Politics in Poetry: The Wordsworth Revolution

Amidst the revolutionary times of late eighteenth century, William Wordsworth helped usher in the era of politically charged poetry, a movement created to help promote a new system of thought, one of change and social equality. Included in the revolutionary sentiment of his works, Wordsworth intertwined the revolutionary thought of a return to nature, a thought of dissolving the economic caste system of Britain. "At a time of the Terror, impending war, domestic political repression, and social upheaval owed to poor harvests, inflation, and stagnant reforms, Wordsworth had much to protest and consider" (Fusso, 68). The lines of Salisbury Plain develop a storyline of a society wrought with war and misery, one where people were displaced without care, all told through the eyes of a wandering solider and the vagrant woman. A man who no longer has a home, no longer has a place in the society he once belonged. Through the eyes of the traveler, we can see the despair felt by the wanderer, the loneliness, and what life was like during a time of civil unrest.

Wordsworth introduces the wandering traveler, one who is lost in his own land, trying to find his way home. This metaphoric wandering is telling of Wordsworth's view: he believed the lower class was similar to the traveler, wandering in their own land, lost and hopeless, looking for a place to call home. "While wandering lonely in the west country of England later in the same year, he also quickly conceptualized and subsequently composed Salisbury Plain, dramatizing not only the abject suffering of the rural poor but also the analogical need of English society for reform and even revolution" (Liu, 19). Both the soldier and the peasant class were unwelcome in their own country, and Wordsworth captured the despondency of the lower class in the despair of the soldier effectively. "When men in various vessels roam the deep/Of social life, and turns of chance prevail/Various and sad, how thousands weep/Beset with foes more fierce than assail/The savage without home in winter's keenest gale." (Wordsworth, lines 32-36) His wandering and isolation on Salisbury Plain is reminiscent of the isolation the lower class felt, having been denied the higher educational and economic privilege the upper class took for granted. "The opening lines' description of social difference and alienation can be read as an allegory of the text's implicit search for a means to transgress social limits and thereby discover a means to diminish inequality and suffering" (Fosso, 74). From the beginning of the poem, Wordsworth constructs the narration to guide us towards the very plight most of England was trying to ignore. By opening with the wandering, isolated traveler, we are forced into viewing the world through the eyes of him, and therefore, the eyes of the poverty stricken.

With the introduction of the female vagrant, Wordsworth solicits the sympathies for the families impacted by war: "Husband and children one by one, by sword/And scourge of fiery fever: every tear/Dried up, despairing, desolate, on board/A British ship I waked as from a trance restored'" (Wordsworth, lines 321-324). Effectively, Wordsworth demonstrates who the war can have devastating effects on. The families of those sent off to war suffer much more, especially when the families were suddenly widowed, and often sent off because they lack the means to maintain their households, as was the case with the vagrant woman. She is left with no one to care for and no one to care for her. She has no family, no country and no place to call home, except for the decaying spital she discovered on Salisbury Plain. Though her circumstances are blight, she gives a glimmer of hope, as if she is a light in the darken night on the plain. "Salisbury Plain's romance form casts this vision as a summit of recuperation, setting its protagonists within a framing structure of permanence and renewal that contrasts with the narrative's 'ruinous' social world" (Fosso, 82). Despite their pared down life and ostracized status in society, the female vagrant and the traveler find optimism within the morning sunlight: "But now from a hill summit down they look/Where through a narrow valley's pleasant scene/A wreath of vapor tracked a winding brook/Babbling through groves and lawns and meads of " (Wordsworth, lines 406-409) Wordsworth uses her as a metaphor for the impoverished to rise up and seek out a new life, as the soldier implored her to rise up and seek out a small cottage to begin their new life together.

As the vagrant explains her story, and how she came to be at the spital in the middle of Salisbury Plain, the couple's situation seems to echo the casting out of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. The vagrant and traveler are isolated from their once happy existence, as Adam and Eve were cast out of the garden in the barren waste land of the world outside. Both ate the 'apple': Adam and Eve literally, and the Wordsworth couple metaphorically, as they ate their apple of pre-revolution life. Both were cast out, and left in despair, wandering, hopelessly in a world that had forgotten them. The parallels are striking, as Adam and Eve lived in a setting that mirrored Wordsworth's beliefs, as the Garden of Eden had the healthy and truthful balance of man and nature: "The revolution Wordsworth led was not primarily a back-to-nature movement. It was rather a movement which called for a fresh and mutually fructifying reunion of reality and ideality" (Baker, 103). Wordsworth hoped that by returning to nature, the British society could heal the wounds it had opened within the caste system. The reunion of reality and ideality would allow man and nature to co-exist and educate, instead of constantly being at odds with each.

Throughout the poem, Wordsworth uses imagery that speaks to the plight of the unfortunate. As the traveler is wandering through the darkened land, he uses the spire of Salisbury Cathedral to navigate by. The spire, the highest architectural point in England at the time, stands to represent the insignificance of the soldier, as well as the inferiority of the poor, with the spire being held high above both. "It also suggest the narrator's desire not only to represent the plight of social mariners who 'roam' with unfulfilled desires but also to plumb the social depths-the causes, meanings and connections-that underlie economic and political existence amid these eddies of modern life's 'turns of chance'" (Fosso, 74.) The juxtaposition of the cathedral and its representation of the clergy and possibly even the politically powerful against the use of its spire as a compass to guide the traveler home seem paradoxical, since it is both a symbol of oppression and of guidance.

With the cathedral situated against the foreground of Stonehenge, a symbol of pagan isolation and a forgotten people, the soldier seems caught in between the very power that sent him to war in the first place and the welcome that he never received upon returning home. Yet, the disappearance of the spire later reminds us how easily guidance through false idols can be. Once used as a compass, the spire isolates and misguides the traveler even more. This misguidance of individuals resounds in the religious politics of the day, in that the clergy tended to be in cahoots with the aristocracy.

In the last lines of the poem, the narration complains about hopelessness of British society and the need to seek a better way of life. "Hardship, hopelessness, isolation, death and endurance appear in poem after poem as he attempts to formulate a plain and empathic poetic discourse where the individual spirit can stand up to and transcend the radically changing landscape and culture that, in his lifetime, has accelerated in its economic transformation from rural to urban, from agrarian to industrial, and from producer to consumer" (Blank, 368). Throughout Salisbury Plain, Wordsworth sets forth his decree of equality, setting forth both male and female together, impoverished and isolated from the worlds they once knew, and sends them into the sunset, with a renewed hope of prosperity and life. "Now among these there are, of course, many human solitaries, many who have been made lonely by their own actions or the actions of others, and this poem tells us, arousing in us a sense of our own capacity for solitude and endurance" (Williams, 113-114) The image of both rising from the spital, surviving the storm and the terrifying darkness of night was Wordsworth's metaphor for individual rights. Within this context, he protests for the need of the indigent to regain their footing, by idealizing the people's revolt in France, without being too controversial with his imagery.

Wordsworth began his literary career idealistically hoping, as the traveler and vagrant had, that change was possible. "'There is scarcely one of my poems,' Wordsworth wrote to Lady Beaumont, 'which does not aim to direct the attention to some moral sentiment, or to some general principle, or law of thought, or of our intellectual constitution'" (Willey, 90). Wordsworth knew that poetry could monument moments of life, recording the psychological relevance of his time, and effectively promote change. With Salisbury Plain, Wordsworth decried the principles of the British Empire, using the Terror as a gage to what could come:

Insensate they who think, at Wisdom's porch

That Exile, Terror, Bonds, and Force may stand:

That Truth with human blood can feed her torch,

And Justice balance with her gory hand

Scales whose dire weights of human heads demand

A Nero's arm. Must Law with iron scourge

Still turture crimes that grew a monstrous band

Formed by his care, and still his victim urge,

With voice that breathes despair, to death's tremendous verge?

(Wordsworth, lines 514-522).

The narrator describes the failure of the British society, using the strong arm of Nero as a reference of revolution. This reference connotes the idea that violence, such as with the French Revolution, may not be the best solution to social change, but perhaps more natural means, such as poetry, could bring about the change needed in Britain. "Salisbury Plain comes to stand not just for an exalted state of mind, but for a particular quality of Wordsworth's poetic imagination. He sees it as the origin of his greatness-the poem, above all others, on which he would base his claim to have created 'a power like one of Nature's...'" (Newlyn, 183). Wordsworth theorized that all men could be equal, and that the moral unhealthy interconnection of the affluent and political gain was perpetuated by hopelessness festering in the lower class. After the French Revolution, Wordsworth was convinced even more that social equality could be achieved through the education and mobilization through the use of poetry. "The 'revolution' of sentiment (13P 10.237) experienced from foreign and domestic turmoil left him longing all the more for forms of stability and social cohesion" (Fosso, 69). However, with the impending tide of industrialization, social equality between the classes was forced even further apart, as the affluent continued to profit off the lower class in their workshops and through the increasing consumerism of the turn of the century.

Though his poetry could be considered revolutionary because of the social change effecting England at the time, it could be theorized that his politics are as binary as his poetry: they are neither revolutionary nor evolutionary, but at the same time, they are. Wordsworth demonstrates the duality of his work and how society can be twofold. There is a sense of revolution, with the connection between the two wanderers and their desire to survive and rise against the darkness that once enveloped them, but it is evolutionary in that it is human nature to survive against the odds and that a revolution against the system is biologically engrained. "He tries to show the relationship between poetry and the primary psychological laws of human nature, including the pleasure-pain principle..." (Baker, 102) Through poetry, Wordsworth believed he could reach the inner workings of human nature, thereby enlightening others to the ingrained psychological facets of life, and dare, society.

Shortly after the first rumblings of the French Revolution, Wordsworth found that he was unaffected by the upheaval. In fact, he thought it "a matter of course" (Gingerich, 38), but later found himself deeply impressed by the moral rising, and threw himself in "for France, out and out" (Gingerich, 39). It was through this experience that Wordsworth matured into a man who understood the power emotions and the psyche can have over people. "By strenuous exercise of the power of passion and will Wordsworth developed an unusually strong spirit of personal liberty and acquired a complete mastery of his senses" (Gingerich, 45). Wordsworth understood his passion, and weaved it into his poetry, in the hopes to arouse the same spirit in others, particularly in Salisbury Plain. Wordsworth used the overthrowing of the Bastille as a metaphor for a discovery of truth and knowledge: "Heroes of Truth pursue your march, uptear/Th'Oppressor's dungeon from its deepest base:" (Wordsworth, lines 541-542). His passion was a search for truth, a return to nature, a knowing of oneness in the universe, and he conveyed it in lines of Salisbury Plain.

As a child, Wordsworth was sensitive: a sensitivity he carried with him into adulthood, and a sensitivity that deeply affected his writings. Through his mastery of sense and passion, Wordsworth captured the essence of the disillusioned and hopeless in the solemn plains of Salisbury. It is this solitary image which deconstructs the entire premise of British society and embodies the return to nature as Wordsworth hoped. The evolution or devolution as it may be, of the once happy, materialistic, societal beings that the traveler and the vagrant once were is disassembled to their barest elements. The vagrant and her family are separated from their possessions: "My father's substance fell into decay" (Wordsworth, 256). She forced to seek refuge in a badly decayed spital, which does little to shelter her from the elements. This devolution typifies the reunion between man and nature, and that it is the consumerism of the British society that is impeding this reunion. She has forgotten her natural roots, accepted a life of product and societal needs, and that society betrayed her. Her own passion for product and assimilation into society (for survival-the impoverished or greed-the aristocracy) blinded her to the nature surrounding her: a surrounding that Wordsworth held in high regard. Because of her blindness, she was forced into a downward spiral of devolution, returning the metaphoric nature that had initially given life to her.

This undoing of fortune expresses the duality of British society. Fullness over emptiness, mastery over submission: these deconstructive attributes are representative of the social structure from which Wordsworth was trying to seek freedom, yet, within the deconstruction of political and social morays, Wordsworth deconstructed his own views about the revolution. "The whole history of Wordsworth's literary life may be summed up as a constant and persistent endeavor to substitute this power of vision for imagination as ordinarily conceived, to put himself at once at the center of eternal being and the center of his own life, and to make those centers, not imaginatively but actually, identical. To attain this end completely, however, is an impossibility forever, for it is always by a leap of imagination that the final identity is made" (Gingerich, 111). In other words, man and nature are symbiotic, balanced between being and thought, but the two continuously deconstructive in an attempt to signify the other. Here is where the problem lies within the natural, poetic revolution of Wordsworth; however, the journey that Wordsworth takes is a powerful and thought provoking one, encouraging the further investigation of the natural and how it can affect and effect the social.

A society evolving from agrarian to urban slowed Wordsworth's hopes for an equal social structure. The French and Industrial Revolutions negated one another in the sense that what was once seen as hopeful had now been contradicted by the impending move to a more commercial environment, which drove the lower class further away from the utopian society Wordsworth had strived to convince. "From Wordsworth's perspective, these, along with emerging social conditions related to urbanization and occupational roles, provide a nexus of unforeseen and unique 'causes' leading to new and, as far as he is concerned, objectionable forms of cultural practice" (Blank, 378). Because of the evolutionary change within the very culture he was trying to get rise up, Wordsworth found himself lost in a sea of consumerism and economic growth; a transition he most likely did not foresee and a transition that would serve to undermine all that he set forth in his poetry.

Within the lines of the poem, the choice is given: its very context can be as either revolutionary or evolutionary and not seen as both, yet, it is both. The dichotomy is appealing and revolutionary, yet it did not incite the revolution amongst the lower class as Wordsworth had hoped. "Somewhat prophetically, he also opens up the class issue and questions of meaning often associated with the consumption of low an popular culture, for in Wordsworth's time the working class that defines itself later in the nineteenth century had not fully emerged as a political or social force" (Blank, 379) It did however incite generations of readers to rouse a revolution of literature, helping to promote the use of poetry as a medium for political freedom and equality, by allowing the work to employ the ability to speak for the poet, in an environment where the poet feels he can not speak out, for fear of isolation and imprisonment.

Wordsworth and his contemporaries, as well as those who came before, evolved expression to what we now have: freedom of speech. So despite his disappointment in provoking a people's revolution in England, Wordsworth assisted in goading the people's right to freedom of speech and written word, without the fear of persecution.

WORKS CITED

Wordsworth, William. The Major Works. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984.

Fosso, Kurt. Buried Communities: Wordsworth and the Bonds of Mourning. New York: Albany State University of New York Press, 2004.

Blank, G. Kim. "The "Degrading Thirst after Outrageous Stimulation": Wordsworth as Cultural Critic." Journal of Popular Culture, 39 no. 3 (2006): 365-82.

Chandler, David. "John Rieder, Wordsworth's Counterrevolutionary Turn: Community, Virtue, and Vision in the 1790s." Romanticism On the Net 18 (May 2000) [Date of access] http://users.ox.ac.uk/~scat0385/18rieder.html

Liu, Yu. "Crisis and Recovery: The Wordsworthian Poetics and Politics." Papers on Language & Literature. Volume 36, Issue: 1. (2000): 19.

Willey, Basil. On Wordsworth and the Locke Tradition.English Romantic Poets: Modern Essays in Criticism. Ed. M.H. Abrams. New York: Oxford University Press, 1960.

Baker, Carlos. Sensation and Vision in Wordsworth. English Romantic Poets: Modern Essays in Criticism. Ed. M.H. Abrams. New York: Oxford University Press, 1960.

Gingerish, Solomon F. Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Browning: A Study in Human Freedom. New York: Gordian Press, 1968.

Newlyn, Lucy. Coleridge, Wordsworth and the Language of Allusion. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986.

Williams, Charles. Wordsworth. English Romantic Poets: Modern Essays in Criticism. Ed. M.H. Abrams. New York: Oxford University Press, 1960.