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Wordsworth's Lucy Poems in Psychobiographical Context

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Richard E. Matlak
Richard E. Matlak*
Affiliation:
College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, Massachusetts
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Abstract

The Lucy poems were evoked by stress in Wordsworth’s relationships with Dorothy and Coleridge. Four were written in Germany, where Wordsworth was forced to separate from Coleridge because of the added expense of keeping Dorothy. Wordsworth’s resulting hostility toward Dorothy mixes with his love as he fantasizes her death and then mourns her loss in the Lucy poems. But his relationship with Coleridge darkened as well after Coleridge stated a preference for living near Thomas Poole rather than Wordsworth when the poets met at Göttingen following their winter-long separation. “I Travelled among Unknown Men,” written in England two years later, reveals, however, that Wordsworth overcame his ambivalence toward Dorothy and his excessive dependency upon Coleridge; his declaration of love for England becomes an indirect refusal to venture abroad with Coleridge again. Through the development of the Lucy cycle, Wordsworth discovered that place is the foundation of love and relationship.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 93 , Issue 1 , January 1978 , pp. 46 - 65
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1978

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References

Notes

1 As early as 1934 the list of possible originals for Lucy had grown embarrassingly large; she had been identified as Dorothy, Mary Hutchinson (Wordsworth's future wife), Annette Vallon (Wordsworth's estranged lover), some ideal maiden, an adopted gypsy child, an early love, Hartley Coleridge, and a conventionalized heroine arising from the poet's experiments with popular ballads. See Herbert Hartman, “Wordsworth's Lucy Poems,” PMLA, 49 (1934), 134–42, for a fuller accounting.

2 Geoffrey Durrant, William Wordsworth (London: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1969), p. 60.

3 Wordsworth: A Re-Interpretation (London: Longmans, Green, 1954), pp. 151–54.

4 In “ ‘That Melancholy Dream’: Wordsworth's Goslar Experience and Poetry” (Diss. Indiana Univ. 1976), I analyze the Matthew poems, the Lucy poems, and the two-part Prelude (1798–99) in the light of the psycho-biographical context offered here.

5 I am primarily dependent upon Mark L. Reed, Wordsworth: The Chronology of the Early Years 1770–1799 (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1967) and Wordsworth: The Chronology of the Middle Years 1800–1815 (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1975), for the dating of the Lucy lyrics.

6 The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, i, The Early Years, 1787–1805, ed. Ernest de Selin-court, 2nd ed., rev. Chester L. Shaver (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967), 236. Hereafter cited as EY. The relationship of Wordsworth's health to his composing is a matter still requiring investigation. Violent headaches and pain in the side troubled Wordsworth at least from his college days (EY, p. 7), but it is not until Goslar that the Wordsworths write of the pain attendant upon composition. Later we learn that Wordsworth's pain was most severe when revising, rather than when composing anew (EY, p. 332). At one point, Dorothy writes that “we have put aside all the manuscript poems and it is agreed between us that I am not to give them up to him even if he asks for them” (EY, p. 335). At Goslar, of course, it was new composition that was affecting Wordsworth, and the passage discussed in the text is the most explicit and detailed description we have of Wordsworth's psychosomatic distress. In arguing for the influence of Coleridge, or rather Coleridge's absence, on Wordsworth's emotional and physical condition at Goslar, it is relevant to note that this particular bout with anxiety and ill health was foreshadowed at Alfox-den between late February and early March, just about the time the Wordsworths learned that they might have to part with Coleridge because of their losing the lease on Alfoxden and because of the unlikelihood that they would be granted another, due to their great unpopularity in the neighborhood. Dorothy writes: “It is decided that we quit Allfoxden—The house is lett. It is most probable that we shall go back again to Racedown, as there is little chance of our getting a place in this neighbourhood. We have no other very strong inducement to stay but Coleridge's society, but that is so important an object that we have it much at heart… . William was very unwell last week, oppressed with languor, and weakness. He is better now” (EY, pp. 199–200). Wordsworth's recovery was probably due to the fact that Poole, the day preceding this letter, gave the Wordsworths “great hopes that we shall get a very pleasant house a quarter of a mile from [Alfoxden] with furniture &c” (EY, p. 209): but then plans for the German venture intervened, and Poole's action on Wordsworth's behalf was most likely discontinued.

7 Meyer Mendelson, M.D., Psychoanalytic Concepts of Depression, 2nd ed. (New York: Spectrum, 1974), esp. pp. 95–100.

8 The Prelude: Or, Growth of a Poet's Mind, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, 2nd ed., rev. Helen Darbishire (Oxford: Clarendon, 1959), 1805 text, xiii.391–410.

9 Wordsworth: The Construction of a Personality (Kent, Ohio: Kent State Univ. Press, 1968), pp. 27, 37–39.

10 Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs (Oxford: Clarendon, 1956–71), I, 334. Hereafter cited as Griggs.

11 Coleridge (1968; New York: Collier Books, 1973), pp. 87–88.

12 The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn (New York: Pantheon, 1957- ), i, 344. Hereafter cited in the text as STCNB.

13 Hardly a day went by without Dorothy recording in her journal that one of the party had been cheated or harassed by German shopkeepers, innkeepers, and even porters. See Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt (New York: Macmillan, 1941),i, 26–28.

14 In the period October 1798-April 1799, Wordsworth drew on Wedgwood for £110/13/-. See Reed, Chronology of the Early Years, p. 266, No. 25. In a letter to Wedgwood dated 21 May 1799, Coleridge estimates that he will have drawn on Wedgwood for £103 for Göttingen bills, transportation, etc., through May 1799 (Griggs, 1, 519).

15 Wordsworth to Josiah Wedgwood:

[Goslar] was once the residence of Emperors, and it is now the residence of Grocers and Linen-drapers who are, I say it with a feeling of sorrow, a wretched race; the flesh, blood, and bone of their minds being nothing but knavery and low falshood [sic]. We have met with one dear and kind creature, but he is so miserably deaf that we could only play with him games of cross-purposes, and he likewise labours under a common German infirmity, the loss of teeth, so that with bad German, bad English, bad French, bad hearing, and bad utterance you will imagine we have had very pretty dialogues. ... “ (EY, p. 249)

Coleridge to Thomas Poole:

Every one pays me the most assiduous attentions—I have attended some Conversations at the Houses of the Nobility—stupid things enough.—It was quite a new thing to me to have Counts & I.and-dr[osten] bowing & scraping to me—& Countesses, old & young, complimenting & amusing me.—But to be an Englishman is in Germany to be an Angel—they almost worship you.

(Griggs, 1, 435)

16 From “Written in Germany,” The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire (Oxford: Clarendon, 1940–49), iv, 65. Hereafter cited as PW.

17 “Wordsworth's ‘Lucy’ Poems: Context and Meaning,” Studies in Romanticism, 10 (1971), 160–61.

18 The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953- ), xvi, 417. Hereafter cited as CPW.

19 See “Dreams of the Death of Persor.s of Whom the Dreamer Is Fond.” CPW, iv, 248–71, p. 250–55, where Freud considers dreams of the death of brothers and sisters.

20 '“ William Wordsworth: A Biography; The Early Years. 1770–1803 (1957: London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1968), p. 423. Hereafter cited as Early Years.

21 “I do not know how without being culpably particular I can give my Reader a more exact notion of the style in which I wished these poems to be written than by informing him that I have at all times endeavoured to look steadily at my subject, …” Preface to Lyrical Ballads, with Other Poems (1800), in Literary Criticism of William Wordsworth, ed. Paul M. Zall (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1966), p. 22.

22 David Ferry, The Limits of Mortality (Middle-town, Conn.: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1959), p. 77.

23 In “Mourning and Melancholia” Freud identifies self-reproach as depression's distinguishing symptom (CPW, xiv, 244).

24 In MS. JI, the earliest manuscript of The Prelude, composed at Goslar, Wordsworth repeatedly poses the question, “Was it for this …, ” i.e., for wasting my time and talent at Goslar, that nature fostered my development with a watchful eye? And in MS. JJ and subsequent forms of the first book of The Prelude, Wordsworth casts the shadow of reproach over his entire childhood. The sounds of “undistinguishable motion” that pursued him through the dark wood after his poaching escapades, the cliff that rose monstrously above him in the stolen boat on Ullswater Lake, even his kite rebuffed by the storm—all emphasize a guilt-oriented relationship with the world. The guilt reaches its thematic and formal climax in the two-part Prelude, Pt. I, in Wordsworth's presentation of his father's death as a punishment from God, which, he says, “appeared / A chastisement” for certain unstated desires (The Prelude, 1798–1799, by William Wordsworth, ed. Stephen Parrish [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1977], p. 51). It can be argued then that the self-reproach we find as such a strong thematic influence in Wordsworth's recounting of his early life and as such a forceful spur to his present inertia (The Prelude, 1798–99, 1.450–53) is related to his melancholic depression at Goslar. All references to MS. JI and to The Prelude, 1798–99, are taken from the edition by Parrish cited in this note.

25 “Little Girls Lost: Problems of a Romantic Archetype,” Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 67 (1963), 579–92; rpt. in Blake: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Northrop Frye (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1966), p. 76.

26 Wordsworth's Poetry 1787–1814 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1964), p. 158.

27 Coleridge's love for Poole makes his feelings for Wordsworth seem pale in contrast, as we see in these tender testaments of his love. Before leaving for Germany, Coleridge writes to Poole:

I am on the point of leaving my native country for the first time—a country, which, God Almighty knows, is dear to me above all things for the love I bear to you.—Of many friends, whom T love and esteem, my head & heart have ever chosen you as the Friend—as the one being, in whom is involved the full & whole meaning of that sacred Title… . (Griggs, I, 415)

After departing England, Coleridge writes again:

The Ocean is between us & I feel how much I love you!
Go to my house and kiss my dear babies for me—my Friend, my best Friend, my Brother, my Beloved—the tears run down my face—God love you… .
(Griggs, I, 418, 420)

After a month on foreign soil, Coleridge finds it impossible to control his emotions when writing to his “best and dearest Friend”:

My spirit is more feminine than your's—I cannot write to you without tears / and I know that when you read my letters, and when you talk of me, you must often “compound with misty eyes”—. (Griggs, I, 430)

By the following springtime, Coleridge is overwhelmed with the desire to see Poole again:

O my God! how I long to be at home—My whole Being so yearns after you, that when I think of the moment of our meeting, I catch the fashion of German Joy, rush into your arms, and embrace you… . Now the Spring comes, the vital sap of my affections rises, as in a tree! (Griggs, I, 490)

28 Clement Carylon, an English medical student at Göttingen during Coleridge's residence there, provides an interesting comment on Wordsworth's visit to Coleridge:

Soon after Coleridge's arrival at Göttingen, Mr. Wordsworth and his sister came from Goslar to pay him a visit, and I have been informed, by one well acquainted with the fact, that the two philosophers rambled away together for a day or two (leaving Miss Wordsworth at Göttingen)… .

Quoted in George McLean Harper, William Wordsworth: His Life, Works, and Influence, 2nd ed. (New York: Scribners, 1923), I, 370, from Carylon's Early Years and Late Reflections. Although neither the Wordsworths nor Coleridge mentions such an excursion, it does seem plausible in the light of the theory of Dorothy's unwanted presence offered in this article.

29 Noted by Sybil Shepard Eakin, “The Composition of The Prelude 1794–1804: A Critical History,” Diss. Harvard 1972, p. 96.

30 Coleridge's addiction to opium probably begins at this time as well. See Bate, Coleridge, p. 101.

31 It almost sounds too mechanical, but surely it is metaphorically sound, to depict this process as Freud does:

Each single one of the memories and expectations in which the libido is bound to the object is brought up and hyper-cathected, and detachment of the libido is accomplished in respect of it. Why this compromise by which the command of reality is carried out piecemeal should be so extraordinarily painful is not at all easy to explain in terms of economics. It is remarkable that this painful unpleasure is taken as a matter of course by us. The fact is, however, that when the work of mourning is completed the ego becomes free and uninhibited again. (CPW, xiv, 245)

32 Wordsworth wrote to Poole on Coleridge's behalf, requesting that he lend Coleridge the amount necessary for the Azores trip, at least £50, “unshackled by any conditions, but that he should repay it when he shall be able.” Wordsworth then continues with an entreaty that one would think would be unnecessary among friends. “If he dies, if he should be unwilling that any debt of his should devolve on his Brothers,” Wordsworth writes, “then let the debt be cancelled” (EY, p. 340). Perhaps still smarting from Coleridge's rejection of Stowey and his company, Poole replied, to Coleridge rather than to Wordsworth, that he could not lend any more than £20, that Coleridge might ask his brothers for assistance, and then—the coup de grace—that the £37 that Coleridge supposed he owed him in his last letter was in error; it was actually £52 (Griggs, ii, 755, headnote).