BRIGHT VOLUMES OF VAPORS

“The Old Cumberland Beggar” depends upon a narrator who occludes his own presence from the landscape in order to record the details of his story, whereas “Gipsies” obtrudes upon its readers a distinctly sanctimonious poet-figure who dominates the tale with his confident moral judgments. In neither case is the teller of the tales comfortably at home in the poem; in both cases he bears an aura of the uncanny, of a spectral death-in-life. One narrator implacably records the progress toward death of an aged man, while the other freezes his subjects into a hyperbolic immobility within a still-life scene which they can never escape, imaging thereby his own demonic eternity-in-time as a figure of Satan or of the Wandering Jew. Both the overbearing and the self-effacing narrator, the one too much present and the other too remote, demonstrate a condition of alienation that governs many of Wordsworth's best-known encounter poems. They share also a ghostly identity and a rhetoric of machine-like motion that describes both what they see and how they themselves behave: they have become what they behold. Other extremes also meet: the city comes to the country, mechanical regularity to rural routine, repetitive rhythm to freedom of action. This chapter will focus on two more poems and an important fragment which further articulate the strange constellation of concerns at work in “The Ruined Cottage” and “The Old Cumberland Beggar.”