566
HAROLD BLOOM
the sad unity of the pastoral sunset, here they dissolve into the image of
a pastoral hunger shared both by the earth and by the wintry sheep.
Again the hand of the human is missing, and the wild claims its own - the
earth is hard, the withered grass is knotted, the herbs and flowers gnawed
away and trampled and the young apple tree gradually dies into its
longest winter, its bark nibbled round by the hungry sheep. What the
scene speaks ,of is at the borders of the visible, for the abandonment does
not indicate despair, but grimly once again tells of the destructive strength
of outrageously sustained hope. It is an instance where Valery is proved
correct, for here the poem is antithetical to its own cinema; what camera
eye could gaze upon this scene, and tell us, mutely, that the voice that
will rise from this solitude and wilderness will be the voice of a woman
transfigured by an infinite hope, and not by a despair?
In the third passage, ending the poem, the torturing hope attains
its visionary climax. Nature has been abandoned to apocalyptic yearnings,
and it replies as it must, in the killing image of winter. The cottage and
the woman fuse together, and both reach the borders of the visible, for
the artifact and the human alike slide over into a blending where they
are merely vegetal and animal, exposed remnants of nature yielding to
natural entropy. The cottage is reft and sapped by frost and thaw and
rain, and Margaret is chilled, asleep, by nightly damps and, awake, by
a wind that blows by her own fireside . The last
more-than-visual
image
is one of dreadful naturalization, even of a Blakean sort ; the endearing
but torturing hope holds her to the wretched and now deathly spot,
"fast rooted at her heart." The final image is purely
visual-
the ruined
walls of the cottage, but visual presentation has little to do with the
Wordsworthian power of this final image. I t is a complex of emotions
that falls apart in this abandoned spot, and the falling-apart is truly
one of the credences of winter.
We need not puzzle as to why Blake distrusted the merely visual,
and insisted on the visionary in its place. But, despite the great line of
Wordsworthian critics, from Bradley and Abercrombie through Wilson
Knight and Hartman - that alternative contention that has insisted
against Arnold that Wordsworth was
not
the poet of future - despite
that splendid array the Wordsworthian distrust of the eye remains a par–
tial mystery. Wordsworth, at his very greatest, feared both the outward
eye of nature and the inward eye of vision, though the fears never kept
him from his courageous assaults upon both modes of seeing. Hartman
suggests the influence of Burke on Wordsworth, quoting Burke's notion
that the business of poetry "is, to affect rather by sympathy than imita–
tion; to display rather the effect of things on the mind of the speaker,
