Back_to_The_Logos.pdf

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BACK TO THE WORD
(THE LOGOS)
By Julian Scutts
Copyright Julian Scutts 2019
ISBN: 9780244248017

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Foreword Page 3
I: In Principio Erat Verbum -A Review of Theories and Attitudes to the Word in
Verse
II: Hamlet, Being and Doing Page 15
III: Wandering, the ‘ Worst of Sinning’ Page 27
IV: The Multivalence of the Word “Wanderer” in “Wandrers Nachtlied” by Goethe
Page 32
V: "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" – The Myth of Narcissus and Milton’s Muse
Page 44
VI: Is the word ‘ Cross’ a hint pointing to less than obvious levels of meaning in ‘By
the Fire-side’ and ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ by Robert Browning? Page 76
VII: What is ‘the Rude Red Tree’ in ‘Altarwise by Owl-Light’ by Dylan Thomas
Page 76
VIII: Did Godot show up after all? Page 94

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FOREWORD
‘Back to the Word’ has a somewhat fundamentalist ring about it
and may therefore scare off those who pride themselves on their
academic prowess or levelheaded sagacity. However, what objection
could one raise to any concern with fundamentals and the
fundamental of concern here is ‘the Word’? Oh no, not a sermon on
some aspect of theology! In the first scene of Goethe’s tragedy Faust
Part 1 the protagonist shares the skepticism that typifies the
attitude of modern intellectuals towards traditional religion as he
musters his mental energy in furtherance of translating a passage
containing the Greek term the ‘logos’ into German. I hasten to
assure prospective readers that my main concern in the matter of
discussion does not concern theology but a ‘logocentric’ 1approach
to a study of well-known literary texts, namely Hamlet with special
regard for that famous line ‘To be or not to be,’ ‘Wandrers Nachtlied’
by Goethe,’ Lord Byron’s reference to ‘the worst of sinning in Don
Juan, Robert Browning’s’ The Pied Piper of Hamelin,’ Samuel
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The ‘logocentric’ approach, the nature of which is to be elucidated in the
following section, may prove of value in showing familiar works of literature in
a new light. Rabbi David Cooper, a leading expert on Jewish mysticism, once
brought out a book with a striking title: God is a Verb. 34 Without entering into
the profundities of the Kabbala we can derive a powerful impulse to our
thinking from this title alone. We recall the scene in Goethe's Faust in which
the listless don ponders the suitable way to translate the Greek "logos" into
German. He rejects "das Wort" ("the Word") as too arid and bookish and in a
flash pounces on "Tat,"("the "Deed.") The verb occupies a zone somewhere
between the Word and the Deed, lending support to Rabbi Cooper's bold
declaration in the title of his book.

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I
In Principio Erat Verbum -A Review of Theories
and Attitudes to the Word in Verse
Is the Word or the Image the basic Entity in poetry? In this study
special reference is made to the function of verbs, in particular "to
wander," in poetic texts.
The Word in Language Theory
Geschrieben steht: "Im Anfang war das Wort!"
Hier stock ich schon! Wer hilft mir weiter fort?
Ich kann das Wort so hoch unmöglich schätzen,
Goethe: Faust, Der Tragödie Erster Teil, "Studierzimmer I,"
1224-6
It is written: "In the beginning was the Word!"
Here I falter! Who can help me continue?
That highly I can never consider the Word to be,
Goethe: Faust, The Tragedy, Part I, "The Study I," 1224-6
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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The winged words on which my soul would pierce
Into the height of Love's rare Universe,
Are chains of lead around its flight of fire.
Weak verses, go kneel at your Sovereign's feet,
And say,- "We are the masters of your slave,
What wouldest thou then with us and ours and thine?"
Then call your sisters from Oblivion's cave,
All singing loud "Love's very pain is sweet,
But its reward is in the world divine
Which, if not here, it builds beyond the grave."
Percy Bysshe Shelley: Epipsychidion, 588-597
Though usually categorized as an atheist or agnostic, Percy Bysshe
Shelley, in his answer to Peacock's pronouncement on the death of
poetry (one of the first of many), averred the sanctity and prophetic
nature of the art in A Defence of Poetry. The declining prestige of
poetry and a commensurate and related decline in regard to
religious and biblical authority amounted to a dethronement of "the
Word." In this connection it is surely significant that, when
pondering how to translate logos into the language of his day,
Goethe's Faust rejected the "Word" ("das Wort") in favour of "the
Deed" ("die Tat") as an adequate rendering of "Logos" in the first
chapter of St. John's Gospel. This change of word reflected the
zeitgeist of Goethe's, not Faust's, epoch. "The Word" seems to have
absorbed the mustiness of libraries and the aridity of a recluse's
study, and lost its sense of an originating power; "the Deed" implies
action and motion, which in Goethe's age were being treated as
virtues in themselves (Faust set the condition for the forfeiture of
his soul in his becoming resigned to a bed of idleness).
Faust contrasts "Word" and "Deed" as irreconcilable antitheses.
These do not appear absolutely irreconcilable in a possible inference
from the Latin words rendering the passage that exercised Faust's

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skills as a translator: "in principio erat verbum." The verb is both a
word and often an indicator of a deed. Kenneth Burke recognizes
parallels between theology and the domain of language, when
stating in The Rhetoric of Religion2:
"What we say about words in the empirical realm will bear a
notable likeness to what is said about God in theology."
The transition from the belief in direct inspiration to a modern
perception of the originality of the poetic genius entailed a deep
sense of trauma. In their dilemma, Goethe and later the Romantics
tapped the power inherent in verbs of motion, the most notable of
these being to wander and wandern, the bases of the common
derivative Wanderer. Not only are these verbs indicators of action
and movement: they are incomparably rich in allegorical
associations.
The verb to wander often denotes acts of walking, roaming and
travelling and as John Frederick Nims notes in Western Wind, a
handbook for students of poetry, the very description of a travelers
who makes a step towards some place or object generates an
allegory. The implications of this observation are discussed at some
length in the following chapter.
The expression logocentric is a significant item in the modern
critic's list of basic terms. A logocentric approach to the study of
poetic texts emerges in the following discussion of theories put
forward by Jurij Tynjanov. Together with Roman Jakobson,
Tynjanov was a member of the group of critics and linguists known
as the Russian Formalists. This movement arose in the early l920s
before its suppression by Stalin. Trotsky alleged that the Formalists
had succumbed to "the superstition of the word." When repudiating
the Formalists, Trotsky echoed the lines (quoted above) in Goethe's
Faust in the statement:
"The Formalists show a fast-ripening religiousness. They are
2
Kenneth Burke, The Rhetoric of Religion (University of California, 1970).

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followers of St. John. They believe that "In the beginning was
the Word." But we believe that in the beginning was the deed.
The word followed as its phonetic shadow." 3
The logocentricity manifested by Tynjanov and other Formalists
does not fully square with mainstream criticism in the West, which
perceives the essential basic elements of poetry as "images" or
quasi-musical effects. It was probably the Romantics who set the
trend for interpreting characteristics of poetry in terms of analogies
with the non verbal arts of painting, sculpture and music, perhaps
because "the word" as such had apparently lost its ancient vitality
and authority. Shelley, though a doughty defender of poetry,
agonized about the heaviness of words when composing the lines in
Epipsychidion cited at the beginning of this chapter.
In the domain of literary criticism, as formerly in that of
ecclesiastical controversy, "the word" and "the image" pose
contrasts arousing intense debate as to which of them has
precedence over the other. Though it is hardly possible to conceive
of a poem without words, literary critics - and even poets
themselves - have at times made unfavourable references to words
and language, such as in the case we now consider.
In the heyday of the Imagist movement, Ezra Pound records his
opinion that words are merely flat representations of concepts,
whereas images are capable of expressing an unlimited number of
effects and nuances of significance. In an article on "Vorticisim" he
argues that words resemble numerals in having a fixed value, while
images have an "algebraic" quality in their ability to express an
unlimited range of effects and significance.4 Logically any argument
3
Leon Trotsky, "The Formalist School of Poetry and Marxism," Literature and Revolution
(Russian version published in 1924), tr. Rose Strumsky (Ann Arbor: 1960).
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Ezra Pound, "Vorticism" in Fortnightly Review. Sept. 1914. The following citation from this
article is cited in Imagist Poetry, Peter Jones (Penguin Books, 1972): "The symbolists dealt in
association, that is in a sort of allusion, almost allegory. They degraded the symbol to the status
of a word, they made it a form of metronomy. One can be grossly 'symbolic,' for example, by

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or proposition equating the essence of poetry with "the image" -
fundamentally a metaphor based on references to things
apprehended by the sense of sight - implies that words have little
more than an identifying or descriptive role in poetry. Analogies
between poetry and music may also, taken too literally, induce a
negative evaluation of words. Certainly, no high esteem of words,
poetic tradition the verbal dexterity usually attributed to poets is
recorded in one article presenting the view that the best poetry is
"musical" in character.
In his article "The Musical Development of Symbols: Whitman" 5
Calvin S. Brown proposed that "symbols" produced the "musical"
effects characteristic of the greatest poetic achievements, for which
Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" poses a
preeminent example.
Brown evaluated words as little more than the means of labelling
symbols and considered their normal connection with external
reality to be irrelevant in poetry. Thus, according to Brown, the
poem's references and allusions to Abraham Lincoln, whose death
instigated the writing of the poem, serve only to reinforce the idea of
a great man as a function of the poem's organization.
The trend towards evaluating poetry chiefly in terms of analogies
between it and the visual or musical arts was firmly established in
the Romantic period. Since then a terminology derived from such
analogies has become so commonplace as to constitute a technical
vocabulary, the routine use of which tends to discourage new
approaches to literary criticism. In the concluding chapter of
Romantic Image Frank Kermode expressed regret at the habitually
using the term 'cross' to mean 'trial'. The symbolist's symbols have a fixed value, like numbers in
arithmetic, like 1, 2, and 7. The Imagist's images have a variable significance like the signs a, b
and c in algebra.[....] the author must use his image because he sees it or feels it, not because he
thinks he can use it to back up some creed or some system of ethics."
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Calvin S. Brown, "The Musical Development of Symbols: Whitman," Music and Literature
(Athens [U.S.], 1948).

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unreflecting use of the terms "image" and "symbol," which, in this
critic's view, are commonly assumed to provide objective definitions
and concepts although they in fact convey value judgments rooted
in "supernaturalist" beliefs and attitudes.6 Kermode noted as a
positive development a new interest in language theory evinced by
influential critics, which was "anti-supernaturalist" in effect.
Kermode's opinion about the objectivity of language theory is
consonant with the simple fact that words are readily identifiable,
locatable, countable and generally accessible to methods of
statistical analysis. In the case of images and symbols, on the other
hand, opinions differ as to what provides the basic data to be
investigated.
Critics of the internal school assume that words are arbitrary
signs offering little insight into the processes of poetic creativity.
Having dissociated the essential forms and patterns of poetry from
those of language, they argue that poets shape images, symbols,
musical effects, etc. with recourse to the pliant and neutral medium
of language. Critics with a thorough grounding in language theory
will be unable to accept that language is a transparent and neutral
medium. To use a term favoured by William Empson, language is
too "ambivalent" to serve an essentially referential function.7 The
noted linguist Philip Wheelwright has gone so far as to question the
ultimate justification for using the words "symbol" and "image" in
the area of textual criticism, pointing out that these refer to some -
but by no means all - aspects of poetic language. One could go
6
Frank Kermode, Romantic Image (London, 1957). The following citation gives the passage
beginning the Conclusion (Chapter IX): "I have to admit that the last chapter gave no real notion
of the variety and subtlety of modern criticism, nor of the impact upon it of precisely that interest
the earlier Symbolists lacked, a systematic application to language-theory. The effect of this has
certainly been to 'de-mythologise' Symbolism, to reconcile its image with the more empirical
andutilitarian theories of language (as Richard's flux of interpenetrating elements in the language
itself, rather than the intuitive order of Bergson and Hulme)."
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William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (London, 1930).

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further to argue that a tendency to identify "symbols" and "images"
in poetry as the most significant and vital aspects of the art leads to
a bias in the criticism of poetry favouring the appreciation of
substantives and the effects they produce at the expense of a
commensurate appreciation of verbs and their effects, though verbs,
particularly those describing motion, deeply influence and inform
the coherence of the poems. This myopia reflects and reinforces a
widespread prejudice against the narrative and allegorical elements
in poetry, so often dismissed as "trivial" or "artificial."
Linguists who stress the density, ambivalence end complexity of
poetic language adopt a position diametrically opposed to Ezra
Pound's contention that words, unlike images, are incapable of
conveying a rich variety of effects and "algebraic" variations. Is there
a possibility of mediating between the entrenched Imagist and
language-based positions? It is timely to reconsider a basic premise
on which modern linguistics is founded.
According to Ferdinand de Saussure's theory of language, there
are two distinct yet mutually inseparable aspects of language,
namely langue and parole. The former denotes language as a
general system, while the latter defines it as the articulation of
language in speech or writing. Two scholars belonging to the
Russian Formalist school of criticism, Roman Jakobson and Jurij
Tynjanov, point out in a jointly written paper that de Saussure's
distinction between langue and parole provided the proper basis for
linguistic studies of literary texts.8 Without specifying which school
of criticism they had in mind, they note that those who failed to
take account of this distinction have produced distorted and one-
sided results. In an article appearing as "The Meaning of the Word
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Jurij Tynjanov and Roman Jakobson, "Problems in the Study of Literature and Language,"
Readings in Russian Poetics / Formalist and Structuralist Views, ed. by Ladislav Mateijka and
Krystina Pomorska (Michigan Slavic Publications, Ann Arbor, 1978) 79-80.

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in Verse" 9 in English translation, Tynjanov sought to demonstrate
the relevance of de Saussure's distinction between langue and
parole in the practice of textual criticism. His reference to "the
word" seems to have an almost biblical ring, suggesting the notion
of "the Word," for both "the word" and "the Word," in language or
theology, represent something universal condensed into one of its
minuscule parts, whether this universal entity be understood as
language, the Scriptures, or even the Creator. To make the essential
nature of "the word in verse" better understood, Tynjanov used two
metaphors: It is like a vessel which, however various its contents,
always remains the same. It is also like a chameleon in being able
to change colour according to whatever environment poses its
context. I summarize what I see as Tynjanov's main postulations in
the succeeding five paragraphs:
1. The word has both a general and highly specific aspect, reflecting
a duality in language itself (cf. Saussure's distinction between
langue and parole).
2. In respect to its general aspect, the word comprehends all
occurrences of words sharing the same appearance and evincing
recognizably similar meanings. According to Tynjanov, words
fulfilling these criteria partake in the same "lexical unity."
3. In one sense the occurrence of a word may be understood as a
particular and uniquely "coloured" manifestation of the word in the
general sense defined above. It owes its unique quality to its
position in the text of which it is a part.
4. At the primary level of language - that level at which one readily
determines a word's sense as inferable from its (verbal) context - a
word is usually accorded one predominant meaning - its secondary
feature. If a word is felt to convey more than the meaning the
context requires, a reader or listener is forcibly aware of a contrast
9
Jurij Tynjanov, "The Meaning of the Word in Verse," Readings in Russian Poetics, 136-
145.

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between the "word in a specific context" and "the word outside any
context" - in Tynjanov's parlance - between the word's secondary
feature and its basic feature, which allows one to feel or discern the
unity underlying the word's secondary features.10 A usage of a word
that entails an awareness of this contrast tends to be deprecated as
a lapse of style, in non literary prose, at least. If, however, none of
the usual meanings of the word accords with the word's primary
context, the word absorbs meaning from its context, often acquiring
an expletive or strongly emotional tone. If the suppressed meaning
of the word poses the opposite of meanings implied by the context,
an oscillating feature is likely to arise.11 This is the case when
words which convey insults the normal use of language are to be
understood as terms of endearment.
5. So far we have considered the word without special reference of
words in poetry. Words in poetry are particularly striking in their
ability to awaken in a reader's or listener's mind an awareness that
10
Tynjanov elucidated what he mean by this contrast by discussing the various meanings of the
Russian word zemlja [earth, soil, land, ground]. The following citation from his essay "The
Meaning of the Word in Verse" (Readings in Russian Poetics, 136, 137) clarifies his position.
The relevant observations begin with a list of examples revealing the word's basic range of
meanings: "1. zemlja and Mars; heaven and zemlja (tellus).2. Bury an object in the zemlja; black
zemlja (humus). 3. It fell to the zemlja (Boden / ground). 4. Native zemlja (Land / homeland). In
this instance there is no doubt that we have different meanings of one 'word' in different kinds of
usage. And yet, if we say of a Martian that he fell onto the ground of Mars -'he fell to the zemllja'
- it is awkward, even though it is obvious that zemlja in the phrase "he fell to the zemlja" is far
from meaning the zemlja in the other examples. It would also be awkward to say of the soil on
Mars 'grey zemlja'."
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To illustrate this point Tynjanov wrote (Readings in Russian Poetics, 142, 143): "It may also
happen, however, that the oscillating number of words may be used without regard to their
meanings. But they have the auxiliary function of ‘filling up’ the intonal pattern with verbal
material (cf. swearing or cursing intonations using arbitrary words) features. It follows that
expressivity of speech need not be rendered only through word meanings. Words may have an
importance beyond their meanings. They may act as speech elements which bear some
expressive function."

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a word exists both on the "synchronic“ and “diachronic" plane. The
same word belongs to the contemporary world of the poet and
necessarily reflects his or her surrounding world. The resultant new
meaning of the word must in some measure "displace" earlier
meanings and associations of the word preserved by literary
tradition.12 It occludes or overlays these meanings without totally
eradicating them. We shall consider the effects of this apparent
confusion later.
How far is it possible to harmonize Tynjanov's theories
concerning the "word in verse" with rival views upholding the
primacy of "the image" or "musical structure" of poetry? In what
way, for example, does Tynjanov's insistence on the indissolubility
of word and verbal context find parallels in apparently similar
assertions made by "contexualists" with leanings to New Criticism?
Few could fault Roman Jakobson's strict regard for internal
qualities of a poetic work evident in his essay on Baudelaire's "Le
Chat." However, the Russian Formalists could not accept that the
internal features of a poem existed in absolute isolation from
realities to which the poem referred, whether they are events in a
poet's life or some historical fact. We have already noted
linguistically based objections to the proposition that the effect of
words is totally predictable or compliant to design.
As Tynjanov's essay persuasively demonstrates, "the word" is
12
In this connection Tynjanov remarked (Readings in Russian Poetics) 144: "The appeal to
tradition is important, but does not exhaust the problem. The poetic vocabulary is not created
exclusively by the continuation of a certain lexical tradition, but also by contrasting itself to itself
(the vocabulary of Nekrasov and Majakovkij). ‘Literary language’ evolves, and its development
cannot be understood as a planned development of tradition, but rather as colossal its
displacements of traditions (a considerable rÔle is played in this respect by partial re-
establishment of older strata}.”

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both uniquely defined by its position in a work, and yet partakes in
what appears to be the almost mystic unity of the universal word in
the language. Thus we might conclude "the word," properly
understood, unites the "algebraic" quality of Pound's "image" and
the "musical" quality of Calvin Brown's "symbol."
On the basis of arguments that have been discussed so far in
this chapter, I hope to crystallize a basic approach to the "
logocentric" method of textual analysis to be applied to poems
considered in the following chapters of this study. Many of the
issues that concern linguistic and literary theory need not always
be elucidated through technical phraseology. Let us consider why
we normally read a newspaper article once or twice, while we may
return to a well-loved poem any number of times and never exhaust
its reserves of meanings and evocations. Is the difference in our
attitude to a newspaper article and a poem solely attributable to the
intrinsic qualities of an article or poem? From a linguist's point of
view a piece of journalistic writing - or even a section in a technical
handbook - poses an immensely complex phenomenon. We tend to
evaluate texts in accordance with expectations reflecting our
understanding of the purpose of a given text, even if this be only to
inform us on the right time to sow potatoes. The more technical or
factual the perceived objective of a text, the greater the expectancy
on the reader's part that words have a precise and unambiguous
meaning. The reader normally understands words in the light of
their context determined not only by reference to the text in its
entirety but also through a recognition of recurrent patterns and
conventional juxtapositions. We do not need to consult a wide
context to know that "a train of thought" and "the next train to
Liverpool" are different kinds of train. When reading poetry we do
not suspend our usual mode of understanding language. When
confronted by some abstruse work by Dylan Thomas or James
Joyce, we inevitably first record a disparity between the text being
read and the language we normally use.
If a poem does not superficially deviate from common usage, we

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understand words in much the same way as we do when reading a
non literary text. Of course, if we understood poetry only at such a
level, we would read through (and discard) a poem as though it
were a report in a daily newspaper.
It emerges from Tynjanov's discussions that words in poetry
possess an inexhaustible range of meanings. With each new reading
of a poem, new meanings rise to the surface of a reader's
consciousness. Here we may speak of a process of progressive
revelation, a fact ultimately grounded in the dual nature of the "the
word" with its specific and universal aspects.
II
Hamlet, Being and Doing
What then are the situations, from the representation of
which, though accurate, no poetical enjoyment can be made?
They are those in which the suffering finds no vent in action;
in which a continuous state of mental distress is prolonged,
unrelieved by incident, hope or resistance; in which there is
everything to be endured, nothing to be done. In such
situations there is inevitably something morbid, in the
description of them something monotonous. When they occur
in real life they are painful, not tragic; the representation of
them in poetry is painful also. Matthew Arnold, 185
Synopsis
This essay compares two passages in which the verb “to be”
invites particular attention, in Act I, Sc. II and Act III Sc. I. In one of
these the word “be” already enjoys no small measure of attention
throughout the world. The appearance of the same word in Act 1,
Scene II seems to have slipped critical attention. I will argue that

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both passages in question throw light on each other, and when
viewed in their respective contexts prove to be centred on two
contrasts inhering in Shakespeare’s use of the word “be,” that of
being and seeming and that of being and not being. Together they
reflect the fact that Hamlet is a drama rooted in questions of
ontology, the nature of being, rather than in an interplay of actions.
Verbs in literary texts receive relatively attention, perhaps because
they tend to submerge themselves in the onward process of
sentence construction, and “to be” is perhaps one of the least
obtrusive and most inconspicuous verbs of all. When then should it
deserve our special attention in Hamlet ?
Disparaged but Undeniably Great
Hamlet has certainly incurred its fair share of adverse criticism,
notably from Voltaire, Bernard Shaw and T. S. Eliot, but in one
regard the play marks an unchallengeable achievement. Few other
literary works have enriched the English language with such
succinct and proverbial phrases as Hamlet has done. Probably most
people, when saying “You have to be cruel to be kind,” “there’s
method in his or her madness,” “more in sorrow than in anger" or
“there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in
your philosophy” are not making any conscious allusion to
passages in Hamlet, but in the case of one quotation they probably
are, namely: “To be or not to be, that is the question.
Being and doing
Hamlet fails to do because of what he is. By contrast, in
Shakespeare’s most recent literary source for Hamlet, Thomas Kyd’s
Ur-Hamlet, a play we can only reconstruct on the basis of secondary
evidence, the protagonist’s delay in taking decisive action is dictated
by circumstances and tactics, not his own psychological inhibitions

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or moral misgivings. In Shakespeare’s Hamlet the one pivotal and
decisive action of the play, the killing of Polonius, is a gross and
absurd blunder (indeed, there is the view that Hamlet anticipates
the Theatre of the Absurd in significant ways). Polonius’s death
marks Hamlet’s departure from his careful experimental mode of
operation as typified by his staging “The Mousetrap,” an indication,
perhaps, that the real world offers no laboratory conditions for the
resolution of all human problems. Indeed, the incongruous
relationship between the actions and the inward character of
Hamlet provoked Eliot’s famous assertion that in Hamlet
Shakespeare failed to establish an “objective correlative” revealing
how Hamlet’s emotions might find their adequate and precise
expression in actions and events. Endorsing the opinion of another
critic (J. N. Robertson), Eliot argued in his essay “Hamlet and his
Problems” in The Sacred Wood (1920) that Shakespeare’s alleged
failure partly lay in the “intractable” nature of the material provided
by his sources with its motif or revenge, its ghost and "its
despicable intrigues." 35
Perhaps Eliot did not take full account of one very important
difference distinguishing Kid’s UrHamlet (and closely associated
with it The Spanish Tragedy) from Shakespeare’s drama, for the
Bard inverted the roles of father and son in making it Hamlet’s goal
to avenge his father, while in Thomas Kyd’s play a father avenges
his son. In fact, Shakespeare partially returned to the plot laid
down by the original Danish story of Hamlet, likewise a son who
avenges his father. This inversion or return to source entails an
orientation to the future, the expectation of progress, if not a
guarantee of its full achievement. At one level Hamlet revolves
around the thwarting of a normal smooth transfer from one
generation to the next. A reflection of England’s looming dynastic
crisis? Be that as it may, in Hamlet we witness the interpenetration
of two historical planes with one reflecting the transition from
paganism (with its ethos of revenge) to Christianity (with its ethos of
forgiveness) while the other reflects the transition from medieval
society to modern secularism. Perhaps this density of associations
offers the main reason why Hamlet has been seen so variously as
the champion of conflicting beliefs and ideologies, whether as a
Catholic, a Puritan or modern agnostic. In fact, all these elements
intermingle in Hamlet’s character making him a prototype of the

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distraught Romantic hero and today’s “crazy mixed up kid.”
Individual Words and the Light They Shed on the Works to which
They Belong
Amid all the debate and contrary opinions that surround Hamlet
I wish to adopt a logocentric approach to this drama which involves
a consideration of particular words in this literary text. I feel no
better point of departure is offered by these words:
“To be or not to be, that is the question.”
Do these words pose a memorable yet isolated expression, or do
they point to something of essential importance to the dramatic
work in which they found? The same underlying question concerns
not only words found in Hamlet but those in all works of literature,
a point made clearly by the Russian Formalist Yurij Tynjanov in an
article bearing the translated title of “The Meaning of the Word in
Verse”. (1) The very formulation of “the Word” arguably betrays the
Russian linguist’s indebtedness to scriptural precedents such as
those laid by the opening of St John’s Gospel or in rabbinic
principles of biblical interpretation, for Tynjanov arguments build
on de Saussure’s distinction between langue and parole by
contrasting the specific reference of a word in terms of its
immediate context with its universal aspect as part of a totality
created by all words of like meaning and appearance. A poet’s puns
or play on words produce much more than the jocular effects of
puns in nonliterary language but point to a connection between the
specific context-related significance of a word and its universal
aspect. For Tynjanov a word derives significance from more than
the context supplied by the sentence or passage to which it belongs
but also from other wider contexts, including that of the entire work
of which it is a part, that of the author’s entire literary output, that
of his or her historical situation and finally that of its being
subsumed by “the word” as Tynjanov defined it in its widest, its
universal sense. 36

19
Reflections on the Verb “To Be”
Can one consider “to be” in the light of Tynjanov’s theory of the
word? As many a teacher of language will know, “to be” is in some
ways the most problematic, irregular and infuriating of verbs. With
other verbs, at least, the infinitive signals the formal unity of its
various forms and manifestations irrespective of tense or
declination. “Be” as a word occurs only in the infinitive, the
imperative and subjunctive categories. Second, while verbs
generally denote some form of action, “to be” denotes a state of
existence with no necessary reference to any action at all. Some
languages can apparently dispense with the verb altogether. In
certain ways it poses an obvious antithesis of “to do” and it is only
in the imperative that “be” is dependent on “do” . This contrast
finds a parallel in the basic issue that confronts us in Hamlet.
The very ubiquity to the verb “to be” in all its various forms
renders it virtually featureless and inconspicuous in all but the
most exceptional cases, the line “To be or not to be” posing one of
them. Let us, however, consider another case where “to be” deserves
attention. It occurs early in the play in a scene placed at a juncture
before Hamlet meets his father’s ghost.
“If It be”
The following reference to the text of the play in Act I, Scene II
reveals Shakespeare’s interest in the verb “to be”, containing as it
does a contrast between being and seeming, essence and
appearance Act I, Scene II:
Queen:……..
Thou know’st ‘tis common; all that lives must die,
Passing through life to eternity.
Hamlet: Ay. Madam. It is common.

20
Queen: If it be,
Why seems it so particular with thee?
Hamlet: Seems, madam! Nay, it is; I know not ‘seems.’
The appearance of the word “be” in the words of Gertrude quoted
above has nothing of the resounding effect of “be” placed at the
beginning of Hamlet’s famed soliloquy. Even so, in his reply to his
mother Hamlet pounces on Gertrude’s choice of verbs changing the
form of the verb “to be” from the diffident subjunctive to the bold
indicative, which he then juxtaposes with “seems”. The use of
quotation marks in this case draws attention to words as individual
bits of language rather than to the information conveyed by words
when assuming their usual subservient role. In treating “seems” as
a noun and thus deviating from the rules of grammar, the author
again makes us aware of the mechanics of language which we
constantly use without reflecting on them. Hamlet proceeds to
expatiate on the difference between what is and what seems –
between Schein and Sein - in the lines quoted below:
It is not alone my inky cloak, good mother,
Not customary suits of solemn black,
Nor windy suspiration of forced breath,
No, not the fruitful river in the eye,
Nor the dejected ‘haviour of the visage,
Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief,
That can denote me truly. : these indeed seem.
They are all actions that a man might play:
But I have that within which passeth show.
Hamlet in Act I scene II evinces all the main traits of character
that later come to the fore and manifests his basic attitudes to the
world. These will undergo little qualitative change, even after he has
cause to wrestle with the possibility that Claudius has killed his
father. We find in this scene anticipations of what will more fully
emerge in great soliloquy in Act III, Sc. I. In Act I Sc. II he already
contemplates suicide while expressing countervailing fears instilled
by religious teaching when saying in the soliloquy that ends this
scene:

21
Oh, that this too solid flesh would melt
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew !
Oh that the Everlasting had not fix’t
His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter. ..
These lines together with inferences we can draw from the great
emphasis ][aced on the special prtmission required for Ophelia’s
burial suggest that Shakespeare was somewhat preoccupied with
the issue of suicide at the time of writing Hamlet. Speculations
about the author apart, Hamlet questions, even before his
encounter with the ghost, whether life has any true meaning. The
profundity of his underlying pessimism is temporarily occluded by
his situation as a son mourning his father’s death, but Claudius
and his mother shrewdly note that he exceeds the limits of filial
piety normally demanded by decorum. Claudius’s objection that
even mourning a parent’s death can become obsessive and
eventually exceed a socially acceptable limit comes over as
sagacious and temperate advice, should we disregard his vested
interest in raising it. As his exclamation …”Frailty, thy name is
woman !…..makes abundantly clear, Hamlet has already developed
a strong antipathy to womankind, which augurs ill for any future
relationship with a member of the opposite sex. The reason is clear.
What most galls him at this stage, as later, is the unseemly haste in
which his mother has entered into marriage with Claudius, his
father’s brother, a marriage he decries as “incestuous,” the same
word the ghost will also employ in due course. His invective seems
to combine his own sense of disgust with a defence of the Church’s
laws on marriage. Talk of “incest” immediately recalls the Freudian
and Jungian theories concerning the “Oedipus complex.”
Hamlet’s killing of Polonius occurs, significantly enough, in his
mother’s bedchamber and a reference he makes to Nero points to
his fear of becoming an unwilling matricide. This reference finds an
odd parallel on the occasion when Hamlet hails Polonius as
Jephthah, the biblical judge who slays his own daughter to fulfill a
rashly made vow. Few other plays outside Hamlet show how people
advertently or inadvertently bring death and harm to their nearest
and dearest, whether son, mother, sweetheart, uncle, niece or
prospective brother-in-law, a fact which seems to symbolize the

22
interdependence and inextricability of human relationships and
hence the impossibility of surgically clean assassinations. One of
the more laudable motives that inhibits Hamlet from killing
Claudius stems from this recognition. On the philosophical level
Hamlet fears committing himself to action because the
consequences of deeds are unpredictable and may well become the
agents of evil. It will also be interesting to take some account of C.
G. Jung’s variant understanding of the Oedipus complex, which he,
more emphatically than Freud, uncovered in that stage in cultural
development when great heroes like Ulysses and Hercules were
identified as human embodiments of the sun on its course through
day and night. According to Jung the male libido seeks its source
and future goal in embodiments of the female anima, which in line
with the logic of Jung’s main argument conflates mother and bride.
Jung saw art as a possibility of evading the logic implied by this
dread of incest, a possibility afforded by the artist’s exercise of
boundless creativity in the media of sound, word and physical
substances and in imaginative powers of sublimation. Hamlet’s
prevarications stave off death until the play’s cataclysmic end with
a commensurate extension of the scope given to the development
and articulation of words. As we know from The Thousand and One
Nights verbalizing can be a very effective way of stalling. Besides,
deferred action heightens interest in psychological and mental
tensions. Hamlet is a psycho-drama, a fact which Eliot and others
seem to have disregarded.
What a Difference a Ghost Makes
The entrance of the ghost occurring at a juncture set between the
passages under consideration does not induce a fundamentally new
attitude in Hamlet but at most serves as a catalyst effecting an
acceleration of already existing trends. The ghost makes Hamlet
aware of the possibility that his father was killed by his own
brother, but is a supernatural agent necessary as the only way of
pointing to such a possibility? On the strength of circumstantial
evidence alone Hamlet has reason enough to suspect his uncle of

23
being responsible for his father’s death. The evidence provided by a
ghost was in any case suspect according to the tenets of Christian
doctrine. The question as to whether the Devil could assume the
appearance of innocent mortals was a contentious issue that was
still being hotly debated at the time of the notorious witch trials in
Salem Massachusetts. Hamlet’s encounter with his father’s ghost
leads to no resolution of Hamlet’s malaise. It intensifies already
extant emotions and tensions to the point of making him even less
capable of reasoned action. The experience of encountering a
supernatural being serves only to produce feelings of headiness and
frenzy of the kind that has induced many a disoriented and
distracted young person to commit extra-judicial executions in the
name of a higher authority. Making decisions is difficult enough
when one has this world’s parameters to contend with without
having to worry about otherworldly dimensions. Hamlet’s fear that
the ghost might pose a malign influence, a centre of contagion, is
not to be dismissed lightly in view of subsequent events culminating
in the play’s final massacre.
“To Be or Not To Be”
Hamlet’s irresolute state of mind that follows his encounter with
the ghost is mirrored in the second passage in which the verb “to
be” is foregrounded. The celebrated soliloquy confirms what we
have been able to infer from Hamlet’s previous utterances in Act 1,
Scene II. He is not an assured believer in the promise of eternal life
according to the Christian creed though he nurtures lingering fears
about the possible suffering of a departed soul in purgatory or hell.
But is the soliloquy exclusively concerned with the question of the
soul’s survival after death? The words “To be or not to be” cannot be
adequately paraphrased by “to live on or not to live on.” The initial
prompt for the soliloquy is instigated by Hamlet’s act of
contemplating suicide, but beyond this point the soliloquy makes
little reference to Hamlet’s personal situation but rather expands
into a general philosophical discussion of the ills attending the
human condition. Viewed in a linguistic or grammatical light, “To be
or not to be” poses a striking use of the infinitive which in

24
subsequent lines recurs in “to die,” “to sleep,” and “to dream,”
creating the effect of an algebraic formula devised to discover the
unknown in terms of the known. However, as Hamlet himself
admits, his linguistic-analytical approach to comprehending non-
existence must ultimately prove inconclusive as a human being can
never directly confront death in his or her mind without dying in
the process, only the thought of death or images for death derived
from the mind of a living person. Thus Hamlet tests the very limits
of thought and its principal vehicle, language, particularly language
that relies on the use of metaphors. Here the verb “to be” plays a
central role, for in the processing of creating a metaphor we
elucidate the nature of the object of comparison by associating it
with something other than itself. Put simply, a metaphor arises
when you say that something is what it is not. Rational metaphors
such as similes state that one thing, person or entity is like
another. However, absolute or mystical metaphors state that one
such thing, person, etc is the other without further qualification.
The issues raised by Hamlet’s famed soliloquy are all-pervasive in
this play and possibly others written by Shakespeare, being rooted
in the spirit of an age in transition, an age when leading minds were
increasingly concerned with the nature of metaphors and language.
What after all posed the central point of contention between
Protestants and Catholics in Shakespeare’s age if not the metaphor
contained in the words “This is my body”? The flowering of the
theatre in Elizabethan England could be seen as a reaction to the
vacuum left by the cessation of medieval church ritual after the
introduction of the Reformation. The final scene seems to derive
much of its imagery by ironically inverting aspects the Eucharist
with the icons of the table and the cup of wine and by Hamlet’s
ironic use of the word “union” when ending Claudius’s life.
Hamlet and other persons surrounding him question not only
the validity of words and their ability to represent truth but all
signifiers in the domain of semiotics, of which language is only a
part. Perception and memory as representations of reality are not
always be assumed to be reliable, a point already intimated in the
first scene when Horatio and Marcellus discuss the sight of the
ghost.
Before my God, I might not this believe

25
Without the sensible and true avouch
Of my own eyes
Horatio to Marcellus, Act 1 Sc. 1
The unsettling implications of the Copernican revolution are
apparent in Hamlet’s protestation of love written on a note to
Ophelia:
Doubt thou the stars are fire;
Doubt that the sun doth move;
Doubt truth to be a liar;
But never doubt I love
Letter read to Gertrude by Polonius, Act ll Sc.
Il
Indeed the spirit of doubt conjured up in these points
anticipates the pose of absolute skepticism adopted by Descartes
towards outside reality which found definitive expression in the
dictum cogito ergo sum. Shakespeare gave voice to what has become
a central postmodern attitude to the arbitrariness of the sign, most
notably in Juliet’s words “What’s in a name?” A corollary to the
arbitrariness of the sign on the philosophical level is the
manipulation of the sign on the moral and aesthetic planes. The
case of The Mousetrap demonstrates the relevance of drama to
politics, leading some to conclude that this play within a play
recalled the uproar caused by the performance of Richard II at the
time of the Essex rebellion. The motif of the jester in Hamlet
epitomized by Hamlet’s meditation on Yorick’s skull belies the
prince’s declaration that he rejects all actions “that a man might
play”. In this light we may interpret the deaths of Hamlet and
Laertes as a reflection of an inseparable connection between
sportive play and the reality it imitates and is normally supposed to
harmlessly replace.
To Thine Own Self Be True

26
This above all ; to thine own self be true.
And it Thou canst not then be false to any man.
Must follow, as the night the day.
Act I Sc. III
Polonius’s parting words to Laertes betoken more that a piece of
well-meant paternal advice. They are predicated on the age-old
philosophical viewpoint that a person’s knowledge of the world and
all acts stemming from it are profoundly affected by the extent and
character of that person’s self-knowledge. In philosophical terms,
this means steering a middle course between the Scylla of
solipsistic isolation and the Charybdis of a belief in the possibility of
achieving absolute objectivity detached from morality and self-
interest.
In Hamlet such an insight evidently arrives too late to be of
much practical assistance to the main players at the end of the
drama. On the other hand, approaching death has a remarkable
way of concentrating the mind and sharpening awareness of what
essentially matters. In Hamlet and more obviously in Romeo and
Juliet it proves not only to be the dreaded universal destroyer but
also the reconciler of what cannot be united on this imperfect earth.
Romeo and Juliet at least points to a beneficial result of death for
the surviving society. Hamlet and Laertes are reconciled at the point
of death not simply because they realize that they have fallen victim
to Claudius’s evil machinations. They acknowledge their mutual
affinity as brothers in death. Gertrude drinks the poisoned wine
despite Claudius’s warning not to do so, which makes her dying act
a token of a desire to expiate her guilt and declare solidarity with
her son, thus, in the terms of Jung’s theory of the unconscious,
symbolizing the union of the male libido and the female anima.
Horatio volunteers to kill himself too, but Hamlet lays upon him the
charge of reporting to others the tragic events he has witnessed,
doubtless for the sake of posterity. Someone has to live on to report
the tale, as Shakespeare himself well knew. Fortinbras’s
commentary of “The sight is dismal” on surveying the corpses of
members of Denmark’s royal house might be taken as evidence of
Shakespeare’s descent to banality at so solemn a moment in the
play, but perhaps Fortinbras is reminding us that death is a
banality that in the end overtakes all, the good and the evil, the

27
wise and ignorant, nor can society and even the physical universe
itself defer death’s triumph indefinitely, be this the work of
Doomsday or the second law of thermo-dynamics, whether the
world ends with a bang or a whimper. At least, in a certain regard,
the mind’s recognition of the Eternal Now renders it indestructible,
leaving it to each individual to decide whether the thought of death
degrades or elevates the human spirit.
III
Wandering, the Worst of Sinning?
To my knowledge there is no chair in wandering studies to be
found any university or seat of learning in the world. This could be
considered surprising in view of the numerous references to
wandering and other derivatives of the verb “to wander” made by
literary critics and scholars, Geoffrey Hartman, Professor L.A.
Willoughby and Northrop Frye to mention those whose evaluations
of wandering will be the subject of our investigations in due course.
More important even than the fact that scholars and critics cannot
help incorporating words such as "wanderer" and "wandering" into
their books and articles is the fact that poets, particularly Goethe
and the German and English Romantic poets, used these words to
characterize themselves and their art, while celebrating their
newfound autonomy as originators and creators on the one hand
and while suffering from the burdens of isolation and self-
consciousness on the other.
The suddenness with which the word "wanderer" came into
prominence, its widespread diffusion not only in the German-
speaking world but also in the British Isles and the high

28
significance vested therein amount to nothing less than a
phenomenon for which an adequate explanation has yet to be
found. If one is to be found, the requisite explorations will
transcend any one academic discipline or field of study, whether
literary criticism, psychology or history but will rather require the
appropriate integration of all these disciplines. A rather daunting
assignment. It follows and one which in my view only a logocentric
method of textual analysis has any chance of completing.
Let us consider a passage in Don Juan by Lord Byron in which
the word “wandering” occurs and set this within the four contextual
fields which have been outlined earlier in this chapter. First, what is
the most obvious meaning of this word within the context set by the
subject the poets wished to discuss? Second, what function does
this word serve as a participatory element within the frame and
internal dynamics of Don Juan? To answer this question we should
consider other locations in Don Juan where derivatives of the verb
"to wander" are found. Third, what inferences can we draw from
other instances of such words as “wanderer” in Byron's works
understood as a mirror of the author's psychology? Fourth, how do
references to wandering recall used of the verb "to wander" and its
derivatives in poetic tradition and in particular in the works of John
Milton. To assume that wandering constitutes an overall unity
presupposes influences which transcend the limits of any
particular poem and even the mind of any particular poet, which
means we need to contend with theories proposed by Sigmund
Freud and G. C. Jung, particularly the latter in view of his theories
concerning the collective unconscious. 16
My way is to begin with the beginning;
The regularity of my design
Forbids all wandering as the worst of sinning.
Lord Byron, Don Juan, Canto the First, VII
"Wandering" here is not to be understood in the sense of

29
physical motion. In terms of the word's immediate contextual
setting it refers to what the speaker ostensibly intends to avoid, a
failure to present certain items of subject matter in an orderly and
strictly chronological manner.
The speaker announces his intention of beginning his account of
Juan's life by informing his readers about Juan's parentage in a
manner consistent with "the regularity of his design." Even so, it is
remarkable that he disparages "wandering" as "the worst of
sinning." As though even the most censorious of preceptors would
go so far as to discern in some badly organised term paper evidence
of gross moral turpitude! It is not out of the ordinary for a person to
use "wandering" as a synonym for immoral behaviour or, in a
different context, as a reference to incoherent or illogical self-
expression. Byron, however, contrasts both these meanings of
"wandering" within the space of the three lines of verse cited above.
In so doing he displays the poet's proclivity to play with words. Is
this merely indulging in a triviality? Let us consider the word
"wandering" within the context of Don Juan. Are there other
passages in this work in which "wandering" is associated with
"sinning" or "beginning"?
A reference to "sinning" suggests some item of epic content.
"Sinning" implies the existence of sinners and sinners form the
basis of a story. There are certain hints pointing to the nature of the
story in question. Taken together, the words “beginning” and
“parentage” could pose an allusion to mankind's first parents, and
there is a notable passage in Don Juan which includes several
occurrences of the verb to "wander" and explicit allusions to
Milton's version of the story of Adam and Eve. The verb "to wander"
(in declined form) occurs three times in the passage describing the
shore-side walk taken by Juan and Haidée, the prelude of their
sexual and a spiritual union ("Canto the Second" The first line of
stanza CLXXXII).
The words "And forth they wandered, her sire being gone" imply
that the young couple took advantage of the temporary absence of

30
paternal surveillance. The lovers' walk with its sequel recalls
Milton's version of the events that led to Adam and Eve falling from
grace, a connection that becomes explicit from what we read at the
end of the eighty-ninth stanza, for here it is asserted that first love
is "that All / Which Eve has left her daughters since the Fall". In the
ninety-third stanza we find reference to "our first parents." Like
them Juan and Haidée ran the risk of "being damned forever."
Consciously or unconsciously (in my view probably the former),
Byron was influenced by Milton's use of "to wander" in a passage in
Paradise Lost in which there is an altercation between Adam and
Eve about Eve's yielding to what Adam terms her "desire of
wandering." Eve reminds Adam of this choice of words referring to
her "will / Of wandering, as thou call'st it" (IX. 1145,1146). Shortly
we shall consider another passage revealing Milton's particular
interest in the word "to wander."
Byron not only betrays interest in that aspect of Milton's
description of Eve's walk though Paradise that involves "sinning,"
which for Byron inevitably had a strong sexual connotation. Byron's
reference to "sinning" is at one level little more than a puerile jibe at
certain attitudes towards sexual mores. Byron's description of
Haidée and Juan walking along the shore also captures that
sensuous and even voluptuous element in the Miltonic description
of a walk that culminated in Eve's emotional a seduction by the
serpent (who approaches his quarry with a mariner's skill). Both
Milton's description of Eve's walk and Byron's treatment of the
scene culminating in the lovers' union of Haidée and Juan inculcate
a sense of unity expressing a sublimated form of sexual or libidinal
energy, perhaps of a kind that psychologists of the Freudian or
Jungian schools believe to be the mainspring of all human
creativity. Miltonic influence in the respect just indicated also
leaves a trace in the final passage in Shelley's Epipsychidion
describing a walk that leads to a lovers' union. Significantly, this
passage is introduced by the verb "to wander."
Let us consider another way in which "wandering" and

31
"beginning" are related to each other in Don Juan, and indeed in
Byron's other long poem incorporating his travels. An occurrence of
the verb "to wander" is juxtaposed to a reference to the Muse in the
Dedication to Don Juan and again in the first strophe of Childe
Harold's Pilgrimage. In the eighth stanza of the Dedication, the
speaker refers to himself as one "wandering with pedestrian Muse"
in contrast to Southey depicted as one seated on a winged steed. In
the tenth stanza the evocation of Milton is not merely hinted at, for
the speaker alludes to a passage in Paradise Lost in which there is a
clear reference to Pegasus and "wandering" conflating the word's
associations with poetic inspiration and disorientation.
Up led by thee
Into the Heav'n of Heav'ns I have presumed,
An Earthly Guest, and drawn Empyreal Air,
Thy temp'ring, with like safety guided down
Return me to my Native Element
Lest from this flying steed unrein'd, (as once Bellephoron,
though from a lower Clime)
Dismounted, on th'Aleian Field I fall
Erroneous, there to wander and forlorn (12-20)
Again, as in the dispute between Eve and Adam, the word
"wander" is foregrounded, here in a brief exercise in comparative
philology. Milton recalls the original meaning of "erroneous" in the
light of its derivation from errare in Latin (to stray, to wander).
Similarly, "Aleian" means "land of wandering" in Greek. In this
passage Milton seems to anticipate the crisis in modern poetry
centring on the nature of poetic inspiration and the identity of the
poet.
IV

32
The Multivalence of the Word “Wanderer” in
“Wandrers Nachtlied” by Goethe
Looking back in 1820 on his long and eventful career Goethe
wrote "Zueignung," a poem in which he addressed Shakespeare as
"William" and Frau Charlotte von Stein as "Lida" naming them his
closest and most cherished friends to whom "he owed all that he
was."
That such high adulation should be paid to Frau von Stein is
not particularly surprising. When Goethe, beset by inner doubts
and troubled emotions, first joined the court of Duke Karl August in
Weimar in 1775, it was Frau von Stein who took young Goethe
under her wing, soon becoming his mentor and muse in residence.
Though sexual attraction doubtless played a part in Goethe's
relationship to Frau von Stein, their friendship was essentially
platonic and high-minded and thus proved able to survive Frau von
Stein's disappointment with Goethe's amorous pursuits in Rome
and his other than platonic relationship with Christiane Vulpius,
who eventually became his wife.
It was to Frau von Stein that Goethe dedicated the cycle of poems
sharing the general title of Verse an Lida. In these Goethe's use of
the pronoun du is conspicuous, leading the noted Goethe scholar
Erich Trunz to remark that the poems in this cycle are DU-oriented,
that is to say, of a deeply personal and dialogical nature.13 This
orientation of Goethe's, Trunz adds, contrasts with the
"monologizing" mode which in his view typifies the cycle of poems
dedicated to Lili, the preceding love in Goethe's life.
13
Erich Trunz, Goethe Gedichte, ed., Erich Trunz (Munich, 1929 (1982) 537.

33
There is a notable poem that is preeminently Du-oriented,
though not included in the Verse an Lida: "Wandrers Nachtlied."
One can regard "Wandrers Nachtlied" both as an undivided unity
and as two separate poems placed together on the basis of their
close affinity. "Wandrers Nachtlied" was originally the title of a poem
a copy of which was inserted in a letter that Goethe sent to Frau
von Stein in 1776. The poem entitle "Ein Gleiches" bears testimony
to Charlotte von Stein's positive influence on Goethe, the whilom
fugitive and vagrant, by helping to engender in him the patience of
the scientific observer and the poise that befits the consummate
poet-artist.
"Wandrers Nachtlied," Goethe's most celebrated and widely
discussed lyrical poem, remains as enigmatic as it is famous. It is
indeed remarkable that so short a poem, which is in fact a unity
composed of two poems written in 1776 and 1780 respectively,
continues to intrigue the minds of literary critics by its profundity
and allusive power of association. Perhaps the secret of the poem's
claim on the attention of poetry lovers, scholars and literary critics
lies in its brevity. More on that later.
We have Goethe's authority for treating the two poems that
conventionally go by the titles "Wandrers Nachtlied I" and
"Wandrers Nachtlied II" as a unity. Goethe gave the poem composed
in 1780 the title of "Ein Gleiches" (meaning "the same"), thus
equating it in some deep sense with "Wandrers Nachtlied."
In what way then do the "Wandrers Nachtlied" composed in
1776 and "Ein Gleiches" pose a unity? On the face of it they are
quite different. In the first case the speaker implores some heavenly
power to assuage his troubled soul, and in the second, the speaker
describes a nightscape revealing high hills and surrounding trees
before receiving a promise that he like the silent birds nestling in
the nearby wood will soon find rest.
The very words in the title of the poem prompt a further
question. What is the relevance of the word "Wanderer" to the
subject matter of the two poems combined into one? In the ordinary

34
way we may understand a Wanderer as one who moves on a
journey in the literal sense, that is to say physically. The German
verb wandern has none of the somewhat negative associations of
the English to wander with the notion of disorientation and
wooliness. It often refers affirmatively to the acts of rambling for
pleasure, hiking and migrating.
In "Wandrers Nachtlied I" there is no reference at all to physical
motion and in "Ein Gleiches" there little to suggest any, either. One
might imagine the observer of the hills and trees described in the
poem to be a wayfarer but there is no need to. The poem harks back
to an occasion in Goethe's life when he viewed the natural setting of
a location near Ilmenau where he was stationed as a minister of the
Weimar court with the brief of inspecting mines. His vantage point
was a huntsman's lodge on a hillside path known as the
Kichelbahn. On the basis of this biographical detail he could not be
described as a wayworn traveller.
The word Wanderer in German commonly conveys the notion of
a pilgrim on a spiritual journey through life, seeking eternal rest in
the hereafter. In this sense the word "Wanderer" fits the mood
instilled by "Wandrers Nachtlied I," less so in "Ein Gleiches." In its
entirety “Wandrers Nachtlied" appeals to religious sentiments
without being a religious poem in the ordinary sense.
We must leave the purlieu of dictionary definitions and consider
what light other references to the "Wanderer” in Goethe's writing
might throw on the nature of the "Wanderer" in the present case.
The word first makes an entry into Goethe's writing in the form of a
so-called "speech," in effect a manifesto pleading for the
emancipation of drama from hidebound neo-Aristotelian rules. The
"Rede zum Shakespeares Tag" (according to present-day spelling) of
1771 declares Shakespeare to be "the greatest of all wanderers"
("der grösste Wandrer"), a title earned on the strength of the vast
scope of the universe created by Shakespeare's dramatic powers
and poetic imagination. In effect Shakespeare becomes a surrogate
muse, now that a literal belief in muses was a thing of the past. In

35
short, “the Wanderer” stands for the poetic imagination without any
necessity to refer to journeys or make allusions to pilgrims or other
traditional allegories. True, in those poems and the novel that
Goethe wrote in the years that immediately followed his composition
of the "Rede zum Shakespeares Tag" the word "Wanderer" does
refer to acts of walking or touring, and in the case of Die Leiden des
jungen Werthers it exploits its allegorical potentiality, but in all
these cases such references were subservient to Goethes artistic
and aesthetic goals. Goethe staunchly defended his belief in the
artist's responsibility towards society and affirmed the inextricable
connection between literature and personal experience. He did not
see it as his role to deny – or, for that matter, to directly assert –
orthodox Christian tenets. Art for him was the power for reconciling
and integrating human aspirations and needs on any level, be this
physical, spiritual or aesthetic.
1. Implications Drawn from Occurrences of the Pronoun Du
in “Wandrers Nachtlied”
Let us now turn our attention to another feature of "Wandrers
Nachtlied," the prominence it gives to the personal pronoun du.
This pronoun occurs three times in "Wandrers Nachtlied" and "Ein
Gleiches." In the two poems that share the title "Wandrers
Nachtlied" the word du occupies a strategic place at the beginning
of the first poem in the line "Der du von dem Himmel bist" and at
the end of the second poem ("Ruhest du auch"). Who is being
addressed in either case?
In the first poem the reader understands that the speaker is a
supplicant and the one whom he intreats is a heavenly power, the
personification of Peace (Friede). The first line echoes the opening
sentence of the Lord's Prayer with the subtle yet significant
difference that the one whose saving intervention is besought is
from Heaven, not in Heaven. The speaker betrays that he is in great
perplexity from being buffeted by adversity and torn between the

36
extremes of sorrow and ecstasy. He ascribes to the power he
addresses the ability to assuage misery by according an equal
measure of emotional fulfillment. "Wandrers Nachtlied I" thus
evinces the diction and tone that typify the high style of poetic
tradition. The same is not true of "Wandrers Nachtlied (II)," where
we find no element of traditional poetic diction, no evocation of a
heavenly power or figure from the domain of mythology. Instead, the
poem makes succinct references to natural objects and phenomena,
hilltops, tall trees and small birds. It ends with a promise that the
one to whom the song is addressed will soon be at rest.
The first and last occurrences of du generate a dialogue between
the supplicant and the one from whom he seeks the bestowal of
peace. The occurrence in the middle – spürst du - raises an
important question. Why does the speaker tell the person he
addresses what this person sees and senses for himself? When
would one normally say to another person "You see mountain tops"
or "You do not hear birds in the woods” ? Does the speaker only
imagine he has a companion? Does du conform to common usage
in lending the pronoun an impersonal sense as in the phrase "You
never can tell" ? Such a conclusion does not tally with the final line,
which indicates that the speaker addresses a particular person, a
friend to whom the same speaker promises the consolation of rest
by the words, "Balde ruhest du auch."
There may be situations in life when somebody points out to
others what they can see for themselves. Let us imagine that a
teacher of art wishes to draw attention to the salient features of a
landscape painting. By stating what his or her students can see for
themselves the teacher could well imply a mode of interpretation
relevant to a greater appreciation of the picture in question. The
speaker emerges as the mentor or guardian of the person to whom
his or her words are addressed. Understood as a mentor or one
endowed with knowledge or insight superior to that of his or her
ward, the speaker poses an unpretentious or downscaled
counterpart of the august divinity to which the speaker directs his

37
plea in "Wandrers Nachtlied I" and we find a parallel between the
peace sought by the speaker in "Wandrers Nachtlied I" and the rest
promised by the speaker in "Wandrers Nachtlied II."
If a landscape in real life can be treated as a picture, why should
not a picture become a physical landscape? Goethe pointed to such
a possibility in a poem entitled "Amor als Landschaftsmaler," ("Amor
as a Landscape Painter"). Here we see with what ease a painted
landscape becomes an animated landscape of the kind we
experience on an excursion in a natural setting. The painter is
Amor alias Cupid or Eros. The idea that love and art combine in the
function of mediators between the inner world of the creative
imagination and the outer world as perceived by the physical senses
informs Goethe vision of Rome under the guardianship of Venus as
described in The Roman Elegies. With regard to "Wandrers
Nachtlied" I contend that it is the spirit of Lida which plays the
role of mediator purely by dint of all that we can infer from the
effect of the pronoun du within its contextual placing in poetry. My
reason for this contention is this:
I begin my argument by considering an implication of the
second instance of du in the light of Longfellow's translation. The
words "Spürest du" in the second "Night-Song" are rendered by
Longfellow as "Hearest thou." Any English translation of the
German du in a poetic text cannot quite convey the force of the
German pronoun. The English you neither specifies a reference to
only one person, nor does it in itself indicate that there is a close or
familiar relationship between the speaker and the person
addressed. Thou corresponds to du in terms of number and
familiarity, but carries possibly unwanted associations with certain
biblical and literary traditions. An evocation of tradition may well be
consistent with the lofty tones of the first "Night-Song" so
reminiscent of the Lord's Prayer in the King James Bible. However,
the self-same tone loses something of the intimate feeling conveyed
by du in the second "Night-Song."
The German verb spüren has meanings in the range to trace, to

38
sense, to make out and to discern under difficult conditions. Why did
Longfellow render this verb using to hear? It seems unlikely that the
answer will be found in any need to make concessions to demands
of meter. Spüren does not suggest which of the five senses allows
one to be aware of some object. In the given context Longfellow's
choice of the verb to hear suggests that the speaker relies
exclusively on the auditory channel of perception when detecting
the slightest movement in the tree tops to which he refers. Common
sense tells us that despite the advent of darkness it is often possible
to see objects at night. Even if we allow that the speaker can attune
his hearing to movements in tree tops (as opposed to those in their
lower branches), we still have to consider the hilltops referred to in
the poem.
Longfellow establishes by the very use of the verb to hear that
the reader records his physical perceptions. To suggest that the
vision of the hills is not physical in character but rather some
projection of the imaginative faculty is to deny the unity and
consistency of the poem itself. We face none of these objections if
we accept that the second night-song depicts a nocturnal landscape
as seen by the speaker. Professor E. M. Wilkinson suggests in an
appreciation of the poem that the speaker sees what he describes
by the twilight of evening.14 The only other source of light capable of
illuminating the hills and trees to which the speaker refers is that of
the moon. When faced with two equally plausible explanations, even
a rigorously objective critic may find it appropriate to consider one
poem in the light of another written by the author, preferably at
about the same time.
In one of the draft versions of "Wandrers Nachtlied" the opening
line runs "Über allen Gefilden" ("Above every field"). This evinces a
strong similarity with words found in "An den Mond," which Goethe
14
"We point to the immediacy with which language here conveys the hush of evening Ueber
allen Gipfeln / Ist Ruh. In the long u of Ruh and in the ensuing pause we detect the perfect
stillness that descends upon nature with the coming of twilight/" Professor E. M. Wilkinson,
"Goethe's Poetry," German Life and Letters, 1949. 316-329.

39
dedicated to Frau von Stein. Here is the second strophe of this
poem:
Breitest über mein Gefild
Lindernd deinen Blick
Wie der Liebsten Auge, mild
Über mein Geschick.
You spread over my pastures / soothingly your glance / like
the eyes of the dearest one /, mildly / over my destiny.
If we concede that "An den Mond" evinces a deep affinity with
the poems that share the title of "Wandrers Nachtlied," it follows
that the second person pronoun situated in the first line of
"Wandrers Nachtlied" (1776) contains the same dual reference. As
the poems entitled "Wandrers Nachtlied" form a unity, we have a
basis for inferring that the speaker describes a moonlit landscape in
the poem of 1780. But if this is the case, why should this poem
contain no explicit reference to the moon? I offer an explanation of
this absence at a later juncture. However, I now briefly submit
reasons why the poem's implicit suggestions concerning the effect of
moonlight are compatible with the deep psychological influences
which Professor Willoughby discusses in association with Goethe's
use of the word "Wanderer."15
2. Why is There no Explicit Reference to the Source of Light,
Whether the Moon or Twilight, by which the Observer
Perceives the Nightscape Composed of Trees and Hills?
.15
L. A. Willoughby, ''The Image of the 'Wanderer' and the 'Hut' in Goethe's Poetry,'' Etudes
Germaniques, July 1949.

40
In poetic usage the English and German words sharing the form
"Wanderer" arouse identical or similar associations, among them
those of the "Wanderer" and the moon. Indeed, Shelley's "Lines
written in the Bay of Lerici" begins with an apostrophe to the moon
with the words "Bright wanderer." In my view there is an implicit
association of the "Wanderer" and the moon in Coleridge's The Rime
of the Ancient Mariner. In his article entitled "Romanticism and
'Anti-Self-Consciousness"' 16 G. H. Hartman identifies the Mariner
as the "Wanderer" or "Wandering Jew." The Mariner is finally
released from the curse that he brought upon himself when he
blesses sea serpents he sees by the light of the moon. Parallel
treatments of the associated themes of the Wanderer and the moon
in German and English poetry cannot be readily explained in terms
of adherence to some convention or well established tradition. In my
view an explanation of this phenomenon must be sought in the
deep levels of the psyche. Professor Carl Gustav Jung constantly
elucidated his theories by referring to the archetypal wanderers
that appear in ancient mythologies.17 In this connection he pointed
16
Geoffrey H. Hartman, "Romanticism and 'Anti-Self-Consciousness,"' Romanticism and
Consciousness Essays in Criticism, ed. Harold Bloom (New York, 1970).
17
"The nature of wandering in psychological terms is discussed in the fifth chapter of
Psychology of the Unconscious. I cite a passage from this chapter as translated by Beatrice M.
Hinkle: "The wandering is a representation of longing, of the ever-restless desire, which nowhere
finds its object, for unknown to itself, it seeks the lost mother, the wandering association renders
the Sun comparison easily intelligible, also under this aspect, the heroes resemble the wandering
Sun, which seems to justify the fact that the
myth of the hero is a sun myth. But the myth of the hero, however, is, as it appears to me, the
myth of our own suffering unconscious, which has an unquenchable longing for all the deepest
sources of our own being."

41
to "solar" heroes driven by a libidinal impulse to achieve union with
that aspect of the consciousness that gives rise to the image of a
goddess of the night, sometimes the moon, representing the anima,
the female aspect of the self, sought by the libido.
G. H. Hartman interprets poems that present the theme of a
journey as expressions of the imaginative process when engaged in
the composition of poetry. I continue this discussion exploring ways
in which words and images encountered in "Wandrers Nachtlied"
mirror the quality and nature of the poems themselves. Let us once
more consider aspects of "Wandrers Nachtlied" in the light of
Longfellow‘s translation. Longfellow's rendering of "Vögelein" as
"birds" in the second "Night-Song" does not convey the diminutive
force of the suffix indicating "little birds." What is lost by this
inaccuracy? We are surely not considering here some aspect of
ornithology but a reflection of an internal aspect of the poem itself. I
find corroboration for this conclusion in a word that also implies a
reference to poetry and poetic inspiration, namely in "Hauch"
("breath"), which immediately precedes the line beginning "Die
Vögelein," for the words "die Vögelein" and "kaum einen Hauch"
share the feature of denoting a slight measure. These intimations
are consonant with the tone of the second "Night-Song" with its
quality of reticence and lack of any superfluous word or image. It is
the bare economy of language evident in the poem, with its
tendency to stress the minimal or negative aspects of what it
describes which lends the poem its especially vibrant qualities and
its density of associations. Again the line "Die Vögelein schweigen
im Walde" will serve to illustrate this point. In the normal way it
should be translated as "The little birds are silent in the wood."
Longfellow's translation of this line offers one possible explanation
of the birds' silence, but forfeits the stark simplicity of the original,
which stresses absence and negation. If, as I earlier argued, a
perception of light is implied by the speaker s reference to inaudible

42
objects, the absence of any reference to a source of light again
reflects the poet's avoidance of any superfluous statement.
The minimalism that characterizes "Wandrers Nachtlied"
enhances the suggestive power those few words that compose it,
making us unusually aware that words exist in their own right and
are not merely subservient to a concise referential and designating
role. This is nowhere more clearly evident than in the case of the
word "Wanderer." No synonym of Wanderer, whether wayfarer,
pilgrim, or itinerant artist covers the full range of meaning that
inheres in "Wanderer," and no dramatic or contextual setting
foregrounds one sense of "Wanderer" at the expense of another. Any
resultant ambiguity does not lead to confusion or contradiction, as
interpretations of the poem based on a regard for one of its
meanings complement and enhance alternative interpretations
based on another understanding of the word's possible meaning.
This ambiguity comes to light if we reflect on the nature of the "rest"
that is finally promised to the Wanderer. This might be construed
as physical rest on a traveller's return to home and family after the
rigours of a long journey. It could betoken the rest of a believer after
life's journey is over, or a release from tensions that assail the
poet's peace of mind. In recognition of what Goethe called
"Wiederspiegelung," the interaction of art and life, we gather that all
the aspects of "wandering" just mentioned colour the full meaning
of the word "Wanderer." We should not consider this word only in
terms of its power to define subject matter. It implies structure,
contrast, relationships and reciprocity. This is clearly evident in the
antithesis of "Wanderer" and "rest" in "Wandrers Nachtlied," or
indeed, within the general context of Goethe's poetic works, as
Professor L. A. Willoughby convincingly demonstrates in his article
"The Image of the 'Wanderer' and the 'Hut' in Goethe's Poetry."
If the associations of "Wanderer" and other forms derived from
the verbs wandern and to wander harbour the same wealth of
implications, we should expect to discover similar themes and
antitheses in poems in which such forms occur. Certain similarities

43
of this kind may be the result of "influence." According to Jonathan
Wordsworth, his renowned forebear, William Wordsworth, was
deeply impressed by Goethe's Der Wandrer as mediated to him by a
translation of this poem by William Taylor of Norwich.18 In entitling
the translation "The Wanderer," Taylor anticipated Longfellow’s
choice of the same word in the title "Wanderer's Night-Songs." In
Jonathan Wordsworth's view, Goethe's influence gave rise to the
figure of the Wanderer in The Excursion. It is, however, in a
comparison of "Wandrers Nachtlied" and "I wandered lonely as a
cloud" that I believe we are able to discover the deepest affinities
shared by Goethe and Wordsworth. In both poems we witness a
vision of natural objects which effects a perfect balance of
subjectivity and objectivity. The communion of the observer and the
observed springs from a harmony of the self-conscious and the
unconscious operations of the poet's mind. The merging of these
modes of consciousness does not result in either poem in an
obliteration of references to recalled experience. Indeed, we can
even assign precise dates to the experiences which prompted
Goethe and Wordsworth to write these poems. However, the poems
also evince that power which transcends the normal individual or
personal consciousness, the power the Romantics called "the
imagination."
Professor E. M. Wilkinson observes in connection with the
second "Night-Song" that the poem reveals the essential order of
language itself. 19 I believe a similar claim can be made for "I
wandered lonely as a cloud," for reasons that should become clear
in a future discussion. It is noteworthy that both poems begin with
the word Wanderer or a declined form of the verb to wander,
18
Jonathan Wordsworth, The Music of Humanity (New York / Evanston, 1969).
19
Elisabeth Wilkinson, Goethe's poetry, German Life and Letters. N. S. 2, 1949, 316-392: "Here
in this lyrical poem his (Goethe's) experience of natural process has been so completely
assimilated into the forms of language, that it is communicated to us directly by the order of the
words,

44
thereby typifying a trait in the poetry of their age. A conspicuous
number of celebrated poems written by Goethe and his Romantic
contemporaries contain the word Wanderer in their titles. The
frequency of this occurrence is so conspicuous that one might be
misled into concluding that the word Wanderer is limited in
function to serving as some conceit or convention. One finds
occurrences of the verb to wander at the beginning of English
Romantic poems which echo traditional evocations of the wandering
Muse.20 If we discover essentially the same phenomenon reflected in
occurrences of the word Wanderer in German poetry and those of
the less conspicuous but no less significant appearances of the verb
to wander in Romantic English poetry, we have cause to ponder
whether the Muse has truly departed from modern poetry. In my
view no prevalent influence or convention, and least of all
coincidence, provides a full explanation for the affinities and shared
associations noted in this discussion.
V
"I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" – The Myth of
Narcissus and Milton’s Muse
One difference between a gardener’s comments on daffodils over
the neighbour’s fence and Wordsworth's description of these flowers
in "I wandered lonely as a cloud" resides in the fact that the poem is
part of a literary tradition and therefore invites comparison with
other poems addressed to the same theme. Frederick A. Pottle
considers this poem in the light of tradition in an article entitled
20
Most noticeably in Byron's Childe Harold' s Pilgrimage and Blake's Milton.

45
"The Eye and the Object in the Poetry of Wordsworth." 21 He notes
with reference to "I wandered lonely as a cloud":
Ever since 1807, when Wordsworth published this poem,
daffodils have danced and laughed, but there is nothing
inevitable about it. The Greek myth of Narcissus is not exactly
hilarious; and even Herrick, when he looked at daffodils saw
something far from jocund.
Even after 1807 a reference to daffodils in poetry may still retain
an element of solemnity admixed with religious mysticism, as the
final strophe of A. E. Housman's "The Lent Lily" makes clear:
Bring baskets now, and sally
Upon the spring's array,
And bear from hill and valley
The daffodil away
That dies on Easter day.
The daffodils described in "I wandered lonely as a cloud,"
whatever their mythical and traditional associations, recall a real
event in Wordsworth's life and personal experience. Pottle ponders
whether a recognition of this fact can contribute to an evaluation of
Wordsworth's poem, thus broaching one of the most contentious
issues in literary criticism: What is the relationship between poetry
and "external" factors in the domains of a poet's biography and
historical setting? Wishing to clarify the nature of this relationship,
Pottle cites the entry in Dorothy's journal telling of the occasion
21
Frederick A. Pottle, "The Eye and the Object in the Poetry of Wordsworth," Romanticism and
Consciousness, ed. Harold Bloom (New York, 1970) 273-287. Originally in Yale Review. Vol.
(Autumn 1951).

46
when she and her brother suddenly came across the daffodils the
abiding impression of which is captured in "I wandered lonely as a
cloud." Pottle attaches great importance to divergences between the
description of the daffodils recorded in the journal and
Wordsworth's poetic vision of the flowers, for these, according to
Pottle, enable a critic to ascertain the scope of the imagination’s
particular sphere of operation in treating material drawn from sense
data and experienced events.
Pottle notes two highly significant divergences between Dorothy's
and her brother's descriptions of daffodils in "I wandered lonely as a
cloud." First, the poem conveys the point of view of a solitary
speaker beside a lake. The discrepancy between the descriptions of
daffodils in poem and journal entails a polarity between the
"solitariness" of the speaker and the "sociability" imputed to the
crowd of daffodils, endowed as they are, both in poem and journal,
with the human attributes of joy and the ability to laugh and dance.
A further discrepancy between poem and journal concerns
implications of word choice. While in Dorothy's account there is a
reference to a "wind" that animated the scene she described, the
poem assigns vital power to a "breeze." Dorothy's journal leaves no
doubt that the April day on which she and her brother were
impressed by the sight of daffodils was overcast and far from
springlike in any positive sense.
Despite certain misgivings about Wordsworth's choice of the
word "breeze," Pottle concedes that the mildness it implies is fully
consistent with the positive, indeed triumphant, mood engendered
by the poem. According to Pottle the "simple" joy evinced by the
daffodils reveals the workings of the imagination as it transmutes
raw experience and the emotions it arouses into one "simple
emotion." Adducing evidence from "The Leech Gatherer" and other
poems, Pottle argues that Wordsworth's imagery rarely incorporates
an exact record of particular memories. Indeed, he calls into
question whether the poem owes any intrinsic quality to the
memory of an actual incident. For him the poem is essentially the

47
product of the simplifying and unifying operation of the
imagination, and as such poses "a very simple poem."
Is “I wandered lonely as a cloud“ as simple as Pottle suggests? I
find grounds for the view that the poem is far from simple in any
unqualified sense. For reasons I shall now adduce, one may trace a
certain ambiguity in the "simple" joy attributed to the daffodil
encountered by the speaker during his walk beside a lake.
Pottle himself establishes that the poem contains a juxtaposition
of contrasting elements in noting the polarity of "solitariness" and
"sociability." With reference to a similarity in the appearance of the
daffodils and the nebulous aspect of the Milky Way, Pottle intimates
a further contrast or polarity associating the earthbound and the
celestial or, on the temporal plane, day and night. Our sense of the
poem's complexity may be much enhanced if we reflect on the
effects produced by the set of contrasts that inform the poem. Let
us consider these interlocking contrasts in greater detail. An
antithetic relationship between the earthbound wanderer and the
cloud to which he compares his motion poses the first intimation of
the opposition between the earthly and celestial.
The cloud establishes a reference to things of nebulous
appearance, and hence a classification that subsequently embraces
the visual effects of the daffodils, specks of light reflected by the
lake, and the Milky Way. The strophe containing the reference to
the Milky Way poses a later addition to the poem's original three
strophes. However, this addition reinforces a contrast implicit in the
poem as it originally stood, a contrast rooted in the distinction
between two modes of consciousness, that of the mind exposed to
the intrusion of sensations from the external world and that of the
mind creating its own images in dreams and dreamlike conditions.
In other words, we are dealing here with modes of interaction
between the conscious and unconscious. The wanderer experiences
two visions of daffodils, those seen in a natural environment, and
those perceived by his mind in "pensive mood."
Only the daffodils independently created in the poet's mind

48
should fully express "pure joy" according to the logic of Pottle's
arguments, as only they have undergone the full process of
ingestion effected by the simplifying and unifying power of the
imagination. If this is not the case, why should the speaker
distinguish between the vision of daffodils perceived by the inward
eye and the daffodils which the speaker saw when out walking? A
number of Wordsworth's works contain lines implying that
immediate visual perceptions entail a sense of discomfort at a time
before the mind is able to assimilate new sense impressions. Even
in "I wandered lonely as a cloud" Wordsworth's choice of words
suggests that the speaker suffers the intrusion of an invincible,
albeit joyful, invasion appearing as a "host" in the (military)
formation of ten thousand. While an element of threat is at most
implied in "I wandered lonely as a cloud," the military connotation
of "host" in biblical English is fully explicit in the opening of another
of Wordsworth's poems, "To the Clouds":
Army of Clouds! Ye winged Host in troops.
Frederick Pottle's discussion of "I wandered lonely as a cloud"
reveals a high degree of sensitivity to the implication of particular
words found in the poem, notably "breeze," "dance" and "daffodil"
with the latter’s power of evoking the myth of Narcissus. It is in
some ways odd that Pottle makes no reference to the verb
"wandered" despite its strategic position in the first line of the
poem. We noted earlier the near invisibility of verbs in comparison
to substantives. A linguist might explain this phenomenon as the
result of the verb's diffuse influence on the stream of discourse. Be
that as it may, in the process of considering the occurrence of
"wandered" in the light of its position, meaning and structural
function, I now hope to complement and amplify Pottle's arguments
and insights respecting "I wandered lonely as a cloud." Taking a leaf
from Dante's four-level approach to interpreting a text and setting
the word "wandered" at the centre of the four contextual planes

49
proposed above, let us consider the word at four levels of
significance, namely
:
 First, what does "wandered" mean in the light of its immediately
recognisable context?
 Second, how does the word function as an element in the poem
viewed as an aesthetic construct?
 Third, what is the word's significance as an index of
Wordsworth's development both as a private individual and a
poet?
 Fourth, how does the word relate to poetic tradition and the
"allegorical" aspect of the poem?
In the following four sections (i-iv), these questions will be
addressed in the order given above.
(i)-Romantic poets occasionally chose the verb to wander in
statements which made disparaging reference to the works of their
contemporaries, though they themselves accorded the word high
significance in their own works. In Don Juan there is a reference to
Juan as a youth who "wandered by glassy brooks, / Thinking
unutterable things." These words, found in the 19th stanza of the
first Canto, are followed in the next stanza by a reference to
Wordsworth:
He, Juan (and not Wordsworth), so pursued
His self-communion with his own high soul.
I can imagine that Byron, when writing these lines, had "I
wandered lonely as a cloud" in mind, as they point to two essential
aspects of "wandering" in that poem: namely physical movement
and the heightened state of consciousness that attends such
movement. Some proponents of literary theory see poetry as the
product of a purely mental process, which leads them to deny with

50
the zeal of the ancient Gnostics any living and reciprocal ties
between poetry and physical, historical or biographical reality, but if
we ignore or belittle the physical nature of the motion referred to in
the poem, we will make little sense of the essential contrast that lies
at the heart of the poem, namely that which emerges when we
compare the effects of physical perception with the power of the
mind to produce its own images autonomously.
For all his mockery of Wordsworth "wandering," Byron's use of
the verb to wander betrays his concern with the same fundamental
relationship between the inner world of thought and imagination
and the outer world that intrudes into a traveller's consciousness
through the channel of sensory perception. As the poetry of both
Byron and Wordsworth shows, the experience of unexpected sights
or other sensations could induce feelings of vulnerability, which in
turn prompted the quest for a countervailing influence, some
process of the mind capable of ingesting elements of extraneous
origin. The experience of physical motion and travel, as we know,
will always tend to enhance a person's awareness of the exterior
environment. This normal enhancement was heightened further in
the Romantic period. As M. M. Bakhtin has pointed out, the poetry
of Byron was subject to the process of "novelization." 22 The novel is
that genre which in its nature thwarts any attempt to impose a
hierarchical structure upon it, even when influencing that most
traditional of genres, poetry. The typical proclivity of Wordsworth
and Byron to grasp some apparently unimportant object or incident
and invest this with universal significance finds a precedent in
Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Les Rêveries du Promeneur Solitaire and
Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey, in both cases the author’s
final work. It would seem from this that we are dealing here with a
general literary rather than a purely poetical phenomenon in
Romantic verse and its immediate precursor, the literature of
sensibility.
22
M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin Tx., 1981).

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