TO_SHOW_THAT_CELEBRATED_WORKS_OF_LITERAT.pdf

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TO SHOW THAT CELEBRATED WORKS OF
LITERATURE IMPINGE ON MATTERS OF
THEOLOGY
“Spilled Religion“ vs. Spilled Theology
By Julian Scutts
ISBN 978-1-365-96929-4
Copyright Julian Scutts 2017

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
1.Is the Allegory an Antiquated and Artificial
Form of Literary Device? (P.3)
2. Inspiration: From Breezes to Cross-Winds (P.
17)
3.Wandering, “the Worst of Sinning”? (P. 52)
4.The Return to The Father’s House (P. 80)
5.Good and Evil: (i) The Role of Dracula and
the Pied Piper in Literature and History / (ii)
From E.T. A. Hoffmann to Heydrich (P. 138)
6.The Wandering Jew, Robert Browning’s
Positive Inversion of the Pied Piper Theme -
and Calvary (P. 197)
7. Crown Witnesses: Confessions of Supposed
Unbelievers, Somerset Maugham, Dylan
Thomas and Samuel Beckett (P. 219)
8.On Earth As It Is in Heaven: Against the
Radical Separation of Literature and Life (P.
251)

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Is the Allegory an Antiquated and Artificial
Form of Literary Device?
An affirmation of the relevance of Dante’s hermeneutic
approach to the reading of literary texts
When Israel went out from Egypt the house of Jacob from
a people of strange language Judea was made his
sanctuary and Israel his dominion.” (King James Version).
Psalm 114, 1-2
According to the hermeneutic principles laid down by Dante
in his “Letter to Can Grande della Scala” the text cited above
referring to the exodus from Egypt 1 bears interpretation at
four levels, the literal, the allegorical, the moral and the
anagogical. These refer respectively to the plain story, the
religious truth underlying the plain story, the conversion of
the believer and the parting of the body and soul at death.
Dante’s mode of interpretation finds precedents in those of
Aquinas and in rabbinic traditions. In effect he broadened the
strict principles of scriptural exegesis so as to adapt them to
the interpretation of any text or piece of writing. Indeed,
Northrop Frye, a leading theorist in literary criticism,
employed the term anagogical as one of his mainstays in
support of his arguments throughout his seminal book
Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays, having borrowed the term
from Dante in order to elucidate his contention that all works
of literature and the words that compose them constitute an
all-transcendent unity. Borrowing a term from Dante,
flattering as this may be to the great Italian, is one thing;

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applying it in the sense specified by Dante is another, but let
us leave this question in abeyance for a moment.
By and large modern criticism does not pay much regard to
the allegory as a literary device or dwell on its relevance to
textual criticism. In close connection to this low regard for the
value of the allegory is a surprising lack of interest in the
word Wanderer and all forms derived from the common root of
verbs to wander and wandern. Such words gained great
prominence in Goethe’s literary works and in those of German
and English Romantic poets, a fact that reflects the power of
these words to evoke allegorical treatments of Cain, the
Wandering Jew, the pilgrimage through life and the guidance
of the Spirit. Nonetheless, sometimes one finds a grudging
admission that the allegory is not dead in today’s world after
all. Let us consider such a case.
John Frederick Nims, as the author of a student’s manual
on the basics of poetics, implies that allegories arise
spontaneously when static symbols are joined together in a
story, and stories arise as soon as a verb of motion has a role
to play, for he writes in Western Wind, a handbook for
students of poetry:
"A mountain may be a symbol of salvation, a traveller
may be a symbol of a human being in his life. But it the
traveller takes as much as one step toward the mountain,
it seems that the traveller and the mountain become
allegorical figures, because a story has begun." 1
From this statement we may derive two important
conclusions.
1 John Frederick Nims, Western Wind / an Introduction to Poetry (New
York, 1983).

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First, a story, especially one about an excursion or
a journey, spontaneously generates an allegory irrespective of
the author's purposes or power of prediction. Thus the
resultant story cannot be solely attributable to the powers of
the conscious mind, even in the case of the most meticulous
poet, who is sometimes likened to a craftsman. The element of
spontaneity and unpredictability of the story belies the alleged
artificiality imputed to allegories in general. What is this
controlling or guiding influence that operates beyond the
scope of deliberation and concentrated thought? For Aquinas
and Dante it was the Holy Spirit, for John Milton the Holy
Muse of Horeb, a conflation of biblical and classical traditions,
and for Goethe, who pioneered exploration of the
unconscious, the libido ever seeking union with the anima, the
Eternal-Feminine.
Second, a story that describes a journey makes this journey
a sustained all-embracing metaphor that integrates all other
symbols that find a place in the story. Evidently a poem is not
a journey in any literal sense and yet the journey and the
work share fundamental affinities, above all in the respective
mentality of a poet, especially at the outset of writing a long
poem, and one about to begin a long and perhaps perilous
journey. With this parallel in mind, John Keats wrote of his
“uncertain path” when faced with the prospect of composing
Endymion. Furthermore, a journey referred to in poetry,
sermons and even common speech is a metaphor for the
course of human life. Indeed, it is a special kind of metaphor,
a synecdoche, a part of what it symbolizes, for a journey is a
segment of life, often one of the greatest importance in
determining the path of an individual’s life history, the entire
course of which is often likened to a pilgrimage. As a natural
consequence of these relationships a work conceived as an
allegory such as The Pilgrim's Progress incorporates
autobiographical elements through the intrusion of many

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recollections of personal experience, leading some to identify
Hill Difficulty with a very real place in Bunyan's home
environment.
Dante referred the term allegory not only to the hidden
sense of a story but to the aggregate of all three non-literal
planes of significance. These enfold the moral level of allegory
that, in the original concept of Dante, concerns the personal
striving of the believer that follows conversion, as exemplified
pre-eminently by the content and substance of The Pilgrim's
Progress. In the course of 18th century writers became less
concerned with the specifically religious question of conversion
and the contentions with the flesh than with the processes of
poetic and artistic creativity, which led to great anguish and
tension in the life and experience of creative artists and
writers.
Daniel Defoe, had Crusoe, as the editor of own story, lend a
new sense to the term “allegory,” for Crusoe asserts that the
“allegorical” and the “historical” aspects of this story are
compatible and complimentary contributors to its essential
unity. It follows that the ‘allegorical” import of the story is not
conspicuous, much less thrust upon readers as a vehicle for a
moral lecture. It is by inspecting the implications of verbal
clues embedded within passages in the story’s text that we
detect the allegorical paradigm that informs the novel, as I
hope to demonstrate in a later section of this book.
Robinson Crusoe seems to display certain germinal
Romantic features as one not only afflicted by solitude and
estranged from society but also as one prone to a deep sense
of existential loneliness more clearly revealed in the person of
the Ancient Mariner, in whom the critic Bernard Blackstone
perceived a manifestation of the figure of the Prodigal Son,
again evidence corroborating an affinity shared by Robinson
Crusoe and the Wanderer that appears in Romantic poetry. In
a manner untypical of literary critics, Bernard Blackstone as

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the author of The Lost Travellers: A Romantic Theme with
Variations 2 separates the Romantic poets into one of two
camps according to whether they were “Christians” or not,
making Christians of those who in his view retained a sense
of sinfulness and who felt a need for divinely wrought
redemption. Wordsworth did not count as a Christian,
believing as he did like Jean-Jacques Rousseau in humanity’s
essential innocence while seeking a remedy for all ills in
measures to improve urban living conditions. Coleridge
qualified as a Christian in keeping with the fact that the
Ancient Mariner evinced an profound sense of guilt and found
a remedy for this in shriving and confession. Geoffrey H.
Hartman on the other hand identifies the Mariner with the
Wandering Jew as a fitting symbol with which to typify the
Romantic poets’ sense of being lost and adrift in an age that
was inimical to poets and poetic language. We need not
uncover a contradiction here if we allow that the inclusive
figure of the pilgrim can subsume partial aspects of
wandering.
In his essay “Romanticism and Anti-Self-Consciousness” 3
Hartman does not go to great lengths to justify his assertion
but there is textual and circumstantial evidence in support of
his claim. The emphasis on the seemingly accidental “cross”
element in the “crossbow” with which he commits the
cardinal sin of slaying the albatross points to parallel between
the Mariner’s distain of an innocent creature and the
Wandering Jew’s act of taunting of Jesus at the foot of the
Cross. Percy Bysshe Shelley makes an explicit reference to
the story of Ahasuerus and Crucifixion in Queen Mab in line
2 Bernard Blackstone, The Lost Travellers, Norwich, 1962.
3 Geoffrey H. Hartman, "Romanticism and 'Anti-Self-Consciousness,"'
Romanticism and Consciousness Essays in Criticism, (New York, 1970).

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with the original narrative of the legend of the Wandering Jew.
However, elsewhere he interprets the Wandering Jew as a
“phantasmal portraiture of wandering human thought.” 4
Likewise, Wordsworth psychologizes the same figure when
referring to “the wanderer in my soul” in his poem “The Song
of the Wandering Jew.” Clearly neither Shelley nor
Wordsworth adopted a doctrinally based hostile anti-Semitic
attitude in this matter. Goethe had already made use of
symbols and motifs rooted in religion in the service of
expressing his concerns with aesthetic and psychological
issues and the Romantic poets continued down the same path.
An interesting variation of standpoint within the broad
spectrum of objective criticism is to be found in the works of
Northrop Frye, mentioned earlier. On one hand he doggedly
affirms a belief in the radical separation of literature from all
“external” factors in the domains of biography and history, etc.
; on the other, he sees all works of literature as part of a vast
unity within which the genres of literature fall into categories
that correspond to the four seasons of the annual cycle.
Tragedy is a mythos of spring, satire of winter, for example.
At the centre of this system we discover the ruling archetypes
of classical symbolism and the high or low status of literary
forms depends on their distance from this centre. In such
terms the novel is “a low mimetic displacement” of classical
archetypes. We see little acceptance of what other critics
discern as the positive and vital nature of novelistic fiction, its
anti-hierarchal force and its power of innovation. Frye’s refusal
to accept the existence of vital connections between literature
and human experience, whether that of an individual or that
of communities throughout history, leads him to adopt a
patronizing or nanny-like like attitude to John Milton, a writer
who held that literature had a lot to do with human behavior
4 Percy Bysshe Shelley, Queen Mab, VII, 267-275.

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and revealed truth. This lack of sympathy and empathy
comes to light in passages that include references to acts of
“wandering.” Indeed, Milton made ample use of the verb to
wander in Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained and invested
this with a positive meaning in line with biblical tradition, for
in this the negative aspect of wandering as sinning and falling
into error is overridden by the curative and redeeming
consequences of wandering through the wilderness of Sinai or
even of the Fall, the Felix Culpa in Thomist theology. “With
wandering feet” Adam and Eve leave Paradise into the
wilderness of history and experience, where in due time Jesus
will also “wander” and thwart the powers of evil. For Frye
wandering is understood only in negative terms, as
entrapment within “the labyrinth of the Law,” not even
conceding, as the apostle Paul did, that the Law at least served
as a schoolmaster in the dispensation of divine providence.
In more general terms Milton’s text implies that the
expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise entailed their
wandering within the worlds of history and experience. With
this in mind we will not find it so surprising that William
Blake’s poem “London” begins with “I wander,” for this poem,
apparently dismal and gloomy in its import, is a “Song of
Experience.” To Hulme's allegation that Romantic poetry was
“spilt religion” it is possible to retort that much carping in
literary criticism comes over a spilt theology. By divorcing the
anagogic level of interpretation from the allegorical and the
moral levels, these forging a vital connection between the
literary text and the life of its author, Frye deprives the
anagogic level itself, as understood by Dante at least, of any
context, profile or basis for contrast.
It might appear at first sight that the Romantic poets
themselves held “wandering” in low regard. Blake, after all,
referred to “the Lakers” (Wordsworth, Southey and Coleridge)
somewhat disparagingly as “cold-earth wanderers ” in “The

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Mental Traveller” and Byron mockingly described the youthful
Don Juan as one who wandered by glassy brooks “thinking
unutterable thoughts” before we encounter the name of
Wordsworth a few lines later. 5 However, neither Blake nor
Byron wished to scorn wandering per se, only manifestations
of wandering they deemed inferior to their own. Just as the
Wanderer became a synonym for the modern poet, so the act
of wandering became a synonym for the act of composing
poetry. In Adonais Shelley lamented that Keats had ceased to
wander, or, in plain speech, ceased to write poetry. Similarly,
Goethe and the German Romantics were bitterly divided over
the question as to the nature of the true Wanderer, even
though the Romantics had accepted the term from Goethe and
identified themselves as Wanderers.
The close association of the word Wanderer with poetic
inspiration could well trace back its origin to the days before
the Christianization of the Germanic tribes when Wotan or
Odin the Wanderer was feared and revered as the leading god
of wisdom and poetic utterance. Tacitus recorded that the
inhabitants of Germania worshipped Mercury, meaning Wotan
most probably in view of the Germanization of dies Mercurii as
Wednesday (the day of Wotan). Missionary influence saw to
the substitution of the day of Wotan by Mittwoch (the middle
day of the week). Later the aura of the Wanderer passed on to
the power of the Holy Spirit, to the Muses and even to lesser
spirits like Puck, “the merry wanderer of the night” in
Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In Milton’s
Paradise Lost Christian and classical notions of divine
inspiration merge in the Holy Muse addressed by the speaker
in the opening lines of the poem. However, the same poet
betrays his fear of becoming unseated and falling from the
back of winged Pegasus only to “wander erroneous and
5 See Dedication to Don Juan, First Canto, 19.

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forlorn.” The negative sense of wandering as losing orientation
contrasts ironically with its positive meaning of divine
inspiration; here we might ponder whether Milton already
anticipated the crisis of confidence that would truly come the
fore in the age of Goethe and the Romantics. In his
imagination Goethe also stalled in flight on his way to the
summit of Parnassus and plunged into a muddy scree as
decribed in the narrative in “Wandrers Sturmlied.”
According to Dante’s four-fold model of interpretation the
term anagogical referred to the entry of the soul into eternity
at the death of the body. Dante himself depicted this
transition in the symbol of the Dark Forest we find in the
introductory lines of The Divine Comedy, as this marks the
entry into the domain of the Afterlife. The Divine Comedy has
exercised the imagination of writers in succeeding generations,
irrespective of their persuasion or attitude to the possibility of
life after death, prompting them to explore in their mind
putative realms beyond the pale of the known world. The
contemplation of approaching death seems to be reflected in
the last works of Rousseau, Sterne and Goethe by lending to
these a certain quasi-musical rhapsodic quality producing a
loosening of form and structure.
If life is a journey and if a literary work invokes the
sustaining allegory of a process like a journey, the end of any
work, be this a novel, drama or poem, reminds us of finality
and death. Wandering in literature finds expression in the
urge to stave off the inevitable in much the same way that
Scheherazade kept telling stories to avoid execution or
Penelope kept weaving. Contemplation of mortality need not
evoke gloom, maudlin and lugubrious obsessions or despair,
as our culture like most cultures finds ways to invert negatives
into positives, which in terms of religious beliefs and attitudes
means resurrection, literal or figurative. To judge by its very
title Wordsworth’s The Prelude might be taken to intimate that

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the writer’s uncertain path on his pilgrimage through life leads
beyond death.
Morbid and maudlin obsessions with death can interfere
with the healthy pursuit of daily living as the story of Hamlet
shows all too well. Even children’s fairy stories sublimate
issues concerned with the two great taboos of death and sex.
Sublimation involves hiding and covering over things felt to be
menacing or unsettling, which brings us back to the subject of
the allegory and the perception of what lies beneath the
surface of plain statements and entertaining or fascinating
stories such as that of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. The poem’s
subtitle reads: “A Child’s Story. Indeed, children can and do
follow and enjoy the poem like an adult without the slightest
knowledge of poetics, linguists and critical theories. Its
beguiling simplicity and appeal to popular taste seems to have
set it aside in the view of scholars who regard that Browning’s
poetic works in general are characterized by profundity and
high seriousness. “How They Brought the Good News from
Ghent to Aix” is another casualty of disregard and for much
the same reason. If “The Pied Piper of Hamelin” and “”How
They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix” are only
enjoyed for their entertainment value we may well ask where
the difference lies between the language of poetry and that of
prose, which is also a vehicle for the recounting of entertaining
and gripping stories. Let us pause to reflect on this difference
light on an article written by the Russian Formalist scholar of
linguistics and literature, Jurij Tynjanov. The Formalists had a
hard time under Stalin’s regime on account of their lack of
enthusiasm for “social realism.” Leon Trotsky even accused
them for being followers of Saint John for holding that “in the
beginning was the Word.” A reading of Tynjanov’s essay
entitled in English translation “The Meaning of the Word in
Verse” supplies a clear reason for Trotsky’s opinion. Tynjanov,
like other Russian Formalists such as Roman Jacobson and

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Boris Eichenbaum based their theoretical propositions on the
fundamental distinction between langue and parole; that is to
say, on one side, between the order of language as a system in
which words are defined in dictionaries and syntax analyzed in
grammar books, and, on the other, context-bound language in
any statement or text. Any word participates in both
categories, langue and parole. Notwithstanding the fact that
the setting of a word within a poem restricts the bounds of its
immediately recognizable meaning, it retains its connection
with the ideal word unbounded by any context at all and is
therefore inexhaustible in its potential range of associations.
All this sounds very grand, but at least Tynjanov’s theory
could explain why we read and discard newspaper articles but
always return to a favourite poem and glean something new
from its treasures.
The potentialities of words posited by Tynjanov can be
viewed in the light of Dante’s distinction between the literal
and allegorical senses of a portion from the Psalms. Only at
the literal level can we make a one-word to one-sense
correlation. At the allegorical level words are released from the
constrictions placed on them at the literal level. As Jurij
Tynjanov argued in “The Word in Verse,” 6 words in a poem
are subject to the warping effect of associations that belie
their function as subservient parts of a narrative, a fact that
often gives rise to apparent oddities of style, verbal
juxtapositions and what in prose could come across as
6 Jurij Tynjanov, ''The Meaning of the Word in Verse,'' Readings in
Russian, Poetics Formalist and Structuralist Views (ed. Ladislav Mateijka
and Krystina Pomorska). Michigan Slavic Publications: Ann Arbor. 1978.
Original Russian Title: ''Znacenie slova v. stixe '' in Problema
stixotvornogo jazyke. 1924.

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stylistic lapses, repetitions and deviations from common
usage. Thus the line “He never can cross that mighty top” in
“The Pied Piper of Hamelin” seems an odd way of stating that
the Piper will never be able to surmount the peak of a high
mountain. In Browning’s poem “By the Fire-Side” we come
across a truly glaring departure from good style according to
the criteria governing prose in the line “We crossed the bridge
that we crossed before,” especially in view of the occurrence of
the words “crossed” and “the Cross” in the immediately
preceding lines. We note here a conflation of the word cross as
a verb of motion and a religious symbol so central to the
Christian faith.
Other biblical echoes are to be heard. The surviving lame
child speaks of the “land” entry to which the Piper also
“promised” him. His idyllic vision of the land he may not reach
finds a parallel in the poems “Pisgah Sights I and II” by
Browning, in which the speaker empathizes with Moses, who
at the point of death yearningly surveys the Promised Land,
which he also may not enter. Milton Millhauser sees in the
word “pottage” a reference to the story of Esau and Jacob in
the Book of Genesis with regard to its judgment on Esau’s
readiness to sacrifice a spiritual benefit for the sake of
immediate physical gratification.7 There are quite explicit
citations of words in the New Testament, the parable of the
camel’s eye, “the trump of doom’s tone” and a conspicuous
number of words that evoke biblical themes, the image of the
children rising from a dark cavern, water symbolism and the
plagues of Egypt. With all this in mind, can we dismiss the
implied association of the words cross and passion and the
Mayor’s Sadducean denial that the dead can ever be revived
7 Milton Millhauser, "Poet and Burgher: A Comic Variation on a Serious
Theme," Victorian Poetry, 7 (1969), I63-168.

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as purely coincidental? A close regard for individual words
allows us to place a Freudian or Jungian construction on the
story of the Pied Piper. The red and yellow colours of the
Piper’s coat, the course of his movements from south to west
and references to the sun could lead us to construe the Piper,
despised as a “wandering fellow” in his coat of red and yellow,
as a solar symbol that represents the quest of the libido to
achieve union with the anima. Goethe and Guillaume
Apollinaire present the Piper as one who exerted an irresistible
power over girls and women.
Does the interpretation I suggest accord with Browning’s
life story and with the history of Pied Piper legend since its
origin? To find connections between poetry and life accords
fully with Dante’s assertion that at the moral level the exodus
story treats the conversion of the believer and hence the
experience of real living people, a contention some schools of
critical opinion firmly deny. Browning composed “The Pied
Piper of Hamelin” at the age of thirty at a decisive juncture in
his life. It had not been easy for him to find his feet as a poet.
He destroyed his early verses and only chance would have it
that his poem “The First-Born of Egypt” survived to reveal a
morbid obsession with the theme of the death of the young,
and the story of Pied Piper is probably the result of the
sublimation of the theme of death. The Byronic tone of this
early poem could betray the residual influence of singing
lessons he received from Isaac Nathan, the same man who had
prompted Lord Byron to write the Hebrew Melodies. Browning
had also tried his hand as a dramatist with limited success.
The Willie whom Browning addressed in last lines of “The Pied
Piper of Hamelin” was the recuperating eleven-year-old son
of the theatre manager William Macready, who had staged
Browning’s plays, and the admonition that one should keep
one’s promises might have been a jibe directed at Willie’s
father. Browning had received some rough handling from

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critics, especially in response to his first published poem
“Pauline” and to Sordello, a long epic poem that earned
Browning the reputation of being a willfully obscure poet. The
publication of “The Pied Piper of Hamelin” under the general
title of Bells and Pomegranates effected a breakthrough into
the area of popular verse and his life made a turn for the
better. Soon he would find his soulmate and wife in Elizabeth
Barratt. Incidentally, the age of thirty or thereabouts proved
propitious for Goethe, Wordsworth and Dylan Thomas, for at
this age they composed their most sublime and memorable
lyrical verses.
The anagogical level in Dante’s hermeneutic scheme refers
to the parting of the soul from the body at death. As we can
tell from the early poem “Pauline” and a poem in which the
speaker, an Arab physician named Karshish, sifts Lazarus’s
first-hand evidence of the Resurrection, Browning was deeply
affected by the story of the Resurrection, which I believe
underlies another famous poem by Browning, “How They
Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix.” What was the
Good News that the third and only surviving horse brought to
Aix and secured its salvation? Browning espoused his so-
called “Theory of the Imperfect,” which in the first place
reflected his pre-Raphaelite views of art, in accord with which
several of his poems lauded paintings that did not hide the
imperfects of the human frame. The perfection of man
remained for Browning a distant goal but what mattered in
the here and now was progress and striving toward the
perfect state, from the present animalistic or rat-like condition
to the ultimate union of humanity and divinity. “The Pied Piper
of Hamelin” apart from all else is a parable contrasting the
rats and the worst in corrupt and greedy humanity with the
saviour-artist and the young who share his nature and vision.
The original story of the Pied Piper by all reliable accounts
goes back to a midsummer event in 1284 at which young

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people indulged in dancing and maybe more. The local counts
of Spiegelberg probably had a hand in suppressing this ritual
practice by brute force or may have led them on a perilous
voyage to settlements in Pomerania that ended in tragedy.
Significantly enough, the Piper led the children to Calvary,
which in the Middle Ages signified a place of execution or even
the jaws of Hell. However, to Browning with his evangelical
upbringing Calvary had altogether positive associations. After
all, the Piper did manage to “cross that mighty top.”
************
Inspiration: From Breezes to Cross-Winds
"I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" – THE MYTH OF
NARCISSUS AND MILTON’S MUSE
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought

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What wealth the show to me had brought:
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
Entries in Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journal 15 April and 16 April
(Good Friday) 1802
Thursday, 15th.—It was a threatening, misty morning, but mild. We set
off after dinner from Ellesmere. Mrs. Clarkson went a short way with us,
but turned back. The wind was furious, and we thought we must have
returned. We first rested in the large boathouse, then under a furze
bush opposite Mr. Clarkson's. Saw the plough going in the field. The
wind seized our breath. The lake was rough. There was a boat by itself
floating in the middle of the bay below Water Millock. We rested again in
the Water Millock Lane. The hawthorns are black and green, the birches
here and there greenish, but there is yet more of purple to be seen on the
twigs. We got over into a field to avoid some cows—people working. A few
primroses by the roadside—woodsorrel flower, the anemone, scentless
violets, strawberries, and that starry, yellow flower which Mrs. C. calls
pile wort. When we were in the woods beyond Gowbarrow Park we saw a
few daffodils close to the water-side. We fancied that the sea had floated
the seeds ashore, and that the little colony had so sprung up. But as we
went along there were more and yet more; and at last, under the boughs
of the trees, we saw that there was a long belt of them along the shore,
about the breadth of a country turnpike road. I never saw daffodils so
beautiful. They grew among the mossy stones about and above them;
some rested their heads upon these stones, as on a pillow, for weariness;
and the rest tossed and reeled and danced, and seemed as if they verily
laughed with the wind, that blew upon them over the lake; they looked so
gay, ever glancing, ever changing. This wind blew directly over the lake to
them. There was here and there a little knot, and a few stragglers higher
up; but they were so few as not to disturb the simplicity, unity, and life
of that one busy highway. We rested again and again. The bays were
stormy, and we heard the waves at different distances, and in the middle
of the water, like the sea.... All was cheerless and gloomy, so we faced the
storm. At Dobson's I was very kindly treated by a young woman. The
landlady looked sour, but it is her way.... William was sitting by a good
fire when I came downstairs. He soon made his way to the library, piled

19
up in a corner of the window. He brought out a volume of Enfield's
Speaker, another miscellany, and an odd volume of Congreve's plays. We
had a glass of warm rum and water. We enjoyed ourselves, and wished
for Mary. It rained and blew, when we went to bed.
Friday, 16th April (Good Friday).—When I undrew curtains in the
morning, I was much affected by the beauty of the prospect, and the
change. The sun shone, the wind had passed away, the hills looked
cheerful, the river was very bright as it flowed into the lake. The church
rises up behind a little knot of rocks, the steeple not so high as an
ordinary three-story house. Trees in a row in the garden under the wall.
The valley is at first broken by little woody knolls that make retiring
places, fairy valleys in the vale, the river winds along under these hills,
travelling, not in a bustle but not slowly, to the lake. We saw a fisherman
in the flat meadow on the other side of the water. He came towards us,
and threw his line over the two-arched bridge. It is a bridge of a heavy
construction, almost bending inwards in the middle, but it is grey, and
there is a look of ancientry in the architecture of it that pleased me. As
we go on the vale opens out more into one vale, with somewhat of a
cradle bed. Cottages, with groups of trees, on the side of the hills. We
passed a pair of twin children, two years old. Sate on the next bridge
which we crossed—a single arch. We rested again upon the turf, and
looked at the same bridge. We observed arches in the water, occasioned
by the large stones sending it down in two streams. A sheep came
plunging through the river, stumbled up the bank, and passed close to
us. It had been frightened by an insignificant little dog on the other side.
Its fleece dropped a glittering shower under its belly. Primroses by the
road-side, pile wort that shone like stars of gold in the sun, violets,
strawberries, retired and half-buried among the grass. When we came to
the foot of Brothers Water, I left William sitting on the bridge,[Pg 108]
and went along the path on the right side of the lake through the wood. I
was delighted with what I saw. The water under the boughs of the bare
old trees, the simplicity of the mountains, and the exquisite beauty of the
path. There was one grey cottage. I repeated The Glow-worm, as I walked
along. I hung over the gate, and thought I could have stayed for ever.
When I returned, I found William writing a poem descriptive of the sights
and sounds we saw and heard.56a There was the gentle flowing of the
stream, the glittering, lively lake, green fields without a living creature to
be seen on them; behind us, a flat pasture with forty-two cattle feeding;
to our left, the road leading to the hamlet. No smoke there, the sun
shone on the bare roofs. The people were at work ploughing, harrowing,
and sowing; ... a dog barking now and then, cocks crowing, birds
twittering, the snow in patches at the top of the highest hills, yellow
palms, purple and green twigs on the birches, ashes with their glittering
stems quite bare. The hawthorn a bright green, with black stems under
the oak. The moss of the oak glossy. We went on. Passed two sisters at

20
work (they first passed us), one with two pitchforks in her hand, the
other had a spade. We had come to talk with them. They laughed long
after we were gone, perhaps half in wantonness, half boldness. William
finished his poem.56 Before we got to the foot of Kirkstone, there were
hundreds of cattle in the vale. There we ate our dinner. The walk up
Kirkstone was very interesting. The becks among the rocks were all alive.
William showed me the little mossy streamlet which he had before loved
when he saw its bright green track in the snow. The view above
Ambleside very beautiful. There we sate and looked down on the green
vale. We watched the crows at a little distance from us become white as
silver as they flew in the sunshine, and when they went still further,[Pg
109] they looked like shapes of water passing over the green fields. The
whitening of Ambleside church is a great deduction from the beauty of it,
seen from this point. We called at the Luffs, the Roddingtons there. Did
not go in, and went round by the fields. I pulled off my stockings,
intending to wade the beck, but I was obliged to put them on, and we
climbed over the wall at the bridge. The post passed us. No letters.
Rydale Lake was in its own evening brightness: the Island, and Points
distinct. Jane Ashburner came up to us when we were sitting upon the
wall.... The garden looked pretty in the half-moonlight, half-daylight,
as we went up the vale..
"I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" Viewed in the Light of
J. Tynjanov's Discussion of "The Word in Verse"
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 "The Eye and the Object in the
Poetry of Wordsworth." 8 He notes with reference to "I

21
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
8
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.).

22
in Dorothy's journal telling of the occasion 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
spring-like 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

23
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 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 besides 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

24
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
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 perception entail a sense of
discomfort at a time before the mind is able to assimilate new
sense impressions. Even in "I wandered" 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

25
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 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:

26
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 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

27
"novelization." 9 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.
ii. We may understand "wandering" in terms of structure and
principles of organization that govern the development of the
poem. Set at the beginning of the poem, the words "I
wandered" function as a leitmotif introducing both the poem's
theme, i.e. subject matter, and the "wandering" process that
emerges from a study of the poem's aesthetic achievements as
revealed in its images in their immediate verbal environment.
In the German poetry of the same period this leitmotif is
announced officially in the titles of celebrated poems. One of
these lends itself to comparison with "I wandered lonely as a
cloud" with particular regard to the implications of the initial
position of words referring to "wandering": Wilhelm Müller's
poem "Das Wandern ist des Müllers Lust" ("Wandering is the
Miller’s Joy") - a poem that will be considered in due course.
According to its immediately comprehensible meaning,
Wandern refers to the act of roaming in a rural setting, just as
"wandered" does in Wordsworth's poem. However, from the
first line on, it gains ever wider references and associations
with movements in objects and natural phenomena
9
M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin Tx., 1981).

28
exemplified by the turning of millstones and the flowing
stream that causes their turning, with the final effect that
"wandering" emerges as the vital principle in all nature. This
widening of associations is reinforced by a repetition of
Wandern (formally justified by the use of a refrain).
In "I wandered lonely as a cloud” the verb to wander also
accumulates ever greater meaning, but not as a result of any
verbal repetition. Its widening of meaning is produced by the
poet's use of similes with all their effects and structural
repercussions. In the first simile (located in the words "as a
cloud"), the speaker likens himself to a cloud, as he and this
object are both solitary and in motion. We may infer from this
comparison that just as the cloud is moved by a "breeze,"
some correspondent breeze impels the speaker's wandering.
This breeze then assumes the aspect of a universal dynamic
principle of the mind and poetic imagination. Hence the
parallel between the daffodils "fluttering in the breeze" and the
daffodils created in the poet's heart, which "dances with the
daffodils."
The second simile in the poem compares the appearance of
the daffodils encountered by the speaker to the stars of the
Milky Way. How - in view of the fact that the stanza containing
this simile was added to the original poem of three stanzas -
can this poem pose an integral element of the entire poem?
The objection I anticipate is surmountable if the simile can be
shown to enhance and develop motifs and characteristics of
the poem in its original form. The reference to the Milky Way
adds strength to the motif established by words evoking the
image of something nebulous: (cf. "cloud," "host" and dancing
"waves"). The reference to the stars of night points to a duality,
already implicit in the original poem, that inheres in the
contrast of daylight vision and the images produced by the
mind at times of repose. Though the speaker does not sleep
when experiencing the vision of daffodils that flash before his

29
inner mind, his state of consciousness resembles that of the
dreamer. The motif of the "night-wanderer" can be found in
both English and German poetic traditions. We recall the
words of Puck in A Midsummer-Night's Dream. "I am that
merry wanderer of the night."
Let us now return to Frederick Pottle's assertion that "I
wandered lonely" is "a very simple poem." It may appear to be
very simple. The similes it contains apparently conform to the
typical use of language in non- literary usage, yet, at a deeper
level they imply contrasts and antitheses rooted in the
unconscious and the imagination. Similarly, the reference to
"a poet" in the third strophe might be taken as a commonly
encountered expression like, "If only an artist could paint this
landscape." At a deeper level, however, it points to
Wordsworth's fundamental concern with the operation and
nature of the poet's imagination.
iii. From the following lines in The Borderers (1795) it is
apparent that the associations of the verb to wander were not
always positive and evocative of joy:
No prayers, no tears, but hear my doom in silence
I will go forth a wanderer on the earth,
A shadowy thing, and as I wander on
No human ear shall ever hear my voice
As contradictory as the verb's associations with death and
joy in the exercise of the imagination may seem, its range of
significance embraces these antipodes in the works of William
Shakespeare and those of other authors for reasons discussed
earlier in reflections based on the common etymology of the
verbs to wander and wandern. In Wordsworth's case the
positive or negative valorization of the verb to wander
corresponds to the general state of mind in which he found

30
himself at different stages of his life and artistic development.
the time of his writing The Borderers, he was still
experiencing a dark night of the soul precipitated by his
disillusionment with the course of the French Revolution. At
that time he was subject to the influence of Friederich
Schiller's Die Räuber ("The Bandits"), a drama that portrays a
world torn apart by the titanic fury of those exercising the
wrong kind of freedom. The play reflects the spirit of Sturm
und Drang ("Storm and Stress"), through which both Goethe
and Schiller passed in the early phase of literary development.
In Goethe's highly influential novel Die Leiden des jungen
Werthers ("The Sorrows of Young Werther") Werther's reference
to himself as a "Wanderer" ominously points forward to his
social isolation and ultimate death.
"I wandered lonely as a cloud" marks the apogee of
Wordsworth's poetic achievement. At the time of its
composition Wordsworth had overcome the weaknesses of his
early works and the lugubrious mentality that they evince. In
the same period we find no anticipation of the diminution in
poetic powers and final atrophy of the imagination that later
overcame Wordsworth. "I wandered lonely as a cloud" marks
the attainment of a balance and harmony of mind wrested
from the tension between daytime awareness and the
influences of subconscious proclivities. The attainment of this
harmony involves the ingestion of images originating in the
involuntary reception of what is perceived by the senses. The
equilibrium we perceive in poem was preceded by - perhaps
predicated on - a period when Wordsworth became familiar
with contemporary German literature and philosophy as this
was mediated to him by T. S. Coleridge. According to Jonathan
Wordsworth, the poet was deeply impressed by a translation of
Goethe's poetic dialogue entitled "Der Wanderer," which he

31
read no later than 1798 10. Professor L. A. Willoughby notes in
his article "The Image of the 'Wanderer' and the 'Hut' in
Goethe's Poetry" that "Der Wandrer" (1771-1772), established
Goethe’s ability to objectify the figure of the Wanderer within
the frame of a dramatic dialogue without suppressing every
trace of the author’s individual personality.11
iv. It has been noted earlier in this discussion that Frederick
Pottle contrasts the elegiac undertones of Herrick's description
of daffodils with the triumphant and joyful emotions evoked by
Wordsworth's description of these flowers. Daffodils recall a
tradition that includes the story of Narcissus in Greek
mythology. We have also seen that Housman intertwines the
Greek classical myth with Christian folklore in his image of the
daffodil that dies on Easter Day (in common usage daffodils
are called "Osterglocken" ("Easter Bells") in countries where
German is spoken).12 I will argue in this section that the very
use of the verb to wander likewise implies and reflects a
confluence of biblical and classical traditions. I also hope to
establish that the word is coloured - to use a term that is
much favoured by the Russian Formalist linguist and critic J.
Tynjanov 13 - by a contemporary influence stemming from
10
Jonathan Wordsworth, The Music of Humanity, (New York and Evanston, 1969).
11
L. A. Willoughby, "The Image of the 'Wanderer' and the 'Hut' in Goethe's Poetry,"
Etudes Germaniques, 1951, 3, Autumn 1951.
12
I beg to differ from the opinion of Professor Hubert Heinen, my
erstwhile mentor at the University of Texas at Austin, that this reference
is “trivial.”
13 Jurij Tynjanov, "The Meaning of the Word in Verse," translated into
English by M. E. Suino, Readings in Russian Poetics, ed. Ladislav
Matejka & Krystina Pomorska, (Ann Arbor, 1978).

32
Goethe and a diachronically mediated influence stemming
from Milton, that poet who consciously merged classical and
biblical or Hebraic elements in his epic poetry. A close analysis
of certain passages in Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained
shows that the verb to wander is contextually associated to
both the classical motif of the "wandering" Muse and to the
biblical motif of the wanderings of Israel described in the book
of Exodus and the cognate period of Christ's wandering in the
Judean wilderness, events commemorated by the festivals of
Passover and Lent. This nexus of associations is implicit in the
opening lines of Paradise Lost, in which the collocation of the
words "Muse" and "Horeb" (Sinai) knit together references to
the Muse, the Holy Spirit and the immediate sequel of the
flight of the Israelites from Egypt (commemorated by the
Jewish Festival of Pentecost).14 In Paradise Regained Milton
mirrors the traditional view, upheld by Dante and inscribed in
the Church calendar at Lent, that the wanderings of Israel
allegorically represent the earthly life and ministry of Christ,15
the forty days of temptation recalling the forty years of Israel's
wandering in the wilderness of Sinai. In keeping with this
tradition the title of Housman's "The Lent Lily” conflates the
14 The Festival of Weeks (Hebr.: Shavuot) or Pentecost marks the end of
the counting of omer (cuttings of harvest crops in the spring harvest),
and became linked by tradition with the Giving of the Law at Mount
Sinai. Philo of Alexandria closely associated this event with a
manifestation of divine inspiration symbolized by the finger of fire that
inscribed the tablets of the Law. The Christian sequel to Pentecost
reflects the Christian belief that the Holy Spirit supersedes the literal
stipulations of the Law.
15
Both in Il Convivio (The Banquet) and the Letter to Can Grande della Scala, Dante
referred to the "allegorical" level of the story of the biblical exodus at which Dante
discerned a prophecy concerning Christ's life and work of redemption.

33
associated symbolism of Lent, Easter and daffodils). Alluding
to a passage in Paradise Regained, Keats taps the same
traditional sources when uniting the theme of vernal renewal
and that of a pilgrimage leading through a wilderness:
And now at once, adventuresome, I send
My herald thought into a wilderness -
There let its trumpet blow, and quickly dress
My uncertain path with glee. Endymion 1, 58-61
Here is an echo of Milton's line "And Eden raised m the
wilderness" in Paradise Regained 1, 7. The association of
vernal renewal and pilgrimage occurs a little later in Endymion
in an allusion to the evocation of spring in ‘The Prologue” of
The Canterbury Tales.
We now consider a further instance of Milton's influence on
a work by a Romantic poet, and one that is directly relevant to
a discussion of "I wandered lonely as a cloud." Again we
consider a poetic evocation of spring combined with an
allusion to the story of the flight of the Israelites from Egypt.
The opening lines of the first book of Wordsworth's The Prelude
refer to a flight from "a house of bondage" and a "wandering
cloud" that should guide the poet on his future journey. Here
we discover obvious allusions to the flight from Egypt in the
Bible and the pillar of cloud guiding the Israelites by day.
To understand the deep significance of "the gentle breeze,"
at the beginning of The Prelude we should consider these
words in the light of Milton's dedication to the Holy Muse that
inspired Moses at Mount Horeb (we note the intertwining of
both biblical and classical strands) at an analogous position in
Paradise Lost. The verbal triad that consists of "breeze,"
"wandering" and "cloud" finds a parallel in the words
"wandered," "breeze" and "cloud" in "I wandered lonely as a
cloud." We often note in criticism that verbal patterns recur

34
and suggest underlying modes of thought influenced by the
operations of the unconscious. Here we may recall that
Wordsworth composed "I wandered lonely as a cloud" during a
period of active preparation for The Prelude of 1805.
While The Prelude contains a specific reference to passages
in Milton's works, "I wandered lonely as a cloud" contains no
literary allusions at all. Here, the very order of words in the
poem implies antitheses that accord with a mythical-religious
frame of comprehension. To make this assumption is to be no
bolder than Frederick Pottle was when he discusses the myth
of Narcissus in connection with Wordsworth's description of
daffodils in "I wandered lonely as a cloud." Indeed, in their
profound implications “the daffodil” in Housman's "Lent Lily"
and the daffodil in folklore share an affinity with the
implications of to wander in poetic tradition, for the flower and
the verb pose the meeting-point of classical and Biblical
traditions. The event which prompted the writing of "I
wandered lonely as a cloud" occurred on the eve of Good
Friday (Good Friday fell on 16th April, 1802), yet a further
reason to suppose that the sight of daffodils described in the
poem was bound up with the thought of Easter in
Wordsworth's mind.
If we were to follow Housman's lead and place an ostensibly
religious construction on the daffodils in "I wandered lonely," I
think we should emphasize their triumphant, perhaps
"Pentecostal," aspect in view of the all-pervasive influence of
the breeze and the almost flame-like appearance of the
flowers. This is not to say that we should place the poem in
the tradition of religious mystical poetry, for, as this
discussion of "wandering" has indicated, words mark an
intersection of traditional and contemporary influences. In the
case of "I wandered lonely as a cloud" the traditional influence
is predominantly Milton’s, the contemporary, Goethe’s.
Subject to this dual influence Wordsworth combined

35
traditional religious insight with the then modern insights of
psychological and aesthetic philosophy. The recall of a
pilgrimage is explicit in The Prelude and Childe Harold's
Pilgrimage, while it is but suggested by the ordering of simple
sounding words in "I wandered lonely as a cloud."
The poem might also be understood as a quest to overcome
the rift between the worlds of inner and outward reality
announced in the Cartesian cogito ergo sum, and its traumatic
after-effect so palpably reflected in The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner. It is noteworthy that the word "breeze" signifies the
vital powers of the imagination in both "I wandered lonely" and
Coleridge’s ballad The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, however
different these poems are in theme. In Coleridge's narrative a
"breeze" fills the sails of the mariner's doomed ship only when
he perceives sea serpents moving by the light of the moon.
Like Wordsworth's dancing daffodils the serpents combine
beauty and motion, both of which attributes were seen as
virtuous in their own right by the poets of the age. In fact,
these virtues exercise a mutual benefit. Beauty alone might, as
the legend of Narcissus suggests, bring entrapment and a
deathlike stasis. Motion without some corrective might lead to
frenzy and self-dissipation. It is "the breeze" which makes the
daffodils in Wordsworth's celebrated poem "dance." In poetic
tradition "dancing" is not always positive in connotation. We
need only think of the Dance of Death. However, in
Wordsworth’s poem "dancing” motion counteracts the stasis
implied by the daffodil's mythical import. This image implies
therefore a balance of beauty and motion.
While it is evident that Romantic poems lie outside the
category of formal religious poetry, I find no reason to accept
view that they possess no religious message. Here it is relevant
to consider the basic implication of poetic "wandering” as a
quest to reconcile apparently irreconcilable opposites and
antitheses, a quest based on the assumption that at a higher

36
level than that at which such opposites appear irreconcilable,
harmony and reconciliation can be achieved.
"Wandering" defies the strict separation of internal truth
and external reality. "The way" described in poems about
wandering, is part of the life of individual experience. How can
one come to any different conclusion when ne considers
"wandering" which subsumes the effects created by the verbs
to wander and wander in their various textual settings, in
works by Milton, Goethe and Wordsworth? From the poetry of
Keats we learn that "truth" and "life" are indivisible in
"beauty."
The Twice-Crossed Bridge in Robert Browning’s “By the
Fire-Side”
By the Fire-Side - Poem by Robert Browning
How well I know what I mean to do
When the long dark autumn-evenings come:
And where, my soul, is thy pleasant hue?
With the music of all thy voices, dumb
In life's November too!
II.
I shall be found by the fire, suppose,
O'er a great wise book as beseemeth age,
While the shutters flap as the cross-wind blows
And I turn the page, and I turn the page,
Not verse now, only prose!

37
III.
Till the young ones whisper, finger on lip,
``There he is at it, deep in Greek:
``Now then, or never, out we slip
``To cut from the hazels by the creek
``A mainmast for our ship!''
IV.
I shall be at it indeed, my friends:
Greek puts already on either side
Such a branch-work forth as soon extends
To a vista opening far and wide,
And I pass out where it ends.
V.
The outside-frame, like your hazel-trees:
But the inside-archway widens fast,
And a rarer sort succeeds to these,
And we slope to Italy at last
And youth, by green degrees.
VI.
I follow wherever I am led,
Knowing so well the leader's hand:
Oh woman-country, wooed not wed,
Loved all the more by earth's male-lands,
Laid to their hearts instead!
VII.
Look at the ruined chapel again
Half-way up in the Alpine gorge!
Is that a tower, I point you plain,
Or is it a mill, or an iron-forge
Breaks solitude in vain?

38
VIII.
A turn, and we stand in the heart of things:
The woods are round us, heaped and dim;
From slab to slab how it slips and springs,
The thread of water single and slim,
Through the ravage some torrent brings!
IX.
Does it feed the little lake below?
That speck of white just on its marge
Is Pella; see, in the evening-glow,
How sharp the silver spear-heads charge
When Alp meets heaven in snow!
X.
On our other side is the straight-up rock;
And a path is kept 'twixt the gorge and it
By boulder-stones where lichens mock
The marks on a moth, and small ferns fit
Their teeth to the polished block.
XI.
Oh the sense of the yellow mountain-flowers,
And thorny balls, each three in one,
The chestnuts throw on our path in showers!
For the drop of the woodland fruit's begun,
These early November hours,
XII.
That crimson the creeper's leaf across
Like a splash of blood, intense, abrupt,
O'er a shield else gold from rim to boss,
And lay it for show on the fairy-cupped
Elf-needled mat of moss,

39
XIII.
By the rose-flesh mushrooms, undivulged
Last evening---nay, in to-day's first dew
Yon sudden coral nipple bulged,
Where a freaked fawn-coloured flaky crew
Of toadstools peep indulged.
XIV.
And yonder, at foot of the fronting ridge
That takes the turn to a range beyond,
Is the chapel reached by the one-arched bridge
Where the water is stopped in a stagnant pond
Danced over by the midge.
XV.
The chapel and bridge are of stone alike,
Blackish-grey and mostly wet;
Cut hemp-stalks steep in the narrow dyke.
See here again, how the lichens fret
And the roots of the ivy strike!
XVI.
Poor little place, where its one priest comes
On a festa-day, if he comes at all,
To the dozen folk from their scattered homes,
Gathered within that precinct small
By the dozen ways one roams---
XVII.
To drop from the charcoal-burners' huts,
Or climb from the hemp-dressers' low shed,
Leave the grange where the woodman stores his nuts,
Or the wattled cote where the fowlers spread
Their gear on the rock's bare juts.

40
XVIII.
It has some pretension too, this front,
With its bit of fresco half-moon-wise
Set over the porch, Art's early wont:
'Tis John in the Desert, I surmise,
But has borne the weather's brunt---
XIX.
Not from the fault of the builder, though,
For a pent-house properly projects
Where three carved beams make a certain show,
Dating---good thought of our architect's---
'Five, six, nine, he lets you know.
XX.
And all day long a bird sings there,
And a stray sheep drinks at the pond at times;
The place is silent and aware;
It has had its scenes, its joys and crimes,
But that is its own affair.
XXI.
My perfect wife, my Leonor,
Oh heart, my own, oh eyes, mine too,
Whom else could I dare look backward for,
With whom beside should I dare pursue
The path grey heads abhor?
XXII.
For it leads to a crag's sheer edge with them;
Youth, flowery all the way, there stops---
Not they; age threatens and they contemn,
Till they reach the gulf wherein youth drops,
One inch from life's safe hem!

41
XXIII.
With me, youth led ... I will speak now,
No longer watch you as you sit
Reading by fire-light, that great brow
And the spirit-small hand propping it,
Mutely, my heart knows how---
XXIV.
When, if I think but deep enough,
You are wont to answer, prompt as rhyme;
And you, too, find without rebuff
Response your soul seeks many a time
Piercing its fine flesh-stuff.
XXV.
My own, confirm me! If I tread
This path back, is it not in pride
To think how little I dreamed it led
To an age so blest that, by its side,
Youth seems the waste instead?
XXVI.
My own, see where the years conduct!
At first, 'twas something our two souls
Should mix as mists do; each is sucked
In each now: on, the new stream rolls,
Whatever rocks obstruct.
XXVII.
Think, when our one soul understands
The great Word which makes all things new,
When earth breaks up and heaven expands,
How will the change strike me and you
ln the house not made with hands?

42
XXVIII.
Oh I must feel your brain prompt mine,
Your heart anticipate my heart,
You must be just before, in fine,
See and make me see, for your part,
New depths of the divine!
XXIX.
But who could have expected this
When we two drew together first
Just for the obvious human bliss,
To satisfy life's daily thirst
With a thing men seldom miss?
XXX.
Come back with me to the first of all,
Let us lean and love it over again,
Let us now forget and now recall,
Break the rosary in a pearly rain,
And gather what we let fall!
XXXI.
What did I say?---that a small bird sings
All day long, save when a brown pair
Of hawks from the wood float with wide wings
Strained to a bell: 'gainst noon-day glare
You count the streaks and rings.
XXXII.
But at afternoon or almost eve
'Tis better; then the silence grows
To that degree, you half believe
It must get rid of what it knows,
Its bosom does so heave.

43
XXXIII.
Hither we walked then, side by side,
Arm in arm and cheek to cheek,
And still I questioned or replied,
While my heart, convulsed to really speak,
Lay choking in its pride.
XXXIV.
Silent the crumbling bridge we cross,
And pity and praise the chapel sweet,
And care about the fresco's loss,
And wish for our souls a like retreat,
And wonder at the moss.
XXXV.
Stoop and kneel on the settle under,
Look through the window's grated square:
Nothing to see! For fear of plunder,
The cross is down and the altar bare,
As if thieves don't fear thunder.
XXXVI.
We stoop and look in through the grate,
See the little porch and rustic door,
Read duly the dead builder's date;
Then cross the bridge that we crossed before,
Take the path again---but wait!
XXXVII.
Oh moment, one and infinite!
The water slips o'er stock and stone;
The West is tender, hardly bright:
How grey at once is the evening grown---
One star, its chrysolite!

44
XXXVIII.
We two stood there with never a third,
But each by each, as each knew well:
The sights we saw and the sounds we heard,
The lights and the shades made up a spell
Till the trouble grew and stirred.
XXXIX.
Oh, the little more, and how much it is!
And the little less, and what worlds away!
How a sound shall quicken content to bliss,
Or a breath suspend the blood's best play,
And life be a proof of this!
XL.
Had she willed it, still had stood the screen
So slight, so sure, 'twixt my love and her:
I could fix her face with a guard between,
And find her soul as when friends confer,
Friends---lovers that might have been.
XLI.
For my heart had a touch of the woodland-time,
Wanting to sleep now over its best.
Shake the whole tree in the summer-prime,
But bring to the Iast leaf no such test!
``Hold the last fast!'' runs the rhyme.
XLII.
For a chance to make your little much,
To gain a lover and lose a friend,
Venture the tree and a myriad such,
When nothing you mar but the year can mend:
But a last leaf---fear to touch!

45
XLIII.
Yet should it unfasten itself and fall
Eddying down till it find your face
At some slight wind---best chance of all!
Be your heart henceforth its dwelling-place
You trembled to forestall!
XLIV.
Worth how well, those dark grey eyes,
That hair so dark and dear, how worth
That a man should strive and agonize,
And taste a veriest hell on earth
For the hope of such a prize!
XIIV.
You might have turned and tried a man,
Set him a space to weary and wear,
And prove which suited more your plan,
His best of hope or his worst despair,
Yet end as he began.
XLVI.
But you spared me this, like the heart you are,
And filled my empty heart at a word.
If two lives join, there is oft a scar,
They are one and one, with a shadowy third;
One near one is too far.
XLVII.
A moment after, and hands unseen
Were hanging the night around us fast
But we knew that a bar was broken between
Life and life: we were mixed at last
In spite of the mortal screen.

46
XLVIII.
The forests had done it; there they stood;
We caught for a moment the powers at play:
They had mingled us so, for once and good,
Their work was done---we might go or stay,
They relapsed to their ancient mood.
XLIX.
How the world is made for each of us!
How all we perceive and know in it
Tends to some moment's product thus,
When a soul declares itself---to wit,
By its fruit, the thing it does
L.
Be hate that fruit or love that fruit,
It forwards the general deed of man,
And each of the Many helps to recruit
The life of the race by a general plan;
Each living his own, to boot.
LI.
I am named and known by that moment's feat;
There took my station and degree;
So grew my own small life complete,
As nature obtained her best of me---
One born to love you, sweet!
LII.
And to watch you sink by the fire-side now
Back again, as you mutely sit
Musing by fire-light, that great brow
And the spirit-small hand propping it,
Yonder, my heart knows how!

47
LIII.
So, earth has gained by one man the more,
And the gain of earth must be heaven's gain too;
And the whole is well worth thinking o'er
When autumn comes: which I mean to do
One day, as I said before.
The invocation of the Muses that introduced Homeric and
other classical epics was a convention which carried over into
John Milton’s Paradise Lost and left a trace in Wordsworth’s
Prelude, William Blake’s Milton and Lord Byron’s Dedication to
Don Juan in a manner that was variously gentle, bizarre or
jocund in effect. In the opening lines of The Prelude a “breeze”
replaces Milton’s “Holy Muse.” In the case of the introduction
of Blake’s Milton the Muses are enjoined to conduct something
akin to a surgical operation to inject inspiration into the poet’s
head via his hand and arm. The speaker we encounter in The
Dedication of Don Juan states that he wanders in the
company of “pedestrian muses” while Robert Southey is seen
mounted on a winged steed in an allusion to the image of
Pegasus as a symbol of poetic inspiration that appears in
Paradise Lost. Even later, in Victorian poetry, we find a vestige
of the tradition of commencing a poetic work with a
supplication to a source of divine inspiration, be this vestige
no more than the dropping of the word “wind” at or near the
beginning of a poem, or of the word “cross-wind” in the
following case for discussion: “By the Fire-Side,” which along
with fifty other poems made up a collection of verse that bore
the general heading of Men and Women when it was published
in 1855. The second stanza of Robert Browning’s “By the Fire-
side” runs:
I shall be found by the fire, suppose,

48
O’er a great wise book as beseemeth age,,
While the shutters flap as the cross-wind blows
And I turn the page, and turn the page,
Not verse now, only prose.
In poetic tradition such words as wind, breeze and indeed
fire connote the power of inspiration but what about a cross-
wind, a rather technical cum nautical term after all? Only a
few lines later we read of children who wish to cut from a
nearby hazel the mainmast for their ship. Does this seemingly
inconsequential reference to things nautical imply that the
poem is comparable to a voyage? Could even the word “bridge”
fall into the category of things nautical? Be that as it may, the
progress of this voyage involves a number of significant tacks.
The standpoint of the speaker is that of a man at the prime of
life who imagines what he will be doing one autumn day when
he has reached old age. Scarcely have we entered the cozy
interior of his home than the narrative sequence U-turns back
to the day, recalled in the speaker’s memory, when he as a
young man accompanied his wife Leanor on a walk to a ruined
chapel situated half way up an Italian mountain-side.
Browning real wife’s name was Elisabeth and no mention of
“Leanor” can disguise the autobiographical nature of the
poem’s import.
The lilting ABABA rhyming scheme that runs through the
poem's fifty-three stanzas is fully consonant with the mix of
contrasts and harmony that informs it. Few poems equal “By
the Fire-Side” as poetry that conveys an overwhelming sense of
the communion of two souls bound by love and mutual
understanding in, quite literally, the marriage of true minds.
Even in their distinctly different kinds of poetry Robert and
Elizabeth complemented each other, not least through the
contrast between what Browning, in a letter to the then
Elizabeth Barratt, called “the pure white light” emanating

49
from her poetry as against the prismatic hues of his own. 16
When writing ”By the Fire-Side” he still conceded to her the
role of “leader” (VI).
The walk involves a physical and spiritual ascent to a
ruined chapel but here spiritual uplift in no way obscures the
poet's perception of even minute and not particularly “poetic”
things on the way, midges included. Like William Blake
Browning did not scotch grubs and insect life from his field of
vision, an indication perhaps that poets can relish life as it is,
bugs and all. 17
The poem bears witness to Browning's full recovery with
the morbid self-consciousness and contentions against with
the prison of selfhood in Pauline, The lyrical ‘I” yields in stages
to other pronouns, “you” and “we”. The minds of husband and
wife join in a communion of spirit that overcomes all mental
barriers that separate them and leads them into a mystical
realm beyond mortality even, for strophe LXVII tells that "a
bar was broken between life and life." In general we note a
progressive falling away of dividing lines between one time and
another, one mind and other and between life and the
hereafter, a transition intimated by the temporal setting of the
walk in the gently declining hours of a day in November, the
month celebrated for its mellowness, richness of colour and
16
Robert Browning to Elizabeth B. Barratt, an. 13, 1845. The Letters of Robert Browning
and Elizabeth Barratt Barratt, Vol. 1 1845-1846,ed Robert Barratt Browning, London,
1900.
17
G. K. Chesterton noted in his book Robert Browning, London 1903: “Browning's verse,
in so far as it is grotesque, is not complex or artificial; it is natural and in the legitimate
tradition of nature. The verse sprawls like the trees, dances like the dust; it is ragged like
the thunder-cloud, it is top-heavy like the toadstool. Energy which disregards the standard
of classical art is in nature as it is in Browning. The same sense of the uproarious force in
things which makes Browning dwell on the oddity of a fungus or a jellyfish makes him
dwell on the oddity of a philosophical idea.”

50
the abundance of its late fruitfulness. Elsewhere an eventide
walk described in the Gospel of Luke tells of a sudden
revelation and the experience of communion.
The poem reaches its point of culmination in the epiphany
which elicits the words "O moment one and infinite" in strophe
XXXVII. It is surely no coincidence that this moment
immediately follows the crossing, or rather re-crossing, of the
bridge that leads to the ruined chapel, W. Whitla adduces the
line as evidence supporting his contention that “the central
truth” of the Incarnation underlies Browning’s thought
patterns as revealed in his poetry.18 F. R. G. Duckworth
understands ‘the moment one and infinite” as a pointer to an
underlying tension between two ways of understanding time
that collided in Browning’s mind, one rooted in Hellenism and
the other in Jewish biblical culture.19 As a reading of Pauline
reveals, Browning renounced the Greek ideal of absolute
perfection along with his allegiance to Shelley and sought
solace in the thought of sharing in the death and resurrection
of Jesus. Historically Christianity posed a merging of the
Hellenist Greek world and Hebraism of the kind that had
deeply impressed Browning. His commitment to Christianity of
a personal kind involved no lack of sympathy for the Jews of
Rome who were forced to attend Christian sermons as we can
adjudge from "Holy-Cross Day." The word "cross" also holds a
significant place in "By the Fire-side," a fact anticipated by the
reference to a “cross-wind” noted earlier. Let us look at these
lines which immediately precede the words "O moment one
and infinite."
18
W. Whitla, The Central Truth: The Incarnation in Robert Browning's Poetry (Toronto,
1963).
19
F. R. G. Duckworth, Browning: Background and Conflict (Connecticut, 1966).

51
XXXV
Silent the crumbling bridge we cross, (x)
And pity and praise the chapel sweet,
And care about the fresco's loss,
And wish for our souls a like retreat,
And wonder at the moss.
XXXV.
Stoop and kneel on the settle under,
Look through the window's grated square:
Nothing to see! For fear of plunder,
The cross is down and the altar bare, (x)
As if thieves don't fear thunder.
XXXVI.
We stoop and look in through the grate,
See the little porch and rustic door,
Read duly the dead builder's date;
Then cross the bridge that we crossed before, (2x)
Take the path again---but wait!
The fourfold occurrence of the word cross either as a
noun or a verb within 15 lines is noticeable and the twofold
occurrence of the verb to cross in the same line is
remarkable. In prose such repetitions are felt to be
awkward, even ugly. In poetry the case is otherwise In his
article “The Meaning of the word in Verse” Jurij Tynjanov
explained why this is so.20 All the multiple meanings,
20
Jurij Tynjanov, "The Meaning of the Word in Verse," in Readings in Russian Poetics /
Formalist and Structuralist Views, ed. by Ladislav Mateijka and Krystina Pomorska
(Michigan Slavic Publications, Ann Arbor, 1978), 136-145

52
potential associations and other effects that reside in a
word come into play in poetry though only one meaning
may be immediately obvious. The word cross conveys both
the sense of to traverse and an object of church furniture
and by extension all that the cross symbolizes in terms of
Christian theology and belief. I shall discuss the rather odd
sounding line in “The Pied Piper of Hamelin” which runs:
“He never can cross that mighty top” in the light of all
potential meanings of the word cross and the underlying
symbolism that informs the legend of the Pied Piper itself.21
************
Wandering: “The Worst of Sinning”?
Byron and William Blake under Milton’s Long Shadow.
As we read in the closing lines of Paradise Lost Adam and Eve,
newly exiled from Paradise, enter the world of suffering and
hard experience “with wand’ring steps and slow”.” In Paradise
Regained Jesus is a wanderer in the wilderness of temptation,
there to thwart Satan’s evil designs against God’s purposes
21
The contrast of moment and infinity is comparable to the essential premise of
Ferdinand de Saussure’s theory of language and Jurij Tynjanov’s application of this
theory to the task of textual criticism. The Word (see stanza XXVII “The great Word that
makes all things new”) is singular in number but it subsumes entire groups and classes of
words such as those that share a common appearance and association of meanings.
Tynjanov imputed to individual occurrences of powers the power to evoke all and any of
its meanings. The mind cannot take in this breadth of significance at any one time and in
the normal way it is limited to recognizing that sense which accords with the overall
theme of the text to which it belongs. However certain passages remind the reader that
words exist in their own right and harbour an immerse reserve of meaning.

53
and prepare the way leading to the redemption of mankind.
By weighing the implication of certain words in the light of
their contexts and arrangement we become better able to
discern the effects of Milton’s pervasive influence on works by
Wordsworth in which the word “wander” gains greater or
lesser prominence. In this connection I have already made
references to The Prelude and “I wandered lonely as a cloud.” I
go further to propose that Lord Byron and William Blake recall
the theological implications of “wandering” in the mind of
John Milto, beginning my argument by citing the following
lines in the First Canto of Don Juan by Lord Byron.
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 1, 7, lines 3-4
First Essay
If one were to fail to appreciate that Lord Byron had his
tongue in his cheek when writing the lines cited above, one
might conclude from them that he had adopted the posture of
some university don of the stricter sort who demanded from
his students a logical exposition of a given subject that would
start from a clearly defined proposition containing exact
definitions of all the terms contained in that position. Failure
to do would amount to evidence of criminal intent.
Let us consider which of the usual meanings of
"wandering" "fits the context" of the lines from Don Juan cited
above. "Wandering" here is not to be understood in the sense
of 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.

54
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 organized 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 in are hints pointing to the nature of
the story in question. The connection of beginning with
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 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

55
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 concerns
"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.
We now consider another way in which "wandering" and
"beginning" are related to each other in Don Juan, and indeed

56
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 wingèd 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," arousing the word's
associations with poetic inspiration but also with
disorientation and error.
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 (VII. 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.
From a Puritan's point of view it was perhaps somewhat
risqué of Milton to have identified the Holy Spirit as the
Heav'nly Muse in the opening lines of Paradise Lost. In that

57
context Milton could hardly dwell on the feminine qualities of
the Muse, and only hints at this in his reference to the Spirit
brooding "dove-like" over the "vast Abyss" from which Creation
came into being. The dove is of course an established symbol
for the Holy Spirit. Milton was not in any case strictly orthodox
on the question of the Trinity and the personal or non
personal nature of the Holy Spirit.22 The conflation of the
biblical Holy Spirit and the classical Muse springs from Milton'
overall strategy of merging Hebrew and classical traditions,
and the mental orientations they typify, when creating
Paradise Lost.
Second Essay
"London" by William Blake- (Printed Version, 1794)
I wander thro’ each charter’d street,
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
In every cry of every Man.
In every Infants cry of fear.
In every voice, in every ban.
The mind-forg’d manacles I hear
How the Chimney-sweepers cry
Every blackning Church appalls.
And the hapless Soldiers sign
Runs in blood down Palace walls
22
William Kerrigan, The Sacred Complex, (Cambridge [Mass.] and London, 1983) 150,
151.

58
But most thro’ midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlots curse
Blasts the new born Infants tear
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.
The journeys and excursions described in William Blake's
poetry are (or seem to be) of a quite different order from those
encountered in Wordsworth's poetry. Blake's poetry does not
depict natural scenes in the familiar or realistic mode. Blake's
eye perceived what the poet understood as the spiritual
realities that underlie the world of common experience.
Following precedents set by Dante and Milton, his long poems
express the author's concern for the spiritual progress of
mankind from its myth-shrouded beginnings to the ultimate
advent of the New Jerusalem.
William Blake and Goethe, however much they differed in
many obvious respects, shared the belief that, in its ultimate
manifestation, mankind's "wandering" journey through history
and experience meant progress in the act of striving to unite
polarities and contrasts. Like Goethe, Blake conceived of
inferior kinds of wandering manifested by those who only
represent a partial aspect of wandering in its most
comprehensive and inclusive sense.
In "The Mental Traveller" there is a reference to "cold earth
wanderers," whom the speaker disparagingly contrasts with
"the mental traveller" as one who is free to move through time
and space without encumbrances, even in reverse sequence.
This reference seems to constitute an allusion to the
depictions of travel and movement found in Lyrical Ballads by
Wordsworth and Coleridge.
However, is the cleft between Blake's depictions of a
traveller's experience and those of the Lakers' so fundamental
as it might first appear? Or did both Blake and Wordsworth
seek to illuminate the same fundamental relationship, though

59
their approaches to it were from quite opposite directions,
revealing the difference of stance between poets who represent
travelling realistically and those who choose to represent
dreamlike journeys? In both kinds of journey, the realistic and
more obviously symbolic or mythical modes of representation
merge, making an absolute division between them appear
questionable.
Recognizing that "wandering" was for Goethe and the
Romantics a synonym for poetry and the poetical imagination,
we will be in a stronger position to assess similarities and
differences between Blake and Wordsworth as poets if we
compare two celebrated poems introduced by a declined form
of the verb to wander.
Blake's visions do not reveal any escapist refusal to
confront the realities of the world, but rather manifest an
acute awareness of social and political conditions. To make a
comparison, Dante's The Divine Comedy is as much concerned
with his contemporary society as it is with realities beyond
temporal reality.
"London" belongs to Songs of Experience, and within a yet
broader context, to The Songs of Innocence and Experience. A
comparison between the draft version of 1792 23 and the
23
Working Draft of “London“ (ca. 1792): underlined words are delete, replacing words
are in Italics. The wording of the draft is as follows:
"I Wander thro each dirty street / Near where the dirty Thames does flow/ And see in
every face I meet / Marks of weakness marks of woe END OF STROPHE In every cry of
every man/ In every voice of every child every infants cry of fear/ In every voice in
every ban/ The German mind forgd links I hear manacles I hear END OF STROPHE
But most How the chimney sweepers cry / Blackens oer the churches Every blackening
church appalls / And the hapless soldiers sigh / Runs in blood down palace walls. END
OF STROPHE But most the midnight harlots curse/ From every dismal street I hear/
Weaves around the marriage hearse / And blasts the new born infants tear. END OF
STROPHE AND THEN RECASTING OF FINAL LINES: But most from every thro

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