The cambridge companion to british roman 254

w i l l i a m k e ac h
Through a thick forest. Silence touched me here
No less than sound had done before: the child
Of summer, lingering, shining by itself,
The voiceless worm on the unfrequented hills,
Seemed sent on the same errand with the quire
Of winter that had warbled at my door,
And the whole year seemed tenderness and love.
(Book VII, ll. 20–48)

A lyric representation of lyric’s own restorative power, this passage evokes
historical duration and age and seasonal change in the process of their yielding momentarily to an unforeseen sense of the “sweetness of the coming
time” (l. 33), to an intimation that “the whole year seemed tenderness and
love” (l. 48). As so often in The Prelude, “seemed” here is the rhetorical
mark not of illusion but of visionary phenomenology (“the sky seemed not
a sky / Of earth,” ll. 349–50). Through a familiar paradoxical merging of
“sound” and “Silence” (ll. 42–3), “music” and “shining” light, lyric interrupts and transforms the poem’s record of its own historical genesis – “Five
years are vanished since I first poured out / . . . A glad preamble to this verse”
(ll. 1–4) – and projects its generative potential into the immediate future, as
“last night’s genial feeling overflowed / Upon this morning” (ll. 49–50).
The beautiful performative enjambment in “Last night’s general feeling
overflowed / Upon this morning” – the line overflows its own prosodic termination – is characteristic of Wordsworth’s blank verse and suggestive of this
lyric moment’s arresting influence on the poem’s autobiographical and historical diegesis. It is a formal effect generated out of an intense lyric responsiveness to nature’s “music” – but it is not itself an instance of musical form.
Neither, however, is it an instance of what Paul Fry sees as “lyric ostension’s”
defining discursive register, “language viewed strictly as pure sound and as
graphic trace” (p. 21). Fry is rightly skeptical, as was John Hollander in his
1975 study Vision and Resonance,22 of poetry’s aspiration to the condition
of music, since this aspiration usually “results in the reduction of music to
sound” (p. 44). “It is not music that poetry hears,” Fry continues, “but rather
sound, with its emphasis on resonance, pitch, and timbre, and an implication
even of monotony.” The “mesmerization by sound of the will to signify,” he

says, “must be a permanent resource of poetry” (p. 45). But in Wordsworth’s
lyric epiphany at the beginning of Book VII of The Prelude, the sounds of
nature are transfigured into a “gentle music” that quickens rather than mesmerizes the will to signify: the resulting overflow of renewed energy spills
over from lyric interruption into resumed autobiographical narration via a
textual event that summons up the full range of language’s semiotic and syntactic resources. Wordsworthian lyric here empowers by interrupting and
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