Part Two: A Slum-ber Did My Spi-rit Seal

Hello everybody!

I want to express how to you all how great class was on Tuesday, I think we all felt the same way, and how sad it is too...That we are done with Wordsworth.

We may be done with him but he certainly isn't done with me. I still have a lot of thiughts about him...and Tintern Abbey and the Ode is haunting them. What a I pleasure to hear them read out loud.

Before I rant about those poems, I'd like to finish my analysis of A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal. Please note: Thanks and reference to Professor Leps with whom I studied this poem, I couldn't share these things without her teaching them...

At the end of my last blog, I made reference to sign rhyme, and exemplified the usage of this with "I had no human fears" and "the touch of earthly years." We all understand how this is an effective technique: The effect of sound draws assonance and dissonance to the ear, changes pitches, slurs and constrasts. But why Fears and Years? What is it about the actual words that lets us leave the phrase so haunting and so lonely?

Allen Ginsberg, writer and member of the Beats (leaders of the cultural and literary Beatnik movement, 1950s America) once spoke of his interest in the effect of words and sounds on the mind. He thought that "what would be interesting," would be to somehow discover if certain words, sounds, or combinations of them, when put together created particular biological reactions in the brain. How and why do certain sounds evoke emotion? What is sadness to the ear? How do we know when we hear "sad" or "lonely" or "fear"? And what are the patterns that generate them biologically? Ginsberg's question is sensical. After all, it is said that all art is patterns.

This Wordsworth poem in particular illustrates this possibility because it strongly and efficiently generates in the reader an emotional response: It generates a particular sense of sentiment that, though created with words, perhaps cannot be described with them. As I said in my previous posting, to explain the impact of the poem would be to let loose its power.

So why did Wordsworth (whether consciously or not) choose the words that he did? He could have chosen any word that rhymed with those particular sounds (fear/year). What made him choose Fear? What about the words themselves, absent of them sounding similar? What is their relationship, and is not the relationship of their meanings amplified by their rhyming? (In other words, it is not the rhyming alone that creates intensity (for the "I feel that" reaction), but that THE INTERCONNECTEDNESS OF THE WORDS AND MEANINGS ARE ASSIMILATED INTO THE MIND BY REVEALING AN IMMEDIATE SIMILARITY BETWEEN THEM (rhyme). WE, IN THE POEM, ARE ALLOWED NO TIME TO THINK OF THE CONNECTION BETWEEN YEARS AND FEARS...WE TAKE IT FOR GRANTED UPON ITS READING. WE SOAK IT LIKE A SPONGE, INGEST IT AND IT TASTES WIERD, AND THEN IT MOVES US.

It is a lot like what Professor Kuin lectured about in regards to how people in the past (Renaissance, etc.) would connect things differently than we do now. Now, our connections are cause and effect related, while at another time, people drew significance in other ways. For example, a walnut looks like a brain, therefore since they are physically similar, walnuts must be good for the brain.

I am not saying that this is scientifically valid way of assessing things, but, I am pointing out that our brains, as we think and as we read and converse, do in fact notice similarities between things in a multitude of ways. We do this even if we do not think them to have any true significance. We make odd associations and they effect us. The power of Wordsworth's poem proves this.

As I was saying, in Wordsworth's poem, we soak associations like a sponge, they intensify themselves without us stopping to even think about them. But, now we have time to think about them, so let's: What is the association between the words Fears and Years? Perhaps there is something about years passing that invokes fear. By throwing this association to us, this fear is awakened in poem and in ourselves. It is said that this poem was written by Wordsworth to or regarding his deceased sister, who had written (whose influence upon Wordsworth's literary content is highly debated) alongside him. Fears and Years has a connection to time. The years they had passed together perhaps invokes in him a fear, now that she is gone? Or, perhaps her death generated in him a realization of time, and now he is fearful of it, perhaps even of his own death? However, the actual sentences are contradictory then, as he denies that he had any fears: "A slumber did my spirit seal/I had no human fears:/She seemed a thing that could not feel/The touch of earthly years." We are left almost unsure as to whether he did or did not have human fear: If his sister was touched by earthly years and could no longer feel, why wouldn't he be afraid? The very fact that these questions come to mind reveals that there is a space left between the meanings of the words, as if we know that there is significance there but cannot point to it. We know there is association there; why? Because our mind hears the rhyme and connects the words for us.

A similar technique is used in the second fragment of the poem: "No motion has she now, no force/She neither hears nor sees/Roll'd round in earth's diurnal course/With rocks and stones and trees." Force and Course: There is no force within the course! The subject cannot hear or see, she rolls around, she is subject to natures course, she has "no force." Again, force contradicts the course, and also rhymes with it. Again, we experience power within the association of rhyme and contradiction of meaning...

The final rhyme is "sees" and "trees". The subject cannot see: She does not see the trees. But though she does not see it, the audience gets a great image of it: Rocks and stones and trees. We end seeing only nature. Sense is important to the Romantics, they were empirical thinkers.

Moving on to the overall feel of the poem, the overall meaning conveyed by the technicalities put together, what I find remarkable about this poem is that it performs itself. Read in a normal tone, it is so strong.

The overall feeling we get of the subject is of a day dream like state, perhaps that is the slumber that Wordsworth fell upon. In the slumber, we experience the idea of mortality: "She seemed a thing that could not feel." Then falls a pause, a silence in the poem. "The touch of earthly years." This is an example of how silence plays the same role that sound does. Lack of sound is still sound. The pause is where the death is. Wordsworth did not have to say it, a play between what is said and what is unsaid.

The entire poem creates melancholy tension in this way, with the use of redescent language: colloquialism makes us feel emotion more strongly because it hints to things unsaid, creating a sense of overall muteness in the work. This muteness says more than flowery language does. It allows the audience to hear words that are not even there, through rhyme and ideological associations. In this way, Wordsworth's techniques are not in isolation. They are not momentary lapses, attempts towards alliteration, etc., but they correspond to and create new, overwhelming sensations of loss, the fear of death, time and absence of an ambiguous subject. Prof. Leps said, "It gives a new feeling of a very old thing." Recite it aloud, and you will feel that too.