Willett 1
Annual Report of the University of Shizuoka, Hamamatsu College
No. 11-3-6, 1997

Stanza and Meaning in Wordsworth’s “On the Power of Sound”
Steven J. Willett

The Wordsworthian equation, as Beckett said of the Proustian, is never simple.1 His
metrical theory, a articulated in the Prefaces to Lyrical Ballads, has attracted considerable
attention in recent years, yet the poetry itself—particularly the lyric poetry—seldom receives any
correspondingly detailed, accurate or sustained metrical analysis.2 His art of stanzaic
composition is, if anything, accorded even less attention. Over the course of a long poetic career,
Wordsworth used nearly 90 different kinds of stanza and 22 irregular verse forms in addition tosonnets and blank verse.3 This is a staggering number of stanza forms even for so long a career.
A comparison with the strophic practice of Goethe, another long-lived and highly inventive poet,is instructive. Although Goethe used more than twice the number of stanzaic schemata as
Wordsworth, he wrote no stanzas over 12 lines.4 Wordsworth, by contrast, crafted very intricate
regular stanzas up to 26 lines in length.5 One would like to think that this widespreadindifference to his skill in stanzaic composition is a tribute to the creative torture endured inachieving an art, as Horace says, that conceals art: “ludentis speciem dabit et torquebitur, ut
qui/nunc Satyrum, nunc agrestem Cyclopa movetur.”6 Wordsworth was, after all, a meticulous
craftsman who got in the habit, even so early as An Evening Walk, of tirelessly revisingcompleted poems in pursuit of some elusive ghost of perfection.7 Unfortunately, the kind ofstrophic blindness we find here is the result of a general critical failure to appreciate how thestanza itself, as a form shaped by the interplay of rhyme and meter, in turn shapes a poem’s

Willett 2
structure and meaning. Ernst Häublein makes substantially the same point in the conclusion to
his deceptively short but important book The Stanza.8 There he notes that prosodic analysis andcritical analysis both tend to neglect the stanza, the former by pursuing the skeleton of metricalpatterns to the exclusion of virtually everything else and the latter by analyzing form—or more
typically these days “text,” “discourse” or “narrative”—without regard for the stanza as an aspectof meaning. Regular stanzaic composition, however, “inevitably poses problems of meaning” we
can only solve by closing this artificial gap between prosody and structural poetics.
Häublein’s pioneering work demonstrates the role of the stanza as a container for various
logical, emotional and semantic stimuli (as he likes to call them) that collectively determine thetype of stanzaic progression we find in a given poem and therefore its overall poetic structure. I
should like to extend his analysis beyond the fairly simple and brief examples he gives fromDonne, Herbert, Blake, Tennyson and Moore to a major work by Wordsworth, who is unrivaled
at his technical best in the skill with which he exploits the interaction of meter and rhyme toreinforce, or even create, a cascade of stimuli that produce a nearly seamless stanzaic
progression. Despite the cautionary words at the end of The Stanza, Häublein focuses on logicaland semantic stimuli to the virtual exclusion of the contribution meter and rhyme make to stanza
dynamics. I would like to rectify this. My test case will be “On the Power of Sound,” an ode
written in 1828–1829 during the poet’s so-called period of decline and first published in 1835. I
have selected it for three reasons. First, it employs a complex sixteen-line stanza that is uniqueamong Wordsworth’s long poems in not being created on the model of a cento by combining
shorter, identifiable stanza forms.9 The implication is that he developed this stanza for a uniquepurpose. Can we in fact demonstrate that? Second, Wordsworth ranked the poem quite high in
his corpus.10 Modern critics have not, however, accepted his ranking and have evaded

Willett 3
Wordsworth’s estimation by largely ignoring the poem.11 A reassessment seems to be in order.
Third, the poem is outside the canon of current romantic studies. That has kept familiarity fromcorroding freshness of critical perception. Familiarity with a text, as critics insufficiently realize,
is a very dangerous impression. Mere linguistic “familiarity” can easily mislead us into thinking
we possess aesthetic “familiarity”; or a distaste for some familiar genre, say paraenetic literature,
can induce us to look right through a great meditation like the “Ode to Duty,” which Stephen Gill
asserts “is no one’s favorite poem,”12 and see nothing but an austere cliché on the other side.
Something like this has, it seems to me, been the fate of “On the Power of Sound.”In the following discussion, I undertake to do three things. First I present a detailed
analysis of the stanza’s interlocking scheme of rhyme and meter based on its origin in an earlier
uncompleted poem. Then I turn to the more difficult task of showing how the logical relations
between the stanzas determine the poem’s structure. Finally I conclude with a closer look at
Wordsworth’s metrical practice in the ode, emphasizing the contribution of rhythm to thearchitectonics of the stanza. In a coda, I consider some problems of poetic form and familiarity
suggested by Heidegger’s Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes.
If all this sounds like pure poetic formalism, it is—and unapologetically is. We need moreformalism, not less, as the critical blindness to Wordsworth’s stanzaic art makes all too clear. In
a recent essay, Peter Brooks stressed the priority of poetics to exegesis, and its crucial importanceto the critic, in language with a strong religious coloration:
The critic needs the self-imposition of the formalist askesis because this alone canassure the critic that the act of interpretation has been submitted to an otherness,that is not simply an assimilation of the object of study. The realm of the aesthetic
needs to be respected, by an imperative that is nearly ethical. It’s not that theWillett 4

aesthetic is the realm of a secular scripture, that poetry has taken the place of afailed theodicy, or that critics are celebrants at the high altar of a cult of beauty
isolated from history and politics. It is rather that personality must be tempered by
the discipline of the impersonal that comes in the creation of form.13
This precisely summarizes the situation: created form is, always and inescapably, the aesthetic
Other. And just as we must temper steel to make it hold an edge, so we must temper personality,with all its vagaries of personal imagination, on impersonal form to make it hold a critical edge.
Poetics is not only prior to exegetics, it is the only secure way to exegetics.
1
The stanza that Wordsworth created for “On the Power of Sound” is a marvel of internalbalance and harmony: balance of proportions that prevents it from ever seeming heavy or inert,
and harmony that restrains complex, often conflicting and jarring, rhetorical thrusts fromshattering the hard-won form. Let’s examine the process by which he drew this intricate form
from simpler and cruder materials lacking any potential for development.
Brennan O’Donnell notes that the stanza grew out of Wordsworth’s work on “The Triad”
in 1828, but doesn’t trace its evolution in any detail.14 The 16-line stanza form as we have it now
emerged from a reworking of 16 lines in one of two passages originally written for “The Triad”
and then rejected.15 “The Triad” itself, with the exception of these ultimately rejected lines, is atissue of the language never spoken by real men in any state of vivid excitement and, as Sara
Coleridge (herself one of the three girls, along with Edith May Southey and Dora Wordsworth,
who are its subjects) wrote, contains no truth as a whole, but only “bits of truth, glazed andmagnified.”16 And yet Wordsworth, the indefatigable reviser, saw in these lines the germ ofWillett 5something that, once impressed with a unique form, had the power to unfold his thought with analmost living thematic momentum.
Despite the absence of the Cornell Wordsworth volume covering this period, we canreconstruct the development process with reasonable accuracy. Here are the 16 lines whose roughmaterial were the starting point for the “Power of Sound” stanza:
The Heavens, whose aspect makes our mind as stilla5

As they themselves appear to be,b4

Innumerable voices filla4With everlasting harmony;b4

The towering headlands crowned with mist,

c4

Their feet among the billows, knowd4That Ocean is a might harmonist.

c5

Thy pinions universal Air,e4

For ever sweeping to and fro

d4

Are delegates of harmony and beare5

Accents that cheer the seasons in their round—f5

Even winter loves a dirgelike sound;f4

There is a world of spirit

g_4

Whose motions by fit music are controlled,h5

And glorious is their privilege who merit

g_5

Initiation in that mystery old.17

h5

Wordsworth had originally intended to insert them at what is now line 80 of the poem. His
attention may have been drawn back to this passage by the magnificent description of theWillett 6
towering headlands, a description whose severe and haunting music reminds me of the cuckoo’ssong “Breaking the silence of the seas/Among the farthest Hebrides” in “The Solitary Reaper.”Certainly the lines of the other rejected passage, like virtually all of “The Triad,” are an exercise
in the artificial poetic diction that Wordsworth had attacked so strongly in the Preface to Lyrical
Ballads nearly 30 years earlier.18 These 16 lines, and these alone, contain the only poetic ore in
the whole venture. Whatever first attracted him to the passage, he reshaped it by three relatively
simple changes that produced a completely new stanza.
(1) He probably started by moving the last four lines, which form a regular heroic stanza
except for the first tetrameter (g_4h5g_5h5)19, to the head of the passage. His initial motive may
have been to shift the quatrain, containing the core of his Pythagorean number theory, to the start
where it could lead more naturally into the description of the innumerable voices of nature. Leftat the end of the stanza it would have proven highly anticlimactic—dangling there in search ofcontext or illustration. A further motive for the change may have been to provide the embryonicstanza with a more distinct closure by ending it with a couplet (f5f4). That, at any rate, is the exact
effect of moving the quatrain from the end to the beginning.
(2) Whether he revised the quatrain before or after repositioning it, Wordsworth
introduced two subtle new changes we shall discuss in more detail later: he shortened the new
first line to a trimeter and decided to continue the feminine rhymes of the first and third lines (theoriginal g_4 and g_5) all the way through the poem. That is, he took an accident of the original
passage and made it a set feature of the stanza. What, in brief, are the reasons for these two
modifications? The answer is, I think, lies in the tetrameter line that now ends all but the laststanza. (a) The opening trimeter glides lightly and gracefully into each succeeding stanza out ofthe preceding tetrameter, the lightness of its opening enhanced by feminine rhyme. That this is its

Willett 7
function is shown by the rarity of initial metrical variations: they occur only in IV:1 (trochaic
inversion) and III.1 (initial beat, sometimes called a “spondaic substitution”). (b) The tetrameterat the end of stanzas I - XIII, on the other hand, slightly mitigates the closure effected by the
couplet. Throughout the history of English accentual-syllabic verse, couplets have provided a
distinct method for closing or rounding off the stanza. Shortening the second line of the coupletby two syllables just perceptibly softens the closure, providing a more fluid transition to the next
stanza. That this is its function is shown by the expansion of the last line of the poem (XIV:16)
into a pentameter to provide a full rhythmic stop.
(3) The final alteration in the original passage is, in some respects, the most refined andinteresting of the set. Wordsworth transformed line 9 from an iambic tetrameter to a headlesstetrameter or, in more technical parlance, a trochaic tetrameter catalectic, by canceling the “For”
in “For ever sweeping to and fro.” He then incorporated the new meter, without any variation, asa set feature of the stanza.20 The intrusion of a single line of falling rhythm into the second halfof each stanza is quite unexpected. It can easily go unnoticed unless one reads the poems withattention to rhythm. Now why did he do this? If you compare the stanza structures of the original
passage and its final modification below, the answer should become partially clear.
“The Triad” Passage

a5
b4
a4
b4
c4
d4
c5
e4

“On the Power of Sound” Stanza

a_3
b5
a_5
b5
c5
d4
c4
d4

Willett 8
d5
e5
f5
f4
g_4
h5
g_5
h5

e4
f4
e5
g4
f4 (BoBoBoB)
g5
h5
h4

(Triplet)

The interlocking rhymes on “f” and “g” help bind the last eight lines together into a unit, but the
final couplet, like all final couplets in repeating stanzaic structures, has a tendency to become therepository of flat summaries, padded repetitions or dull gnomic caps unless handled very
carefully. Exactly how difficult it is to handle a final couplet can be seen in Shakespeare’ssonnets, where the couplet often sits uselessly at the end of the sonnet wagging its summary tailat the sestet. Wordsworth’s solution, as a greater stanzaic poet than Shakespeare ever attempted
to be, or perhaps could have been, is to group the last three lines into a distinct subsection thatprevents the couplet from detaching itself as a separate entity from the stanza. He does this by
avoiding full stops at the end of line 12, so it often enjambs quite strongly with line 13, and thenusing line 13 as a trochaic bridge to the triplet.21 The sudden shift from rising to falling meter inline 13 emphasizes its function as a transition quite effectively, while terminal punctuation
further isolates the last three lines. Line 13 ends 10 times with full (“:” and “;”) or partial stops(“,”), stops that bring the falling meter to a clear terminus and thus prepare us for the stanzaic
climax to follow.22 This climax, if that isn’t too strong a word, often consists of an intense
image or (more frequently) a series of icon-like symbols charged with the thematic emotions
developed in the preceding five lines. I say the preceding five lines and not the preceding 13
lines, because Wordsworth has articulated the stanza into two distinct eight-line sections. The
stanza does not function, thus, as a simple 16-line container of meaning that moves linearly, andWillett 9smoothly, from beginning to end. Let’s now step back and take an overview of the structure
Wordsworth created.
By shifting the last quatrain of “The Triad” passage to the start of the stanza, Wordsworth
generated a pair of cross-rhymed quatrains. Although the meter varies from the opening trimeterline to tetrameter and pentameter lines, the separate identity of the two quatrains is clearly
defined by their rhyme and their punctuation: both the first and second quatrains are end-stopped
12 of 14 times, with the punctuation at the end of line eight particularly strong (eight periods,
three semicolons and an exclamation mark). Unlike line four, line eight never ends with lighter
commas. The result is to divide the stanza into two eight-line sections, the first comprising two
quatrains and the second comprising two assymetrical subsections of five (e4f4e5 g4 f4 ) and three(g5h5h4) lines respectively. Each half nominally contains 35 metrical beats. Wordsworth does
introduce hypermetrical lines at several points and deploys an exceptionally wide range ofvariations, some quite extreme, but the sum of these variations changes the total number of
metrical beats only in stanzas VIII and XI.23
Rhyme and punctuation may thus segment, but the counterpoint of meter to rhyme, theuse of different meters with the same rhymes, significantly blurs the segmentation.24 Only twopairs of lines rhyme with the same meter in each stanaz: 2:4 and 6:8, pentameter and tetrameter
respectively. Both occupy the same relative position in their quatrains. The short trimeter
opening leads to a run of four pentameter lines (2–5: b5a_5b5c5) that carry us over into the second
quatrain by a kind of rhythmic continuity, thereby helping to integrate the two. In a like way, a
run of five tetrameter lines carries us over the strongly end-stopped line eight into the heart of thefollowing five-line subsection (6–10: d4c4d4e4f4). And, finally, the interlocking rhymes on “f” and“g”connect the two assymetrical subsections. When we read the poem, then, two structural

Willett 10
principles are acting together simultaneously: (1) the cross-rhymes and punctuation of the firsthalf partition it into two quatrains and sever it cleanly from the second half, where the same
factors also partition it into two asymmetrical subsections, but (2) the two arches of identicalmeter in counterpoint provide an integrative movement, partial and uncoercive, to unify both
halves of the stanza just below the level of our awareness. I use the word “movement” here
precisely. Rhythmic correspondence, like rhyme, is only experienced retroactively as we move intime through a poem; the poem only exists as lived experience in time.25 All otherrepresentations of the poem, whether theoretical abstractions or visual schemata employed toclarify structure, are models and must not be confused with the poem itself. We in fact never talkabout poems at all, only about static simulacra of our temporal experience.
The division of the stanza into two equal sections doesn’t look accidental, and isn’t.
Wordsworth exploits the internal architecture rather like a sonnet.26 The first eight lines
constitute the “octave,” and the second eight lines a kind of expanded “sestet.” There is always,
with the exception of stanzas VII and XIII, where enjambment at the end of the second quatrain
permits the content to flow into the second half, a turn between the two divisions—a distinct shift
in tone, emphasis, content or imagery. The shift is marked by contrastive conjunctions, rhetoricalquestions (which occur only in the second half of the stanza) and imperatives.27 As a master ofthe sonnet form and the creator of 517 sonnets, Wordsworth clearly understood and relished thisstructural technique. But he risked an obvious danger by using the technique in a bipartite stanza
form. The sonnet’s structural identity, as Paul Fussell, Jr. has pointed out, lies in its imbalance,
where a weightier octave stands in a dynamic relationship to a lighter sestet.28 Wordsworth
avoids the danger of a stark medial division by means of the two metrical arches (particularly thesecond) I mentioned above. The dual quatrains feel, with their conspicuously clear and delimited

Willett 11
form, like an octave that is preparing us for the traditional turn in a sestet. The turn does come as
expected, but the rhythmic movement of those two sequences of metrically identical lines
conducts us over, and thus moderates the sharpness of, the shift. We experience something like aturn, and we also experience something like a sestet—a floating sestet. The five-line subsection(e4f4e5 g4 f4 ), ending unequivocably with its trochaic tetrameter bridge, has a rhyme scheme that
is identical to one Wordsworth occasionally used in the sestet of his sonnets (cdcede) if we
include the “g” rhyme from the first line of the triplet (e4f4e5 g4 f4 g5).29 The rhyme scheme in thesecond half of the stanza, taken by itself, defines (1) a variant sestet and (2) a couplet; syntax andpunctuation, however, define (1) a five-line truncated sestet and (2) a triplet. The first rhyme of
the triplet completes the sestet with metrical counterpoint (g4 :g5), but we only vaguely sense thecompletion because it occurs in a separate structural element. We equally don’t sense a crudely
reductive couplet tacked onto the sestet as an afterthought because it is absored into the triplet.30
The triplet gives Wordsworth great flexibility. He can use it to concentrate pictorial imagery andsymbols, to foreground moments of dramatic intensity or to list generalizations and abstractions
without the pressure for aphoristic simplification. The best way to make all of this clear is to lookconcretely at the internal dynamics of a particular stanza. I would like to use stanza IX for thispurpose.
Stanzas VII - X constitute a unified mythical sequence concerning the origin of music andits effects. Stanza VII deals with the psychological power of music as evidence of its divine
origin, stanza VIII with Orpheus, stanza IX with Arion and the first half of stanza X with thetriumphal procession of Dionysius. Myth is suddenly shattered in the second half of stanza X by
the strange intrusion of the poet, who addresses the reader in his own voice and commands those
who are weary of truth-telling myth, as no doubt many modern readers are weary, to hear anotherWillett 12
and altogether different sort of truth, that “The little sprinkling of cold earth that fell/Echoedfrom the coffin-lid.” Here is stanza IX in its entirety:
The Gift to king Amphionthat walled a city with its melody
Was for belief no dream:—thy skill, Arion!
Could humanise the creatures of the sea,
Where men were monsters. A last grace he craves,
Leave for one chant;—the dulcet sound
Steals from the deck o’er willing waves,
And listening dolphins gather round.
Self-cast, as with a desperate course,
Mid that strange audience, he bestrides
A proud One docile as a managed horse;
And singing, while the accordant hand
Sweeps his harp, the Master rides;
So shall he touch at length a friendly strand,
And he, with his preserver, shine starbright
In memory, through silent night. (129–44)
The brief allusion to Amphion, son of Zeus and Antiope, whose lyre charmed masonry into thewalls of Thebes, serves as a priamel or foil for the power of Arion’s lyre to achieve the more
remarkable feat of charming creatures of the sea into humanity.31 Wordsworth omits all
background narration, and presents only two notational, almost nonpictorial moments from themyth: Arion’s last wish to sing before leaping into the sea (lines 133–36) and his rescue by one

Willett 13of the enchanted dolphin audience (lines 137–41). He uses the triplet (lines 142–44) to fashion akind of Ovidian conclusion with the apotheosis of Arion and his preserver. The first moment
springs with an abrupt asyndeton from the very syntax of Amphion’s melody, which “Was forbelief no dream,” at the end of line 131. We are, Wordsworth says directly, in the belief systemof myth.32 He pulls the illustrative scene before us as if he stood there in person, rather like thepuppet master in Bunraku, who stands in full view behind the puppet he manipulates and yet is
not there by dramatic convention. The exclamation point after “Arion” is a false stop, serving
more like Italics to emphasize the name. But the slight impediment it gives the meter seems torelease the following antithesis between humanized creatures and bestialized men with evengreater point. The syntax that starts with Amphion, pauses briefly on the name Arion and thenruns on without break to the middle of line 133 tends to mask the bare bones of the quatrain
skeleton. The actual narrative begins near the middle of line 133 with an implied offbeat, whose
effect is to isolate the narrative from the preceding moral.33 This metrical variation, one of thestrongest available in accentual-syllabic verse, heightens the syntactical break and makes us feelthe first eight lines less as a double quatrain than as a five-line unit and a three-line unit thatoverlap in line 133. The initial inversions in the next two lines (134–35), both involving verb
phrases, occur in tetrameter lines where their effect is more pronounced and, consequently, more
distracting from the quatrain structure:Thy skill, Arion!
o

B oBo

Could humanise the creatures of the sea,
o

B o B

o B o

~B o B

Where men were monsters. A last grace he craves,
o

B

o

B

“

^

o

B

Willett 14

Leave for one chant;—the dulcet soundB“Bo B o B

Steals from the deck o’er willing waves,
B

“

B

o

Bo

B

And listening dolphins gather round. (131–136)
o

B

o

B o

B o B

The rhetorical reinforcement of these inversions extends half way through the lines, leaving theirsecond halves markedly subdued though not detached. The effect of the strong medial pauses andthe metrical variations in lines 133–35 is almost cinematic: three short half-line “cuts” (133–34)
introduce the sound of Arion’s lyre as it steals furtively from the deck over one last inversion andout into a full unstopped line (135). The second movement, Arion’s rescue, is embedded in thecomplex second half of the stanza. Lines 137–44 form one long sentence articulated by thetrochaic line (141) into two unequal parts. The semicolon at the end of line 139 is barely noticed,
and the following conjunction resumes the narrative impetus with only a slight halt. Moderate
enjambment at the end of line 140 between subject (“while the accordant hand”) and predicate(“Sweeps his harp”) gathers this brief, kinetic sketch to a stop in the falling rhythm of line141. I
called this line a bridge earlier, and now its function can be more easily appreciated. It guides ourattention by the sudden metrical shift from thematic exposition to stanzaic closure. The closure iseffected by (1) concentrating the exposition into a climactic image (as here, III, V, VIII and XII)
or by (2) introducing two-item symbols or icons (I, II and X), contrastive images (IV and VI),
epigrammatic summaries (VII, XI and XIII) or an unqualified assertion implying a sense ofcomplete finality (Letztenendlichkiet) beyond which the poem simply cannot go (XIV). This last,of course, is the traditional poetic closure. The bridge here directs us from a lively but pictorially

Willett 15
schematic—even dull—description of Arion on the dolphin’s back, singing his way to safety, totheir resurrection in motionless, starbright memory:
So shall he touch at length a friendly strand,
o

B

o B

o B

o B

o

B

And he, with his preserver, shine starbright
o

B

o

B

oB o

B

o

B

In memory, through silent night.
o B oBoBo

B

The luminous calm of a starlit night is made almost palpable by the unusual stress on the secondsyllable of “starbright” and by the unexpected elision of “the” before “silent night.” In the firstcase, Wordsworth has apparently remembered Milton’s description of Satan on his return toPandaemonium (PL X.450), where the stress is also on the second syllable: “And shape Starrbright appeerd, or brighter, clad.”34 In the second case, elimination of the definite article throws
redoubled stress on “silent.” The elision seems even more pronounced due to the secondary stresson “memory,” a word often contracted to maintain syllable count but here used as a trisyllable
with a full metrical beat on the last syllable. That unexpected beat, isolated by the ensuing pause,
forces the rhythmic flow to start anew with the light offbeat on “through” that delivers theemphatic beat on “silent.” And it hardly needs saying that the alliteration on “s” and theassonance on “i” in “shine” and “silent” both contribute to the same impression of starlightflooding silent memory.
The thematic shift in stanza XI, signalled by the demotion on “Self” in “Self-cast,” isadmittedly not very sharp. It separates Arion’s song to the listening dolphins from his rescure by“a proud One.” But we need only turn back to stanza VIII or forward to stanza X to see strong
examples of it. In stanza VIII, the first eight lines summon up an abstract meditation on OrpheanWillett 16
music that ends by characterizing it as a “tutored passion” that induces pathos: “And voice andshell drew forth a tear/Softer than Nature’s self could mould” (VIII.119–20). The second eightlines immediately amend the characterization by loading the musical imagination of that early
age with some very heavy luggage and launching it on a rugged flight through all the extremes ofsorrow and joy:Yet strenuous was the infant Age:
o

B

o

~B

oB o B

Art, daring because souls could feel,
*

B

“

o

^

B

Stirred nowhere but an urgent equipage*

Bo ~B o B o B o B

Of rapt imagination sped her marcho B oBoBo

BoB

Through the realms of woe and weal. (121–25)
B

o B

o

B o

B

In case we might miss the point, Wordsworth Italicizes the word “strenuous.” But he also makes
his point by distorting the normal rhythmic movement with some of his harshest variations. Line122 begins with a demoted beat, in itself not particularly jarring, but then proceeds to an impliedoffbeat with stress final pairing. Positioned near the demotion in a tetrameter line, however, theimplied offbeat is exceptionally disruptive. The next line also begins with a demotion, followed
by a promotion on “but” and ends with an uncomfortably strong beat on the third, and rhyming,
syllable of “equipage.” Shakespeare used the same word in rhyme position in one of his sonnets(xxxii.12), where it stands out less prominently in a longer line without any metrical variations.
In stanza X, by contrast, we not only have a distinct turn but the most powerful example of a
Stimmungsbruch, a rupture of mood, in all of Wordsworth’s poetry.35 At the end of the first half,

Willett 17
Silenus is swaying tipsily this way and that in Dionysius’ raucous procession. Suddenly the
mythical backdrop falls and death, in a rattle of cold earth echoing on the coffin lid, looms over
us in lines of unsparing asperity:
To life, to life give back thine ear:
Ye who are longing to be rid
Of fable, though to truth subservient, hear
The little sprinkling of cold earth that fell
Echoed from the coffin-lid;
The convict’s summons in the steeple’s knell;“The vain distress-gun”, from a leeward shore,
Repeated—heard, and heard no more! (153–60).
If it weren’t anachronistic, one could call this quintessentially postmodern in its sudden
devolution from low to high style, from mythic narrative to authorial voice, from crude comedy
to Sophoclean tragedy. Across the bridge in line 157 we pass to stark and unrelieved images: thecriminal’s summons to execution and the useless report of the distress gun from the sinking ship,
both of which seem to fill all space with endless repetition. Once again Wordsworth uses
metrical variations to heighten emotion. The initial inversion in line 154 underscores the roughtreatment the poet intends to give those impatient with myth and perhaps longing for a modern
myth of sentimental comfort, while the implied offbeat in line 156 invests “sprinkling” with areferent and a feeling quite different from those we normally associate with it:(1) Ye who are longing to be rid (154)B“
B(2) The little sprinkling of cold earth that fell. (156)o B o B“ *

Willett 18

The sounds of the steeple bell and the distress gun in the triplet expand by a kind of metrical
amplification from the “little sprinkling” of earth, whose echo sounds at first so transient in thetight falling meter of the bridge, like a brief fall of cold rain, into finality.
It would be very difficult to find, in all English stanzaic poetry, a structure of such
intricacy and expressive possibilities. It provides a perfect mesh of rhyme-shaped substructuresand heterometrical counterpoint. Each stanza offers a dynamic, sonnet-like contrast between its
two halves that never becomes symmetrically rigid due to (1) the metrical continuity between
each half and (2) the asymmetry in the second half created by the engrafted trochee. Stanzaic
closure rounds off each structure in a formally satisfying way without letting the poem, as I shallshow next, break into disconnected and mobile units. Given the unpromising material he drew itfrom by modifications of great elegance and simplicity, the accomplishment is all the moreamazing.36
2
We experience the structure of a regular stanzaic poem as a dual rhythm that unfolds inreading time. The first rhythm is intrastanzaic. (a) It is a composite movement of meter and inner
strophic form. Unlike stichic or distichic poetry, we progress through a stanza by reading linesthat impose a certain tempo on us depending on their meter, length, rhyme and syntacticalorganization. The rhyme scheme in particular can, as we have seen, segment the stanza into
substructures that sometimes resemble the metrical periods of classical Greek poetry.37 Because
end rhyme has such a powerful capacity to shape relationships between sections of the stanza, it
has been called a “vertical metaphor” by analogy with the “horizontal metaphor” of meter.38 We
not only perceive intrastanzaic movement as a counterpoint of “horizontal” meter playing against

Willett 19“vertical” rhyme, we also perceive it as a dynamic variation of opening and closing devices(apostrophes, initial or final questions, variations in tone, repetitions, catalogues and rhetoricaltropes) designed to impart a unified impetus to each new stanza. The sum of all these aesthetic
stimuli is our sense of each stanza as a repetitive unit of meaning that yet possesses its own
specific inertia.39 The second rhythm is interstanzaic. (b) It is a progression of stanzas that trace
out the poem’s contour as they follow a unique evolutionary course and finally coalesce into an
achieved form that never quite seems to stop developing no matter how strongly closure may
terminate the movement. Like Goethe’s Dämon in “Urworte. Orphisch,” the stanza is “Geprägte
Form, die lebend sich entwickelt” and seems to continue moving with a sort of ghostly
momentum in the mind.
Häublein has identified two types of interstanzaic progression: ex posteriori or lightstimulus progression and a priori or strong stimulus progression.40 The difference between the
two types depends on the logical relationships that obtain between the stanzas. Light stimulus
progression occurs when one stanza contains no clues as to the logical direction of the next one,
forcing us to discover the connection retrospectively. The logical stages fall into separate stanzaic
units, and we realize each stage ex posteriori. The evolutionary stimulus driving each stanza
forward is therefore light. (It makes no difference, of course, whether the stanzas are syntacticallyclosed or linked so long as they are logically closed.) Strong stimulus progression occurs when
one stanza points directly ahead and determines the logical direction of the next, permitting us topredict the connection in advance. The logical stages extend over more than one stanza, and werealize each stage a priori. The evolutionary stimulus driving each stanza forward is therefore
strong.

Willett 20
Clearly, then, the experience of reading a stanzaic poem is extremely complex, as intraand-interstanzaic rhythms overlap in a fluctuating cycle from one stanza to the next. I shall return
again to the issue of rhythmic time in my conclusion. For now we need only focus on the general
distinction between light and strong stimulus progression as it applies to “On the Power ofSound.”
Even a cursory look at the poem would suggest that it exhibits light stimulus or exposteriori stanzaic progression. Stanzas I - XIII all end with full syntactical stops. There are thus
no run-on stanzas to provide a strong stimulus connection. In addition, Wordsworth avoids any
use of the other common techniques to create a priori links.41 The reason for this should beselfevident from the internal structure of the stanza. That structure is expressly designed toapportion the thematic content of each stanza into regular subsections that are demarked byrhyme, line length, meter and punctuation. Any technique that opened up the stanza, so logic or
syntax could spill over from one to the other, would vitiate the whole purpose of its organization.
The inner dynamic of contrasts and transitions that Wordsworth took such trouble to create byrecasting “The Triad” passage would be lost, or at best severely attenuated, if the logical flow
swept the reader across stanza boundaries. The avoidance of light stimulus progression is also
important due to the sheer length of the stanza. Long stanzas have less of an easily perceived
shape than short ones. We need the full sense pause at the end of a long stanza to give us a
resting point before the next one begins to evolve. The meaning of “stanza,” after all, is “room,”“house” or “resting place.” So great a stanzaic poet as Horace took care to put a sense pause after
the majority of his four-line Alcaics (58 exceptions out of 280) and Sapphics (8 exceptions out of
179) to prevent loss of strophic integrity even in such short forms.42 Twentieth century poets
have largely abandoned stanzaic poetry with their abandonment of accentual-syllabic verse,

Willett 21
Yeats being the most notable exception, but when they do use the form they tend to show adisregard for stanzaic unity by excessive a priori linkage. This is a tendency that has been
underway since about 1800, and we are now so accustomed to it that a taste for clearly definedstanzaic contours has almost atrophied. The refusal of most critics to second Wordsworth’s
judgment about the poem may in fact stem from the atrophy of their sensitivity to intricate,carefully wrought and delimited stanza forms.
The key to Wordsworth’s handling of light stimulus progression lies in the structure of
the stanza itself. He uses logical suggestions, trains of thought and imagery developed in thesecond eight-line section of the stanza—most frequently in the final three-line triplet—togenerate a continuous retrospective evolution in the poem’s subject. The connections are so
subtle, in fact, that some stanzas almost seem mobile, that is, they seem to lack any stimulus toindicate sequence and could easily be shuffled about without loss of effect. Before we examine
the connective links in detail, I want to lay out the thematic plan of “On the Power of Sound.”This is important because both the title and the headnotes raise false expectations about its focus.
The general structure of the poem is fairly clear. It falls into three parts of six, four andfour stanzas respectively.
The first part (stanzas I-VI) exhibits a simple ring composition. It begins with an
apostrophe to the ear as a spiritual organ in communion with sound and closes with anotherapostophe to the ear, now called the “Regent of sound” (VI.82), as a portal for psychologicallyand socially restorative music that will heal neurosis, soothe suffering virtue, stop suicide andharmonize all thought “Ere martyr burns, or patriot bleeds” (VI.89–96). How did we get fromsound to musical hygiene? Very simply. Wordsworth’s real interest was not in sound but insound organized: music. Although his headnote says that the first six stanzas detail the “Sources

Willett 22
and effects of those sounds” the ear perceives, they mostly describe music. Only stanza II, with
its rushing streams, roaring lion and shouting cuckoo is about sound per se. The first eight linesof stanza III shift to artificial echoes—echoes of hound and horn, bell and bridal music (III.36–
40)—before making the decisive break with sound as a theme in the second half. Suddenly
Wordsworth intrudes as expositor (which he will do even more violently in X.153–160) and withthe poetic equivalent of a cinematic zoom sweeps us high over a cove filled with singing
milkmaids:
Then, or far earlier, let us rove
Where mists are breaking up or gone,
And from aloft look down into a coveBesprinkled with a careless quire,
Happy milk-maids, one by one
Scattering a ditty each to her desire,A liquid concert matchless by nice Art,A stream as if from one full heart. (III.41–48)
Wordsworth is not merely sharing his response to a charming scene with us. He has enjoined it
on us. Even the short aside in line 41, that we ought to have turned from echoes to song far
earlier, adds greater urgency to his coercion. We have perforce become the audience, he theexpositor and the singing from a distant cove below the subject of a reflexive drama that the poetmakes us experience.43 In this drama, the depth of our imagined experience is a measure of his
own response. What touches his ear touches our ear and we, therefore, universalize the singing
from our high prospect almost as if we are the eye of a camera transforming sound to sight bysome poetic synaesthesia. From line 41 to the end of the poem music, not sound, is the center ofWillett 23
Wordsworth’s attention. Stanza IV deals with the ability of song to solace suffering or toil, stanza
V with the emotional effects of martial and amatory music and stanza VI with the hope that theear will be a passageway not for “the cozenage of sense” (VI.85) but for iatric melody.44 Ring
composition and the extensive use of imperatives in the second half of stanza VI (“But lead,”“Soothe,” “stay” and “Knit”) mark the end of the first part.
The second part (stanzas VII-X) contains a series of mythic illustrations on the theme ofmusic as a divine power. That power is introduced in stanza VII with a simile: as consciencestrikes the guilty, so music insinuates itself into “the dull idiot’s brain” and unleashes reason “Byconcords winding with a sway/Terrible for sense and soul!” (VII. 105–06). Surely then it is anart, as the bridge in line 109 claims, “Lodged above the starry pole.” And the triplet draws the
expected conclusion with a train of abstractions in which wisdom, beauty, truth, order andendless youth parade in gnomic order. That divine art is then illustrated by the myths of Orpheus,
Arion and Dionysius in stanzas VIII-X.152 respectively. The imperious command to hear the
little sprinkling of cold earth that rattles off the coffin brings the second part to an end with theshattering of myth as ultimately insufficient. Myth may offer a an enticing suggestion of vague
meaning, an opulence of antique sentiment, but that is ultimately a deception: it only serves toconceal “the heavy and weary weight/Of all this unintelligible world” behind a charming facadeof trivial narrative and imagery. It no longer has the ability to compact collective experience into
a timeless form that can release that experience back into society at an unconscious level. That’s
why modern writers use myth merely as an internal scaffolding for an external narrative, anarrative that virtually absorbs and digests it. If we now look back to the start of “On the Powerof Sound” from this point, the first six stanzas present music as a social force and the next four
stanzas then instantiate it as a divine art by myth. But myth suddenly collapses into reality.

Willett 24
The last part (stanzas XI-XIV) leaps into the domain of faith where myth would neverwant to tread. It treats all earthly sound and music as reflections of a pervading spirit of tones andnumbers that fill the heavens “With everlasting harmony” (XII.183). That harmony itself iscommanded in stanza XIII, by imperatives directed completely away from the listener, to praise
God. Wordsworth then draws the poem to an end with a great apocalyptic vision of an empty
universe filled only with the Word that created harmony. Ironically enough, it is only in this lastpart45 that Wordworth gives us magnificent aural panoramas: the voice of a great city rolling far
into the countryside where it blends with the nightingale’s song (XI.163–66), the waves crashingagainst high mist-crowned headlands (XII.185–87), the universal winds that rise to a dirge inwinter (XII.188–92) and the eagle’s hungry barkings high in the sky (XIII.200–02). But of course
there is nothing surprising in this. Only because all sound has become harmony, the everlastingharmony that fills existence, can it now become natural music.
If we step back and review the thematic shape of the three divisions of the poem, we seethat the first is social, the second mythic and the third religious. The first deals with music asperformance, the second with music as divine art and the third with music as world-controlling
logos that is itself subsumed by the Word.
Within this broad tripartite framework, Wordsworth dovetails his stanzas in a progressionof intricate and almost hidden light stimulus links. To clarify how these ex posteriori connections
function, I have summarized the thematic structure of the first six stanzas. Their organization isperhaps the least obvious of the poem, and this paraphrase should help to highlight the thematicsilhouette. The sonnet-like division of the stanza into two equal subsections will also stand out
more clearly. The structural elements of the stanza are numbered 1-4: 1 and 2 for the twoquatrains of the first half, 3 and 4 for the asymmetrical segments of the second half. A verticalWillett 25
line | indicates full sense pause, and a carriage return ↵ indicates enjambment between (1) thetwo eight-line subsections or (2) the bridge-triplet segments. Phrases that mark the turn in thesecond half are quoted in bold face.
Stanza I
1. The functions of the ear are ethereal
2. The ear is an intricate labyrinth for sighs and whispers |3. And shrieks, healing melody or smiles enticed into the ambush of despair |4. Hosannas in church and requiems at death.
Stanza II
1. The streams and fountains serve Thee, invisible Spirit
2. Roar of lion and bleat of dam |3. Shout, cuckoo! Carry spring to the frozen zone, toll to mercy ↵4. Listening to nun’s devotions, sailor’s prayer and widow’s lullaby.
Stanza III
1. Voices and their echoes flung back to hound and horn
2. Church bells and bridal symphony |3. Then, or far earlier, let us rove high over a cove of milkmaids↵
4. Singing severally in concert.
Stanza IV
1. Blest be the song that lightens sorrow and toil
2. Song helps the tired galley slave lift his oar |3. Yon pilgrims see—their choral Ave Marie beguiles time and enhances hope |4. Nor friendless is the prisoner of the mine, who sings his griefs to rest.

Willett 26
Stanza V
1. Revolutionary inspiration mounts on a tune whose passage through the land
2. Awakens the sluggard to freedom |3. Who, from a martial pageant incites battle? Even those Lydian airs that inspire↵
4. Amatory play.
Stanza VI
1. How often, Regent of sound, dangerous passions tread your mazes
2. Do not betray your votaries to the cozenage of sense |3. But lead sick Fancy to healing melody, soothe the virtuous and stop the suicide |4. Let music harmonize thought before martyrs burn or patriots bleed.
The connection between the first two stanzas looks especially tenuous. How to we get fromhosannas and requiems to cheery streams and fountains? We get their via two techniques: one
rhetorical and one iconic. The first is the repetition of the apostrophe that opens stanza I. I
mentioned this above in the general structural analysis of the poem. The ear is directly addressedby a logical synaesthesia as an “Organ of vision” in stanza I and as an “invisible Spirit” in stanza
II; it is not so addressed again until stanza VI, where it becomes the “Regent of sound” This
provides a kind of rhetorical continuity. The second is the link we make retrospectively when weconnect the nun’s devotions, sailor’s prayer and widow’s lullaby in II.30–33 with the devotionalmusic of I.14–16. The two catalogs of icons (they are too notational to be called images)
establish an ex posteriori stimulus. The remaining connections are fairly obvious. The three
individual voices at the end of stanza II are a prelude to the collective voices and echoes that
open stanza III and then swell into the concert of individual songs, “A stream as if from one fullheart” (III.48), that closes it. Song as emotional analgesic occupies all of stanza IV, whose triplet

Willett 27
depicts a “prisoner of the mine” singing himself to sleep (IV.62–64). The image of the prisoner
stands in stark contrast to the spontaneous song of the milkmaids in the prior stanza. Wordsworth
purposely heightened the contrast by confining the prisoner’s song to three lines in the triplet—an analog to his dark mine—while permitting us to gaze down from the unbounded sky on themilkmaids in one long continuous passage formed by enjambment of the bridge (III.41–48).
Stanza V shifts from song to revolutionary, martial and amatory music. The first of these, themelodic “voice of Freedom,” refers directly back to the injustice suffered by the prisoner who,
after all, sings from “the well-spring of his own clear breast” (V.63). Stanza VI terminates thesequence with a meditation on the dangerous passions the “Regent of sound” can stimulate and aprayer for healing melody. Sound as a cozener of sense points straight to the music of battle andlove in the second half of stanza V. Writing in the postNapoleonic era, Wordsworth knew
perfectly well how powerful a song like the “Marseilles” could be in “thrilling the unweaponed
crowd” to follow Ares, the money changer of bodies, as Aeschylus calls war in the first stasimonof the Agamemnon.46 And as a great deal of his poetic output shows, he knew equally well how“the plausive wings of Love” could betray the heart of those “wooingly resigned/To a voluptuous
influence.” “Plausive” is one of the most ironic, and dangerously ambiguous, epithets everapplied to the little Anacreontic cupid who has been flitting about western amatory verse sinceHellenistic times. Wordsworth discretely leaves out wine, Dionysius and Aphrodite from his list,
although they bulk large in the Anacreonta, but does reveal a crack in the trompe l’oeil Rococo
ceiling with his “plausive.”
None of these retrospective links employs the usual techniques of light stimulus
progression between stanzas: general statement and concrete example, statement and alternative,
logical influence and conclusion or stanzaic contrast. Instead Wordsworth provides hints or

Willett 28

implications, normally in the triplet, which generate light stimulus links. The bifurcation of thestanza into two thematically contrastive halves militates against the type of simple whole stanza
to whole stanza connection that is more common with retrospective chaining. Is this also true, wemight ask, of those instances where the internal contrast is eliminated? In two cases enjambment
overrides the partition (VII and XIII), and in two cases the mythic narrative continues across thepartition(VIII and IX). Let’s consider the four exceptions within the two larger wholes of which
they are elements: stanzas VII-IX occur in the second part, and stanza XIII in the last.
(1) Stanza VII begins the second part of the ode with a slight disjunction. There is no
distinct stanza-wide stimulus joining it to stanza VI. All we see is a rough parallel between
melody that heals or saves in VI.89–96 and music that transforms an idiot to a noetic in VII.97–
107. In both stanzas, music thus possesses a certain mental dynamis in addition to its aesthetic
pleasure. Otherwise they are about quite different things. Stanza VIII on Orpheus must comenext because the gnomic generalization that provides such a strong closure in VII.110–12
resonates thematically in its first half:
Oblivion may not cover
All treasures hoarded by the miser, Time.
Orphean Insight! truth’s undaunted lover,To the first leagues of tutored passion climb,
When Music deigned within this grosser sphere
Her subtle essence to enfold,And voice and shell drew forth a tear
Softer than Natures’s self could mould. (VIII.113–20)

Willett 29
Music originates above the starry pole (VII), but is practiced within this grosser sphere (VIII);
Orphean insight is the undaunted lover of truth, but climbs only the first leagues of tutored
passion (VIII) and not all the way to the home of Truth in divine Love (VII). Stanza IX depicting
the historical kithara-singer Arion of Corinth should follow stanza VIII depicting the archetypalmusician Orpheus, but cannot itself follow stanza X due to the rupture of mood in X.153–60.
That is, stanzas VIII - X are not mobile; we could not reshuffle their positions with logicalimpunity. What connects them is myth. Framing the myths on one side is a terrifying
transformation (VII) and on the other a shattering breach (X), the former justifying the myths andthe latter expunging them as almost worthless in face of death. The two stanzas on Orpheus andArion come the closest to standard light stimulus linkage. Each one contains a single coherent
narrative (highly generalized in the case of Orpheus) that illustrates the mystery of an art“Lodged above the starry pole.” Nevertheless, stanzas VIII and IX could detach themselves fromthe progression if the reader failed to note the retrospective link of VIII with the triplet of VII andproceeded to view Orpheus and Arion not as archetype and simulacrum but simply as equal
iconographic myths. Then their two stanzas would indeed start to look mobile. The seemingmobility would be further aided by the brief three-line reference to Amphion in IX.129–31,
which inclines the reader to mythologize Arion completely. Relatively little disruption would
result if the two were transposed, however, since mobile stanzas often serve as exchangeable
units in a catalog or series of variations, and that would be their function here should the reader
take them to be mobile.
But stanzas VIII and IX do not in fact become mobile because the enjambment in stanza
VII actually foregrounds the triplet, with its link-generating reference to truth, by carrying theidiot’s shattering illumination through line 107 right up to the lodging where the mysteries of art

Willett 30
dwell. Rhythm supports the rhetorical emphasis directed on the triplet. Line 106 is headless(accenting the idiot’s terror), line107 contains an implied offbeat with stress initial pairing(accenting his agonized struggles) and 108 opens with an inversion (accenting the direction weshould look). I shall return to these lines in more prosodic detail later. For now it is enough to seethat syntax and meter force the words at the end of lines 111 and 112, “Truth” and “youth,” into
prominence where they will be echoed by Orphean song as “truth’s undaunted lover” in “theinfant Age” of the next stanza.
(2) Stanza XIII, in the third part of the ode, has enjambment on line 201 and also on line
204 preceding the bridge. Both tend to soften the internal divisions of the stanza so that, as awhole, it becomes a psalm of praise that builds to a climax in the triplet:
As Deep to Deep
Shouting through one valley calls,
All worlds, all natures, mood and measure keep
For praise and ceaseless gratulation, poured
Into the ear of God, their Lord! (XIII.204–08)
The name of God leads directly, and almost predictably, in stanza XIV to the voice of Genesisthat created the universe. This connection is the closest thing to a strong stimulus, or a priori
link, in the whole poem. It is close to but not quite a strong stimulus; we can only anticipate ageneral meditation on the divine, not the apocalypse to follow. I called this stanza a psalm ofpraise above, and a very close analogy with stanza XIII, including some suggestive verbal
parallels, would be Psalm 19.1–4:
The heavens are telling the glory of God;and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.

Willett 31

Day to day pours forth speech,
and night to night declares knowledge.
There is no speech, nor are there words;
their voice is not heard;
yet their voice goes out through all the earth,and their words to the end of the world.47
The poet has “The six-day’s Work” (XIII. 203) transmit a hymn of joy to heaven, the psalmist
has the firmament proclaim God’s handiwork; the poet has all creation pour praise like a wave ofeulogistic din rolling through some deep valley into the divine ear, the psalmist (more modestly)
has the revolution of time pour forth speech not speech to the end of the world. The position ofthis stanza in the sequence of the last four is firmly anchored by the triplets. The steeple bell andvain distress gun in stanza X, both of which sound with the echoing coffin lid, provide anappropriate link to the “terror, joy, or pity” (XI.161) supposed to lie in the vast swell of notes
represented by XI.163–68 (cry of baby, murmur of regal city and song of nightingale). Two ofthese are human productions, and one is natural, although the nightingale’s song is perilously
close to absorption by the city’s rumble. As a matter of fact, however, there is nothing to evoke
terror, joy or pity in these descriptions. The tag in line 161 has only one purpose: to provide a
retrospective stimulus with stanza X. Having done that, Wordsworth gets on with the evocationof erratic, wandering sound. There may be a tenuous connection with the triplet of stanza X by
the implied contrast between a small village steeple and a great metropolis or between the sharp
reports of the distress gun and the “solemn sea-like bass” of the city. But the main purpose of
XI.163–68 is to provide a foil for the strange wish, one of the strangest indeed in all of modern

Willett 32
poetry, that sound might be captured in a kind of musical notation and played as it were for moral
improvement or intellectual contemplation of the Unsubstantial:
Ye wandering Utterances, has earth no scheme,
No scale of moral music—to unite
Powers that survive but in the faintest dream
Of memory?—O that ye might stoop to bear
Chains, such precious chains of sightAs laboured minstrelsies through ages wear!
O for a balance fit the truth to tell
Of the Unsubstantial, pondered well! (XI.169–76)
The hope that sound might submit to visual symbology on the model of music is a hope that theinherently transient might permit itself to suffer enslavement by aesthetic law. And transience isthe key note of the aural imagery in the first half of the stanza. The cry of the baby is one ofinnumerable chance voices in the regal city, whose collective voice drifts out to the woodlands
where it blends with the fugitive song of the nightingale. Here is a cascade of chance waiting forthe mathematical imprisonment that will render it moral. Impassioned hope arises with a slightdash-marked asyndeton after the question in line 172 and rushes through the strong enjambment
at its end to the bridge. The bridge, whose falling meter twice places emphatic beats on theimprisoning “chains” and whose light enjambment carries the thematic momentum into thetriplet, drives the wish home with as much passion as hopelessness. We can now record sound,something Wordsworth could not have imagined, but our recordings have “No scale of moral
music” to them; they do not tell the truth of the Unsubstantial, only the truth of acoustic waves,whose “truth” vanishes into the background noise of modern industrial society where it becomesWillett 33
literally insubstantial because psychologically unperceived. The triplet of stanza XI leaves us
with an unsatisfiable desire for this aesthetic law. Stanza XII gives us law in the different form ofa Pythagorian system of numbers and music. Wordsworth distances himself from the veracity ofthe doctrine in the first quatrain by attributing it to sages who taught when “faith was found to
merit/Initiation in that mystery old” (XII.179–80). But out of this uncertain doctrine emerges
sound that is anything but erratic, transient or meaningless:
The heavens, whose aspect makes our minds as still
As they themselves appear to be,
Innumerable voices fill
With everlasting harmony;
The towering headlands, crowned with mist,
Their feet among the billows, know
That ocean is a mighty harmonist. (XII.181–87)
The assertive, driving rhythm—free of all major variations48 and with the two key verbs “fill”
and and “know” in rhetorically emphatic terminal position—makes these lines immediately
memorizable. They have the mnemonic insistence of the cuckoo’s song in “The Solitary Reaper,”which has always been one of my personal touchstones for rhythmic inevitability. The
Pythagorian framework, however uncommitted Wordsworth may be to the notion, has one
particular advantage: it cancels any need for a system of notation to capture sound. Now allsound partakes of a mathematical order implicit in the universe. That order gives all theinnumerable voices of existence, despite their seeming evanescence, some role to play in thegreat harmony. The last voice of stanza XII was the dirge-like wind beloved of winter, a windthat is merely one among the many pinions of “universal Air.” This provides the link to theWillett 34“banded instruments of wind and chords” in the opening apostrophe of stanza XIII. “Wind andchords” precisely ingeminate the “universal Air” and its seasonal “delegates of harmony” in thepreceding triplet. We return once again to the sustained hymn of praise that mounts throughstanza XIII to culminate in the name of God.
Stanza XIII as a whole, we can now see, stands at a critical position in the last part of thepoem. It faces two ways, toward the diverse sounds of the previous stanza, which are merelyreflections of a cosmic harmony, and toward the two sounds of the following stanza, which
created and will uncreate the cosmic harmony. If there is a Pythagorian order in stanza XII, it’san order that seems to speak only to itself. The winds of the air are delegates of harmony that
“support the Seasons in the their round”; the stern winter loves “a dirge-like sound.” Nowhere do
we find a human listener. Nature is listening to herself, she is natura naturans in the oldmedieval formula. Our minds, stilled by the heavens in XII.181–83, seem filled with voices
outside conscious perception. A sudden explosion of all-too mundane and unexpected noises instanza XIII (winds, chords, words, lowing mead, forest hum and “barking” eagle) becomes ahymn of thanksgiving enforced by imperatives in line initial (193 and 195), medial (199) andfinal (200) positions. Then with equal suddenness the creating voice of God makes and the last
trump unmakes the cosmos in stanza XIV. Between unconscious harmony and divinely
conscious gesture stands a passage of Biblical and quite unRilkean praise.49
The importance of the triplet should now be evident. Wordsworth makes particular use ofit (1) to unify each stanza with a full closure and (2) to maintain the forward progression of thepoem by generating light stimulus links with each succeeding stanza. Even where enjambment
overrides the mid-stanza division or narrative continues across the division, the triplet continues
as we have seen to interlink the stanzas. The danger of too strong an intrastanzaic closure, which

Willett 35

might cause stanzas to disassociate or grow mobile, is countered by the retrospective connections
that bind stanzas into a concatenation. The subtlety of this technique prevents us from predicting
the thematic progression with any precision. To see just how difficult prediction is, you might try
a brief thought experiment. Position yourself at the moment in stanza X when the narrator hassmashed the mythical drop-scene and left you with the fall of earth on coffin. The raucous
Bacchic procession has been swept away by a little resounding noise. The commanding voice ofthe poet presents you with an apparently unanswerable fact. The poem could end here. It would
lack a closure, of course, but it would have your ear in the way a satisfyingly rounded closure
might not. Where now, do you think, could Wordsworth possibly go? How could he resume his
topic, or impart a new forward momentum to the poem?
3
On 24 September 1827, a little over a year before he completed the first draft of “On thePower of Sound,” Wordsworth wrote to William Rowan Hamilton with his response to one of
Hamilton’s poems, expressing confidence that Hamilton would discover on his own “without
conference with me or any benefit drawn from my practice in metrical composition” the main
conclusions about poetry:
You will be brought to acknowledge that the logical faculty has infinitely more to
do with Poetry than the Young and the inexperienced, whether writer or critic,
ever dreams of. Indeed, the materials upon which that faculty is exercised in
Poetry are so subtle, so plastic, so complex, the application of it requires anadroitness which can proceed from nothing but practice, a discernment, which
emotion is so far from bestowing that at first it is ever in the way of it.50

Willett 36
The truth of these expansively unromantic sentiments is borne out, as we have seen, by thecraftsmanship lavished on ode’s stanza structure. This is in fact a Horatian position about poetic
skill advanced in the very century that was to witness the snapping of the Horatian tradition forgood. Wordsworth is in complete agreement with the extraordinary importance Horace places ontechnique, an emphasis that has no precedent in Aristotle’s Poetics or Rhetoric.51 Throughout
the Ars poetica, a text of paramount importance for the Western notion of poetic craftsmanship,
the topic of studium works itself unceasingly into the poetic discourse. Horace balances the needfor artistry against other claims and always finds it to be the essential requirement of all great
poetry. Wordsworth if anything outdoes Horace by stressing the sheer mental effort needed toorganize such subtle, plastic and complex materials into an aesthetic unity. Only long practice
can win the necessary skill to overcome the impediment of uncontained emotion.
Nowhere is Wordsworth’s attention to sheer craftsmanship more evident than in his
metrical practice. The notion of poetic craftsmanship has become virtually extinct in this age offree verse, so a few prefatory remarks are in order. Whatever virtues vers libre may have, it
suffers from one serious vice: the temptation to careless craftsmanship. There is a widely-heldview, especially in the United States, that poetry should discard both scientific and literaryprosody as constraints on freedom of creation. Proponents of this attribute to the poet a nearly
god-given creative ability to make an original prosody, even an original language, which his
worshippers are supposed to master with an equally god-given sensitivity. Free verse thus springs
from “the doctrine of autonomous art and its circular theory that rules for art are unnecessary
because art is like nothing else and that art is like nothing else because it needs no rule.”52
Meter, however, is like law in its regularity and uniformity as Wordsworth stressed in the 1802
Preface to Lyrical Ballads: “. . . meter obeys certain laws, to which the Poet and Reader bothWillett 37

willingly submit because they are certain, and because no interference is made by them with thepassion but such as the concurring testimony of ages has shewn to heighten and improve thepleasure which co-exists with it.”53 These laws are easily picked up, as Shakespeare picked themup, by reading and listening. They are fairly easy to apply at a low level of craftsmanship andtheir effects, at a high level of craftsmanship, are fairly easy to understand. No one ever thought
understanding metrical art was particularly difficult or problematic before its four-hundred year
tradition broke under the onslaught of free verse dogma at the end of the last century. Today it’s
approached as an arcane discipline whose intricacies require explication worthy of a Russian
formalist. The one rule of vers libre, by contrast, requires the poet virtually to invent a new“prosody” for each poem. Whether the prosodies are crude anisosyllabic variations on medieval
accentual verse or simple breath groupings, they cannot be judged by any formal standards andmust therefore be accepted at face value as the poet’s free selfexpression. This gives the poetaesthetic carte blanche to call anything art but leaves the reader without any tools of judgment. A
judgment of failure on grounds of rhythmic incompetence can be countered by the claim that
selfexpression generates its own laws which only fail when judged by a false aesthetic
consciousness.
Our best approach is to start inductively without recourse to the theory of meter in the
Preface to Lyrical Ballads. That theory, which Coleridge (for all his disagreements on matters ofdiction) said “is highly ingenious and touches at all points on truth,”54 really consists of scatteredcomments on the aesthetic effects of meter and is quite irrelevant to his actual practice. As I shallpoint out shortly, Wordworth provided the best description of his actual practice in a letter whose
import has to this day not been properly appreciated.

Willett 38
The two tables of the appendix, one for each half of the stanza, summarize all metricalvariations in the ode except elisions and contractions. The starting position of each variation isindicated by a superscript number; the absence of a superscript number indicates that thevariation begins the line. Punctuation inside the variations and at the end of stanzaic subsections
is enclosed in square brackets. Departures from the nominal meter at any position are noted inparentheses.
The first impression we take from this tabulation is one of metrical balance between thetwo halves of the stanza. Initial inversions occur 19 times in the first and 18 times in the second
half. Initial demotions, sometimes called spondaic openings or substitutions, occur 9 times ineach half, although line internal demotions are somewhat less symmetrical with a ratio of 9:14
respectively. Implied offbeats, rather surprisingly, are distributed very evenly between the two
halves in a ratio of 9:10. The pairing conditions of the implied offbeats are also balanced: theratio of stress final to stress initial pairings is 8:1 in the first and 8:2 in the second half. This
distribution of implied offbeats is unexpected. They are the most disruptive of regular duple
meter and we would not, prima facie, expect to find them so evenly disposed in the stanza butclustered at moments of intense emotion or thematic concentration.
The impression of even dispersal is, however, somewhat misleading. Wordsworth
allocates his metrical resources, his variations above all, with great care and purpose to reinforce
the internal organization of the stanza by rhyme, line length and punctuation . We shall consider
the two halves of the stanza independently to see how he deploys rhythm as an adjunct tostanzaic architectonics. This is an important distinction. Poets handle meter differently in stichic
and in stanzaic poetry. Classical prosodists have long recognized this, but their English
counterparts have been slow to grasp its implications. All poetry is not simply stichic poetry forWillett 39
the purposes of metrical analysis. Wordsworth’s metrical practice varies considerably between
his blank verse and his stanzaic verse, whether regular or irregular. The “Intimations Ode,” forexample, is an irregular Pindaric in which he uses rhythm with great subtlety to shape theemotions and structure the theme as it unfolds through stanzas of startling—and potentiallydestabilizing—variety. That is, he uses rhythm architectonically as a key structural element inconstructing the poem and not merely as a tool to achieve localized effects within individual
lines.55 Failure to grasp this fact contributes to the depreciation of his craftsmanship. Before
examining the metrical architecture in detail, however,we must first be clear about his generalrhythmic habits in handling the decasyllabic line.
Wordsworth’s normal rhythmic practice was to treat the first two positions of the iambic
pentameter line indifferently, unless “the Passion of the sense” demanded a certain pattern ofstressed and unstressed syllables, and then adhere generally to the iambic pattern. But he reserved
the right to dislocate the verse without limid if he thought the emotion justified it. Writing in
1804 to John Thelwall, he sketched out his metrical system in a short, but revealing, passage:
As to my own system of metre it is very simple, 1st and 2nd syllables long or shortindifferently except where the Passion of the sense cries out for one in preference
3d 5th 7th 9th short according to the regular laws of the Iambic. This the general
rule. But I can scarcely say that I admit any limits to the dislocation of the verse,that is I know none that may not be justified by some passion or other. I speak ingeneral terms. The most dislocated line I know in my writing is this in the
Cumberland Beggar. “Impressed on the white road in the same line” which takenby itself has not the sound of a verse . . . The words to which the passion is
att[ached?] are white road same line and the verse dislocates [for the] sake ofWillett 40
these. This will please or displ[ease by th]e quantity of feeling excited by theimage, to those in whom it excites [such? much?] feeling, as in one it will bemusical to others not.56
He uses the words “long” and “short” above for stressed and unstressed styllables respectively. It
was common in his time to misuse terms for phonological duration, which we now know is justone component of stress along with pitch and amplitude, for stress proper. This practiceoriginated in education. The only formal prosody studied in secondary school and university wasquantitative Greek and Latin prosody, where “long” and “short” referred accurately to the rules
governing long and short syllables. It became habitual, therefore, for poets and critics to employ
the vocabulary of quantitative metrics to describe the very different accentual-syllabic meter.
This is merely a terminological confusion, and does not indicate any misunderstanding of basic
versification by Wordsworth.
Out of 102 decasyllabic lines in the ode, 55 begin with initial inversions or spondees, anda majority of these fall on strong verbs or participles, with rhetorically emphatic nouns, pronouns
and conjunctions trailing well behind. This tallies with the poet’s statement above that “thePassion of the sense” determines the stress sequence of the first two syllables and not the
metrical paradigm. Wordsworth avoids nearly all variations in the opening trimeter, however, toprevent disrupting its integrity as the rhythmic upbeat to each stanza. But once into the stanza’s
main body, he concentrates initial and internal variations in the pentameters that occupy thesecond and fourth lines of the first quatrain almost as if he were defining it by a rhythmic outline(the quatrain is perceived as a quatrain by the rhymes on its second and fourth lines). Four double
offbeats in particular occur in the fourth line, two of them at the start of the line, where theirdislocating power is greatest. The second quatrain begins with a pentameter which, as I said

Willett 41
earlier, provides a sense of metrical continuity with the first quatrain. This may explain thecontinuation of forceful initial variations in 7 of 14 stanzas. The variations then taper off sharply
in the following three tetrameters. The majority of all metrical variations in the first half of thestanza are concentrated, thus, in the pentameters of the second, fourth and fifth lines. Tetrameters
are admittedly somewhat less tolerant of metrical variations than pentameters,57 but is there anyother explanation for their relatively sudden cessation? These three tetrameters, which bring thefirst hemistanza to closure, contain a syntactically continuous and coherent phrase group in 10 of
14 stanzas. Strong syntactical stops occur only in I.6, II.22 and XIII.198, all on the firsttetrameter, with the punctuation serving merely to introduce a different but related sound sketchin the next two lines.58 Wordsworth treats the pentameter in fact as the thematic initiator for a
description embodied in the following three relatively strict tetrameters. The tetrameters need to
be strict because they not only close out the first half of the stanza but also provide the solid
hinge for the turn—the thematic shift or rhetorical contrast—that regularly occurs in the next line
(9). This line is also a tetrameter but, as Table 2 shows, it contains a high incidence of initialvariations including one hypermetrical line (XI.9) that help signal the shift. A good illustration of
how the second quatrain functions in concert with the turn occurs in stanza IV.53–61:
For the tired slave, Song lifts the languid oar,
“

^

*

B

o B o BAnd bids it aptly fall, with chimeo

B o B o B

oB

That beautifies the fairest shore,
o

B oB

o Bo

B

And mitigates the harshest clime.
o

BoB

o B

o

B

Yon Pilgrims see—in lagging fileWillett 42
*

B o

B

o B o

B

They move. But soon the appointed way [Elison gives “th’ appointed”]
o

B

o B

o B

o

B

A choral Ave Marie shall beguile,o

Bo Bo BoBo B

And to their hope the distant shine
o

~B o

B

o Bo

B

Glisten with a livelier ray.
B o ~B o B oBAs the metrical pattern shows, the pentameter introduces the image of a personified Song lifting
the galley slave’s oar with an implied offbeat-demotion pair that is precisely located to throw
heavy, perhaps even sentimentally heavey-handed, emphasis on the words “tired slave” and“Song.” The remaining lines of the quatrain, however, are perfect tetrameters whose clean
movement reflects, or is supposed to reflect, the transmuted suffering they convey. Like so muchof Wordsworth’s best poetry, the implications often vanish behind the facade of simple languageand deceptive metrical art. The quatrain doesn’t merely claim that song lightens the slave’s
burden; it asserts that song enhances the beauty of a shore seen from the dark prison of the galleyand (chiastically) moderates the effects of climatic extremes on those penned inside. Whether or
not this is literally true, the quatrain makes it seem plausible by a forceful pair of variations that
uncoil their energy into the following three lines with such clarity that we hardly notice theimport of the words. The sudden intrusion of the poet, speaking in his proper voice andcommanding a change of scene, is marked by a demotion on “Yon” that is as unexpected, andrhetorically disconcerting, as the similar technique in stanza III.41–44, which captures “Then” in
an initial inversion heightened by punctuation that isolates it from the offbeat:Then, or far earlier, let us rove

Willett 43
B“

B

Where mists are breaking up or gone,
And from aloft look down into a cove
Where mists are breaking up or gone.
In both cases the rupture of mood foregrounds the current thematic scene and leaves the impactof the preceding words almost unregarded in a kind of rhetorical darkness. Although the threetetrameters of stanza IV are free of major variations, elsewhere Wordsworth introduces a total of
five initial inversions, nine demotions and one implied offbeat in the same three-line. Four of theinversions fall on descriptive verbs and serve as iconic strengthens with minimal disruption of
the meter. The majority of demotions are concentrated in the second tetrameter (line B) andintensify tone or imagery, with no effect on rhythmic integrity (particularly in the important final
tetrameter). The one implied offbeat in XI.166 is not so benign. It is combined with a demotion
on “shy” to evoke the song of the nightingale under assault by the rumbling voice of a regal city,that floats
Far as the woodlands—with the trill to blend
B

“

B

o

~B

o B o

B

Of that shy songstress, whose love-tale
o

B

* B

“

^

Might tempt an angel to descend,
While hovering o’er the moonlight vale. (XI.164–68)
The placement of a stress-final pairing at the end of the line, where its double stresses canprovide emphatic strength to a concluding image or summary, is a fairly common technique inaccentual-syllabic verse.59 Here, however, we have a jarring inversion of syntax after the dash inline 165 that seems to cooperate perversely with the variations in line 166 to create a sense of
disjunction between rhythm and imagery. The imagery is wonderfully, and typically, romantic:

Willett 44
the city’s “solemn sea-like bass” floating far into the woodlands, the nightingale’s trill of passion
and the hovering angel that might be tempted by her song into a moonlight vale. But the image
doesn’t work its magic simply, as anyone can find out by reading the lines aloud. The twisted
syntax, redoubling the force of the variations, plays against the evoked scene and subverts our
expectations for a lyrical largo cantabile rhythm to carry the imagery. The confused noise of theregal city seems to contaminate the nightingale’s song and with it the power that might, but does
not, tempt an angel to descend quite literally into earthly noise and passion.
The second half of the stanza, whose metrical variations are summarized in Table 2,
presents a somewhat different metrical picture. It consists, you will recall, of two subsections: afive-line unit ending with a strongly endstopped trochaic bridge and a three-line summative
triplet. But despite its segmentation into two asymmetrical units by meter and rhyme,
Wordsworth treats these eight lines as one sustained syntactical train. There are full syntacticalstops inside this train only in stanzas VII (107), XI (172) and XIV (218 and 222). One has the
feeling of a continuous thematic stream channeled by the formal structure, particularly thetrochaic bridge, yet moving irresistibly forward to the strong closure in the triplet. Indeed, theshaping forces in the meter and rhyme almost seem to increase the forward drive by a kind ofcompression. When the thematic movement is arrested by a full syntactical stop the effect is felt
very strongly.60 In stanza VII, for example, the jarring effect of reason let suddenly into theidiot’s mind is suggested by the rhetorical pause of the exclamation mark at the end of line 106
followed by the sudden full stop in line 107 after a short, tentative resumption of syntax:
As Conscience, to the centre
Of being, smites with irresistible pain,
So shall a solemn cadence, if it enter

Willett 45

the mouldy vaults of the dull idiot’s brain,
Transmute him to a wretch from quiet hurled—
Convulsed as by a jarring din;
And then aghast, as at the world
Of reason partially let in
By concords winding with a sway
Terrible for sense and soul!
B o Bo BoB

Or, awed he weeps struggling to quell dismay.
* B

o

^

“

B

o B

Point not these mysteries to an Art
B“

B

Lodged above the starry pole. (VII.99–109)
The enjambment in line 104, one of two at the end of the first hemistanza (the other is at
XIII.200), makes the sudden stop in the contre-rejet all the more prominent. The stoppage is also
supported by powerful variations in line 106 (headless) and line 107 (initial demotion andimplied offbeat with stress initial pairing). Rhythm and syntax perfectly model the terror of asuddenly invasive rationality. Wordsworth then extracts a conclusion, perhaps with rather too
much glib abstraction, from the terror and sharpens his moral with an initial inversion in line
108. Of the three other cases of full syntactical stoppage, two are rhetorical questions (XI.172
and XIV.218) and one is a powerful interjection (XIV.222). They clearly function as rhetoricalintensifiers designed to set up, in the first instance, the notion of a sound score (XI.172–76) and,in the second two, the survival of sound in the eternal logos (XIV.222–24). These fourWillett 46
exceptions aside, the second hemistanza contains a single long period that forms either a separate
sentence or a continuation of a sentence from the first hemistanza (as in I, VII, XII and XIII).
Within this complex syntactical container, Wordsworth arrays his metrical forces in analmost predictable way. The five-line subsection, as the dynamic, contrastive and energetic heartof the stanza, contains a wealth of initial and internal variations. Those in the first line, for which
the three tetrametes of the preceding quatrain serve as foil, we have already discussed: they markthe thematic turn. The lone pentameter, sandwiched between two pairs of four-beat lines, again
holds a particularly rich load of inversions and demotions. The variations then taper off in thenext line and virtually cease in the bridge, which only has three almost invisible promotions. The
bridge is the rhythmic pressure point of the stanza, and Wordsworth maintains its pure trochaic
movement free of metrical flux. The internal movement comes to a maximum constriction at thebridge and then, once freed, sweeps out through the triplet to a closure of such decisiveness thateach one seems to signal the end of the poem. It seems in fact to masquerade as poetic closure, amasquerade that the retrospective stanza structure must always counter right up to the true end.
This is probably the explanation for the pentameter in XIV.224, which serves as a reminder to thereader that the poem has, in fact, ended. After 13 incarnations of the stanza, we feel something of
its ghostly paradigm even with the dissolution of the universe in the last stanza, and can easily
imagine the poem continuing on stanza after stanza. The pentameter may have been intended toprevent that feeling, but it fails I think because the stanza is instinct with such formal life. It
persists in memory like an obsessive shape or rhythm.
The triplet, in its capacity as a capping or summative structure, is charged with a visual
imagery of exceptional clarity and precision. Virtually every line contains a strong descriptive
verb, and collectively they evoke a sense of active, pictorial concentration. Several of the verbs

Willett 47
are accentuated with prominent metrical variations. In some cases this is so obvious as toconstitute a metrical flourish in the face of the perceptive reader. In stanzas II and III, forexample, both triplets (II.30 and III.46) open with a present participle stressed by initial
inversion, while in stanza V two syntactically parallel past participles (V.B9–80), again stressedby inversions, hammer home the power of amatory music with a very unerotic plosiveness:(1)

Listening to nun’s faint throb of holy fear (II.30)
B

“

B

*

B o Bo B

Scattering a ditty each to her desire (III.46)
B(2)“ Bo Bo B oB

Shot from the dancing Graces, as they move
B

“

B o

B o ~B o

B

Fanned by the plausive wings of Love. (V.79–80)
B

“

B o

B

o

B

The true effectiveness of the triplet does not, however, lie in the variations, rich as they
are in the second pentameter (to which I shall return later), but in the subtle orchestration ofsyntax within the metrical frame. It is unusual in English verse to move directly from a tetrameterin falling meter (such as the bridge) to a pentameter in rising meter. The effect in a regularstanzaic poem is potentially jarring.61 But most lines of the bridge end with a strong stop thatmoderates the sense of rhythmic shift and even increases the pent-up rhythmic energy thatstreams into the triplet. In the four cases where the bridge is enjambed (II.29, III.45, V.77 and
XI.173), creating the potential for metrical confusion, Wordworth softens the transition either by
beginning the first line of the triplet with an inversion (II.30 and III.46), which seems for a
moment to continue the falling meter, or by letting it run on in unvaried rising meter (V.78 and
XI.174), which gives the illusion that the falling meter continues directly across the enjambment.

Willett 48

If one reads the latter two passages from bridge through triplet out loud, one will instantly notice
how the falling meter appears to persist into the contre-rejet. There is, then, a perfectly smooth
metrical transition from the bridge to the triplet. Rhyme on the first line of the triplet binds it
formally to the preceding subsection while the rising meter, loosed from the bridge, starts
forward as if it were the beginning of a run of pentameter lines. This sense of a new beginning isquite natural: the previous lone pentameter was isolated between two tetrameters, and one mustgo back six lines from there to find another. This sense of a run is immediately checked,
however, because the following pentameter rhymes with the tetrameter that terminates all but thelast stanza. The abrupt channeling of five-beat rhythm into four-beat rhythm imparts aparticularly emphatic force to the final tetrameter. It becomes the perfect envelope for arecapitulation, gnome or pictorial flourish. And Wordsworth makes sure you notice the effect bya simple trick: he binds the second pentameter all the more firmly to the tetrameter by avoiding
full stops at line end (the only one is in XII.191)62 and frequently enjambing it with thetetrameter. Almost any triplet would serve to illustrate the combined effect of these refinements.
My own favorites are in stanza IX, with its apotheosis of Arion, and in stanza X, with its almost
minimalist evocation of death. We have already considered both in some detail. But stanza XIII
also provides a powerful example:
As Deep to Deep
Shouting through one valley calls,
All worlds, all natures, mood and measure keep
For praise and ceaseless gratulation, poured
Into the ear of God, their Lord. (XIII.204–08)

Willett 49
Here the rhythm starts midline, comes to a tentative rest at the end of the bridge, picks up speed
in line 206 (where the slight anacoluthon in “All worlds, all natures” seems to accelerate the two
syntactically inverted objects of “keep”), surges over the line boundary, comes again to a briefhalt after the Latinate “gratulation” and then rebounds off the pause through another enjambment
into the tetrameter conclusion. This is an effect that Milton, the master at dovetailing syntax andmeter, could applaud. Three successive lines end with verbs: first (205) the main verb of asubordinate clause depicting untamed natural praise, second (207) the main verb of the wholesentence depicting the rationally organized praise of the universe and third (208) the past
participle depicting the stream that actively carries gratulation to God. All three verbs aremonosyllables and receive strong stresses due to their line-end position, but the second and third
are accorded special prominence by enjambment. There are no metrical variations in the entire
passage (the preposition “Into” in line 208 is a fudge word that can be scanned as iamb or trochee
at need). The almost Handelian jubilation of the passage is achieved solely by the articulation ofsyntax within its metrical frame.
In most triplets, however, we find (as Table 2 indicates) a convergence of variations inthe second pentameter that is exceeded only by the lone pentameter of the preceding five-line
subsection. This position contains such a large proportion because it provides the setup for the
final tetrameter, whose clarity of movement is nearly untouched by variations, particularly initialvariations, that might mar its almost ceremonial conclusiveness. As always in Wordsworth’s
stanzaic poetry, a pronounced reduction of metrical variations at a given position signals that itserves an important structural purpose. That purpose is directly aided by the contrast we
experience when moving from the convolutions of the pentameter to the clear, transparent
tetrameter.

Willett 50
I should like to conclude this discussion of meter by scanning an entire stanza to illustrate
in a more general way how deftly Wordsworth integrates meter into an architectural structure
defined by rhyme, line length and regular syntactical pause. The relatively fixed placement of
pauses cued by punctuation and occasionally overridden by enjambment is rarely studied instanzaic poetry. I have drawn repeated attention to the technique above because the ode cannot be
understood without taking it fully into account. Stanza II provides a superb example ofWordsworthian architectonics, notably his handling of pause, but it also demonstrates how quite
traditional materials, much of it recycled from other poems and poets, can be elevated almost
solely by a rhythmic drive that is the poetic analogue to the energy of accent and concision ofdramatic expression found in the music of Beethoven’s high-Classical style:
The headlong streams and fountains
o B o

B

o

B

o

Serve Thee, invisible Spirit, with untired powers(Contraction of “invisible”)*(Demotion + implied offbeat)

B

o B o

Bo

“

^

Cheering the wakeful tent on Syrian mountains,
B

“

B

o B o

B o

B

o

(Contraction of “Syrian”)(Inversion)

They lull perchance ten thousand thousand flowers.
o B

o

B

o

B o

B o

B

That roar, the prowling lion’s Here I am,
* B

o B

o Bo

B o B

(Demotion)

How fearful to the desert wide!
o

B o ~B o B oB(Promotion)

That bleat, how tender! of the damoBo

B o ~B o B(Promotion)

Calling a straggler to her side.
B“

B o ~B o B(Inversion+promotion)

Willett 51
Shout, cuckoo!—let the vernal soul
*

B

o

B

o B o B

(Demotion)

Go with thee to the frozen zone;
B o

B

“

Bo

B

(Inversion + post. comp.)

Toll from thy loftiest perch, lone bell-bird, toll(Contraction of “loftiest”)

B(Inversion + demotion)

“

B o

B

*

B

o

B

At the still hour to Mercy dear,
“

^

o

B o B

(Implied offbeat)Mercy from her twilight throne
B o ~Bo

Bo

B

Listening to nun’s faint throb of holy fear,(Contraction of “listening”)

B(Inversion + demotion)

“

B

*

B

o Bo BTo sailor’s prayer breathed from a darkening sea(Contraction of “darkening”)o B o(Implied offbeat)

^

“

B o

B

Or widow’s cottage-lullaby.
o

Bo

Bo

BoB

I’ve noted the contraction of “invisible” in the second line but not that of “Spirit,” whose extra
syllable is best understood as a kind of grace note absorbed (as is common in accentual-syllabic
verse) by the pause. The stanzaic punctuation, that is, the regular punctuation marking structuralpauses in the stanza, follows the pattern I have already described. Full stops in lines 20 and 24
help contour the two quatrains of the first hemistanza. The exclamation point at the end of line
22 is strictly rhetorical and is intended to work in tandem with the internal exclamation point inline 23, both of which fall after parallel adverbial phrases (“How fearful” and “how tender!”).
The placement of rhetorical punctuation at two different syntactical points produces a kind ofsyncopation in pause. The only strong stop in the second hemistanza occurs at line 26, where it
sets off the imperative to the cuckoo. This pause releases the two imperatives that frame line 27,
the first emphasized by initial inversion and the second by final stress position. The descriptive

Willett 52
drive put in motion by the imperatives is suddenly diverted, through the marvelously tranquil
implied offbeat at the start of line 28, from the cuckoo shouting on its lofty perch to theincorporeal throne of mercy in the bridge. Stanza II has one of four bridges that are not endstopped. Here the enjambment furnishes a transition from the personification of mercy passively
sitting on her throne to mercy actively listening, against the rocking shout of the cuckoo, to thenun’s devotions, the sailor’s prayer and the widow’s lullaby.
This is surely one of the strangest, and most daring, images in all English poetry. With akind of double imagistic movement the cuckoo’s vernal cry, which in “The Solitary Reaper” wehear “Breaking the silence of the seas/Among the farthest Hebrides,” carries spring to the frozen
north and simultaneously tolls to mercy’s throne at the exact moment that hazy abstraction isherself attending to the whispered devotions of the small and insignificant of the world as they
face fear, impending storm and uncertain future. A stanza that opens with the sound of streams
and fountains, lion and sheep, shifts unexpectedly at line 25 to the cuckoo with a powerfuldemotion and dash-marked pause to accent the shift. The progress of the cuckoo’s song, if we
can call a shout a song, surges through the inversions in lines 26 (with postponed compensation)and 27 until it blends into the prayers of the triplet as an unheard voice in the still night.
Wordsworth creates an aural layering of exceptional complexity here. The raucus cry of the bird
breaks the calm night hour without seeming to break its spell and then vanishes without seeming
to vanish into faint human words.
In stanza XI, Wordsworth has the “voice of regal city” float out to the countryside andblend with the nightingale’s trill in a moonlit vale that might tempt an angel to descend. His
purpose there was simply to create a vast sonic landscape that would justify his hope for anotational system to record the full emotional range of sound. But why does he specificallyWillett 53
command the cuckoo to toll, bell-like, to mercy in stanza II? It might be tempting to say that thelone bell-bird provides a contrast to the convict’s death knell in X.158 by tolling to mercy before
another bell tolls to strict law, but this still does not explain the explicit linkage between cuckoo
and mercy in the context of human prayer. Wordsworth certainly loved the song in itself, andmany years before “On the Power of Sound” depicted it with very similar imagery. In line 6 of
“To the Cuckoo” (composed 1802) the poet hears its “restless shout” while lying on the grass,and in lines 2–3 of “Yes! full surely ’twas the Echo” (composed 1806) he hears the echo
“Solitary, clear, profound,/Answering to Thee, shouting Cuckoo!”63 In neither case does herelate the cuckoo’s song to mercy.64 He does, however, relate it to those visionary moments
when another reality, numinous and undefinable, transforms this world. The third stanza of “To
the Cuckoo,” as revised for the 1827 edition of his collected poems, and thus just a year before
composition of the ode,65 gives us a cuckoo very different from the one in the original version.
Here are lines 9–16 with the original 1802 version of stanza three printed next to the 1827
revision for comparison:1827 Revision

1802 Version

Though babbling only, to the Vale,To me, no Babbler with a tale

Of sunshine and of flowers

Of sunshine and of flowers,

Thou bringest unto me a tale

Thou tellest, Cuckoo! in the valeOf visionary hours.

Of visionary hours.

Thrice welcome, Darling of the Spring!
Even yet thou art to me
No Bird: but an invisible Thing,
A voice, a mystery. (9–16)

Willett 54
The revisions of 1827 shift the tale from one of sunshine and flowers to one of visionary hours
and, at the same time, point a contrast between the cuckoo’s inane babble and the poet’s
privileged access to a deeper experience. The cuckoo that was “no Babbler” in 1802 is by 1827
(and all subsequent editions) only a babbler to the vale. The cuckoo that told of “visionary hours”
in 1802 can by 1827 only bring or evoke them from nature as part of nature. The “invisible
Thing,” rarified to pure voice, helps the poet “beget/That golden time again” (lines 27–28) when,
as a youth, he would rove over field and wood in pursuit of the ever elusive bird who made theubiquitous voice, “a hope, a love;/Still long’d for, never seen” (23–24). But that voice, which heoriginally called a “restless shout” (line 6) and by 1827 a “twofold shout” to eliminate any false
humanization of the bird, means more than the mere overcoming of time through some quasiProustian memory.66 The “hours” of “visionary hours” is a synechdoche for time and not merely
for historical boyhood hours. It is a time more like the midwinter spring in the first movement of“Little Gidding,” which, Eliot says, “is in the spring time/But not in time’s covenant.” Thevisionary hours are not in time’s covenant. In the last two stanzas, the emphasis is on the present
experience as a fresh instance that parallels but does not simply resume the past experience. The
poet can hear the song “yet” (25), he begets the golden time “again” (28), the earth appears a
fairy place “again” (30). The visionary experience has not been dispossessed of the present andrelocated to the past from which it can only be recovered in memory by the cuckoo. This is fully
consonant with the 1806 poem, which we shall examine next, where there is no question of
reproducing a fact of childhood. It is also consonant with “The Cuckoo at Laverna,” a superb
blank verse poem of 183B in which the sudden cry of the cuckoo has the power to summon up
the true meaning of St. Francis.67 The “vagrant Voice” (27) not only stimulates a train of thoughton St. Francis but makes Wordsworth, and perhaps even other monks who hear it, think of theWillett 55
prophet Isaiah—makes them even name the bird a prophet before it carries its glad spring tidings
across the mountains toward the Pole (82–102).68
The cuckoo that only babbles to the vale, indifferent nature babbling to indifferent nature,
conveys a numinous vision to the poet who even now, in this present moment as once in the past,can see into the inner life of its shout. This is one part of the key to understanding why
Wordsworth uses the cuckoo the way he does in the ode. The other part is in the poem of 1806.
In that poem the shouting cuckoo hears its own echo, which is like her ordinary cry yetvery different. The image immediately suggests a parallel with humanity, unthinking creatures
who also hear two different voices:
Hears not also mortal Life?
Hear not we, unthinking Creatures!
Slaves of Folly, Love, or Strife,
Voices of two different Natures?

Have not We too?—yes, we haveAnswers, and we know not whence;
Echoes from beyond the grave,
Recognized intelligence?

Such within ourselves we hear
Oft-times, ours though sent from far;
Listen, ponder, hold them dear;
For of God, of God they are! (13–24)

Willett 56
Wordsworth tinkered with punctuation and capitalization in later years, most importantly
changing the question mark after “intelligence” to an exclamation mark, thereby guaranteeingthat the echoes from the grave are an intelligence and not an ambiguity, but only made substantial
modifications to the last stanza, which by 1836 read as follows:
Such rebounds our inward ear
Catches sometimes from afar—
Listen, ponder, hold them dear;
For of God,—of God they are!69
In a moment we’ll see the bearing of these late changes. First, we must settle the question of what
the “Voices of two different Natures” really mean. The cuckoo hears two voices: her ordinary cry
and its subtly transformed echo. Extending the comparison to mortal life, we hear our own
ordinarily corrupt voice and its echo, as recognized intelligence, from beyond the grave. The
echo also conveys some sort of answer, though we don’t know its origin until Wordsworth tells
us at the end of the poem. The revisions of the last stanza force an interpretive narrowing of theimage: the echo is strictly internal, to be caught rather unsurely by an inward spiritual ear andthen only sometimes. The verb “Catches,” which is an inspired 1827 improvement over the lame
original, suggests our uncertain or even precarious hold on the echo. The mundane voice weemploy for every corrupt end—summarized by folly, love and strife—is really just an imperfectreflection of a divine voice we don’t grasp very often and, even when we do, not very securely.
The intelligence is in that rare other voice, not the one unthinking creatures commonly use tofabricate reality.
When we combine these two images of the cuckoo from the revised 1802 and 1806 lyrics,
we have the bird in stanza II. The cuckoo’s shout is numinous, it opens up a vast insubstantial

Willett 57
perspective on another reality quite different from the one before us that looks so solid,
permanent and intractable. By using the word “toll” twice in line 27, Wordsworth ritualizes thevisionary moment at a specific place and time, midnight perhaps, when fear looms up
gigantically in the shadows. The nun, sailor and widow all use mundane language in their searchfor peace. Mercy comes, as recognized intelligence, from the hand of God beyond the grave—anecho to their voices. It is, however, not clear and unequivocal. Mercy sits on a “twilight throne,”which at first looks as though it were an error for “twilit throne.” But it isn’t a throne lit by
twilight, it is twilight: vague, undefined and ambiguous. The half-light defeats our expectation ofa simple, clearly-defined spiritual comfort. Mercy may listen, but she doesn’t act. There is no
promised action that will free the galley slave and the prisoner of the mine (IV), secure religious
passions from the cozenage of sense (VI), release the idiot from the agony of sudden reason(VII) or avert the convict’s summons and the vain distress gun (X). Oppression, injustice,intolerance, mental torment, execution and accidental death are constant; mercy is inconstant.
She only seems to listen. All we can hope to do is occasionally catch in our mortal twilight theunderstanding that mercy, by its existence beyond this life, is also a guarantee that we live in aprovidential universe where Hamlet may fall but the sparrow will live, a universe where there’s
providence in the fall of a Halmlet. Mercy listening is God listening. Whether, or when, she will
act is not an answer we are ever going to get this side of the grave.
4.
In recent years criticism has developed a strong distaste for literary evaluation. The
attempt to rank works qualitatively is treated by theory as an outerance, an attempt to externalize
or objectify hopelessly subjective criteria that are themselves a collection of largely unrecognizedsocial and sexual forces. Valuation is only another phrase regime. Postmodernist-textualist

Willett 58
metaphysics reduces all literary works, at whatever level of “seriousness,” to an endless stream oftext characterized at all points by the same rhetorical strategies of evasion. But in the case of “Onthe Power of Sound,” the issue of evaluation must be faced squarely and honestly.
Here is a work which Wordsworth rated near the top of his approximately 400,000-word
poetic oeuvre,70 on an aesthetic footing with the Intimations Ode. It is a masterpiece of formal
construction that perfectly meshes a wide variety of traditional materials and myths into a nearlyseamless unity. Its rhythmic drive and subtlety are equal to his best stanzaic poems of the great
period between 1797 and 1807. Indeed, the metrical art alone goes a long way to support
Wordsworth’s estimation of the ode. The language, though occasionally stiff or even formulaic inplaces, frequently rises to the kind of daring splendor that the Greeks called thauma, a “wonder,”one of the strongest words of commendation in Greek. Taken as a whole, the ode achieves theconsummate balance that Polykleitos of Argos emphasized in the first sentence of the Canon:“Perfection comes about little by little through many numbers.”71 Polykleitos’ aim was toestablish a new set of criteria for sculptural art based on unshakable principles of a priori
mathematical reasoning—principles that found their application in measurement. His
Doryphoros, a sculpture “whose impact on Western art is quite incalculable,”72 epitomizes theaesthetic power of Measure (or to meson) just as Wordsworth’s ode epitomizes the aesthetic
power of temporal rhythmos and symmetria.
And this, of course, is precisely the problem. Romantic art is not supposed to exhibit
calculation, measure, symmetry and composition. All that has been exiled to the Augustans. It is
supposed to be an art of passion under the guiding hand, and only the guiding hand, of asovereign imagination. Even among those critics who exhibit some sympathy for Wordsworth’s
later career, the ode is almost never listed among the handful of poems that are patronizinglyWillett 59
recommended to readers. Typically they will commend lyrics with some vibrancy of feeling.
John Purkis, for example, responds to the question “Is the late poetry so bad?” with a slightanthology that includes “Compos’d Upon an Evening of Extraordinary Splendour,”“Extemporaneous Effusions upon the Death of James Hogg,” The River Duddon (particularly
sonnet xxxiv) and “Processions.”73 These are all fine poems, especially the Duddon sonnet
cycle, but none has the emotional variety, formal perfection, metrical sophistication or breadth ofconception we find in the ode. They, like all such lists of good late poetry, are always presented
in an ambiguous light that suggests a certain insecure quality: not great, but the best we can find.
A recent critic even went so far as to call “The unremitting voice of nightly streams,” a 17-line
verse paragraph that Dove Cottage Manuscript 89 shows to have a close chronological and verbal
relationship with the ode, “arguably the most important and possibly the most beautiful ofWordsworth’s lyrics written in the final twenty-five years of his life.”74 This estimation can only
stand if the poem rises up from a fairly level plain of mediocrity. Perhaps the most sympathetic
treatment ever given the ode came from John Jones. He identified the dominant theme of thelater poetry as convention: a convention in style that tries to approach God’s artistic manner
through the heraldry of nature and the imitation of action determined by accustomed forms, astyle that in trying to explain the How of Things tends increasingly toward ceremony.75 Jones,
virtually alone, finds the late convention a positive development and the ode “The finest
achievement in this kind . . . , for all the materials of his late poetry are here blended withsupreme felicity.”76 But a defense resting on convention and ceremony is very dangerous.
Postromantic readers may briefly pause on ceremony and summon up the late poetry of Yeats,saturated with a unique rhetorical ceremony as no other in modern times. Convention, however,is the killing touch. For those who want intensity of feeling and judge not only Wordsworth but

Willett 60
lyric poetry in general by that criterion, convention—let alone formal perfection—is an aridityfrom which nothing can bloom. Out of that soil, they will always insist, only desiccated verse cangrow.77
One would not, of course, want to claim that intense emotion is unimportant. But
arguments that elevate intensity of emotion to a necessary criterion make a category mistake.
Poems don’t express emotions, they express formal aesthetic structures that evoke secondary
responses of various kinds in poetic time. Those responses cover a wide spectrum from intense
emotion to sheer, Nabokovian delight in play. Poems expand in time and only exist therefore byoral or mental recitation; their formal structures can only evolve temporally. If you try to grasp apoem without reciting it, you only grasp a summary abstraction: the ghost of an image, anapparition of feeling, a gleam of some rhythmic gesture. Nothing you abstract from the poem as astatic text is the poem, though it may help the act of reading. The reading, however it may be
performed—linear reading through a complete poem, repeated reading of select passage as partof a complete reading, reading in stages (for a long narrative poem), skim reading of well-known
poems—is the only act that actualizes the formal structure. Sometimes critics will say, “I knowthat poem. It’s very familiar.” This means that the abstract model of the poem in memory is wellstocked with textual artifacts. The critic could pull them out at need for display. The feeling offamiliarity that we all have after years of reading or studying a poem is the collective memory ofreading experiences, not the experiences themselves.
An excessive preoccupation with emotional intensity can blind us to a poem’s formal
structures, which are, after all, the only means the poet has to elicit responses from the reader. If
the aesthetic forms are all stripped from a poem, we face nothing but plain text. The reverse,
unfortunately, is also true. If we are ignorant of aesthetic forms and their historical development,

Willett 61
we may hear a poem as little more than plain text and demand, in compensation for our
unrecognized ignorance, that it somehow exhibit intense emotion. Absent that emotion, the poem
is judged desiccated. This has been fatal to Wordsworth’s later poetry which, despite its
enormous bulk, varies in quality about as wildly as that of the great period. It has led more
precisely to a devaluation of the stanzaic and metrical art in “On the Power of Sound.” Not one
critic in the English speaking world has correctly explained its (1) stanza structure, (2) techniqueof stanzaic linkage or (3) metrical art, to say nothing of its tone and imagery. Yet Wordsworth’s
assessment of his achievement is depreciated and the ode ignored or damned with the faint praiseof “convention.”78
We can answer the critics of emotional desiccation in three more general ways: one
psychological, one poetical and one philosophical.
1. Poetry, as Johan Huizinga pointed out long ago in his little-read masterpiece Homo
Ludens, is a function of play: it proceeds within the intangible playground of the mind, within adimensionless space which the mind constructs for the ludus.79 Poetry like play casts a spellover us, it enchants and captivates us with order. Play is in fact order of a very special kind—rhythm and harmony. The technical means for compassing rhythm and harmony are in the
broadest sense aesthetic forms. These can range widely, with no pretense to completeness, fromstructural forms (meter, rhyme, stanza, narrative) to linguistic forms (imagery, rhetoric,
symbolism). Excessive indulgence in textual metanarratives and metaphysics destroys sensitivity
to play, to appreciation of the technical means by which the enchantment is achieved. You cannot
read the most technically sophisticated and arguably the most powerful of all western lyric poets,
Pindar, without sensitivity to the play of forms. That, in turn, requires an engagement with thedactylo-epitrite meter he so often uses. Only when one has worked one’s way through its

Willett 62
intricacies is it possible, as M. L. West illustrates from the Fourth Pythian (70–77), to apprehendwith the ear and not merely the eye “Pindar’s ability to unroll long-breathed sentences over thecolon- and period- boundaries to majestic effect. . . .”80 Horace, who paid Pindar the greatest of
all poetic compliments,81 is a poet almost devoid of passion. Paul Shorey said bluntly of his style,“There is no intensity of feeling.”82 Horace’s vitality comes from his play with rhetoric, his
metrical craftsmanship in modifying Greek lyric rhythms to the Latin language, his mastery ofstanzaic architecture and his inevitability of phrasing. The Horatian phrases on the humansituation and its pathos replace all others once we learn them; they have virtually defined us thepast two thousand years. But no one, unless perhaps Robert Graves, has dared call him desiccatedthe past two thousand years! One could make the same case with another poet outside theEnglish tradition: Hölderlin. Knowledge of his Alcaic and Asclepiadic stanza forms is essential
for a full response to the poet whom George Steiner ranks along with Rilke and Celan as themost original creators in German verse. Wordsworth stands with these makers in the demands heplaces on us, especially in the late poetry, to follow the sheer delight of a paidia with form. The
parallel with Horace is particularly apt, since Wordsworth has an equal skill in capturingexperience—sometimes very strange experience like “To the Cukcoo”— with an inevitability ofphrasing, an irreducible spontaneity of rhythm, that abide in memory.
2. The poet aims at experience not emotion. Rilke made this point decisively in Die
Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge, where the 28-year-old Malte, meditating on his
shallow accomplishments as art critic and poet, realizes how little value verses have when
written young on a slim accumulation of experience:
Ach, aber mit Versen ist so wenig getan, wehnn man sie früh schreibt.
Man sollte warten damit und Sinn and Süßigkeit sammeln ein ganzes

Willett 63

Leben lang und ein langes womöglich, und dann, ganz zum Schluß,
vielleicht könnte man dann zehn Zeilen schreiben, die gut sind.
Denn Verse sind nicht, wie die Leute meinen, Gefühle (die hat man
früh genug), — es sind Erfahrungen.83
The reason so many poets burn themselves out early in their twenties or early thirties, Coleridge
being a notable example, is their failure to understand the distinction between feelings (Gefühle)and experiences (Erfahrungen). Failing to understand what Rilke early grasped, they attempt tomake feeling carry each poem and quickly lose the capacity to pump it up to the requisite pitch as
they age. Wordsworth is in fact one of the very few English poets who continued to explore thefull range of life and consolidate his experiences into poems virtually to his death. The highly
disparaged and seldom read Ecclesiastical Sonnets, for example, present his defense of the
Anglican Church in a sonnet narrative that often sinks to mere chronicle but often rises tomagnificence, as in the memorial (II.xxvi) to “saintly Fisher and unbending More”
unsoftened, undismayed
By aught that mingled with the tragic scene
Of pity or fear; and More’s gay genius played
With the inoffensive sword of native wit,
Than the bare axe more luminous and keen. (PW 3.374)
A critical regime that blacks out the late poetry the way Kipling used to black out great swatchesof his first drafts with a brush and India ink pot will never see beyond the supposed absence of
Gefühl to the Erfahrung of Wordsworth’s deeply considered generosity, which shows
exceptional fairness to Nonconformits and unusual respect for Catholic theology, and will missWillett 64
in consequence such rare moments of hushed beauty as his hymn (III.xliii) to the architect ofKings College Chapel “who fashioned for the sense”
These lofty pillars, spread that branching roof
Self-poised, and scooped into ten thousand cells,
Where light and shade repose, where music dwells
Lingering—and wandering on as loth to die;Like thoughts who very sweetness yieldeth proof
That they were born for immortality. (PW. 3.405)
3. How do we gain access to a work of art? We might be tempted to answer that weperceive it with ours senses as an aistheton, an object of sensation, that emerges from some kindof form imparted to material, whether stone, metal, wood, pigment, tones or words. Clearly wehave to perceive a work to experience it. But this is precisely the temptation that Heidegger
rejected in “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes” (1935–1936) because (a) it rests on the old Western
dichotomy of matter and form, which are incapable of explaining the work of art as a thing, and,more seriously, (b) because any attempt to grasp the most immediate reality of a work in somematerial substructure (“dingliche Unterbau”) misrepresents the relationship of work to thing andrequires us to treat the work of art as an instrumental means to accomplish some artistic
experience through an aesthetic superstructure: “Sobald wir es am Werk auf solches absehen,haben wir unversehens das Werk als ein Zeug genommen, dem wir außerdem noch einen
Oberbau zubilligen, der das Künstlerische enthalten soll. Aber das Werk ist kein Zeug, dasaußerdem noch mit einem ästhetischen Wert ausgestattet ist, der daran haftet [emphasis
added].”84 It is the inveterate failure of Western aesthetics to look not at the work of art itself but
half at a simple thing and half at a tool to effect an artistic response. As a result, we fail to seeWillett 65
those characteristics in the work of art that pertain only to the work and those that pertain only tothe thing. Throughout the first part of the essay, subtitled “Das Ding und das Werk,”85 Heidegger
wants to correct this confusion by forcing us to recognize that, while the work of art certainly has
a material component (“das Dinghaften am Werk”), this material component must be understoodby way of the work’s own intrinsic features (“aus dem Werkhaften gedacht sein”), not thereverse. The proper way to determine the material actuality of a work proceeds not from the thing
to the work but from the work to the thing. This has a very simple aesthetic consequence: you
must first let the work of art unfold itself to you, in all its singularity and truth, before you canunderstand any of the means by which the experience has been achieved, before you canapproach its thing-based actuality and—need one add—engage in qualitative valuation. We gain
access to any work of art, thus, by removing from it all relationships to anything other than itself
in order to let it rest alone for and in itself. And this, Heidegger says, is the artist’s mostparticular intention: “Das Werk soll durch ihn zu seinem reinen Insichselbststehen entlassen sein.
Gerade in der großen Kunst, und vor hir allein ist hier die Rede, bleibt der Künstler gegenüber
dem Werk etwas Gleichgültiges, fast wie ein im Schaffen sich selbst vernichtender Durchgang
für den Hervorgang des Werkes.”86 It is, however, very difficult in practice to remove all
extraneous relations from a work of art so it can stand alone in its own pure selfsubsistence(“seinem reinen Insichselbststehen”). Each of us brings a vast invisible superstructure ofprejudices, cultural assumptions, critical blindnesses and defective knowledge to every work ofart. The best we can perhaps do is treat this as a hermeneutic ideal, and approach each poem as
openly and receptively as possible. In Wordsworth’s case, the very notion of “a great decade”
helped give birth to the myth of a forty-year poetical afterlife distinguished by robot-like rhythms
and a letters-to-the-editor insipidity only occasionally lit by feeble gleams of the old genius.

Willett 66
Many readers, under the influence of the myth, reject the later poetry or only half read it. Halfreading is a virtual denial of the poem’s Insichselbststehen, its selfsubsistence. Our first job asreaders is rather to let each poem speak to us fully on its own terms without any preconceptions.
At the minimum, that requires knowledge of how to read a poem as a piece of verbal
craftsmanship. There is no way any poem will come alive in its own selfsubsistence withoutsome basic knowledge of poetic rhythm and structure. That knowledge is not abstruse; it’s easilyfound in the poetic traditions of a given language. Absent the knowledge, we have only anillusion of accessing a poem. Much of what passes for literary criticism, especially since the riseof textual metaphysics, is an attempt to apply very sophisticated analytic techniques to texts thatare nothing more than semantic paraphrases of poems. The paraphrase is taken to “contain” all of
the essential aesthetic superstructure of the poem, while the material substructure is cast aside,
consciously or unconsciously, as excrescence. Such criticism presents a strange perversion of thework conceived—wrongly according to Heidegger—as a kind of tool possessing a material
substructure and an aesthetic superstructure. Textual metaphysics, along with many attempts to
explain meaning or discover aporias, require such a crude division because, ironically, “Il n’y pasde hors-texte.” It is impossible to extract a paraphrase from rhyme, stanza structure, rhythm orverbal music. We only perceive their most intimate actuality by moving as Heidegger
recommends from the work, fully experienced without reference to anything outside itself, to thething. The irreducibility of the aural and structural aspects of a poem make them as nonexistent,
therefore, as a referential “outside text” in the unbearable lightness of deconstructionist
criticism.87 The verbal artifact with centuries, sometimes millennia, of tradition behind it isabstracted to a text outside which we can grasp nothing and within which we can only play withsemantic, and fluidly paradoxical, meanings. Under such treatment the poem effectively ceases toWillett 67

exist; it serves only as a pretext for another kind of discourse. One might almost say, with acertain malicious jouissance, “Il n’y pas de pre-texte!” Even when passages of a poem are cited,the citations themselves usually only serve to support some aspect of the metaphrase that is thereal object of scrutiny.

Willett 68

Table 1
Line 1

Line 2

Line 3

Line 4

Line 5

Line 6

Line BLine 8

o3Boa

o5Bb

o5Boa

o5Bb

o5Bc

o4Bd

o4Bc

o4Bd

1

5B, ooBBB

2

3

B

4

BooB

[;] BooB

B

5B, B

B

[;]

BooB

[.]

B

B

BooBoB

[.]

4

5B

4

4

6

5B, B ,5B [—] BooBo[!]B

4

OoBBB

5

3

BooBo[,]B

6

BooB

5B

B

4

8

[.]

8
BooB, B ENJ BooB

OoBB

[.]

6

[.] ooBB, 55

[,]

B

4

B

4

5

B

BooBo[!]B

5

5B, B

6

[!]

2

[;]

B

4

B

ENJ

B

5

BooB

BooB

4

4

5

B

B
B

5

6

[,]
8

OoBB

B

6

6

BooB

5

[.]

[,]
9

B

B

B

10

BooBoB

B

OoBB

6

2

8

[,] o[.]oBB

8

5

BooBoB[.]B

5B, 5B

[.]

B

B

[.]

4

[,]
11

BooBoB

12

BBoo

13

14

5B

6

ooB

BooB

ENJ BooBoB

B

[.]

6

OoBB

5

5

5&8

[!]

[;]

5 , o[,]oBB
3

5

6

4

[;]

B

5B, 5

6

5

BooB

ENJ

[.]

Willett 69

Table 2

Line 9Line 10

Line11

Line 12

Line 13

Line 14

Line 15

Line 16

o4Be

o4Bf

o5Be

o4Bg

4Bf

o5Bg

o5Bh

o4Bh

(o4B)

(o5B) B

B

B,5

B

ooBB

B

1

B

2

5[,]B

BoBooBoB

BooB, 5B

OoBB

3

B[,]ooBo[,]B

B

B ,5

B

6

6

2

6

4

5

4

2

B[,]ooB

6

5 ,B

B

B

8

5[,]B, B

5[,]B,ooBB ,5B 5B, B

9

5B, B

5 ,B

5 ,B

BooBoB

B

ooBB

(o5B)

BooBoB

(o5B)

3

4

4B

6

4

4

3

(o5B)

B

14

o[!]oBB

6

3

6

4

3

9

6

(4B)

4

BBoo

ENJ BooB, B8ooBBB

ENJ oBoBoBoB [;]BooBoB[;] 5B, B8

o5Bo[:] BooB, 55

6

4

5

5

ENJ BooB, 5

5

3

B , 5B
4

BooBoB, 5

9

BooB, B8

BooB

5B
ooBB

[;]

5 (or o )

[;] B

B

9

9

6

ENJ

BooB

B

4

[,]

BooB, B

5B

B

4

5

3

[,]

B

5

B

(o5B) B12

13

5 [,]B, BBoo
3

6

ENJ

B[,]ooB, 59

6

10

11

BooB

B

3

[;]

[:] B8

B

5

6

6

5

OoBB

[,]

8

4

2

Willett 70

1

I borrowed “the Proustian” equation from Samuel Beckett, Proust (New York: Grove Press,

1931) 1.
2

Judith W. Page, “Wordsworth and the Psychology of Meter,” Papers on Language andLiterature 21 (1985) 275–294; Susan W. Wolfson, “Romanticism and the Measures of Meter,” inManners of Reading: Essays in Honor of Thomas R. Edwards, ed. Adam Potkay and Robert
Maccubbin, Eighteenth Century Life 16 (1992) 221–246; David Perkins, “Wordsworth, Hunt,and Romantic Understanding of Meter,” JEGP 93 (1994) 1–17 and Brennan O’Donnell, The
Passion of Meter: A Study of Wordsworth’s Metrical Art (Kent, Ohio: Kent State UP, 1995) 21–
47. O’Donnell’s book is the first attempt at a general survey of Wordsworth’s metrical art, andin many ways a good one despite certain gaps in treatment. He devotes his longest chapter (115–78) to a study of the stanzaic verse in Lyrical Ballads , but provides only brief, scatteredobservations supported by scansions. No more than four consecutive lines from any single poem
are treated in detail. Although many of his observations on the mutual accommodations of meterand diction are quite perceptive, we gain no distinct picture of how Wordsworth constructs
poems from well-mortised stanzas. It is only in the brief conclusion (238–248) that O’Donnell
attempts to mount a sustained critique of “On the Power of Sound,” the only such critique in thewhole book, but as I shall show later his analysis is too lapidary, incomplete and general to do
anything like full justice to a poem that he calls “magisterial both in statement and design” (238).
3

Brennan O’Donnell, “Numerous Verse: A Guide to the Stanzas and Metrical Structures ofWordsworth’s Poetry,” Studies in Philology 86 (1989): 9.
4

Fritz Schlawe, Neudeutsche Metrik, Sammlung Metzler Band 112 (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzlersche

Verlagsbuchlandlung, 1972) 98.

Willett 71

5

O’Donnell “Numerous Verse” 102. Not even Pindar, our most adept strophic poet and arguably

our greatest lyric poet, ever attempted anything so long in the epinicia. His stanzas, whethermonostrophic or triadic, are organized around complex metrical periods that possess lessintegrative force than rhyme. This naturally limits stanza length. In the long debate over thenecessity of rhyme, a debate extending from the attempts of Sidney, Campion and Spenser towrite English quantitative meters in the sixteenth century, through Milton’s attack on rhyme as“no necessary Adjunct or true Ornament of Poem or good Verse” in the prefatory remarks about“The Verse” in Paradise Lost and down to the virtual death of rhyme this century, it has not been
sufficiently appreciated by those who criticize rhyme that classical Greek quantitative meters,even when emphasized by simple musical accompaniment from flute and lyre, have less power tobind the stanza into a perceptual unity than the repeated aural markers of rhyme at line end. For adetailed and balanced discussion of Elizabethan quantitative metrics, see Derek Attridge, Wellweighted Syllables: Elizabethan Verse in Classical Meters (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1974).
6

Epistles II.ii. 124 - 25.

7

See An Evening Walk, by William Wordsworth, ed. James Averill (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1984) 8–

18 for a history of textual revisions to the poem extending over a fifty-eight-year period fromcomposition in 1787–1789 to final edition in 1845.
8

Ernst Häublein, The Stanza (London: Methuen, 1978) 116.

9

O’Donnell “Numerous Verse”12.

10

The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, 2nd ed., ed. Ernest de Selincourt and Helen

Darbishire, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1952–1959) 2:526n (abbreviated PW with theappropriate volume number in future citations). Perhaps the most powerful evidence of his

Willett 72

estimation is the fact the he placed the epigram “Paulo majora canamus” after the title in several
manuscripts. This is the same epigram he originally had printed on the verso of a separate title
page to introduce the Intimations Ode on its first publication in Poems in Two Volumes, although
he later dropped it and substituted the now framiliar quotation. For its textual history see “Poems
in Two Volumes,” and Other Poems, 1800–1807, by William Wordsworth, ed. Jared Curtis(Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1983) 27 and 269.
11

There exists no major study of the ode, and the very few short notices that mention it are mostly

negative. The reasons for this neglect are various, but three stand out prominently. (1) The first is
the universal judgment that Wordsworth’s powers declined precipitously after the great decade of
1787–1807. Some critics do extend poetic creativity to 1815, when about two-thirds of his poetry
had already been written, but no farther. Little of the later work is therefore read or studied withany firm sympathy. (2) The second is the modern distaste for poetry that employs myth andtraditional symbols or ideas in their traditional signification. Homeric myth can be violently
displaced to Bloomday in Ulysses, or the Upanishads stitched into a pastiche of modern
references in The Waste Land, and we foolishly accept this because we think the writer has
proven himself ever so clever by innovative colocation. The myths and symbols cease to havemuch value except for their structural utility. To take such materials at their traditional value,
however, looks aesthetically gauche. But this is precisely what Wordsworth has done in the ode.
Virtually the whole poem is a tissue of commonplace citations, images, myths and symbols
drawn from western cultural traditions and employed without transformation. As a result, theyoften seem to modern ears perilously close to clichés. (3) The third is the manifest inability of
most teachers and students to read poems rhythmically. Ignorance of the principles underlying

Willett 73

the English tradition of accentual-syllabic verse is nearly as universal as the belief in
Wordsworth’s poetic decline. A tin ear leads to a trivial understanding of poetry, flatens form
into discourse (or worse, into mere persiflage) and prevents us from even reading the poem at all.
One cannot claim the experience of having read a poem unless one has read it with metrical skill.
12

Stephen Gill, William Wordsworth: A Life (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989) 226.

13

Peter Brooks, “Aesthetics and Ideology: What Happened to Poetics?,” Critical Inquiry 20(1994) 522.
14

O’Donnell “Numerous Verse” 99. In his more recent The Passion of Meter, O’Donnell has

apparently misunderstood the apparatus criticus in the De Selincourt edition (2:294). Here is his
account of the stanza’s genesis: “The lines—beginning “The Heavesn, whose aspect makes our
minds as still”—correspond to lines 181–92 of “On the Power of Sound,” the fifth to sixteenthlines of stanza 12 in the published poem. Later, Wordsworth added another set of verses rejectedfrom “The Triad” to the head of this group. These lines correspond to lines 177–80, or the first
four lines of stanza 12...” (244). Wordsworth did not add “another set of verses rejected from
“The Traid” to the head of this group,” since the four lines in questions are part of the original
passage canceled from the “The Triad.” They continue directly from the line “Even winter loves
a dirgelike sound,” which ends with a semicolon, after the poet had replaced a false start (“Withrapturous notes the vernal throng”) with “There is a world of spirit.”
15

PW 2:525n323.

16

PW 2:522n174–211.

17

PW 2:294.

Willett 74

18

Wordsworth argued in the Preface of 1800 that a large portion of any good poem and even themost interesting parts of the best poems—his distinction is not always appreciated—“will befound to be strictly the language of prose when prose is well written” (“Lyrical Ballads,” andOther Poems, 1797–1800, by William Wordsworth, ed. James Butler and Karen Green (Ithaca:
Cornell UP, 1992) 748). He went even farther in the Preface of 1802 by asserting “that there
neither is, nor can be, any essential difference between the language of prose and metricalcomposition” (749n249–251). He also added an appendix on poetic diction to the 1802 Preface
in which he extended his argument against poetic diction by tracing its successively greater
distortions of language from ancient poets down to those of his own day: “In process of time
metre became a symbol or promise of this unusual language, and whoever took upon him to writein metre, according as he possessed more or less of true poetic genius, introduced less or more ofthis adulterated phraseology into his compositions, and the true and the false became so
inseparably interwoven that the taste of men was gradually perverted; and this language wasreceived as a natural language; and, at length, by the influence of books upon men, did to acertain degree really become so” (762).
19

The system of notation used here to describe stanza forms is entirely conventional. Lower caseletters represent terminal rhymes, and a subscript line following a letter indicates feminine oraugmented rhyme. Subscript numbers give the number of metrical beats in the line which, unlessotherwise noted, is assumed to be in duple rhythm. Thus, “a_4” indicates a tetrameter or 4-beatline with feminine rhyme. For ease of understanding I use the standard descriptive terminology
based on metrical foot analysis, but as I shall make clear in more detail later, I do not analyze
meter on a foot basis.

Willett 75

20

O’Donnell, The Passion of Meter 243 states without citation that “line 13 of each stanza withtwo exceptions is a catalectic tetrameter. . . .” The only two candidates for variation are I:13 andVI:93. In the first case, “Into the ambush of despair” is a normal trochaic line if we place thestress on the first syllable of “into” and contract “the ambush” to a trochee by Wordsworth’scommon practice of eliding “the” before a vowel. “Into” is a fudge word in much accentualsyllabic verse, since it can be either an iamb or a trochee as needed. It is clearly a trochee in
VI:92, to which we will turn shortly, but must be an iamb in XIII:193. The structural importanceof the trochaic line, the lack of variations found at this position and the ease of reading it as
falling meter all suggest it is not a variation from the normal pattern. In the second case,
O’Donnell has simply misunderstood Wordsworth’s very subtle rhythmic enjambment. VI:91
occupies the position of an iambic tetrameter, but here it is missing the first offbeat. This gives
the line a falling rhythm, and the abrupt enjambment carries the falling rhythm across the line
boundary into the next line, forming a kind of syncopated trochaic tetrameter with the simple
contraction of “the uplifted” as above:
Soothe it into patience—stayB

oBo B oB

The uplifted arm of Suicide. (VI:92–93)
o

Bo B

o BoB

For the notation used in this scansion, see note 33 below.
21

Line 12 ends four times with commas and enjambs with the following line 9 times, some ofthem quite jarring. The high incidence of enjambment is a clear rhythmic signal that the thematic
movement continues into the trochaic bridge.

Willett 76

22

I shall consider the four instances where line 13 is not end-stopped (stanzas II, III, V and VIII),and the reasons why, in the second section of this paper.
23

Lee M. Johnson, in Wordsworth’s Metaphysical Verse (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1982) 235–

36n71, was the first to notice the metrical bisymmetry of the stanza, though he was not quite
correct in claiming that each eight-line section “contains precisely thirty-five metrical feet.” Wefind (a) pentameter lines in tetrameter positions (I:12, VIII:12 and XI:9–10, 12), (b) a tetrameterin a pentameter position (I:11), (c) headless lines (VI:12 and VII:10), (d) anapestic substitutions(XI:3 and XIII:4, though a judicious use of elision and contraction can just manage to get thesecond back into duple verse) and (e) a plethora of initial inversions and implied offbeats. While
it’s true that these only alter the balance of metrical beats between the two halves in stanzas VIII
and XI, the numerous strong variations undermine the utility and meaning of a foot-based
analysis. Johnson also notes the striking impression made by “the irregular, presumably
rhapsodic, character of line-lengths and literary style.” As I shall show, he exaggerates theirregularity in line-length and is simply wrong about the literary style, which, though occasionally“rhapsodic” perhaps, can in no way be considered “irregular.”O’Donnell, The Passion of Meter 247 repeats Johnson’s claim about the invariant number of
metrical beats (although he substitutes “beats” for Johnson’s “feet”) in each hemistanza, but fails
to realize that the eight departures from nominal meter that he lists a few pages earlier (243)refute the strict accuracy of the claim. In a footnote he lists the eight departures (275n9), but oneof these (IX:12) is erroneous.
24

Albert M. Hayes was the first to use the term this way in “Counterpoint in Herbert,” Studies in

Philology 35 (1938): 43–60. Häublein (36–37) has a short discussion on heterometrical stanzas,

Willett 77

where he distinguishes between formal stanzaic unity achieved by rhyme pattern and line length,
but he shows no awareness of the fact that line length can also function to integrate disparate
subsections grouped by rhyme.
25

Lessing attempted to break the false comparison of poetry and art in Laokoon. Chapter XVI

contains the heart of his argument that the plastic arts employ figures and colors in space, while
the poetic arts employ articulate sounds in time. Simonides is the origin of this pernicious
dictum. As quoted by Plutarch in de glor. Ath. 3, he called painting silent poetry and poetry
painting that speaks. In our post-postmodernist afterlife we might update it by calling theorrhea
motionless text and text a theorrhea that flows.
26

O’Donnell, The Passion of Meter 246 drops the brief observation that the rhyme scheme“suggests, but does not quite conform to, sonnet quatrain and couplet divisions,” but then fails toprovide any explanation for use of the structure other than Wordsworth’s preference for thesonnet—and its intense organic unity—during the years when he was drafting “On the Power ofSound” (246–47).
27

Contrastive conjunctions: “Then” (III:9), “But” (VI:9) and “Yet” (VIII:9); commands: “Shout,cuckoo!” (II:9), “Yon pilgrims see” (IV:9) and “To life, to life give back thine ear” (X:9); andrhetorical questions (V:9–11, VII:11–16, XI:9–12, XIV:9–10 and XIV:11–14). The sustained
rhetorical question in VII:11–16, filling most of the second half of the stanza, occurs after a twoline enjambment. The enjambment cancels a strictly contrastive structure, but the rhetoricalquestion, capped with the abstractions of VII:14–16, is given even greater emphasis by coilingout unexpectedly from the sharp conclusion of the contre-reject in lines 9–10. The result is that
we still sense a turn, but one delayed by two tension-enhancing lines. The only other imperatives

Willett 78

in the poem occur in the first half of stanza XIII, where a long four-line enjambment across theturn yokes the two halves thematically and thus obviates the need for a contrast.
28

Paul Fussell, Jr., Poetic Meter and Poetic Form (New York: Random, 1969) 119–20.

29

Wordsworth employed this variant sestet (cdcede) over most of his creative life. Here is a shortcross section of examples: sonnets I and V from “Poems Dedicated to National Independence andLiberty” Part I (PW 3:109 and 111 = sonnets 1 and 5 from “Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty” in“Poems in Two Volumes,” and Other Poems, 1800–1807 155 and 158); sonnets XII and XXII
from “Poems Dedicated to National Independence and Liberty” Part II ( PW 3:130 and 134 =Shorter Poems, 1807–1820, by William Wordsworth, ed. Carl H. Ketchem (Ithaca: Cornell UP,
1989) 57 and 55); sonnet XX from “Memorials of a Tour in Italy, 1837” (PW 3:225); sonnets XII
and XVII from “The River Duddon” (PW 3:251 and 253); and sonnets I.ii, I.iii, I.iv, I.xxix,
II.xxiii, II.xxxiii and III.xxiii from “Ecclesiastical Sonnets” (PW 3:342–43, 355, 372, 377 and
395).
30

The fatal aphoristic tendency of pentameter couplets in terminal position is further moderated

by meterical counterpoint (h5h4) in all but the last stanza of the ode.
31

John Hollander has suggested (“Wordsworth and the Music of Sound” in Geoffrey Hartman,

New Perspectives on Coleridge and Wordsworth Selected Papers from the English Institute (NewYork: Columbia UP, 1972) 70–71) that Wordsworth’s “surprising use of Arion” rather thanAmphion derives from Christopher Smart’s “Ode on St. Cecilia’s Day,” which contains anelaborate treatment of the Arion myth. There is nothing surprising, I would argue, in using
Amphion as a foil to Arion. Throughout “On the Power of Sound,” Wordsworth dwells on thepsychological power of music to heal, comfort or rouse emotions—even its (hoped) potential toWillett 79

knit all conflicting thoughts into concord “Ere martyr burns, or patriot bleeds!” (VI:96). Arion is
the humanizer of beasts; Amphion is only the founder of a city, although this activity makes hima suitable prologue to Arion. Wordsworth would certainly have been familiar with Horace’s
presentation of Amphion as one of the two great mythic civilizers. In the Ars poetica (391–396),
both Orpheus and Amphion are introduced quasi-allegorically as civilizing forces, the former forhalting bloodshed and brutal living (“Silvestris homines . . . caedibus et victu foedo deterruit”)
and the latter for founding Thebes (“Thebanae conditor urbis”), reputed to be the oldest city insome mythological accounts. In this ode, however, Wordsworth had no need for a foundation
myth. What he did need was a humanization myth that would complement the story of Orpheus
as primal musician and conqueror of Hades in stanza VIII. For an account of the allegorized mythof Amphion, see C. O. Brink, Horace on Poetry The ‘Ars Poetica’ (Cambridge: Cambridge U P,
1971) 388n394.
32

The punctuation after “dream” make it clear that the story of Arion is an extended andparticularly potent illustration of the power of belief: the narrative is connected syntactically tothe previous clause by the colon but distanced from it by the dash. The combination of a strongstop with a dash is one of Wordsworth’s favorite techniques for marking a thematic juncture andthen foregrounding the subsequent material. Three very effective examples in this ode are II.25,
X.151 and XI.172. Sometimes the stop completely terminates the syntax, as in XI.172, andsometimes it merely indicates a pause of a certain duration, as in II.25 and X.151. The technique
is used with effect in the Intimations Ode at line end (6, 49, 113 and 141 with the lineation of“Poems in Two Volumes,” and Other Poems, 1800–1807 271–77). Among innumerable
examples from his poetry, the “Elegaic Stanzas” contain some of the best in lines 22 (terminal),

Willett 80

34 (medial), 45 (medial) and 59 (terminal). Only in the case of line 59 does the stop preceding
the dash terminate syntax. Indeed, throughout his career Wordsworth showed partiality to thedash, whether alone or in combination with other punctuation, as a device to focus rhetoric orarticulate rhythm.
33

For all metrical analyses, I use the terminology and notation of Derek Attridge’s The Rhythmsof English Poetry, English Language Series Title No. 14 (London: Longman, 1982). This study,
despite some very technical material and a certain occasional infelicity of style, stands in thesame relation to English metrical studies as M. L. West’s unabridged edition of Greek Metre(Oxford: Clarendon,1982) stands to Greek metrical studies: if you really want to know how the
prosodic system works, how to read poetry rhythmically and how “to save the metricalappearances,” it is simply indispensable. Attridge clarifies the assumptions behind his book,gives a précis of his prosodic method and confronts some of his linguistic critics in “Linguishtic
Theory and Literary Criticism: The Rhythms of English Poetry Revisited” in Rhythm and Meter,
Phonetics and Phonology vol. 1, ed. Paul Kiparsky and Gilbert Youmans (San Diego: Academic
P, 1989) 183–199. For readers unfamiliar with Attridge’s system, here is the minimal
information needed to follow my discussion of the ode.
The metrical pattern is represented by a sequence of “o” (metrical offbeat), “B” (metricalbeat), “(o)” (optional offbeat) and “[o]/[B]” (unrealized offbeat/beat) written beneath the line.
The stress contour that realizes the metrical pattern, represented by +s/-s can be written above theline for clarity, but is redundant. Thus, iambic pentameter is o B o B o B o B o B (o) or, insummary form, o5B(o). Three deviation rules permit (1) an unstressed syllable to realize a beatwhen it occurs between two unstressed syllables or with a line boundary on one side and an

Willett 81

unstressed syllable on the other (promotion = ~B ), (2) a stressed syllable to realize an offbeat
when it occurs between two stressed syllables or after a line boundary and before a stressedsyllable (demotion = * ) an (3) an offbeat to be implied between two stressed syllables due to thephenomenon of stress timing in English (implied offbeat = ^ ). The third rules gives rise to twovery important patterns: stress final pairing, when the implied offbeat occurs after a double
offbeat (ooBB or “ ^ in Attridge’s symbology), and stress initial pairing, when the impliedoffbeat precedings the double offeat (BBoo or ^ “ ). The variations in order of their increasing
disruption to the metrical pattern are (1) promotion, (2) demotion, (3) stress final pairing and (4)stress initial pairing.
34

The Poetical Works of John Milton, ed. Helen Darbishire, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1952)

224.
35

The most famous practitioner of the rupture of mood, or Stimmungbruch, was Heine He would

blow a wonderfully opulescent soap bubble of rhetoric or emotion and then, at the end, explode itwith reality or with some stark antithesis. Here is an example of the rupture that leaves an acidic
taste in the air:
Die Jahre kommen und gehen,
Geschlechter steigen ins Grab,
Doch nimmer vergeht die Liebe,
Die ich im Herzen hab.
1XUHLQPDOQRFKPFKWHLFKGLFKVHKHQ
Und sinken vor dir aufs Knie,
Und sterbend zu dir sprechen:“Madame, ich liebe Sie!”
36

Hollander 74 is certainly correct to say that the poem’s fixed stanzaic pattern minimizes theturns and counterturns of rhetoric one would find in an irregular Pindaric, but equally wrong toWillett 82

claim that “the structure is both more arbitrary and, nevertheless, more expository than thesuggestions of self-generated form in the irregular Pindaric or even in Wordsworthian blankverse.” It should be clear by now that nothing in the structure of the stanza is arbitrary, and abetter word to describe much of the poem would be “coercively evocative,” not “expository.”
37

West 5 defines the period as “the fundamental selfcontained rhythmical unit in metricalcomposition. It is analogous to the sentence in discourse: the sentence is a segment within which
there is syntactical continuity and at the end of which syntactical connection is interrupted, theperiod in metre is a segment within which there is prosodic continuity and at the end of which
prosodic connection is interrupted” The period can be quite large, extending over many lines,
and this gives rise to a complexity of internal structure that is extremely difficult to analyze. The
Greek strophe was a structure longer than a single verse made up of one or more periods andrepeated, sometimes directly and sometimes with intervening forms, to create the poem. For a
more recent, and in some ways more sophisticated analysis of the period, see C. M. J. Sicking’s
Griechische Verslehre. Handbuch der Altertumswissenschaft: Abt. 2, Teil 4 (München: C. H.
Beck, 1993) 22ff and 52. Note: Perhaps I should extend this material with a more fully developed
analogy between period of rhyme-defined stanzaic elements.
38

Schlawe 25–26.

39

See Yuri Lotman, Analysis of the Poetic Text, ed. and trans. D. Barton Johnson (Ann Arbor:

Ardis, 1976) 95–102 for a short but highly suggestive discussion of the stanza as a semantic
entity with its own rhythmic inertia.
40

Häublein 100–116.

Willett 83

41

These include (1) use of forward-pointing demonstrative pronouns, (2) references to subsequent

direct speech, (3) placement of subordinate clauses before their main clauses and—“the mostradical method of a priori progression” (Häublein 114)—(4) separation of parts of speech bystanza, so that individual stanzaic boundaries dissociate important syntactical and logicalelements. In the last method, sentences seem to flow through stanzaic containers almost
arbitrarily with little regard for their formal organization. The stanza becomes a mere conveyer
without its own proper logical unity or coherence.
42

R. G. M. Nisbet and Margaret Hubbard, A Commentary on Horace “Odes,” Book I (Oxford:

Clarendon, 1970) xlvi.
43

See Don H. Bialostosky, Wordsworth, Dialogics and the Practice of Criticism (Cambridge:

Cambridge UP, 1992) 134–151 for an analysis of “The Solitary Reaper” in which very similar
imperatives (“Behold her,” “Stop here,” “O listen!”) are interpreted as commands directed at thereader to share the speaker’s appreciation of the song and help explain its meaning. Here also, thespeaker’s and the listener’s reactions are selfreflexive. One might almost say that without alistener, the poet could not validate his remembered experience. It would simply crumble away
into the general detritus of the past.
44

There was a tradition in the ancient world, which Wordsworth may have known, that the

Spartans—lacking a talent for the Muses—would summon foreign musicians to heal sickness,madness or factional disturbances with music. Two historical if shadowy choral poets of theseventh century, Terpander and Thaletas, are both credited with stopping civil strife that had
broken out in Sparta. The latter is also reported to have delivered Sparta from a plague thatgripped it. For the testimonia see Greek Lyric Poetry, ed. D. A. Campbell, vol. 2 (Cambridge:

Willett 84

Harvard UP, 1988) Terpander test. 7 (Spartan resort to iatric music), Terpander test. 9(restoration of psychological harmony and civic peace), Thaletas test. 4 (restoration of civic
peace and stopping of plague) and Thaletas test. 6 (inculcation of unity and social harmony
paving the way for Lycourgean reforms).
45

The only other images of pure natural sound occur in stanza II in the context of an apostrophe

to the “invisible Spirit” of the human ear: streams, fountains, roaring lion, bleating dam andshouting cuckoo all serve it “with untired powers” as if that were their only purpose qua sound.
The roar of the lion and the bleat of the dam may have no direct human connection, but the othersounds all fulfill some emotional function.
46

Aeschylus, Agamemnon, ed. Eduard Fraenkel , vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962 corr. ed.) 116–

18 (ll. 436–55).
47

This translation is from the Revised Standard Version in The Oxford Annotated Bible (Oxford:

Clarendon, 1962) 668.
48

The contraction of words like “heavens” and “towering” to monosyllables is a regular feature ofaccentual-syllabic verse, so regular in fact that it can hardly be called a variation as such. For afull list of words regularly subject to metrical contraction since the sixteen century, see Edward
R. Weismiller, “Triple Threats to Duple Rhythm” in Rhythm and Meter, ed. Paul Kiparsky and
Gilbert Youmans, Phonetics and Phonology, ed. Stephen R. Anderson and Patricia A. Keating,vol 1 (San Diego: Academic P, 1989) 288–89. Aside from contractions, Wordsworth lets a
secondary stress realize a beat in “Innumerable” and promotes “is” in line 187. Only the latter isa true variation, and the least disruptive of those common in duple rhythm.

Willett 85

49

Rilke’s praise, in both the Sonnets to Orpheus and “The Tenth Elegy” from The Duino Elegies,

is quite unlike Biblical praise. It is directed at the spirit of poetic creation or the Angels. In “The
Tenth Elegy,” praise is an attempt to affirm the importance of sorry and suffering in general, tokeep the door open to the other side of life: death.
50

The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, The Later Years, Part I, 1821–1828, ed.

Ernest de Selincourt, rev. Alan G. Hill (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978) 545–56.
51

C. O. Brink, Horace on Poetry. Prolegomena to the Literary Epistles (Cambridge: Cambridge

UP, 1963) 255–56.
52

Timothy Steele, Missing Measures. Modern Poetry and the Revolt against Meter (Fayettevilleand London: U of Arkansas P, 1990) 282. In his conclusion (279–194), Steele—who is one of themost accomplished poets now writing in the accentual-syllabic tradition—makes an incisive
critique of the fallacious reasoning behind free verse and suggests that “an assessment may now
be called for” (292) given the mannered and generally irrational diction it has adopted as anaesthetic signifier to distinguish it from prose.
53“Lyrical Ballads” and Other Poems, 1797–1800 by William Wordsworth, ed. James Butler andKaren Green (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1992) Appendix III, 754.
54

S. T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. J. Shawcross, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1962) 51.

Coleridge was only unhappy about Wordsworth’s failure to provide a separate and abstract
theory that would clearly indicate how meter produced it effects in conjunction with the otherelements of poetry.

Willett 86

55

Steven J. Willett, “Wordsworth’s Metrical Architectonics: A Study of the ‘Intimations Ode’(Part I),” Shizuoka Kenritsudaigaku Tankidaigakubu Kenkyuukiyou 7 (1993) 45–57. Part II ofthis study will appeared in March, 1995 and Part III in March, 1996.
56

The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, The Early Years, 1787–1805, ed. Ernest de

Selincourt, rev. Chester L. Shaver (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967) 434–35. Wordsworth employs thecommon eighteenth century terms “long” and ”short“ for stressed and unstressed syllables
respectively.
57

The literary tetrameter observes stricter restrictions on variation than the pentameter, as

Attridge (142) observes, to prevent it falling back into the insistent four-beat verse of the oldnative English tradition. See also Marina Tarlinskaya, Englisyh Verse: Theory and History (The
Hague: Mouton, 1976) 144 and 151.
58

The semicolons at the end of III.38 and VII.102 are more like commas. They reflect the greateruse of pointing for rhetorical effect in eighteenth and nineteen century-poetry. In both cases, theconjunction “And” in the following line indicates that the syntax continues smoothly across theboundary.
59

The hyphenation of “love-tale” might suggest that the second syllable is unstressed, but it

rhymes with the stressed word “vale” in line 168 and this, along with the preceding double
offbeat, points to an approximately equal stress on both elements.
60

The use of strong stops for rhetorical emphasis is beautifully illustrated in the one completely

preserved poem of Sappho (Poetarum Lesbiorum Fragmenta, ed. Edgar Lobel and Denys Page
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1963) fr. 1). In stanza 6, the climax though not the end of the poem, twocontinuous stops in lines 21–22 add special force to Aphrodite’s promise that she will make theWillett 87

woman who now flees the poet pursue her, a force made all the stronger by the fact that this is
the first syntactically contained stanza in the poem. See also The Cambridge History of ClassicalLiterature, Vol I, Greek Literature, ed. P. E. Easterling and B. M. W. Knox (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1985) 205.
61

Milton, “Lycidas” 32–34.

62

This was the original core of the ode. Some remarks on the changes in revision, particularly thestrong isolation of the last line?
63“Poems in Two Volumes,” and Other Poems, 1800–1807, by William Wordsworth, ed. Jared

Curtis (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1983) 213–15 (n419–20) and 255–56 (n423–24) respectively.
64

In a sonnet also entitled “To the Cuckoo” (of unknown date but published in 1827),

Wordsworth celebrates the cuckoo’s “twin notes inseparably paired” for their power to lighten
suffering in a way very reminiscent of the ode:
The captive ‘mid damp vaults unsunned, unaired,
Measuring the periods of his lonely doom,That cry can reach; and to the sick man’s room
Sends gladness, by no languid smile declared. (PW 3.45:5–8)
But his emphasis in the sonnet is on the cuckoo’s “erratic voice” as harbiner of spring, a voicethat may outlast both the eagle and the lion over the ages. He nowhere invests it with any sonic
metaphysics.
65“Poems in Two Volumes,” and Other Poems, 1800–1807 214 app. crit. ll. 5–12 and Nonverbal

Variants 493.

Willett 88

66

Some critics locate the “visonary hours” in childhood and interpret the poet’s reaction to the

cuckoo as little more than an emotional or memorial echo of the past. The classic case isGeoffrey Hartman. In Wordsworth’s Poetry 1787–1814 (New Haven: Yale UP, 1964) 270, hesees the poem as an almost formulaic “renewal of the past in the present” through the influenceof an image. His brief mention of the poem occurs within a larger discussion on Wordsworth’s
use of the after-image which, he claims, “expresses the possibility of the renewal (or at least
recurrence) of a certain experience by including that possibility in the very structure of theexperience” (269). Unlike Proust, however, Hartman confuses the power to recall with an almost
metaphysical recurrence that overcomes time itself since the “past event in not so totally in thepast, not so determinate, that it cannot confront the poet in a new way” (269). But this is not how
Wordsworth presents his experience. The past doesn’t suddenly loom mobilely into theforeground of the present when he hears the cuckoo; rather, the present offers a view into thebackground of past experiences. Whatever the experience of hearing the “two-fold shout” mayhave meant to the boy, we only know what it means now—in poetic time—to the mature man.
The cuckoo’s voice directly recalls other cuckoos heard in youth, it does not evoke youth torelease past visionary hours into the present.
David Perkins simply devalues the spiritual depth of the poet’s experience. In Wordworth and the
Poetry of Sincerity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1964) 186–87, he maintains that the
cuckoo’s cry, while it may summon up the “golden time” of childhood with new imaginative
energy, represents no spiritual presence behind common appearances: the poet hears little morethan a suggestive analogy in the song, which is denied any high seriousness by “the jingling
stanzas and tripping verse” (187). They indicate by their lighter tone, he thinks, that

Willett 89

Wordsworth’s response is not communion with an ultimate mystery. One hardly needs to notethat stanza structure by itself conveys no set tone. There is nothing inherently jingling in common
meter. This is, after all, the same stanza as “A slumber did my spirit seal,” the starkest and mostdesolate of all Wordsworth’s lyrics. Perkins has misread the poem’s tone (and therefore its
meaning) by crudely misreading the formal design.
John Beer is more accurate in Wordsworth and the Human Heart (London: Macmillan,1978) 185 when he argues that the cuckoo “reminds the poet of the ‘visionary hours’ of hischildhood, when it was ‘No Bird; but an invisible Thing,/A voice, a mystery. . . .’ Listening to
the bird does no t simply recall the “golden time” but begets it afresh. In his version an old
experience is recreated by a new stimulus, and the former then displaces or engulfs the latter.
Wordsworth, however, says nothing about an old visionary experience in this poem. The cuckoo,
as it babbles “only to the Vale,” brings to him “a tale/Of visionary hours.” In the next stanza heagain uses the present tense to address the bird directly as even yet “an invisible Thing,/A voice,a mystery.” The “tale” that the song conveys is not a narrative about the poet’s boyhood, when
he experienced a certain vision. The tale is the content of the vision educed by the cuckoo’s twofold song, and that content—as the original version of stanza three makes quite a bit moreclear—was a transcendent experience that is not sharply contrasted with the bird’s discourse on
sunshine and flowers.
67

For the historical importance of Wordsworth’s discovery, see Edith C. Batho’s The Later

Wordsworth (New York: Russell and Russell, 1933) 296–98. Batho calls him the first modern
European to understand St. Francis, and that discovery is poetically triggered by the cuckoo.
68

PW 3:221.

Willett 90

69“Poems in Two Volumes,” and Other Poems, 1800–1807 256 app. crit. ll. 21–23 andNonverbal Variants 512.
70

Hugh Sykes Davies, Wordsworth and the Worth of Words, ed. John Kerrigan and Jonathan

Wordsworth (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986) 53.
71

Philo Mechanicus 4.1 and 49.20. See Andrew Stewart, Greek Sculpture, vol. 1 (New Haven:

Yale UP, 1990) 160–63 and 263–66.
72

Stewart 160.

73

John Purkis, A Preface to Wordsworth, Rev. ed. (London: Longman, 1986) 157.

74

Jeffry C. Robinson, “The power of Sound; ‘The Unremitting Voice of Nightly Streams,’” The

Wordsworth Circle 23 (1992): 177.
75

John Jones, The Egotistical Sublime (London: Chatto & Windus, 1964) 186–87.

76

Jones 187. Jone’s comments about the ode are rather vague, though he does single out stanzas

IX (Arion) and X (procession of Bacchus and echoing coffin) for particular praise. He nowhere,
however, provides any analysis to support his claims.
77

Thomas McFarland makes one of the harshest cases for poetic decline in William Wordsworth:Intensity and Achievement (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992) 89–97. Holding a rather crude notion ofemotional intensity as the touchstone for poetic worth, he virtually writes off the last four
decades of the poet’s life: “No great poet equals Wordsworth in the melancholy quantity ofdesiccated verse nor in the forty-year death-in-poetic-life in which most of that verse wascomposed” (89). His method of demonstrating desiccation is to set up a straw dog and thensmash it with a sonnet. The straw dog is “The Triad” and the sonnet is “Surprized by joy,
impatient as the Wind.”

Willett 91

78

Despite O’Donnell’s belief, cited above, that the ode is “magisterial both in statement indesign” (The Passion of Meter 238), he only partially shows it to be magisterial in design andfails to show it magisterial in statement, in verbal enargeia. He spends so much time in the lastchapter summarizing content that he is unable to demonstrate the glorious imagery, verbal music
and rhythmic drive that rightly led Wordsworth to place it on a par with the Intimations Ode.
79

Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens (Boston: Beacon, 1955) 119.

80

West 76.

81

Horace, C.4.2.4-27.

82

Horace: Odes and Epodes, ed. Paul Shorey, Rev. ed. Paul Shorey and Gordon J. Laing (:Chicago: Sanborn, 1910) xvii.
83

Rainer Maria Rilke, Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge, Bibliothek Suhrkamp Bd.

343 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1973) 21.
84

Martin Heidegger, Holzwege, Gesamptausgabe I Abteilung Bd. 5 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio

Klostermann, 1977) 24 (pp. 27–28 in the 1960 Reclam edition).
85

Heidegger 5–25 (10–28 Reclam edition).

86

Heidegger 26 (29 Reclam edition).

87

I have borrowed the phrase from Frank G. Verges’ witty analysis of deconstructionist follies in“The Unbearable Lightness of Deconstruction,” Philosophy 67 (1992) 386–93.