sides. They do not “teach the
conflicts,” they enact them.29 In three cases in Part 1 (Chapters 2, 3, and 6) and
two more in Part 2 (Chapters 7 and 8), I bring on Wordsworth poems as both
practical demonstrations of these tensions and, more important, to anchor those
tensions in the literature itself. It is not just we, in other words, who anguish such
matters; the poetry itself (I would say, all the poetry we call Romantic when we use
the term qualitatively rather than merely chronologically) stages these debates in
its own concrete and situated terms (e.g., in its formal workings, arguments, recep-
tion histories, intertextuality, referential gestures, etc.). Because those terms are con-
crete and situated—because they are poetic terms—they provide a kind of traction
that is not, I believe, available through critical reflection alone. In other words, the
readings offered in these chapters are not illustrations, they are thinking through
poems.
Described from an inner standpoint, Part 1 plots a confrontation with the
contradictions organizing my own practice of historicism in the three books I had

28 The phrase entered intellectual life via Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno’s Dialectic of
Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972).
29 Gerald Graff, Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American
Education (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992).
12 Thinking through Poetry

published in the late 1980s, the last of which, Keats’s Life of Allegory,30 was decisive
for my move into a self-critical phase. My account of Keats’s relationship to the liter-
ary canon showed me something about the nature and origin of my own intellec-
tual stance, by which I mean my attachment to a particular literature of knowledge
and a particular literature of power. (I borrow De Quincey’s terms—Romantic
terms—in order to underscore my unselfconscious identification with my objects
of study.) The former—literature of knowledge—comprises the so-called “strong
critics” of the 1960s and 1970s who had shaped my sense of Romantic poetry, its
philosophical provenance, and its ideal theory-interlocutors in the present. The
leading names in this group—a genuinely visionary company—are M. H. Abrams,
Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, Northrop Frye, Geoffrey Hartman, and, in a differ-
ent but equally charismatic way, David Erdman. By literature of power, I mean the
poetry considered canonical for Romanticism in the 1970s, prior to the robust
recovery of the poetry by women (cf. the Northeastern [formerly Brown] Women
Writers Project)31 and to the full-blown interest in and access (typically, digital) to
the period’s nonliterary writers (and to noncanonical constructs of literariness). In
my reading of Keats’s style as classed and gendered in ways integral to its accom-
plishments, I glimpsed aspects of my own formation and of my investment in
otherness and alienation. My picture of Keats mobilized a subject-form that fet-
ishized those deficits and contradictions, capturing their productive energy by block-
ing the movement toward consummation and integration. With what aim? I inquired.
To engender a kind of pleasant pain in the service of aesthetic and existential self-
fashioning, a process of “stationing” (Keats’s word)32 rather than mastering and
transcending, a style that I associated with the middle class—middling station—of
Keats’s day.
My allegorizing of Keats’s style rescued his own life of allegory33 and transformed
its conditions of alienation into conditions of achievement. The hero of my alle-
gory was writing itself, or writing under the conditions of modernity, with its
power to double the negative and turn deficit into plenitude, hapless transgression
into literary originality, everyday embarrassment into a high self-consciousness.
Beyond the triumphalism, I felt the gender implications of the parallel between, on
the one hand, the less-becomes-more, substitute-becomes-supplement devices
I described as Keats’s solution to his central social dilemma and, on the other, the

30 Marjorie Levinson, Keats’s Life of Allegory: The Origins of a Style (New York: Basil Blackwell,
1988).
31 The Women Writers Project: http://www.wwp.northeastern.edu/.
32 In a comment on Paradise Lost, 7:420–3, Keats notes that Milton “is not content with simple
description, he must station.” (Quoted in Ian Jack, Keats and the Mirror of Art (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1967), 142.) In Keats’s Life of Allegory, I develop a link between the sculptural poise—a kind of
moving arrest or motion without movement—noted by all who comment on Keats’s style and his
project in social stationing.
33 Keats’s Life of Allegory had taken its title phrase from Keats’s letters, where, in the context of his
reflections on Shakespeare, he writes “a Man’s life of any worth is a continual allegory. . . . Shakespeare
led a life of Allegory; his works are the comments on it.” (Letters of John Keats: A Selection, ed. Robert
Gittings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 218.) The book’s subtitle, Origins of a Style, meant
to summon up and set as a critical model Fredric Jameson’s Sartre: The Origins of a Style (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 1961).
 Introduction 13

logic subtending the many theory discourses that gave me my own critical gram-
mar.34 With Keats, I argued, a difference culturally coded as lack (i.e., his unnatural,
as it were, prosthetic access to the cultural tradition) gets made over into a signifier
and simulacrum of presence. The gendering of this story that I traced in Keats sug-
gested the historical and cultural overdetermination of my own ideas and methods
(my own subject-position, or the one that I had made my own, to the extent that
one chooses these things), prompting a searching and discomfiting review.
I looked back to my reading of Wordsworth, grasping the identification and
idealization mixed into that effort as well. My Wordsworth, as opposed to the cari-
cature I have been joined to (viz., my alleged denunciation of his personal and
poetic integrity), was a paragon of authenticity, the exact opposite of the hypocrite
I was said to depict. I argued no “choice” for Wordsworth, no easy escapism, and
above all no bad faith (as in, erasing the compromising evidence of contemporary
life and politics). What there was in the poetry and what I argued was representa-
tion, which, by the traditions cited above is always and by definition misrepresen-
tation: “misprision,” as Harold Bloom put it.35 There was only “seeing,” within and
by means of a structured field of vision. The seeing was unique to a position, not a
person, or rather to a position embodied in a person at some time, in some place,
and having those conceptual, affective, and discursive tools.36

34 I came to grasp that connection through Eric Santner’s Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and
Film in Postwar Germany (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990). This is the burden of his open-
ing chapter (“Postwar / Post-Holocaust / Postmodern”) and it is sustained throughout the book: “ . . .
this obsession with death, loss, and impoverishment . . . is part of a larger, more properly postmodern
project that is equally concerned with the resources of what one might call a playful nomadism. That
is, these discourses of bereavement see in the harrowing labor of mourning one’s various narcissisms
and nostalgias a source of empowerment, play, and even jouissance” (p. 11; and see pp. 16, 18, 19, 62).
Also, p. 168, note 39: part of a long textual note on de Man’s juvenilia, where Santner offers this sum-
mary of Jonathan Culler’s commentary, viz., “that deconstruction, as a form of analysis dedicated to
the disarticulation of what one had taken to be natural and inevitable, is that mode of Ideologiekritik
which may best undo the narcissisms and nostalgias—and the totalitarian tendencies that ostensibly
flow from them—informing the Western tradition.”
35 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1997).
36 My understanding of blindness and insight as dialectically codependent came from Althusser’s
cross-grained reading of Marx in For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Allen Lane, 1969), (with
Étienne Balibar) Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster (London: NLB, 1970), and Lenin and Philosophy
and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971). I flagged that, but
also expected readers to recognize the general shape of the epistemic claims, for Althusser was a theor-
ist of our time, as defining as Derrida. A problematic is a field of vision, without which seeing/know-
ing cannot happen. By the same token, for those who see through that problematic—as in, by means
of it—its outlines and workings are imperceptible. It is, simply, your way of seeing, your constitutive
categories, invisible if you are inside them (which is to say, if they are inside you). This kind of under-
standing entered American literary criticism and took on a more technical, language-specific cast,
through Paul de Man’s Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (NY:
Oxford University Press, 1971).
Because this is an important point in itself (to wit, Felski’s recent account of “crrritique”) and key
to the developing arc of this book, I take the risk of flogging a dead horse. The essay of mine that drew
(and still draws) the most fire is “Insight and Oversight: Reading ‘Tintern Abbey,’ ” from Wordsworth’s
Great Period Poems: Four Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 14–57. The bulk of
that essay went into parsing the poem’s problematic, reading it as consisting of folkways histories of
the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII, of Cartesian excluded middles, of anxieties
about poetry and patronage in an age of free market print capitalism, and many other things. That was
14 Thinking through Poetry

Not only was my reading of Wordsworth not “damaging,” it was profoundly

idealizing and humanizing (in that Hegelian-Romantic mode so gorgeously tracked
through Abrams’ Natural Supernaturalism), delivering a figure of the capable poem,
heroically conflicted, suffering the creative contradictions of its age and thereby
dying into life.37 Wordsworth, on my reading, took on the look of a new Prometheus,
to whom I repeated his own early words, that they might be integrated into the
amassing harmony. Similarly, from this belated vantage, I saw how my study of the
Romantic fragment as a historically distinctive (and historically expressive) poetic
form not only redeemed the brokenness of those texts by a practice of recuperative
reading, but credited them with a unity, coherence, closure, and achievement not
just matching but surpassing the achievement of the well-wrought urn.38 Less was
indeed more. Brushing against the grain ended up burnishing the glamor.

what the poem was about, I said; that was what shaped its sense of the still, sad music of humanity;
that is what mediated its philosophic themes. “Mediation” was a key concept in the traditions of
Hegelian Marxism and in the general discourse of materialist scholarship at the time. The doubleness
of the term was not just understood but mobilized for critical purposes. Like the verb “to cleave,”
“mediate” means both to divide and to connect. It means a “belonging-together-in-opposition,” a
phrase coined by T. J. Clark (“Clement Greenberg’s Theory of Art,” Critical Inquiry 9 (1982) 139–56),
and one that I borrowed at the time. The picture of the mind did not abolish the picture of the place;
to the contrary, each brought the other into being. The pictures describe a dynamic relationship, not
two separate items, exactly comparable to the way in which, as I say above, the Freudian unconscious
is not a deep truth trumping the false consciousness of consciousness itself, but a process through
which different kinds of knowledge are related to each other. Comparable also to Althusser’s notion of
ideology as the way that individuals live their relation to the Real, a Real that becomes such only in
that relationship, rather than standing outside of and prior to it. The subject of my reading was that
relationship, that process of mediation—not the vagrants and the war, and not Wordsworth’s bad faith.
I will take this opportunity to speak even more clearly now than I did then, this time for a new
generation of readers and to respond to a fairly recent critique. It does not matter if the river muck on
the Wye commonly noted in the late 1790s came more from algae than from industry, or if the
vagrants or the smoke happened to be in evidence on the day or at the hour that Wordsworth did his
looking, any more than it matters for a reading of the “Eton College Ode” that fog might have
obscured Gray’s view of Windsor Castle; or, for that matter, whether he wrote en plein air or not. Here
is what matters: (a) what contemporary reports tell us about what could have been known or seen at
that time, at that place, by persons so positioned. Because evidence of that kind is rarely uniform and
never exhaustive, what also matters is (b) what we can know from historical and critical reconstruc-
tion, which, to the extent that it seeks to understand its materials, will show how inconsistent reports
(such as oozy weeds vs. pollution from the coal furnaces along the Wye) can both be objective. Finally
(and, I would say, first as well), what matters for the reconstruction of a problematic, or a field of see-
ing, is (c) what an artwork shows at a given moment in its reception history. I say “shows” rather than
“tells,” “argues,” or “narrates” so as to underscore the fact that the expressive medium in question is the
artwork’s form: its body-language, as distinct from its discursive dimensions. Does our reading of the
form–content relationship make more of the poem make sense (i.e., does it add to the set of things
that signify)? And does it make more sense of the poem, as in, a sense more precise, more vivid, more
complex, more moving, more generative, more memorable, more intelligent, more liberating, etc.?
Those three criteria are my test for historical validity in interpretation, not comparing one empirical
record with another to see whose is bigger. See Charles J. Rzepka, “Pictures of the Mind: Iron and
Charcoal, ‘Ouzy’ Tides and ‘Vagrant Dwellers’ at Tintern, 1798,” Studies in Romanticism 42 (2003),
155–85.
37 The phrase, “damaging reading” is from Morris Dickstein’s “Damaged Literacy: The Decay of
Reading,” Profession (1993), 34–40.
38 Marjorie Levinson, The Romantic Fragment Poem: A Critique of a Form (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 1986).
 Introduction 15

What I learned in the aftermath of the Keats book was the error, which was also
the truth of my readings (borrowing from Adorno, its own historical “commit-
ment”): namely, that its concept of nature and the human, and of art and critique,
came right out of the deepest arguments—I mean the formal arguments—of the
poems themselves.39 Literature against and thereby for itself: writing agonistes,
tempered in the crucible of its contradictions, strengthened by tactically deploying
its weaknesses, perfected by giving itself over to the humanizing labor of reading.
What was all this if not a lesson in the cunning of history, and topping that, the
cunning of art, testifying to the human spirit, fashioning itself through and against
its conditions of social and material being, at once negating and actualizing its real-
ity principle and, in that complexity, achieving autonomy? This was the condition
and the limit of my philosophy: this noble rider and the sound of words, this pres-
sure of imagination rising up against and precisely calibrated to the pressure of its
peculiar reality.40 In a fine new account of that moment, Simon Swift notes the
“emphatic posture” that “once shaped a whole generation of readings of Romantic
poems . . . highlight[ing] that generation’s claims for the activism of the critical act,
its Orphean rescue of blocked or occluded voices.” (He notes critically as well the
“vocabulary of restraint” circulating through today’s new reading, in this way mak-
ing room for his own focus on an “indefinitely suspended horizontality” in both
Wordsworth’s poetry and in the critic’s own posture.)41
Early in the Wordsworth book, I quoted a famous passage from Arnold’s essay
on Wordsworth: “Wordsworth’s poetry . . . is inevitable, as inevitable as Nature her-
self. It might seem that Nature not only gave him the matter for his poem, but
wrote his poem for him. He has no style.”42 I used the excerpt to show the tran-
scendentalizing thrust of the long reception history and to challenge the seeming
transparency (e.g., universality, disinterest, ahistoricity) of Wordsworth’s represen-
tation of nature and, in consequence, of the terms of his dialectic, “the mind of
man and Nature.” The goal was to reanimate a corpus grown hugely abstract by
showing the richly worked, complexly motivated, historically specific, and affectively
charged character of its stylelessness.
Five years later, Arnold’s phrase—“as inevitable as Nature herself ”—came back
upon me, echoing with a strange new force. It amplified effects in Wordsworth’s poetry
that I had certainly registered in the 1980s but always as instrumental to the exist-
ential and epistemic adventures of the poet-narrator figure: the “becoming-sovereign

39 Theodor Adorno, “Commitment,” New Left Review 1st series, 87–8 (Sept.–Dec. 1974), 75–89;
and “On Lyric Poetry and Society,” Notes to Literature, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1991), 1: 37–54. See Chapter 6, “What is New Formalism?,” 89, 94–5,
96–7. There is a double irony worth noting here: first, that my critique of my own new historicist criti-
cism—an immanent critique of the commitments informing my working ideas and methods—goes
deeper than the many attacks on it; and second, that surpassing historicism is the dialectically royal
road to its preservation.
40 These phrases are from Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel (New York: Vintage Books, 1951,
chapters 1 and 2.
41 Simon Swift, “Wordsworth and the Poetry of Posture,” English Literary History (forthcoming).
42 Levinson, Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems, 4.
16 Thinking through Poetry

subject” figure.43 This new alertness on my part was not, at this time, a response
I connected with either general cultural sensitivity to or academic interest in envir-
onmental degradation and finitude. Instead, I traced it to the postclassical science
research path I had already begun venturing on, where history got plotted on
entirely different scales and timeframes from the order of politics, events, and cul-
tural determinants and where the relation between form and history seemed both
suppler and more concretely realized than in the Hegelian/Marxian models that
had been key to my intellectual formation. (Prigogine and Stengers’s path-breaking
work on self-directing chemical reactions was my introduction to this thought-
style.)44 Arnold’s phrase threw into relief not the big bow-wow poems (the “great”
period-poems that I had treated in my book of that title), but the slighter, stranger,
off-center poems from the same “great period.” It trained the spotlight not on the
poet figure in these lyrical ballads but on the stony things in his way.45 Arnold’s
coupling of “inevitable” with “nature” opened onto longer durées than those that
had measured my sense of history, and it highlighted other human “natures” than
those I had studied: more precisely, other ways of being human—not against or
through nature, and not even in nature but rather, somehow (in ways I could not
conceptualize) of nature.
I assimilated Arnold’s “inevitability” as indifference—a less fatalistic, less easily
theologized, more neutral term, one that could accommodate history, albeit on a
scale that seemed qualitatively to change the very idea of history.46 The phrase,

43 At the time, I had no framework for articulating states of quiet being—in Wordsworth’s own
idealizing phrase, “wise passiveness”—without, like him, transvaluing that state of quiet being, which
he explores from earliest days. Cf. “The Borderers”: “Action is transitory—a step, a blow, | The motion of
a muscle—this way or that— | ’Tis done, and in the after-vacancy | We wonder at ourselves like men
betrayed: | Suffering is permanent, obscure and dark, | And shares the nature of infinity.” The Poetical
Works of William Wordsworth: Poems Written in Youth; Poems Referring to the Period of Childhood, ed. E.
de Selincourt (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940), 188, ll. 1539–44.
44 Ilya Prigogine and Isabel Stengers, Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature
(New York: Bantam Books, 1984). In a self-directing chemical reaction, “there is no longer any univer-
sally valid law from which the overall behavior of the system can be deduced. Each system is a separate
case; each set of chemical reactions must be investigated and may well produce a qualitatively different
behavior” (pp. 144–5). Reactions of this kind occur in systems that are thermodynamically open to
the environment and where non-equilibrium can become a source of order: Erich Jantsch, The Self-
Organizing Universe: Scientific and Human Implications of the Emerging Paradigm of Evolution (Oxford:
Pergamon, 1980), 28. The authors propose that “processes associated with randomness, openness lead
to higher levels of organization” and that “irreversible time” (that is, historicity in the working of
physical law) is not a mere aberration but a characteristic of much of the universe (p. xxi).
45 While reviewing the copyedited MS of Thinking through Poetry, I attended the 2018 MLA
Convention panel titled “Weak Environmentalism.” Three of the talks (by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Paul
D’Amour, and Susan Wolfson) hitched their reflections (on a slow and sideways form of activism) to
the figure of stone. All were superb, but I single out Wolfson’s “Stories in Stones” for its vantage on
Wordsworth and its sensitive reading. Her gloss of the “mounting stone” in “The Old Cumberland
Beggar” was one of several fine and moving illuminations of Wordsworth’s poetry.
46 Whereas events and conditions set the scale for my earlier sense of history, the time scale keying
my later interest chimes with the temporality of Wordsworth’s Essays upon Epitaphs, 1: “It is a connec-
tion found through the subtle progress by which, in the natural and moral world, qualities pass insen-
sibly into their contraries, and things revolve upon each other. As, in sailing upon the orb of this Planet,
a voyage towards the regions where the sun sets, conducts gradually to the quarter where we have been
accustomed to behold it come forth at its rising.” W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington, eds., The Prose
Works of William Wordsworth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), 2: 53.
Exploring the Variety of Random
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disguise their interest, and so everybody set to and helped
to spread the feast.

A place was fixed upon under some shady trees, where

in front they had a beautiful view of the sea far beneath
them. The ground sloped away from them gradually for
about fifty yards, and then came the edge of Orston Cliff,
and beyond that an expanse of sea and sky, whose blue to-
day rivalled each other.

"You are very grave, Nellie," said Maude.

"Only it is so beautiful," answered Nellie, taking a deep

breath, and turning to the baskets once more.

"Here is Maude's bread," said George, unwrapping a

snowy cloth, and displaying a number of tempting rolls.
"And here is another package with it."

"What's this?" said Mary, feeling it with her fat little

fingers. "It feels very knobby."

"Let it alone, Mary," said Maude. "It is not to be opened

till we have said grace."

Mary put it down, and found that her mamma had

turned out a blancmange and some jelly, and was now
unrolling something else. What could it be?

"Only a ham," said Mary, disappointed, and was hissed

at by her young brothers, who did not at all disdain ham.

"That is all my contribution," said Mrs. Elliot, as she

placed the strawberries at the far end of the tablecloth.

"Not so bad," said Wilmot. "I wish I could get this

country fare in London, mother."
 "I wish you could, dear."

"Here are Hope's things," said Maude. "Now, Miss Hope,

let us see what you can do."

"How awfully jealous Maude is!" said George.

"Not at all," answered Maude; "but she was perfection

before she went, and what she must be now—"

"Well," said Hope calmly, "here are a couple of

chickens."

"You couldn't have made them," said Mary, nodding.

"No, I didn't," said Hope. "And here is a meat-pie; and

here—"

"Stop," said Maude; "did you make the meat-pie?"

"I did," answered Hope.

"Then let us 'Hope' it will be good," said George. "What

else?"

"Here are some tartlets, and some lemonade."

"Did you make that?"

"I did," answered Hope again.

"Well done!" exclaimed Wilmot. "Now let us begin."

"But here's another basket," said Nellie.

There was a general rush, but Hope pushed them away,

and told them dryly that that was for tea; whereupon there
was a rush back again, and they all settled down to enjoy
their dinner.

"Now everybody," said Maude, "here is a mysterious

package; and what will you give me for its contents?"

She took up as she spoke the neatly-folded cloth which

had aroused curiosity before, and began to undo it.

Inside appeared a number of queer-shaped looking

dainty rolls, and Maude held up the top one, saying, "Here
is my first pretty thing; whom can it be for?"

"It is an M," said little Mary. "Perhaps it is for me."

"No, it does not happen to be," said Maude, smiling;

"nor for me either; it is for mamma."

"Oh, to be sure!" said Mary.

"Here is a W."

"That is Wilmot," exclaimed Mary.

"And here an H for Hope, and an N for Nellie, and so on,

and so on," passing them all round with rapid fingers; and
then she laughingly told them, they must put some suitable
adjectives to each letter before it was eaten, applicable to
the person for whom it was made.

This set them off with fine jokes, and Wilmot was
pronounced "wise" and "witty" and "wilful" in a breath. But
they found some of the names more difficult to match;
however, it served to amuse them, and dinner was a very
cheerful affair.
 "Now what shall we do next?" asked Wilmot, when
dinner was over, stretching himself on his back under a
tree, and putting his hat over his eyes.

"It is not difficult to guess what you intend to do," said

Hope, laughing.

"I'm ready for anything," he answered; "but you would

not let me help with the plates for fear of breaking them,
and so I may as well wait in comfort."

"I shall rest here," said Mrs. Elliot, "and very likely go
over and peep at the pony at the cottage, and have a talk
with the woman who lives there all alone."

"We thought of going down to the shore; it is so lovely

there, mamma," said Hope.

"Very well; but take care of the little ones."

"Oh, yes, we'll do that! But shall you not be dull?"

"Oh dear, no. I have brought my knitting, and there is a

book in the pony carriage if I want it."

So they wished her good-bye, and left her. She watched

their retreating forms down the green slope till they were
lost in a turn of the road, and then her mind wandered over
the events of the morning, over Nellie's conversation, and
over the memories of her past life.

What had her life done for her? It had been one long
struggle with a large family, and small means—a struggle
which had been unblessed by the comforting assurance of a
Father's providing care. She had worked and thought and
wearied for her husband and children because she must;
because life, with its treadmill round of duties, had forced
her. She had not known that there was sustaining strength
to bear her on her way; nor had she the comfort of the
highest motive for doing her labour cheerfully, even
because it was meted out to her as her portion of her
Father's will.

Her burdens would have been the same perhaps; but

the heart that was now such a heavy weight, would have
been light.

Alas! She knew not the way. She shut her eyes to the
blessing that was so close to her, and went along in
darkness, dragging weary feet.

While Mrs. Elliot was thinking so sorrowfully, the young

people were hurrying gaily down to the shore, full of life and
merriment.

They soon reached the edge of the waves, and at first

were satisfied to sit down and watch the rolling breakers.
Then the girls sang, "What are the wild waves saying?"
which Nellie said "was never old, and sung by the sea was
always thrilling."

"Can't you sing us something?" asked little Mary,

looking up in her face.

"I did not know you could sing," said Hope, bluntly.

"I do at home," said Nellie. "We sing a great deal."

"Well, sing something now," said George; "I am tired of

the girls' old songs."

"Songs must get old; but relations ought never to get

tired of them," said Nellie, smiling.
 "Well, sing away, Miss Arundel," he answered.

Nellie paused. What should she sing to this assembly?

Here was an opportunity which she might not have again.
How she wished she could think that all of them knew what
it was to be safe! So she began in rather a tremulous tone—

"Late! late! so late! and dark the night,

and chill!
Late! late! so late! but we can enter
still!
Too late! too late! ye cannot enter
now!"

Before many words were sung, Nellie grew brave. She

did not know if anyone there would sympathize with her,
unless it were Wilmot, who she fancied thought differently
from them all; but at any rate her Lord and Master was with
her, and was she not trying to carry a message from Him?

There was deep silence among the little party when she
ceased. The painfully solemn words, the pathos of her
voice, the murmur of the sea, blended together to make an
impression on the thoughtless young hearts.

Wilmot drew Mary's little hand within his own, and rose
to proceed on their walk, and the rest followed in silence.

"It is not always 'too late,' Wilmot, is it?" asked she.

"No, my pet; never while life lasts."

 "Because I shouldn't like to be left out. I often think
about it, and I don't believe He will shut me out."

"Not if you have once been in, darling."

"But I'm not in heaven now, Wilmot, so how can I be

in?"

"I mean if once you love Christ, and ask Him to be your
Saviour. Then you are safe in Him."

"Well I often have; and I do love Him, Willie."

Wilmot pressed her hand.

"Did you ever hear about the ark, Mary?"

"Noah's ark?"

"Yes. Do you not remember how God told them to go

into the ark to be safe?"

"Yes; and they went in."

"Just so; they went in. Did they know whether they
were inside or not?"

"Of course they did," said Mary, smiling.

"And did they feel afraid of the water which was rising
so rapidly round them on every side?"

"No; they knew it could not touch them in the ark."

"No more can anything hurt you, darling, if You have

come to Jesus. The Bible says, 'No man shall pluck them
out of My hand.'"
 "Yes; that's as if you held something very fast, high
over my head, and someone was trying to snatch it away
from you."

"Yes; someone not as tall or strong as I."

"I see," said Mary; "and so, just the same, if I'm safe in
the arms of Jesus, I can't be shut out, because if He's there,
I must be too."

She smiled happily, and they turned round to look for

the others.

They were close behind, and were eagerly collecting

shells, which were to be found very perfect on this part of
the coast.

Mary joined in the search, while Wilmot watched them

and walked along humming a song to himself, his voice
blending with the song of the waves, and then falling below
it, and then rising above it, but always in tune.

They were in a comparatively small bay; on either

extreme to the right and left a headland jutted out into the
sea, with rocks beneath them which the winter's storms had
detached from the cliff above. Here the breakers played
their prettiest gambols. Just now they were surrounding the
rock which appeared furthest out to sea, and were dashing
up its side with fountains of white spray.

"The tide is coming in," said Hope; "but we shall have

plenty of time for the caves. Come along, Nellie; you will be
so delighted with them."

No one could leave the edge of the sea, however, till

they actually came in front of the spot they were seeking.
Then they all turned landwards, and soon had traversed the
strip of even clear sand which brought them up under the
rocks.

The Elliots had been here twice before, and had very
little difficulty in finding the opening to the caves. They all
halted then, and several produced small wax candles, which
they proceeded to light.

Little Mary was delighted, and begged to hold one; and

George gave his up to her good-humouredly, saying, "Mind
you don't singe your curls, Polly."

Wilmot led the way, and the rest followed. There was no
danger in the caves, as the sea washed in to the furthest
point of them every day, and they had nothing worse to
walk on than a bed of exquisite sand.

They wandered about, admiring the roof and laughing

at the grotesque shapes which their shadows made upon it
and the rocky sides; and then George proposed to dance a
hornpipe, and they should see how that looked. They were
very merry over this, but as the candles began to burn
rather low, they all got up to proceed homewards once
more. Suddenly a cry from the younger ones in front, who
were climbing along the ledges of the rock, startled them,
and Wilmot and Hope hurried forward, quickly followed by
the rest.

On the ground sat Alice, who was next in age to

George, holding her foot, and in the half-light looking
ghastly pale.

"What is it?" asked Hope, kneeling down by her, and

rapidly beginning to unlace her boot.

"Oh, don't!" she shrieked. "I cannot bear it. Oh, what
have I done?"
 "It is a sprain, I expect," said Hope; "but do, Alice dear,
let me get off your boot."

Alice let go her clinging fingers, and once more Hope

tried to undo the fastenings with gentle touch.

"Now I must draw it off, dear; but we will soon bathe it

with sea-water, and then it will be better."

As she spoke she tenderly, but firmly, drew off the boot.
"There," she said reassuringly, at the cry of agony which
escaped the child, "now it will be easier."

When, however, she looked up in her sister's face, she

found she had fainted.

The candles had by this time gone out, and though they
could not see either the sky or sea, they were near enough
to the mouth of the cave to distinguish all around them.

"Shall I run and get some water?" asked George.

"She could not drink that," said Hope, "of course; but
what a pity we did not bring any with us."

They laid Alice down, and Nellie examined the wounded

foot.

"How did she do it?" Hope asked.

"We none of us know exactly; but she slipped off that

ledge."

"She will be better soon," said Nellie; "but see how her
foot is swelling up! Don't you think we might pour some
sea-water over it?"

"We haven't a thing to fetch it in. I forgot," said George.

 "Here is my hat," answered Wilmot; "you could get a
good lot in that."

George and one of the others ran out for it, and in a few
minutes returned with it full.

"My!" he exclaimed. "Isn't the sea come up since we

came in here!"

"We must be quick," said Hope, calmly proceeding to

pour the contents over Alice's foot.

The cold water dashing on the painful, heated ancle,

brought Alice back to consciousness. Hope asked her if she
could rise.

She struggled to a sitting posture, looking frightened

and woebegone.

"Come, we must go; we have been a long time, and

George says the tide is rising."

Wilmot started violently, and putting his hand under his

sister's arm, raised her at once, then calling to Hope to
help, they proceeded to the outer air. When the view of the
sea burst upon them, they found by its nearness how long
they had been detained.

"Hope," exclaimed he in a whisper of intense anxiety,

"shall we be able to get round the corner of those rocks?"

Hope looked. The sea was dashing among the stones

directly at the base of the cliff, but some of them were still
visible, and stood up black and hopeful against the spray.

"Oh, Wilmot!" she exclaimed. "Call to them; we must

hasten forward. How can we reach it?"
 Wilmot called in a tone which brought the whole party
up to them in a moment.

"What is it?" said Maude, looking in their anxious faces.

He pointed with his disengaged hand, while he hurried

forward, supporting poor Alice, who was doing her best to
help herself, but could not put her foot to the ground.

"Never!" exclaimed Maude, with blanching cheeks.

The nearer they came to the projecting cliff, the quicker

the ever-advancing sea seemed to come in upon them.

"What shall we do?" said Hope, when she saw that the
black points were fast disappearing.

Wilmot and she were now so breathless that they were

forced to give up their heavy burden to George and Maude.

"Oh, hurry on," said Maude, weeping, "and see what

can be done, and whether we can pass."

Wilmot looked round. "Come, Mary; come, Miss

Arundel; we will all keep together."

He did not slacken his speed for a moment, and Mary,

who was holding Nellie's hand, caught his, and so they
hurried on.

Alas! When they reached the cliff, the water was

washing up at their feet, and far in front of them to their
left, was the point, with the breakers rolling playfully in and
out among the few stones that were still uncovered.

As the party came to a stop, and looked in each other's

terror-stricken faces, they realized the full extent of their
danger.

Behind them the cliff rose gaunt and tall; in front the
sea crept nearer and nearer, slowly but surely advancing
upon them.

Their eyes scanned the horizon, not a boat or sail within

sight, all smiling and sunny; the ocean, holding so many
secrets in its bosom, without a change on its calm face.

"Surely we can pass by wading," said Hope, gathering

her clothes together and stepping into the shallow water.

The others were following, but she and Wilmot bade

them wait one moment; for they found that the point was
still far ahead, and the water was already nearly to their
waists. It got deeper and deeper, and Hope put out her
hand to her brother as she felt her feet slipping under her.

"It is useless," said Wilmot hoarsely; "come back."

He guided her till she was within her depth again, and
then he looked towards the little party on the shore. They
had already retreated some feet from where he had parted
from them, and now stood gazing at them with hopeless
faces.

"I must swim round and get a boat; it is not very, very
far to the village there. I may be back in time, Hope."

"And if not?" she said; but she needed no answer.

"Pray," he said. "Go back and tell them all that 'Christ is
able to save to the uttermost.'"

"Oh, Wilmot, Wilmot! What will mamma say?" she

exclaimed, as he wrenched off his wet coat and threw it to
her, and, dropping his boots, waded into deeper water.

"My love to them all," he said, "and to Miss Arundel,

and tell them not to fear, but that I will do my best."

In a moment there was nothing to be seen but his dark

head. But soon they saw him clambering over the rocks at
the corner of the cliff.

"Deep water!" he shouted, and waved his hand. And as

he plunged in again on the other side, he felt as if he had
left behind him something which he held very dear.

CHAPTER VII.
WHERE?
 MRS. ELLIOT sat for some time after her little party had
left her, thinking of many things, and when she began to
feel lonely she made her way down to the cottage, which
was about half-way to the shore.

The woman was busy preparing their tea, which had

been ordered when they left the pony there in the morning,
and Mrs. Elliot therefore sat down on the bench outside the
door and opened the book she had brought.

When she looked up, after an hour or more, she felt

astonished that the young people had not returned.

She went into the old-fashioned kitchen, and found the

woman setting the cream and butter upon the table.

"They are late, Mrs. Mansbridge," said Mrs. Elliot; "but

they will soon be here, I expect. What a pleasant room this
is."

"Yes, ma'am; but since my man left me, it has not

seemed the same."

"I can well believe that," answered Mrs. Elliot. "Is it long
since you lost him?"

"Six months," answered the woman; "and he left me

with a day-old baby."

"Oh, how very sad for you."

"One thing that comforts me is, he kissed it before he

went. He held it in his arms; he had so longed for it; and
then he said, as he gave it back to me, 'I don't know if I
shall ever see thee again, my love; but tell the little man
that his father loved him and blessed him.'"
 "How was it?" asked Mrs. Elliot, thinking of the long
weary illness of her own husband.

"He never came back alive, ma'am. A storm came on,

and one of the spars of his boat broke, and in half-an-hour,
he was—'at home,' ma'am."

"At home?" asked Mrs. Elliot. "Ah, yes, I know what you
mean."

"And though this is not like home without him," said the
woman, "yet I can wait; my Father has made me willing,
ma'am."

Just then a sailor boy was seen hurrying up the hill. He

beckoned to Mrs. Mansbridge through the lattice window,
and she went out.

When she re-entered her face was very pale, and she
came up gently to Mrs. Elliot.

"There has been an accident, ma'am," she said softly;

"but a boat has been gone some time with the young
gentleman."

"What has happened?" said Mrs. Elliot, starting towards

the door.

"They were overtaken by the tide at the Caves. But take

courage, dear lady; there's One above who rules all things."

"Is there any hope? Tell me truly," she breathed.

The woman took her hand. "There is some hope; but

the tide flows in very quickly in that little bay, and rises very
high too. Still—he has been gone some time, with a boat
and two sailors."
 Mrs. Elliot mechanically walked out of the cottage, and
turned towards the shore. Mrs. Mansbridge looked after her
with pitying eyes; and while she put on a large fire, and set
blankets to warm, she murmured half aloud:

"O Lord, it's easy to trust Thee in fair weather; but

when the storm comes—And yet it is in the storm that Thou
art most near; and Thou canst say, 'Peace, be still.'"

* * * * * *

When Wilmot once more stood on the clear sand at the

other side of the projecting cliff, so near to them all and yet
divided by such a gulf, he rushed at the utmost speed to
which he could force his limbs, towards the few fishermen's
cottages which he could descry about a mile along the
shore.

Drawn up above high water mark were two or three

boats, and when he could make these out he took courage.

How weary the time seemed. He almost felt as if he

were going backwards instead of forwards. At last the boats
were reached; but no men were to be seen.

He shouted with all his voice, and ran up towards the

cottages. Two sailors, who were smoking at their garden-
gates, answered to his call, and came running down to him.

"A boat—quick—" was all he could gasp; and

understanding in their precarious trade that there was
danger, they quickly unfastened one, and pushed her down
into the water.

Wilmot jumped in after them, and they set off. Now

while the oars splashed evenly and strongly, he had plenty
of time to think, and plenty of time to explain. But of
explanation, he only said half-a-dozen words, and sat back
at first exhausted.

His soaking, shoeless, and coatless condition, and the

signs of extreme exertion which his manner indicated,
showed the men, without much telling, that he considered
there was urgent need of speed. Besides they knew of the
treacherous tide.

"I say, master," said the man, handing him over a rough
coat, "you put that on, or you'll have an illness, as sure as
sure."

Wilmot roused himself, and asked if they had another

pair of oars; and on being told there was, he pulled them
out, and set himself to help forward the little craft; so
nearer and nearer came the jutting cliff, and lower and
lower sank the sun.

The men strained every nerve to push on; and Wilmot,

while he aided them, could not help glancing over his
shoulder every now and then to see how near they were
getting.

At last they reached the cliff, and were under the

projecting rocks, and were actually turning the corner.
There lay the little bay before them, with the setting sun
lighting up every crevice of the steep rocks, and sparkling
on the water as it rolled inwards.

But as the boat came well round the point, and Wilmot
could scan the length of the cliffs, there was no row of faces
to welcome him; nothing on which his eye could rest but a
piece of floating muslin; for the waves washed up deep and
sullen against the rocks.
 CHAPTER VIII.
FLOATING OUT TO SEA.

AS Hope watched her brother plunge into the sea on the

other side of the rocks, she felt forsaken indeed.

She turned landwards, and dragged her heavy soaking

clothes after her through the surf, till she stood once more
beside the frightened group.

"Wilmot sent you all a message," she said sadly; "and

before we get more anxious I will give it to you. I wish we
all understood more about it."

"Take of some of your wet things, dear Hope," said

Nellie, who had been already wringing her dress. "Can we
not each contribute some dry garment; we should not miss
it, and it is dreadful for you to wait two or three hours in
this state."

"I am not the least cold," said Hope; "and I will walk
about. No, dear, I can't change, it would be such a fuss; and
I am so anxious."
 Nellie did not press her further, and Hope drew them
back against the cliffs.

"This is Wilmot's message: He told us to pray; and he

said, 'Tell them Christ is able to save to the uttermost.'"

The young faces all turned towards her, and Hope felt
bitterly that she knew not how to comfort them.

"Shall we pray?" she asked.

They knelt down on the sand, and Hope buried her face
in her hands; but there was silence, interrupted only by
Maude's and the little ones' sobs.

At last a gentle voice broke the stillness.

"Heavenly Father, Thou who rulest the raging of the sea,

who stillest the waves when they arise, look down upon us
now, and send peace into our troubled hearts. May we be
delivered, if it is Thy holy will; and if not, if these waves are
to come nigh to us, and end our earthly life, oh! For Jesus
Christ's sake, may each one of us here be willing from our
hearts to accept Thy salvation; and may the waves but
introduce us into Thy eternal glory. We ask Thee, in the
name of Jesus our Lord, to hear us, and bless us, and be
very near to us. Amen."

When they rose from their knees, Mary slipped her little
hand into Nellie's, and Hope gave her a warm kiss. "Thank
you, dear," she whispered.

"Now," said Nellie cheerfully, "we must all take courage.

Mr. Elliot cannot be here for a long time, and perhaps the
water will reach us before he comes. But let us remember
that nothing can hurt us without our Father's permission,
and that even if we are surrounded by water, He can yet
deliver us. But, all of you, it is a solemn time, and unless
you know Jesus is your Saviour, I should advise you all to
seek Him;

"'He can save to the uttermost them that come

unto God by Him.'"

The little party were very silent. The solemnity of a

possible grave, so near, so dreadful, was enough to awe
them, and beyond a passing question or conjecture hardly a
word was spoken.

The water flowed in rapidly; the ground was very level,

and though the sea had seemed at first an immense
distance off, they were astonished to find that it crept
nearer and nearer in such a way as to leave but little hope
that Wilmot could get back to them in time.

In vain their eyes looked upwards to see if there were

any ledges on which they might climb. The few there were,
were far above their reach. One small place, however, was
discovered, and on this they stood little Mary.

"She is mamma's only comfort," said Maude; and then

she burst into tears, and hid her face against Mary's dress.

A steamer now came in sight round the point, but very

far away. They waved their handkerchiefs wildly, feeling it
was of no use, and strained their eyes for any response.

None seemed to come; for the steamer passed

gradually before them till the other point hid her from view,
and then Maude suddenly exclaimed, with a shriek, which
shook the nerves of the whole party:
 "The water has reached us! Oh, what shall we do? What
shall we do?"

"We must pray," said Nellie, looking up towards the blue

sky, "each one for ourselves."

It was an awful moment, that first wetting of their feet;

worse than even when the water was up to their knees.

How intently they gazed at the corner of the rocks

round which Wilmot must come!

"Halloa!" called a voice from the other side of them, and

there, to their right, was a young man seated in a canoe.

"I say!" he called. "Are you in danger, or only doing it

for fun?"

His eyes scanned the cliffs; not an opening of any sort;

he looked in their faces, and knew it was no fun, even
before they had time to answer:

"Oh, can you save us, or do anything for us?"

"If I come near," he answered steadily, "you will not all

rush in and swamp the canoe?"

"No," shouted Hope, "not one of us will move."

"No, we promise," answered all.

"There is no time to be lost," said the young fellow; "but

I can only take one of you at once, except the little ones.
Which is it to be? Be quick, and come out beyond this first
wave."

Fortunately it was tolerably calm, and in this little bay

there was only a swell that day.
 Hope and Nellie looked at each other, and then at Mary.

"The youngest first," said Nellie.

They sprang forward, and lifted her down, and waded in

with her to the canoe, taking also the next little boy with
them.

The young man directed them to place the children as

near to him as possible—in front of him and behind him—
and telling them to hold on tight, in a moment he was
paddling off as fast as he dared.

Hope and Nellie retreated to the cliff, and told Alice to

be ready; for it was tacitly understood that the next in age
was to go first.

"Why did he turn that way?" said George. "It is nearer

to the village to the left."

They could not tell; and the minutes seemed hours till
the canoe could come round to them again.

When he was seen returning, a shout of joy broke from

them, for they had not expected him so soon.

"There is a large rock just round there," he said, as he

came near, and they placed poor Alice beside him.

He was off again in a moment, and still the water kept

on steadily rising. It was now to their middles.

"He cannot rescue us all," said George bravely; "you

girls must go first."

"We will keep to ages, George," said Nellie firmly, "at

least as far as I am concerned, till it comes to my turn, and
then I should like Hope to go first. Let us have no confusion
or dispute."

"Why should I go first?" asked Hope, looking imploringly

at her.

"Because I am sure of going 'there,'" said Nellie; "and

oh, Hope, I don't mind!"

As they stood now by the rocks, the swell rippled

against them, and almost took them off their feet. They
held each others' hands; but it began to be apparent that all
could not be saved.

"Now, George," said Hope, when the canoe was seen

returning; "Nellie is quite right; you go at once."

"I say!" called the young man, "I'm afraid I dare not
take you tall ones on my boat! I had great work with the
last when we got into the waves at the corner, and an upset
would be very serious. But if you could take hold of the
sternpost, it would keep you up perfectly, and it is not far."

He looked anxiously in their faces, fearing this would be

considered sad news.

"I can swim a little," said George; "I think I might hold
on to your rope, and then Maude could hold on to the stern.
You would be back quicker for the others by taking two."

"All right," answered he, throwing his painter to him,

and coming close to Maude, showed her where to hold;
"just let yourself float easily," he added, "but hold firmly;
don't be frightened."

"Keep up a brave heart," he said to the two who were

left behind; "I will come as soon as ever I can."
 "We are sure of that," said Nellie gratefully; "thank you
if we never—"

"I say!" he shouted back, "can you two float?"

"Yes," shouted Hope in return.

"Then float, and don't lose your presence of mind; you

will be saved, I hope!"

"I am off my feet," said Nellie hurriedly, holding tighter

to Hope's arm.

"Have you courage to try to float?" said Hope; "for I too

shall be out of my depth soon."

"Good-bye, then, dear Hope," said Nellie, giving her a

kiss. "Look to Jesus; He knows and cares."

She spread her arms and fell backwards, committing

herself not only to the deep, but to His care who she knew
was "a very present help in time of trouble."

At first her agony was lest her courage should not hold
out. Just floating for a few moments with a sandy shore two
or three feet beneath was a very different feeling from
floating on the wide ocean, drifting, it might be, out to sea.

But Nellie's habit of trust came to her aid, and she

opened her eyes and looked once more calmly and trustfully
up to her God.

How long she floated, she never knew.

Presently a sound of oars fell on her ears, she felt sure,

above the noise of the rushing sea; and, still looking up,
she felt a shadow come between her and the sunlight; her
eyes were met by those of Wilmot Elliot; she was grasped
by a strong grip, and lifted out of the water, and placed in
the boat by the side of a dripping, shivering Hope.

CHAPTER IX.
ADA'S FRIEND.

WHILE Nellie was spending a happy time at Fairleigh,

two girls sat side by side, bending over their respective
desks in London. They were intent on their lessons, and it
was only when the teacher had shut her book that either of
them raised her head.

"Ada," whispered the elder of the two, "we had such a

jolly time last night."
 "Did you?" answered Ada, leaning towards her, and
looking interested.

"Yes; I wish you had been there. I say, Ada, I shall

come and see your mamma; shall I?"

"If you like," answered Ada, just a little doubtfully.

"Why, you are a goose, Ada. Of course I shall like, and

she will like me, too, I daresay; and I'll persuade her to let
you come and see me."

Ada's eyes sparkled.

"No talking," interposed the teacher, and Clara May and

Ada hastily opened their exercise-books, and proceeded
industriously.

When school was over for that day, Clara followed Ada
to the dressing-room, and announced her intention of
coming home with her that afternoon.

Ada would have hesitated had she dared, as she would

have preferred to ask her mamma's permission; but Clara
had already laughed at her in a good-humoured way once
or twice about "asking mamma;" and as this could not be
anything the least underhand, she let it take its course,
though secretly somewhat anxious as to what mamma
would think of her friend.

So when they left the school door, they turned Ada's

way, and soon arrived at No. 8.

"Here is my friend Clara May, mamma," said Ada,

entering the drawing room, where her mamma was at work.
 Clara May came forward and shook hands readily. She
was quite used to good society, and had but little
bashfulness. Nevertheless when she looked into Mrs.
Arundel's face, a new feeling came over her, and instead of
at once laughingly putting her request, she began to talk of
the hot weather, and of how glad she was Ada and she were
in the same class.

Mrs. Arundel chatted pleasantly to her, and Clara felt it

more and more difficult to say what she wanted. At last she
rather hurriedly began—

"Oh, Mrs. Arundel! Would you let Ada come to see us?
Mamma said she should be so pleased to know her."

Ada looked anxiously at her mother, and Mrs. Arundel

answered—

"If your mamma likes, dear, Ada may come to call on

you at home."

"Oh, thank you," said Clara; "then you may, Ada, and I
shall take you home to-morrow after school."

Clara soon after took her leave, and Ada and Mrs.
Arundel were left alone.

"You have mentioned Clara May often, Ada, but I did

not picture her quite what she is."

"How, mamma?"

"I hope she will be a good friend for you, my child."

"Why, yes, mamma, I hope so. She is a very nice girl,

and all the others pay her a good deal of attention, and
quite envy me her friendship."
 "Well, dear, I only want you to be on your guard; she
seems pleasant enough."

Mrs. Arundel spoke somewhat grudgingly, and Ada

thought her unnecessarily cautious.

The proposed call the next day, however, came to

nothing, for Ada was detained at home with a bad cold; but
the following week, she received an invitation to spend the
evening at her friend's home in Eaton Square.

"May I go, mamma?" asked Ada, while her mother was

reading the note.

"What does 'spend the evening' mean?" asked Mrs.

Arundel.

"I hardly know, but I should think they would be alone;

but I can ask Clara."

When she did ask Clara, she said, "It was just a few
friends, nothing much, and you must come early, so that we
can have a talk first."

Ada's head was now full of what she should wear. She
did not like to ask Clara, and before the eventful day, was
quite worried with the subject. At last it was decided that
she should put on her best Sunday dress. Her mamma
would have advised her white muslin, but Ada thought it
would be ridiculous if there were only one or two young
ladies, and Mrs. Arundel did not press the matter.

"You must have gloves, Ada," said her mother.

"How horrid!" exclaimed Ada. "I do declare I shall feel

so stuck-up."
 Arthur, who was doing his lessons at the table, looked
up and laughed.

Ada coloured with annoyance.

"How I should like to peep in on you, and see you

sitting as fine as possible, clasping your elegant gloves."

"Hush, dear," said his mother. "Do not tease; your turn
will come for this sort of thing some day."

"Not I," answered Arthur, who, boy-like, supposed that

he would never have to conform to the conventionalities of
life.

The day came at last, and Ada went to school as usual;

but her mind was filled with thoughts of her coming treat.
She met Clara just as she was entering the class-room, and
looked into her face with questioning eyes. But Clara
seemed exactly as usual, and was pre-occupied with her
lessons. She hardly gave Ada a nod, but hurried off to her
desk, and Ada followed with a sense of disappointment.

The day's work was unusually heavy, and the two girls
had hardly time to exchange a word. Clara did just say, at
luncheon time, "You won't forget to-night, Ada?"

"Oh no," answered Ada, wondering that Clara should

think it likely.

When Dr. Arundel came home from his afternoon

rounds, before the carriage went to the stables, Ada was to
be conveyed to Eaton Square.

She came out into the hall at the sound of her father's
latch-key, and he kissed her fondly.
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