Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: How does Wordsworth's poetry listen to the sound of nature?And how might readers continue to listen to and with it?In what follows, I focus on several examples of listening in Wordsworth's poetry and pay attention to how a reader might listen to those acts of listening.In the first section of this article, I consider the capacity of Wordsworth's verse to amplify and pay attention to small but surprisingly remarkable sounds through acts of listening which are aware not only of the dynamism of sound itself but also of moving responses to sound.In the second part, this insight is extended to investigate the multiple sonic phenomena of what might now be called a "soundscape".In the process, I emphasize Wordsworth's precision in recording both change and interconnectedness between sonic agents in his poetry, outlining the resistance of his work to flattening distinctions between different modes of being and connecting this to his broader thinking about nature.Finally, I place the sonic sociability that I have identified in Wordsworth's verse into conversation with more recent thinking about sound and the environment.I attempt not only to draw significance from the sounds and the forms of attention paid to them, but also to investigate the role of sound in shaping environmental awareness in a writer who has often been seen as central to the development of proto-environmental cultural attitudes and early conservation institutions.Listening with Wordsworth requires multiple acts of layered listening, not only to the sound of nature but also to historical continuity and difference, as well as to the sound of poetry.A Startling Sound I would like to start with some often-overlooked acorns.Their position could hardly be more prominent: the opening paragraphs of Wordsworth's masterpiece, The Prelude.But they are far less celebrated than the gentle breezes and murmuring rivers which are more familiar in critical discussions of the poem's variously drafted beginnings.The poet finds himself sitting "Beneath a tree" in a state of what he describes elsewhere as "wise passiveness", "slackening my thoughts by choice / And settling into gentler happiness" (Thirteen-Book Prelude, Book I, lines 72-73; Fourteen-Book Prelude, Book I, lines 63-64).In an earlier draft, the poet writes: Thus, long I lay Chear'd by the genial pillow of the earth Beneath my head, sooth'd by a sense of touch From the warm ground, that balanced me[, though lost] Entirely, seeing nought, nought hearing, save When here and there, about the grove of Oaks Where was my bed, an acorn from the trees Fell audibly, and with a startling sound.(Thirteen-Book Prelude, Book I, 87-94)The passage is altered in a later version:
DOI: 10.12929/jls.17.2.02
Author: James Castell
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4411029000