Generating a National Sublime: Wordsworth's the River Duddon and the Guide to the Lakes (William Wordsworth‪)‬

GENERALLY CONSIDERED, 1820 IS WELL PAST THE ZENITH OF WORDSWORTH'S power as a poet. Both The River Duddon and The Guide to the Lakes, appearing together in 1820, are usually read in comparison with, and in terms of, work written very close to the century mark, as narratives of self and as celebrations of Wordsworth's blessed region. In Wordsworth's Poetry, Geoffrey Hartman writes that "the distance between 'After-thought' [the closing poem in The River Duddon] and 'Tintern Abbey' is not great." (1) For Hartman, "After-thought" displays that old apocalyptic fire which is generally quenched in the late work by a conventional religion that serves to quiet the process of self-questioning. Hartman is generous toward "After-thought," but the poem's worth is nevertheless defined by a "distance" to work two-decades old, effectively portraying much of the intervening time as a period of stagnation. James K. Chandler makes a similar appraisal when he opines that the ideas of "After-thought" are "essentially unchanged from those expressed in the lines added to The Ruined Cottage between January and March of 1798." (2) Chandler's interest lies in Wordsworth's "apostasy"; once the conversion has been made, Nature is Burkean, "wisdom without reflection." (3) Although the central concerns of both critics' work are different, Chandler's "reflection" is something very close to Hartman's, tied to the rupture of boundaries, not the guarding of them. How else could nature in The River Duddon fit Chandler's characterization, as "without reflection," when the work's central trope is the identification between poet, reader, and river? Daniel Robinson has recently summarized critical views of The River Duddon: "... critics still dismiss the sequence as a conventionally didactic loco-descriptive poem of Wordsworth's later years." (4) There is something about Wordsworth's conservatism that invites one to take it on its own terms, as non-evolving and defensive. In September 1819, the month following Peterloo, Wordsworth chose to write a sentimental poem noteworthy only for its deliberate exclusion of recent events: "Yet will I temperately rejoice; / Wide is the range, and free the choice / Of undiscordant themes." (5) The late poetry is conventional in that it idealizes the past and argues against social change, and it is didactic in its moralizing tone. But Wordsworth's choice to stress continuity and harmony does not necessarily mean that the late work is unthinking, or that it is a watered-down repetition of earlier poetry. The effort to present an idealized Britain without discord is a reaction that Wordsworth developed in response to domestic and international conflict, and this surface harmony is, I will argue, ideologically and philosophically complex. Contrary to their critical reception, The River Duddon and The Guide to the Lakes are not simply celebrations of the local. As expressions of nationalism, their burden is to encompass the national through the local, and they achieve this aim through an aesthetic that is highly theoretical.