The Contest of Memory in "Tintern Abbey"
Michael Vander Weele
Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 50, No. 1. (Jun., 1995), pp. 6-26.
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Sat Jan 5 20:36:25 2008
The Contest of Memory
in "Tintern Abbey"
M I C H A E L VANDER WEELE
avrivc
from description of childhood
and youth to adilt maturity, Wordsworth wrote this now famous passage just past the midpoint
of "Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey":
-That time is past,
And all its aching joys are now no more,
And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this
Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur: other gifts
Have followed; for such loss, I would believe,
Abundant recompense.
Modern critics have been suspicious not only of the "abundance" of this recompense but of the very claim of "recompense" itself. As early as 1959 David Perkins, then one of the
new voices for Wordsworth as the poet of consciousness
rather than of nature, claimed that "it is as though the poet
himself could scarcely conceive or know exactly what he was
talking about."^
O 1995 by The Regents of the University of California
"Lines Writtena Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, o n Revisiting the Banks of
I
the Wye during a Tour, July 1 3 , 1798," in "Lyrical Ballads" and Other Poems, 17971800, ed. James Butler and Karen Green (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1gg2), p. 188,
11. 84-89. Further references to "Tintern Abbey" are from this edition and are
included in the text.
The Quest for Permanence: The Symbolism of Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1959)~p. 80. In "The Idiom of Vision," in New
Perspectives on Coleridge and Wordsworth: Selected Papers from the English Institute, ed.
Perkins's reading does not have the force of Harold
Bloom's interpretation in The Visionary Company, published in
196 1 and revised in 197 1 . According to Bloom, "the poem's
own central story . . . [is] its account of aesthetic contemplation and its personal myth of memory as salvation."3The force
of Bloom's reading is due to his magisterial writing, no doubt,
but also to his influence as an editor.4 For example, a generation of students using Bloom and Lionel Trilling's Romantic
Poetry and Prose volume of the Oxford Anthology of English Literature series would meet with this gloss of the "abundant recompense" lines: "first central verse statement of Wordsworth's
great idea of the compensatory imagination, which converts
experiential loss into poetic and (Wordsworth desperately insisted) human gain."5
Though Perkins and Bloom still found much to praise
in the poem, several more recent readings have learned
their suspicion without sharing their praise. In The Romantic
Ideology, for example, Jerome J. McGann saw a similar psychological dodge in "Tintern Abbey" but judged its results
more sternly: "Between 1793 and 1798 Wordsworth lost the
Geoffrey H. Hartman (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 197r), p p 1-39. Kenneth
R. Johnston gives a cogent description of the turn from Wordsworth as the poet of
nature and feeling to Wordsworth as the visionary poet of consciousness. In "Two
Roads to Wordsworth," in Wordsworth:A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs,
N.J.: Prentice-Hall, ig72), pp. 1-1 1, M. H. Abrams similarly describes such a turn in
Wordsworth studies during the 1960s but locates the tension between Wordsworth
as "simple" or "problematic" poet in the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century
criticism by Matthew Arnold and A. C. Bradley.
3 The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry, rev. ed. (Ithaca:
Cornell Univ. Press, 1g7i), p. 140.
4 The Illinet on-line system serving Illinois colleges and universities lists over
four hundred works that Bloom has had a hand in. Though a quick perusal shows
the effects of computer redundancy and human error, one cannot dispute the
influence of Bloom's work as gatherer and practitioner of theory and criticism or as
bold anthologist. I limit my comments in this paragraph to his glosses for an anthology used by a generation of students. An early qualification of Bloom's argument
about memory was given by Stuart M. Sperry, Jr., in "From 'Tintern Abbey' to the
'Intimations Ode': Wordsworth and the Function of Memory," The Wordsworth Circle,
1 (1970), 40-49.
5 Romantic Poetry and Prose, ed. Harold Bloom and Lionel Trilling (New York:
Oxford Univ. Press, 1973), p. 14811 (emphasis added).
8
NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE
world merely to gain his own immortal soul."6 Marjorie Levinson worked to expose Wordsworth's efforts to repress
the real world he pretended to describe. And John Barrell
critiqued Wordsworth's attitude toward his sister, Dorothy,
which Wordsworth mistakenly thought to be egalitarian.;.
While it is possible that these (and other) corrections of
the poet are necessary, I would like to introduce a question
about memory from the side of history rather than psychology. That question is made more promising by the recent work
of Mary J. Carruthers on memory and the arts, especially on
memory as an ethical construct (habitus) that links knowledge
and action (I shall discuss her work later in this essay). But first
we need justification for pursuing such a question. What is
lacking currently, or what might be gained from changing the
kind of question we have asked of "Tintern Abbey"? Limiting
questions of memory to psychological and aesthetic contexts, I
will argue, has made us lose sight of the self-criticism found
within the poem itself. To state my case as strongly as possible:
critics have appropriated the strategies for self-criticism in
"Tintern Abbey" and then turned them against the poem as if
those strategies were a wholly external force. I have chosen
Bloom as a ;epresentative of'this kind of criticism; though 1
will argue that his analysis of memory in "Tintern Abbey" is
too narrow, his early and regular insistence on the importance
of memory in Wordsworth's poem also guides my analysis.
Bloom reads Wordsworth suspiciously. The suspicion
comes first from Freud, the third major nineteenth-century
figure, after Marx and Nietzsche, to institute a "hermeneutics
The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press,
19831, p. 88.
7 See Levinson, Wordsworth's Great Period Poem: Four Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986); and Barrell, Poetry, Language, and Politics (Manchester:
Manchester Univ. Press, 1988) See also Helen Vendler, "Tintern Abbey: Two Assaults," in Wordsworth in Context (Bucknell Review, 36, no. I), ed. Pauline Fletcher and
John Murphy (Lewisburg, Penn.: Bucknell Univ. Press, igg2), pp. 173-90, for criticism of Levinson and Barrell based on questions of evidence and genre. In "On
Political Readings of Lyrical Ballads," in his Doing Things with Texts: Essays in Criticism
and Critical Theory, ed. Michael Fischer (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), p p 36491, Abrams launches a more philosophical attack on New Historicist readings that
"discredit. . . manifest statement." He chooses examples from Jerome McGann,
Heather Glen, and Levinson.
of suspicion" (Ricoeur's phrase)-that is, to work to uncover
unconscious motivations within a life or text. According to
such a view, Wordsworth's claim of compensation (adult experience and memory compensating for the child's loss of immediacy) should be doubted as an accurate self-assessment. Shifts
of tone and image, the white space of the unsaid, figure as
importantly as the author's claims; indeed, they may figure
more prominently in our critical enterprise. In what follows I
will show that Wordsworth was more self-critical than Bloom
makes him out to be. I will argue further that Bloom's analysis
narrows the poem's interests to the aesthetic and reduces memory to the personal and psychological. Better possibilities exist.
Asserting the psycho-aesthetic nature of
the gifts that attended Wordsworth's return to Tintern Abbey, Bloom located the speaker's first intimation of doubt
about the efficacy of those gifts in line 59, with reference to
"half-extinguish'd thought" and, especially, "a sad perplexity" (1. 61). Bloom heard in this perplexity Wordsworth's fear
of a fourth stage in his development, "when natural decay
may dull his responsiveness to the presences of beauty" (Visionary Company, p. i37).8 Such fear could also be described,
according to Bloom, as fear of loss of immediacy, fear of
mortality, fear of time. According to this reading, Wordsworth's assertion of an "abundant recompense" became more
and more desperate in its insistence; his unarticulated prayer
for Dorothy (1. 1 2 1) had the force, by the end of the poem, of
"Do not forget, or the life in me, the creative joy, will die"
(Visionary Company, p. 139). The conscious assertion of free8 Bloom's assertion of a fourth stage moves beyond the traditional three stages
attributed to Wordsworth's organization of "Tintern Abbey" (and the Prelude) by
Arthur Beatty and others. See Beatty, William Wordsworth: His Doctrine and Art in Their
Historical Relations, gd ed. (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1960). Drawing upon
Wordsworth's poetry and prose, Beatty summarized these three stages as the unreflecting life of childhood, or the age of sensation; the mental and bodily activity of
youth, o r the age of feeling; and the mature, if sadder, life of adulthood, o r the age
of thought; each age "has its own integrity and at the same time the earlier is
essential to the development of the later" (pp. 72-74).
10
NINETEENTH-CENTURY L I T E R A T U R E
dom and maturity was undercut by the unconscious, which
grieved the loss of an earlier, more immediate relationship
with nature.
Wordsworth's questioning begins earlier in the poem
and is more pervasive than is suggested by Bloom and most
other critics, who then try to make up for that perceived
deficit. Nicholas Roe, however, notes the conditional mood of
many of the poem's lines. He gives as examples the use of
"perhaps" (1. 32), "I trust" (1. 36), and "would believe" (1. 88),
to which might be added the "perchance" of lines 1 1 2 and
147e9
Drawing upon his reading of the diary of James Losh,
who had been with Wordsworth in Paris six years earlier,
Roe states that "it seems highly likely that politics, poetry, his
recent past and immediate future would have been much on
Wordsworth's mind" (p. 270), as William and Dorothy had
left Losh immediately prior to their walking tour of the Wye
valley. Further, the 'yuly 13, 1798" date in the subtitle of the
poem was the eighth anniversary of the day Wordsworth
had first set foot in France in 1790, and it was also celebrated in the revolutionary calendar as the eve of Bastille
day, whose celebration Wordsworth had witnessed in France
in both 1790 and 1792. Roe writes that "the date therefore
had a personal significance for Wordsworth that served to
connect Tintern and France" (p. 273). Roe's work suggests
that the political and personal in the poem combine in ways
that lead less to repression than to the interplay of hope and
loss, erosion and possibility. As Roe claims, "Wordsworth's
poetry of 'chearful faith' in 'Tintern Abbey' is complicated
by, and derives its power from, a lasting awareness of insecurity that issues in the poem's characteristic idiom of assertion and simultaneous reservation" (pp. 269-70).
This initial analysis of the strategies for self-criticism in
"Tintern Abbey" provides sufficient justification for introducing a new question, a question whether the analysis of
memory should not be placed within a historical rather than
a psycho-aesthetic context. For if we ask why such clear
9 See Nicholas Roe, Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988),pp. 268-69.
textual evidence has not been recognized, ignorance of or
inattention to the resources of a different tradition of reflection on memory presents itself as one cause for not seeing
what is in the text. We are more alert to the resources of a
Freudian and post-Freudian analysis of memory than to the
resources of an earlier tradition. This is natural, but the
attribution of greater self-consciousness to the modern critic
than to the earlier poet, we should remind ourselves, is not
a natural corollary but a seductive prejudice.
Before we turn to an earlier tradition of reflection on
memory as an ethical construct, however, I wish to sketch in
some of the details of Bloom's position. His writings on
"Tintern Abbey" from the 1960s through the 1980s allow us
to consider the early influence as well as the limits of an
approach that pits unconscious motivation against conscious
articulation. Bloom also points to the centrality of memory
more insistently than any other critic, thus preparing the
way for our later historical analysis of memory in "Tintern
Abbey."
In The Visionary Company Bloom described two gifts deriving from Wordsworth's return to Tintern Abbey.'" These two
gifts were a tranquil restoration and a state of aesthetic contemplation in which the object world ceased to be a burden. It was
an aesthetic contemplation because it was not practical, Bloom
believed. It was also valued by Bloom as "the highest kind of
naturalistic contemplation" (Visionary Company, p. 134). Bloom
left out of his discussion, however, the anonymous but practical moral force described in the middle of the "gifts" passage:
feelings too
Of unremembered pleasure; such, perhaps,
As may have had no trivial influence
O n that best portion of a good man's life;
His little, nameless, unremembered acts
Of kindness and of love.
(11. 3 1-36)
lo
These two gifts depend upon Wordsworth's recognition of an affinity between nature and self, Bloom tells us, a n affinity Bloom marks early in the poem
when "the thoughts of more deep seclusion are impressed simultaneously on the
landscape and o n its human perceiver" (p. 132).
12
NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE
If this passage is reinserted into the discussion of gifts, then
"aesthetic contemplation" not only loosens its hold on the
passage as a whole but also becomes a less obvious category
for Bloom's second gift: "that blessed mood" in which "the
heavy and the weary weight / Of all this unintelligible world 1
Is lighten'd" (11. 38-42). Perhaps "mood" leans toward the
aesthetic, but the rest of the passage adopts the language of
illumination, which is not easily limited to the aesthetic alone.
In placing the "blessed mood" within an aesthetic context, indicating it as a time or state that requires neither usefulness nor judgment, Bloom follows Geoffrey Hartman. In
an early essay Bloom still very much admires, Hartman referred the "blessed mood" to a release from the tyranny of
sight and judgment described in Book XI1 of the Prelude:
I speak in recollection of a time
When the bodily eye, in every stage of life
T h e most despotic of our senses, gained
Such strength in me as often held my mind
I n absolute dominion. l l
Wordsworth describes this time as interrupting his "deeper
feelings"; and those deeper feelings, able to quiet both eye
and judgment, Hartman associated with the "blessed mood"
in "Tintern abbey."'^
The "heavy and weary weight" could as easily refer to
the moral realm, however-as it does, for example, in Book
VIII of the Prelude. Wordsworth, thankful for the goodness
of nature and humankind that he experienced as a child,
writes:
And thus
Was founded a sure safeguard and defence
Against the weight of meanness, selfish cares,
Coarse manners, vulgar passions, that beat in
O n all sides from the ordinary world
In which we traffic.
(VIII, 11. 317-22; emphasis added)
'I
The Fourteen-Book "Prelude," ed. W.J.B. Owen (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press,
1985), p. 236, Bk. XII, 11. 127-31.
l P See The Unmediated Vision: An Interpretation of Wordsworth, Hopkins, Rilke, and
Val@ (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1 9 5 4 ) p.
~ 129.
Wordsworth was not the first to feel the weight of human
custom as a moral burden. Nor is this "gift" passage the only
reference to moral burden in "Tintern Abbey," for near the
end of the poem Wordsworth states his hope that nature's
healing power will guard Dorothy, through the operation of
memory, against being drowned in a world of unkindness,
cruelty, slander, and custom:
that neither evil tongues,
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,
Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all
T h e dreary intercourse of daily life,
Shall e'er prevail against us. . . .
(11. 128-32)
Where Bloom hears the psycho-aesthetic fear of the loss of
immediacy, one might also hear a conscious ethical concern
with the violence and passivity that reduce the field of our
response-ability. This is the fear, of course, that is also expressed in Wordsworth's "Preface" to the Lyrical Ballads.
T h e contradiction between conscious design and unconscious fear or desire that Bloom asserted in The Visionary Company was passed on to students in the glosses in Romantic Poetry
and Prose. Earlier I quoted Bloom's commentary on Wordsworth's "desperate insistence." Thisjudgment followed a strategy that turned differences into divisions. With a sidelong
look at "aching joys," Bloom glossed "dizzy raptures" this way:
"like 'aching joys.' This is an ambiguous phrase; 'dizzy' and
'aching' seek to qualz& negatively, yet primarily they testify to the
intensity and authenticity of the now past raptures and joys"
(Romantic Poetry, p. 14th; emphasis added). The registers of
pain and confusion have most likely been used from time
immemorial to describe pleasure; we track such use at least
from the time of Augustine's commentary in the Confessions.
Yet Bloom's attribution of intentionality slides from language
(as if words could intend on their own) to author: the words
accumulate positive connotations in ways that escape the author's control. Different registers get marked as a division of
forces in the poem. Once Bloom sets up such sharp divisions in
the poem, he finds that only the critic, not the poet, can face
14
NINETEENTH-CENTURY
LITERATURE
them. While this may be true for some poems, what we can
learn through further attention to them is limited to diagnostic analysis, a limitation too frequently enacted over the last
decade.
When Bloom returned to "Tintern Abbey" as the "Scene
of Instruction" (the title of his essay) in 1976, his primary
focus was still on "the myth of memory," but this time he had
Nietzsche at hand. He opens this essay by quoting Nietzsche's
efforts at demystification. Our question should be whether
the ideas about memory that Nietzsche criticized were the
same ideas that Wordsworth held:
I start with Nietzsche, as perhaps the least Wordsworthian of interpretative theorists. This is one of his notebook jottings, of 1855,
urging a revisionary view of "memory":
One must revise one's ideas about memory: here lies the chief
temptation to assume a "soul," which, outside time, reproduces, recognizes, etc. But that which is experienced lives on
"in the memory"; I cannot help it if it "comes back," the will is
inactive in this case, as in the coming of any thought. Something happens of which I become conscious: now something
similar comes-who called it? roused it?
Nietzsche demystifies and desubjectivizes memory; Wordsworth
so mystified memory as to make of it the one great myth of his
antimythological poetry.ls
While Bloom used Nietzsche to argue against a view of
time and self that much twentieth-century autobiography
theory and substantialist theology has held, it may be unfair to
identify Wordsworth with such a view.14The notion of memory or of "soul" existing "outside time" is not consonant with
Wordsworth's notion of memory; nor does the notion that the
will is inactive in the recall of memory fit the movement of
Wordsworth's poem. Even in the "Intimations Ode" the great
1 3 Bloom, "Wordsworth and the Scene of Instruction," in his Poetry and Repression: Revisionism from Blake to Stevens (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1976), p. 5 2 .
'4 This is Janet Varner Gunn's claim in her analysis of autobiography theory and
its assumptions about time and self (see "The Religious Hermeneutic of Autobiography: Augustine's Confessions and the Credo ut Intelligam," in ArtlLiteraturelReli~on:
Life on the Borders, ed. Robert Detweiler [Chico, Calif.: Scholars Press, 19831, esp. pp.
66-69).
divide is not between time and eternity or freedom and law but
between human custom and alternative habits that nurture
life: "And custom lie upon thee with a weight, / Heavy as frost,
and deep almost as life!"ls Time is not the adversary of the
self; the self belongs to a world through time. And, to repeat,
that belonging both shapes and is shaped by memory. This is a
human, ethical task. It requires that we build from experience
the medium of our relation to the source of life. It requires
that we find a way of life that nurtures life, that becomes a
blessing.
Bloom, like so many after him, pursues the notion of a
text riven against itself. To do so, I have claimed, he posits a
smoother surface to the text than is really there-only to show
that such smoothness gives evidence of the author's delusion.
Despite changes in critical schools and the values they hold,
this suspicious reading of "abundant recompense" in "Tintern
Abbey" has dominated Wordsworth studies over the last half
of the twentieth century, so much so that we need ways to
reexamine our interpretation of the poem, to defamiliarize it
once again.16
Wordsworth seems to raise questions about the force and
value of memory. What happens to our reading of the poem
if we take seriously this possibility: could Wordsworth himself
have played out in the poem the conflict we are eager to
attribute to repressed motivations? Could there have been
ideas and images that gave strength and nourishment for a
15 "Ode," in "Poems, in Two Volumes," and Other Poems, 1800-1807, ed. Jared
Curtis (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1983)~
p. 275, 11. 130-31. The question of Platonic influence in the "Ode" should be referred, it seems to me, to the writing of
Wordsworth's beloved Virgil in Book VI of the Aeneid, which gives Anchises' travelogue of the underworld and description of the souls who will take on bodies to
become part of Aeneas' line, especially the tragedy of Marcellus. This description of
souls is Platonic, to be sure, but it is also social and political through and through,
describing the values of an earlier and nobler Rome.
16 Wordsworth provides for Bloom, if not the compensation the poet claims for
himself, at least a deep consolation. Bloom argues that the values he finds in Stevens
and Wordsworth are commensurate to each other and appropriate to our age.
Bloom's reading has held its force even for those who would question its humanistic
assumptions, perhaps because its strategy is congenial to other versions of the "hermeneutics of suspicion." A deep similarity in strategies obscures the difference in
values. Or perhaps the view of self for contemporary humanist and nonhumanist
critics is more similar than either group would wish to suppose.
16
NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE
questioning attitude we sometimes suppose we must bring to
Wordsworth ourselves?
Bloom points us in the right direction with his emphasis
on memory in "Tintern Abbey," but he does not consider the
tradition of reflection on memory that was available to
Wordsworth. I am not referring to the early influence on
Wordsworth of David Hartley's associationism but to a longer
tradition of reflection on memory as an ethical construction.
Memory, in this view, is more than personal and certainly
more than simply an inward and autonomous contrast to
perception of the external world. Echoes of historical texts
within the poem, along with recent work on memory and the
arts, invite discussion of this longer tradition.
Near the end of "Tintern Abbey" Wordsworth, projecting Dorothy's future, provides two images of memory that
point forward to the Prelude and back to a longer tradition of
discourse on memory and the arts:
and in after years,
When these wild ecstasies shall be matured
Into a sober pleasure, when thy mind
Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms,
Thy memory be as a dwelling-place
For all sweet sounds and harmonies; Oh! then. . . .
(11. '38-43)
The images Wordsworth employs-mansion,
dwellingplace-trouble Bloom: "there is something about that 'mansion' and that 'dwelling-place' that makes the reader a little
uneasy. The mansion is a touch like a museum, and the
dwelling-place a kind of tape- or record-library" ("Scene of
Instruction," p. 78). Bloom's updated technology would not
be troubling if it did not import such a strong notion of the
passivity of memory into our discussion of the poem. Less
contemporary analogies may prove more helpful.
Wordsworth's images are from the same register as
those from Augustine's Confessions, Book X. The chapter
begins, "And I come to the fields [campos] and spacious
palaces [lata praetoria] of my memory, where are the treasures of innumerable images, brought into it from things of
all sorts perceived by the senses."l7 These opening images of memory (fields and palaces containing treasures of
innumerable images) are continued with these variants: "inner receptacle" [abstrusioribus receptaculis], "cloisters" [recessus], "vast court" [aula ingenti], "great receptacle" [ingenti
sinu], "treasury" [thesauro], and "large and boundless chamber" [penetrale amplum et infinitum]. Though the memory is
figured architecturally as a construction that contains such
images, this containment is neither passive nor neutral. The
images of memory d o not only reflect the world but also
act upon it: "There [in memory] is stored up, whatsoever
besides we think, either by enlarging or diminishing, or
any other way varying those things which the sense hath
come to" (p. 158).ls
From a description of images shared by Wordsworth
and Augustine we turn to a mediating tradition of reflection on memory, drawing upon and qualifying the argument of M. H. Abrams, before turning to recent work by
Mary Carruthers on the art of memory. Abrams wrote a
sustained argument for the influence of Augustine's work
on The Prelude in his book Natural Supernaturalism. After
comparing the interests and strategies of Wordsworth's Prelude and Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu, Abrams
writes:
Such similarities in works otherwise so unlike. . . are the less
surprising when we realize that these works are cognate, and that
their ultimate source. . . is the fifteen-hundred-year-old tradition of religious confessional writings, and within the tradition
the first and greatest example, and one of the most influential of
17 Augustine, The Confessions of Saint Augustine, trans. Edward B. Pusey (1838;
rpt. New York: Collier Books, 1961).
18 Noting these similarities with Augustine's text, I should also state that according to Chester and Alice Shaver's catalog of Wordsworth's library and Duncan Wu's
n e know Wordsworth housed in
index of Wordsworth's reading, the o n l y - ~ u ~ u s t iwe
his library was a complete set marked as belonging to Coleridge. So far as we know,
Wordsworth did not have the set in his possession until around 1810. This does not,
of course, preclude the possibility that Wordsworth read Augustine with care elsewhere o r by other means. See Chester L. Shaver and Alice C. Shaver, Wordsworth's
Library: A Catalogue, Including a List of Books Housed by William Wordsworthfor Coleridge
from c. 1810 to c. 1830 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1979); and Duncan Wu,
Wordsworth's Reading, I 770-1 799 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993).
18
NINETEENTH-CENTURY
LITERATURE
all books, in Catholic as in Protestant Europe, was the Confessions
of St. Augustine.19
Abrams claims for Augustine both "the spiritual vocabulary for all later self-analyses and treatments of self-formation" and "the topics [memory, time, the "significance of
recurrent moments of illumination"] which have since. . .
become the preoccupation of writers of secular confessions"
(pp. 86-87; emphasis added). Yet Abrams may claim too
much for Augustine. Even if the vocabulary may not have
changed much from Augustine's time (the argument about
topics may be a clearer case), the contexts for understanding
that vocabulary certainly had changed many times over by
the time Wordsworth repeated part of it. We may understand
his repetition better as rearrangement or reemphasis than as
shared identity, especially if Wordsworth had a negative or
ambiguous relationship to Augustine's Christian framework.
One hears (it is both a strength and a weakness) the lifetime
reader of Wordsworth in Abrams's catalog of Augustine's
analyses in his spiritual autobiography:
By his intense self-scrutiny Augustine achieved an astonishing subtlety in discriminating the variety and nuance of man's "affections
and the movements of his heart" (IV.xiv), of the complex interaction between what the altering mind brings to its perceptions and
what is given to it in perception, of the difficulty of separating the
pure fact in memory from the intrusive presence of the self that
remembers, and of the slow and obscure growth of convictions
and values which burst suddenly into awareness in the quantum
leap of a moment of insight.
(p. 86)
In fact, Wordsworth and Augustine come dangerously close
to becoming each other in this passage, a criticism first
made by J. Hillis Miller.Z0 If topics and vocabulary have
remained the same, there is nevertheless a sense in Wordsworth that he has strands of textuality rather than a coher'9 Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution i n Romantic Literature (New
York: Norton, 1971), p. 83.
I0 See "Traditionand Difference,"Diacritics, 2 , no. q ( 1 9 7 2 )6-13;
~
rpt. in Miller,
Theory Now and Then (Duke Univ. Press, iggi), p p 79-93.
ent tradition at his disposal. This is why Miller regrets that
Abrams ignored the efforts of Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and
Saussure to replace notions of tradition and revolution with
the notion of repetition as displacement or decentering.
Miller also sees that Abrams's humanistic position did not
lead him to take the Christian tradition seriously enough if
he could make it cover both Augustine's and Wordsworth's
endeavors. Though later in this essay I qualify Wordsworth's "source" as "palimpsest," and though Abrams's interest lies much more in the Prelude than in "Tintern Abbey,"
Abrams rightly points to a tradition of reflection on memory that finds its beginning in the Confessions and one of its
last serious interlocutors in the poet of "Tintern Abbey."
Book X of the Confessions repeats the question with
which Book I had opened: "Where shall I find God?" and its
corollary, "Where shall I find myself?" The answer to these
questions of location is in neither case ethereal but located in
Augustine's analysis of memory and experience, as this passage from Book X makes clear:
These things [the discernment of the senses] do I within, in that
vast court of my memory. For there are present with me, heaven,
earth, sea, and whatever I could think on therein, besides what I
have forgotten. There also meet I with myself, and recall myself,
and when, where, and what I have done, and under what feelings.
( P '59)
Though a Platonic notion of memory as recollection has considerable influence on Augustine (especiallythe early Augustine), in this classical description of memory we hear him
emphasize memory derived from experience. This memory
is already shaped by thought, "enlarging or diminishing, or
any other way varying those things which the sense hath
come to" (p. 158). It is also complicated by the mingling of
present attention, past experience, and expectations for the
future:
Out of the same store do I myself with the past continually combine fresh and fresh likenesses of things which I have experienced, or, from what I have experienced, have believed: and
20
NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE
thence again infer future actions, events and hopes, and all these
again I reflect on, as present.
(p. 159)
Though this memory is to Augustine "some inner place,
which is yet no place" (p. 160), it is in memory that knowledge of God and self must be faced:
Great is this force of memory, excessive great, 0 my God; a large
and boundless chamber! who ever sounded the bottom thereof?
yet is this a power of mine, and belongs unto my nature; nor do I
myself comprehend all that I am. Therefore is the mind too strait
to contain itself.
( p p 159-60)
In "Tintern Abbey" Wordsworth similarly meets himself
in his memory, meets himself as both constructed and constructing. He proclaims his awe for and tests his faith in the
architecture of memory. He questions its effectiveness not
once but three times during the course of the poem. His
ability to raise the question, I am arguing, suggests that there
were ideas and images from the tradition of reflection on
memory that gave strength and nourishment for such a questioning attitude. Wordsworth's image of the memory as mansion or dwelling-place, and Augustine's image of the memory
as palace or chamber, recall for us premodern notions of the
memory as an ethical construct. In this tradition the images
of memory were frequently architectural, as in Geoffrey of
Vinsauf's trope comparing builder to poet-each must premeasure the matter before laying the foundation-or, in
Hugh of St. Victor's imaging of Scripture as a building in
order to exhort its readers to be like masons. Other images
included "storehouse," "cell," "ark," "chest," and "shrine."*l
According to Mary Carruthers, 1 Corinthians 3: io- 16
gave medieval interpreters license for such architectural images and suggested that memory was not only for inventory
but also for invention. Whether the "temple walls" were built
of gold or stubble was a moral question, not a question of
accurate representation. Carruthers places both Dante and
Chaucer within this tradition, claiming that they must not
2'
See Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, ~ggo),p p 34-45.
only view but also use viewing, each sight being a moral test of
character. Though Carruthers's primary focus is medieval
culture, she claims that such a tradition of reflection on memory can be found from antiquity through the nineteenth cent ~ r yIn
. ~Samuel
~
Rogers's The Pleasures of Memory, written in
1792 and passing through nineteen editions before 18i4,23
memory is still referred to as the "moral muse," and the
imagery that Carruthers tracks through Scripture, Augustine, Hugh of St. Victor, and others can still be found in
Rogers's terms "grotto," "secret shadowy cell," "cave," "antique mansion," and "exhaustless mine."24
The choice that Carruthers's research makes available is
how to construe the working of knowledge into memory
and life. Modern thought about memory often divides into
two camps: either memory is mechanical and rote, "just
memorization"; or it is organic, connecting us to our past
but working below the level of intellect or conscious design,
its meanings available primarily through psychological analysis. Carruthers elucidates an earlier tradition's insistence
upon both the design and the ethics of memory. She writes
that "in [medieval writers'] understanding of the matter, it
was memory that made knowledge into useful experience,
and memory that combined these pieces of informationbecome-experience into what we call 'ideas,' what they were
more likely to call 'judgments' " (The Book of Memory, p. 1).
Training in memory was also training in prudence, defined
as "the ability to make wise judgments" (p. 69).
Medieval commentary on Aristotle, Cicero, and Augustine developed an understanding of memory as a disposition
or habit of soul as well as a powerful technique for retaining
22
Carruthers, "The Poet as Master-Builder: Memory and Invention in Medieval
Poetry," keynote address at the Conference o n Memory and the Arts (Newberry
Library, Chicago, 1 May 1993). This notion of memory as ethical construction fits
Wordsworth's notion of the formation of habits that further life, that contest the
weight of human custom. This, too, Wordsworth shares with Augustine, albeit in
secularized form.
*3 See Marilyn Gaull, English Romanticism: The Human Context (New York: W. W.
Norton, 1988), p. 313.
24 See Rogers, The Pleasures of Memory, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth (1792; rpt.
Oxford: Woodstock Books, 1989).
22
NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE
knowledge. Memory, placed within an account of human habits, was viewed as an important ethical construct. "Defining
memory as habitus," Carruthers writes, "makes it the key linking term between knowledge and action, conceiving of good
and doing it. Memory is an essential treasure house for both
the intellect and virtuous action" (The Book of Memory, p. 64).
It is from this perspective of the ethical construction of memory that the modern psychoanalytic or cultural materialist
reading of "Tintern Abbey" might seem less than inevitable.
This is not to say that Wordsworth lives easily within such a
tradition but that he argues with it. It allows him to anticipate
some of the same questions about the efficacy of memory
that latter-day critics are anxious to supply, especially since
those questions, for Wordsworth, are ethical in nature.
Doubt, far from erupting through the otherwise smooth
surface of the poem, seems consciously foregrounded, not
only in the conditional mood of many lines, as Roe argues, but
also in a structure of assertion and qualification that repeats
three times in the course of the poem. All three times, a generalized affirmation of the moral effectiveness of memory is
qualified by an "If" clause in which Wordsworth moves to a
more specific relationship that grounds his belief, whether to
the Wye river, or to Dorothy, or to both the river and the
brother-sister relationship. He moves, it seems, from the
ground of reasons to the ground of nurture.
The first instance of qualified assertion is triggered by the
"If" clause at line 50. The assertion had begun in line 23, with
the statement that "Though absent long; / These forms of
beauty have not been to me, /As is a landscape to a blind man's
eye" (11. 23-25). The passage on gifts follows: tranquil restoration, moral influence, and the blessed mood in which the
weary weight of the world is lightened. The passage ends:
"with an eye made quiet by the power / Of harmony, and the
deep power of joy, / We see into the life of things" (11.48-50).
This conclusion is immediately qualified by "If this / Be but a
vain belief," and Wordsworth shifts to the homelier statement
that often his spirit, in lonely rooms and urban environments,
has turned to the "sylvan Wye! Thou wanderer through the
woods" (1. 57).
The second structure of assertion and qualification finds
its hinge in the "If" clause at line 1 13. This structure moves us
to the present rather than the past influence of memory. The
assertion again makes claims on the moral effectiveness of
memory, this time including the sad music of humanity, which
"chastens and subdues," and the disturbing presence ("motion" or "spirit") that leads to joy. At the conclusion of this
passage Wordsworth claims that he is "therefore. . . still a
lover" of nature and recognizes in nature and the language of
the sense "The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, / T h e
guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul / Of all my moral
being" (11. 110- 12). This conclusion is again immediately qualified: "Nor, perchance, / If I were not thus taught. . . ." This
time it is Dorothy who, even if Wordsworth's more generalizing claims would not hold, establishes the specific relationship
that would not allow his "genial spirits to decay" (1. 114).
The third "If" clause begins on line 148. The structure
of assertion and qualification this time is future-looking and
hortatory. The passage carries less of the sense of argument,
but it gains authority through biblical echoes that are applied
to Nature (this time capitalized).25 It is in this passage that the
architectural images for memory share the same linguistic
register as Augustine's classical description of memory in
Book X of the Confessions. It is here, too, that Paul's consolation to the Romans becomes a kind of palimpsest to the
poet.z6
*h For a comparison of personified Nature and Dorothy based o n the Prelude
and "what we know, biographically," of the relationship of William and Dorothy at
Dove Cottage, see Vendler, pp. 187-88. I suggest above that the force Nature gains
in this third section of the poem is based less o n the projection of a personal
relationship than o n the projection of scriptural authority, though one need not
exclude the other. Abrams, for example, hears in Wordsworth's address to Dorothy,
"For thou art with me" (1. 1 i5), an echo of Psalm 23, conferring biblical language
and authority upon a personal relationship (see "On Political Readings of Lyrical
Ballads," p. 387).
26 I n using the term "palimpsest" I intend a strong contrast between Christianity
and Wordsworth's use of the Christian tradition in his early poetry. In this I share
the perspective of Brian Barbour's recent " 'Between Two Worlds': T h e Structure of
~
the Argument in 'Tintern Abbey,' " Nineteenth-Century Literature, 48 ( 1 9 9 3 )147-68.
For a n analysis that emphasizes similarities more than differences, see Pamela Black,
"The Presence of the Unknowable: A Romantic Perspective on Postmodernism," The
~
Wordsworth Circle, 24 ( 1 9 9 3 )29-34.
24
N I N E T E E N T H - C E N TLUI TRE Y
RATURE
Wordsworth's prayer to see in his sister, for a little while
longer, what he once was modulates to the hope that she will
endure and learn from the education in sorrow that is to follow. His hope is based on the belief "that Nature never did
betray" (1. i23), that it leads "from joy to joy" (1. 126),and that
it has the ability to "inform," "impress," "feed" (11. 126-28). An
echo of Paul still is heard in Wordsworth's catalog of negations. Following the affirmation of Nature's power and ending
in confirmation of blessings for "nature's worshipper," this
catalog writes over the well-known Pauline passage:
for she [Nature] can so inform
The mind that is within us, so impress
With quietness and beauty, and so feed
With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,
Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all
The dreary intercourse of daily life,
Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb
Our chearful faith that all which we behold
Is full of blessings.
(11. 126-35)
The passage in Romans is often referred to theological questions about the perseverance of the saints, a matter completely
secularized but enormously important for Wordsworth:
Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? . . . For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities,
nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height,
nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us
from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
(Romans 8:35,38-39)
This same chapter of the letter to the Romans may provide
the underlying theme of "Tintern Abbey," a theme both secularized in the poem and problematized by the assertionqualification structure we have been following. The theme is
election, or calling, and Romans 8:28-30 lays out the doctrine as clearly as anywhere in Scripture (I quote only verse
28): "And we know that all things work together for good to
them that love God, to them who are the called according to
his purpose." Glimpses of this passage can be found in the
introduction to the catalog of negations quoted above:
And this prayer I make,
Knowing that Nature never did betray
The heart that loved her; 'tis her privilege,
Through all the years of this our life, to lead
From joy to joy.
(11. 122-26)
The faith-the hope-in election, severed from theological
roots but retaining their language and spirit, impels the meditation on memory and its ethical force. It requires, too, the
qualification of such claims as Wordsworth puts forth, the
movement to personal relationships as a kind of ground for
the everyday moral life that Wordsworth desired. In this
third instance the qualification turns to the present as a future memory, a support for Dorothy experiencing the social
suffering that her brother believes is an inevitable stage of
maturity. The present exhortations and the remembrance of
this moment, the brother and sister and Wye River, will serve
her as the earlier visit had served him.
How that earlier visit had served Wordsworth is not a
given, of course, but something tested in the poem. We may
disagree about the effectiveness or value of Wordsworth's secularization of Scriptural authority. We may disagree about the
extent to which he adopts or argues with the tradition of reflection on the moral and inventive powers of memory. But if we
see the contest over memory as being staged in the poem
rather than only in the critics' analysis of a smooth surface
belying a riven text, then there is still more for us to learn from
"Tintern Abbey" in relation not only to Wordsworth's life-to
what could be called his obligation and gift-but also to our
own. Lest this sounds like too cheerful a note, let me reiterate
my deep ambiguity about Wordsworth's efforts to rethink
both the tradition of reflection on memory and the biblical
and patristic passages that echo through his text. My effort has
not been to recuperate a tradition but to clarify the choices
available to a writer and to a society, a clarification triggered, in
this instance, by both a formal analysis of the text and by
26
NINETEENTH-CENTURY
LITERATURE
historical studies of reflection on memory. This clarification
does not pretend to be neutral, however.27 My hope is that it
might point to a greater understanding of the poem in its own
right and of the larger discussion of memory, ethics, and language in which both we and the poem join.
Tm'nity Christian College
2 7 The guide I would claim here is not Bloom, Abrams, or Miller but Erich
Auerbach, especially in his analysis offigura and his subsequent critical practice (see
"Figura," in his Scenes from the Drama of European Literature [ig5g; rpt. Minneapolis:
Univ. of Minnesota Press, 19841, p p 11-78).