Idle thought in Wordsworth's Lucy cycle Article (Unspecified) Adelman, Richard (2011) Idle thought in Wordsworth’s Lucy cycle. Romanticism, 17 (1). pp. 94- 105. ISSN 1354-991X This version is available from Sussex Research Online: http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/40678/ This document is made available in accordance with publisher policies and may differ from the published version or from the version of record. If you wish to cite this item you are advised to consult the publisher’s version. Please see the URL above for details on accessing the published version. Copyright and reuse: Sussex Research Online is a digital repository of the research output of the University. Copyright and all moral rights to the version of the paper presented here belong to the individual author(s) and/or other copyright owners. To the extent reasonable and practicable, the material made available in SRO has been checked for eligibility before being made available. Copies of full text items generally can be reproduced, displayed or performed and given to third parties in any format or medium for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge, provided that the authors, title and full bibliographic details are credited, a hyperlink and/or URL is given for the original metadata page and the content is not changed in any way. http://sro.sussex.ac.uk Richard Adelman Idle Thought in Wordsworth’s Lucy Cycle Keywords: Wordsworth, idleness, sleep, than the abundance of rural ‘tasks’ that Cowper, reverie punctuate Cowper’s narrative. The speaker of Wordsworth’s ‘Strange fits of passion’ (1800) Laugh ye, who boast your more mercurial might be described in similar terms. Daring to powers, disclose a style of thought distinct from That never feel a stupor, know no pause, everyday understanding, the narrator of the Nor need one; I am conscious, and poem uses this confession in order to lead into confess, an account of a mental experience both Fearless, a soul that does not always ‘ludicrous’ and resonant. The selection of the think. term ‘fits’, to the reader who has read both (William Cowper, The Task1) poems, recalls the language with which Cowper connects his fire and his state of mind, the Strange fits of passion have I known: former casting its ‘shadow to the ceiling’ and And I will dare to tell, ‘there by fits / Dancing uncouthly to the But in the Lover’s ear alone, quivering flame’ (Task, IV. 285–6). Cowper’s What once to me befell. ‘waking dream’, and his later classification of (William Wordsworth, ‘Strange the experience of the brown study as taking fits of passion’2) place during the understanding’s ‘sleep’ (Task, IV. 298), also anticipates Wordsworth’s William Cowper’s ‘fearless’ ‘confession’ is narrator’s description of such an experience as situated, in The Task (1784), as an introduction ‘one of those sweet dreams’, ‘Kind Nature’s to the free operations of the fancy that make up gentlest boon’ (‘Strange fits’, 17 & 18). And the poem’s influential ‘brown study’ episode. beyond such similarities of the language in Having ‘a soul that does not always think’ which these two episodes proceed, it is also serves, in the passage that follows, not as an worth pointing out the ambivalence with which inhibition so much as an opportunity for the both texts deal with such experiences. Not only poet’s mind to do much more than think. The is Cowper problematically ‘restore[d]’ to ‘ludicrous and wild’ conjurings and imaginings, himself at the scene’s close, that event’s a ‘waking dream’ of ‘strange visages’ (Task, fragility being signalled by the image of fancy’s IV. 286–8) and other objects inspired by the ‘glassy threads’ being ‘snapp[ed] short’ (Task, movements of the poet’s fire, hold a position of IV. 305–7), but the tone of the scene is also intense creativity in the poem, offering a model instigated by its ‘pendulous and foreboding’ fire of activity more powerful and more interesting (Task, IV. 293) and the patterns it generates. It Romanticism 17.1 (2011): 94–105 DOI: 10.3366/rom.2011.0009 © Edinburgh University Press www.eupjournals.com/rom Idle Thought in Wordsworth’s Lucy Cycle 95 is the ‘gloom’ (Task, IV. 278) of this fitful dumb positions. Richard Matlak’s focus on the poems’ show, marvellously strange but at the same ‘psychobiographical context’ as the key to time disturbingly alien (the meanings most unlocking them and the identity of Lucy, strongly invoked by the adverb ‘uncouthly’), Frances Ferguson’s exploration of the cycle’s that matches and ‘suits’ (Task, IV. 279) the parody of medieval quest romance, Brian poet’s mind, ebbing and flowing with the Caraher’s detailed analysis of linguistic fantastical and the unfamiliar. Wordsworth’s ambiguity in ‘A slumber did my spirit seal’ and version of such reticence can be seen beyond, represent just some of these various throughout the poem in his various spoofs of possibilities.4 the quest motif,3 as well as in the poem’s The reading that I intend to construct here opening stanza. The formal boast of daring to draws on many of these approaches at the same tell of such ‘fits of passion’ is immediately time as attempting to achieve something qualified in the speaker’s third line. It is only slightly different from them. I intend to use ‘the Lover’ that can be permitted to hear this Cowper’s serio-comic association of idle confession, even though such a stipulation thought with sleep as a way into reading two of barely limits the speaker’s audience. The failure Wordsworth’s Lucy poems as also concerned of, but need for, this qualification sets the tone with the parameters and significances of this for the manner in which the narrator’s ‘strange type of contemplation. These two poems are fits’ will be subtly ironized in the poem. As in ‘Strange fits of passion’ and ‘A slumber did my Cowper’s brown study, strangeness seems to spirit seal’, both of which are written in what function as a description of radical individuality Matlak describes as the first phase of Lucy at the same time as threatening to tip over into composition — taking place in Goslar in comic bathos. 1798–9, in the first three months after the The linguistic and rhetorical similarities Wordsworths’ separation from Coleridge — between Cowper’s influential description of idle and both of which first appear in the second thought and the terms of the first poem in edition of Lyrical Ballads in 1800. This will not Wordsworth’s Lucy cycle offer not so much a be to claim, importantly, that Wordsworth’s story of influence, as a starting point for a Lucy poems belong to the tradition of thought reading of Wordsworth’s activities in these that responds directly, and that alludes overtly, poems subtly distinct from current to Cowper’s brown study (as Mary appreciations of them. This is not to say that Wollstonecraft’s Scandinavian Letters and recent scholarly work on the Lucy cycle lacks Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘Frost at Midnight’ variety. On the contrary, the factual problems do, for example5). Rather, this paper contends of even dealing with the five texts as a cycle, the that Cowper, and indeed Coleridge, can be used locations at which and social contexts in which to draw out the manner in which Wordsworth the poems were written, the tentative first is concerned, in this series of poems, with a interpretation Coleridge places on them, similar idea. That idea is that idle thought, Wordsworth’s own 1815 distinctions between aligned in Cowper and Coleridge with the mood poems ‘founded on the Affections’ and ‘of the that generates poetic composition, is at once Imagination’, a distinction which splits the creative and disturbing, both ‘ludicrous and series down the middle, not to mention the wild’.6 Rather than picking out a pattern of work that the poet seems to be doing with the allusions to Cowper, then, as it is possible to do poems’ various interconnections and with Wollstonecraft or with Coleridge, this resonances, all mean that recent criticism comes paper will seek only to read Wordsworth’s at the texts from a spectrum of contexts and Lucy-thought alongside Cowper’s brown study 96 Romanticism and its responses. Neither will this be an events of the poem, but the precise timing he attempt to claim that Cowper’s brown study, or assigns to the fit in question. Seeing it as caused even Coleridge’s reaction to it, are specifically by the ‘triangulation’ (Wordsworth’s in Wordsworth’s mind in late 1798. It is the ‘Slumber’, 114) of the poem’s speaker in contention of this paper, rather, that these texts relation to the moon and his beloved, Caraher share a distinct set of concerns about idle has the narrator prone to ‘fitful’ passion only thought and its attendant mood of poetic after his own movement ‘leaves him lightless’. composition. Those concerns have already been It is apparent, from this observation, that hinted at by my opening quotations, and they the ‘passion’ in question for Caraher is that will be explored in more detail below. contained in the poem’s final two lines: ‘ “O mercy” to myself I cried, / “If Lucy should Let us begin with a more thorough analysis of be dead!” ’ (‘Strange fits’, 27–8). The poem ‘Strange fits of passion’, for it is in this poem begins, in this view, by introducing the idea of a that the parameters in which Wordsworth is ‘fit of passion’ and ends the moment such operating are most clearly visible.