The "Dial's Moral Round": Charting Wordsworth's Evening Walk

John Axcelson

ELH, Volume 73, Number 3, Fall 2006, pp. 651-671 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2006.0021

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/202182

[ Access provided at 5 Oct 2020 08:35 GMT from University of Canberra ]

The “dial’s moral round”: Charting
Wordsworth’s Evening Walk

by john axcelson

i.

There is little dispute that Wordsworth’s early poem An Evening

Walk draws heavily on eighteenth-century descriptive traditions. Alan
Liu has outlined in some detail the poem’s reliance on picturesque and
locodescriptive norms, and Wordsworth himself makes explicit connec-
tions to James Thomson, Thomas Gray, and others through notes and
textual allusions.1 Wordsworth’s relationship to these precursors has
dominated critical reaction to the poem, but in a specific, one might say
limited, manner, focusing on Wordsworth’s ability to break free from
his influences. Because the mainstream of twentieth-century criticism
represented Romanticism as a salutary revolt against the sedate norms
of eighteenth-century culture, the fortunes of the poem have waxed
or waned according to how solid a case could be made for placing it
on the far side of the romantic divide. Sympathetic criticism usually
seeks to tease out of the poem glimmers of the greater poetry to come
in the wake of the French Revolution.2 Other critics simply dismiss An
Evening Walk as juvenilia. Paul D. Sheats, for example, emphasizes
its “striking contrast to [Wordsworth’s] later work” and suggests that
the mature poet “and most of his critics would regard this poem as an
egregious capitulation to conventional stylistic vices.”3
But the assumption that Romanticism in fact represents a revolt
against the eighteenth century is now the subject of renewed critical
debate. These days we are just as likely to place romantic literature
within an extended eighteenth century, stressing its participation in
common patterns of thought and representation. There are practical
reasons behind this change, as job opportunities for those who specialize
in forty or so years of literary history (and, until recently, the work of
six poets) continue to shrink in the face of economic pressures.4 But
it also answers the demands of dominant theoretical perspectives: the
contemporary urge to remove Romanticism from a narrative of rebel-
lion and to resituate it within an eighteenth-century episteme responds

ELH 73 (2006) 651–671 © 2006 by The Johns Hopkins University Press 651
to a mistrust of narrative ordering fostered by both deconstruction and
new historicism. One could refer here to Paul de Man’s well-known
critique of romantic temporal aspirations—specifically the romantic
subject’s tendency to appropriate “the temporal stability it lacks from
nature.” And it is precisely the tendency of romantic values to extend
over time that motivated Jerome McGann’s influential demand that
criticism historicize its object as a matter of academic hygiene.5 The
result is a contemporary predisposition to think of culture in terms
of spatial matrices—the Foucauldian episteme as a map of an era’s
cultural possibilities. While transitions were once the primary focus
of literary history—the (revolutionary) shift from sensibility to Ro-
manticism, for instance, or the charting of Wordsworth’s development
as a poet—texts are now more often than not read against a set of
possibilities determined by the period, the genre, the historical mo-
ment. Deconstructionist criticism has now largely faded from the
mainstream, but historicism is still widely embraced, and this criti-
cism either explicitly or implicitly understands history in opposition
to time. In the case of An Evening Walk, for example, Liu’s historicist
reading exemplifies current critical values by focusing not on the story
of Wordsworth’s career but on “the disciplinary matrix at the heart of
the picturesque” (W, 102).
An Evening Walk holds a peculiar advantage to our age, I would
suggest, because it reflects on the very distinction between time and
history that underwrites contemporary criticism. Like historicist criti-
cism, the picturesque tradition that informs the poem endorses the
discrete moment of vision at the expense of narrative development. The
picturesque, as Liu puts it, “arrests” temporal experience; it accommo-
dates diversity through the construction of a spatial order that requires
renouncing, if only momentarily, the movement of time. As a pictur-
esque poem An Evening Walk indeed presents a series of landscape
views that recall a “picture gallery”; its scenes repeatedly stage diversity
within the matrices of specific historical moments—discrete moments
of viewing (W, 84, 117).6 Such practices seem designed to appeal to
a historicism with little patience for developmental narratives and a
passion for recovering the diverse energies concealed by these narra-
tives. The prize of both picturesque description and historicist analysis
is a full, synchronic portrait of a particular historical moment—“thick
description,” as it’s commonly called in historicist circles.7
Yet temporal processes are not so easily arrested, and the poem
also explicitly charts the progress of the poet’s own life—his youth,
his uncertain future. These temporal reflections are easily dismissed

652 Charting Wordsworth’s Evening Walk

because Wordsworth neatly (or so it seems) segregates them into the
margins. Only at the beginning and the end of this poem are we allowed
to glimpse and reflect upon the poet’s experience of time. This move
is a source of contention for older critics, who typically read the stark
separation of subjectivity from description as a mark of Wordsworth’s
immaturity; a historicist critic like Liu, on the other hand, faced with
the same data, sees opportunity, a fortuitous formal advantage in the
quest for the historical moment.8 Yet the sequestration of temporality
is not the same as its elimination. In fact, the very starkness of the
division of things temporal from things descriptive has the effect of
calling attention to temporality, thereby posing it as a problem for the
picturesque. The most interesting aspect of An Evening Walk, it seems
to me, is the conflict it stages between picturesque stasis and temporal
experience. In this essay I propose to explore the poem’s reflections on
history and time, with the aim of highlighting an important concern
that threatens to be lost both in traditional approaches to the poem
and in its later historicist readings. I want to suggest that An Evening
Walk is designed to unsettle the proper frame of the picturesque.
Specifically, the poem seeks to reform picturesque representation
by relocating it within temporal experience—shifting its foundation,
as it were, from space to time and thereby promoting the priority of
temporal experience. Despite, and indeed partly because of, the poet’s
all too obvious attempt to purify picturesque representation, the poem
slyly compromises the traditional picturesque, resettling its landscapes
upon the experience of time.
By introducing temporality to the picturesque, Wordsworth is not,
however, seeking to establish the kind of totalizing historical narrative
viewed with such suspicion today—and which many historicists asso-
ciate with Wordsworth’s own later poetry. He does not, for instance,
present the experience of time from the perspective of a history already
completed or even fully determined—temporal order in Wordsworth is
not eschatology, as sometimes seems the case for those who attempt to
fit An Evening Walk into the story of what Wordsworth would eventually
become. Nor is this perspective quite the (arguably) Burkean perspec-
tive that would emphasize the limitations that historical necessity poses
for future experience. Rather, the poem pointedly concludes with an
undefined future; while the poet does imagine an idyllic seclusion
with his sister Dorothy, he achieves no resolution, nothing more than
a desire for a future that might turn out quite otherwise. Wordsworth
instead emphasizes the experience of time, focusing on the way time
feels as it passes, and most importantly on the kinds of experience

John Axcelson 653

the consciousness of temporality makes possible. This perspective
yields a paradox, but one that is proved each moment on the pulses:
the necessity of past history intersects in temporal experience with
the openness of the future. Coming of age in the post-Lockean world
of the eighteenth century, Wordsworth sees past experience as the
source of the consciousness that can yet imagine a different future.
For this reason it is better to understand Wordsworth’s relationship
to his precursors not as a rebellion that would explain what he would
become (or as a fallow period prior to that rebellion) but as an effort
to incorporate the past in order to imagine the future. Wordsworth
is here self-consciously looking to make his work develop or emerge
from earlier poetry, but he is also promoting an intriguing and now
timely suggestion that consciousness of the historical moment—as a
field of significance and action—is itself a product of time. Wordsworth
exhibits no tendency to use the present to define the past (history as
the story of the winners); nor does he allow the past to excessively limit
the present or the future; he only suggests that we must acknowledge
the necessity imposed by history in order to know the present moment
properly. His understanding of temporal experience rests on a stub-
born insistence that what we call the historical moment is necessarily
defined by its place in the order of time.

ii.

Despite their similar emphases, today’s historicism and the pictur-

esque differ fundamentally in one respect: there is in the picturesque
an assumption of order and unity that stands opposed to the historicist
commitment to diversity in all its contradictory and even violent energy.
In this respect the picturesque represents a special challenge to histori-
cism, presenting in spatial, synchronic form the kind of (ideological)
organizing force that more often operates in grand historical narratives.
This conjunction accounts for a certain amount of anxiety in historicist
readings of the picturesque. Liu’s treatment of An Evening Walk, for
example, both compliments the picturesque for its ability to draw back
from ideological narratives and recognizes it as “in every sense a form
of social control” (W, 90). He admits that as the eighteenth century
progressed the control provided by the picturesque tended increas-
ingly to reflect liberal values. It “can image a state of property, social
administration, and politics designed to forget older religious institu-
tions and so project a new, carefully reposed discipline of freedom
cognate with the early Revolution” (W, 117). But Liu’s essay looks

654 Charting Wordsworth’s Evening Walk

beyond these liberal credentials and emphasizes instead the disrup-
tive elements released inadvertently by the policing tendencies of the
picturesque: “Wordsworth wishes to describe a landscape in repose,”
but his scenes nonetheless betray “slips, swerves, and stutterings” that
testify to the energies concealed by his representation (W, 135). “In
An Evening Walk,” Lui writes,

nascent stories exert such a torsion upon the picturesque canvas that
the craquelure—the cracks in the paint—widen to show traces of the
istoria underlying all description. (W, 131)

Historicism here cracks open the picturesque, both celebrating its

resistance to narrative and resisting its urge to unify. But what is this
istoria? Liu’s “nascent stories” are indeed newborn—they emphasize
novelty over narrative (they are definitively not akin to the older
religious or politico-moral stories that the picturesque is designed to
“forget”); they are products of the time—of the historical moment—not
of time. These “stories” are not stories at all (although they may aspire
to become so); they rather suggest odd bits of energy or desire, the
inconvenient, or idiosyncratic, or violent voices normally occluded by
traditional narrative forms of history. The cracks in the canvas thus
yield for Liu stories profoundly at odds with time.
Most often Liu refers to these stories as “anomalies” (W, 120); they
appear suddenly and unexpectedly, and they unsettle the ordered
tranquility of the picturesque without compromising its renunciation
of temporality. The arch-anomaly is the female vagrant, who with her
children appears briefly in the middle of the poem and dies, leaving
the poem to resume landscape description. Liu’s reading details the
awkward and incomplete attempt of Wordsworth’s picturesque to sub-
sume even this figure of suffering and sorrow into the diverse unity of
its prospect. He concludes that the female vagrant stands oddly alone
at the center of this poem: able to appear in the picturesque—because
its renunciation of narrative order allows it to present a broad swath of
landscape—but incapable of full repose within this landscape, in stark
contrast to the swan whose presence calls her into being. In this way
she embodies contemporary disorder and thus represents authentic
istoria—her presence speaks the violence of an uncleanly diverse
social world incapable of being entirely repressed by the tranquility
of picturesque repose. I shall have more to say about this important
passage below. For now, I want to emphasize that her presence is, for
Liu, not temporalized. Such history, he insists, “does not exist in time”

John Axcelson 655

(W, 57). In fact, Liu suggests provocatively that temporality itself arises
as an ideological response to the violence and disorder of genuine
history: it is history as “public violence . . . that makes necessary the
thinking of time as a denial of violence.” Istoria, then, is, for Liu, the
rupture or cleavage that isolates the historical moment prior to the
experience of time, which is then formed in anxious reaction: “The
unthought continuum of everyday being is ‘broken in the middle’ [by
history/violence], and then time is thought as the explanation, mitiga-
tion, and denial of the difference history makes” (W, 57).9 Because the
picturesque renounces temporality as a generic precondition, it reveals
anomalies, affording us access to repressed voices that are silenced by
historical narratives and yet unable to conform to the picturesque’s
spatial regime.
Liu concludes that Wordsworth’s early poems “write history and
time together—history as what I will call the poetics of violence, and
time as the reinscription of history” (W, 58)—implying both that the
poet employs time after the fact to conceal the trauma of history and
that this trauma nonetheless emerges under historicist inquiry despite
the poet’s narrativizing tendencies. In the case of An Evening Walk the
accessibility of history is heightened by Wordsworth’s use of a genre
that renounces narrative regulation. Underlying Liu’s reading, then,
is the assumption that Wordsworth’s poem in fact adheres to the tem-
poral norms of the picturesque—an argument more plausible because
it settles on a poet not yet possessed of his mature powers. Yet it is
precisely this assumption that should be questioned. Liu bases his read-
ing of An Evening Walk on the poem’s initial descriptive scene, which
presents the noontime landscape dominated by shadows. Liu reads in
these shadows a collapsing of time: noon already contains evening in
its shadows. He further suggests that the poem’s later scenes repeat
rather than develop this initial scene. “[T]his description sketches the
whole picture gallery of the poem”—the only exceptions being, as
we’ve seen, “certain crucial anomalies,” desires or voices that cannot
quite fit into the spatial unity of the picturesque (W, 117).
Liu’s reading, then, rests on the absence of temporality from the
descriptive core of An Evening Walk and takes this absence as a for-
tuitous effect of genre. Similar assumptions underwrite the work of
traditionalist critics—though these are not, of course, accompanied by
Liu’s positive evaluation. Unlike Liu, most critics regret the purity of
the poem’s picturesque scenes. Yet it seems to me that Wordsworth
accomplishes the picturesque renunciation of temporality with such
exaggerated flourish that we are justified to suspect some more complex

656 Charting Wordsworth’s Evening Walk

intention. The poem begins with references to temporal experience,
but it soon shifts into its properly descriptive manner and at this point
becomes a series of discrete portraits—until the concluding lines again
offer references to time. Thus the representation of temporal experi-
ence is explicitly sequestered, as it were, into the margins, leaving the
bulk of the poem to its business of picturesque landscape. The mar-
ginalization of temporal experience is heightened further by parallel
restrictions of reflective consciousness and sound. Sheats notes that the
body of the poem is “virtually devoid of subjective reference.” Once
the descriptive scenes begin, the “speaker exhibits no melancholy; he
never reflects, never recollects”—again, until the conclusion when
Wordsworth considers his current circumstances and expresses his
desire for a future life of seclusion with Dorothy.10 Finally, the poem’s
margins highlight the experience of sound. An Evening Walk begins
with the poet following the river Derwent, hearing “the roar / That
stuns the tremulous cliffs of high Lodore”; he continues to recount
his former habit of making the landscape sing, teaching “the echoes
of your rocks my carols wild.”11 When the transition to the descriptive
body of the poem takes place, Wordsworth explicitly abandons sound
imagery: “Then quiet led me up the huddling rill” (70, my emphasis),
and the remainder of the poem tracks “[t]he recording eye of the
narrator mov[ing] like that of a painter over the landscape.”12 At the
far end of the poem, once again, sound returns: Wordsworth hears
“[t]he song of mountain streams unheard by day” (433), and in the
final lines he presents a collection of sounds, including the “song of
mountain streams” (433), the shout of a ferryman, the rustling of a
hare, and the howl of a dog.
Wordsworth’s decision to create a radical division in his poem be-
tween time, consciousness, and sound, on the one hand, and space,
description, and vision, on the other, certainly reinforces the formal
expectations of the picturesque. It also leads critics concerned with
the story of the poet’s career, such as Hartman, to focus their attention
on the poem’s margins. But a division accomplished in so exaggerated
a manner seems designed not simply to meet generic expectations
but to draw critical attention to them. We can begin to appreciate
Wordsworth’s method by looking at the similar framing of temporal
experience that appears in another of his early works, Salisbury Plain.
Here we find temporality emphasized in a moment of striking absurdity.
When the narrator encounters a vagrant woman, she recounts to him
an earlier experience on the plain:

John Axcelson 657

 The Woman told that through a hollow deep
As on she journeyed, far from spring or bower,
An old man beckoning from the naked steep
Came tottering sidelong down to ask the hour;
There never clock was heard from steeple tower.
From the wide corn the plundering crows to scare
He held a rusty gun. In sun and shower,
Old as he was, alone he lingered there,
His hungry meal too scant for dog that meal to share.
(163–71)

Clearly, when one is lost—wandering either through the wilderness or

through that peculiar figurative wilderness that, for Wordsworth, was
the era of revolutionary war and social oppression—one loses track
of time. And, as in An Evening Walk, temporality is here associated
with hearing: “There never clock was heard from steeple tower.” But
the passage begs a crucial question: is the old man absurd because he
believes time to be relevant to this terrible moment in this terrible
world? Or, is it rather that the loss of time somehow creates this world?
Put another way, does this desire to know the time illustrate Liu’s
notion that temporality provides an ideological comfort that conceals
history after the fact, or is it rather that this desert is the product of
a world that has lost its sense of time? The first option has the man
suffering from ideological delusion—ripe for a historicist critique that
would undermine the appeal to temporality in favor of a clear-eyed
perspective on the actual world as it appears before him. Supporting
this interpretation would be the implicit connection between temporal-
ity and religion, as the clock is placed on the steeple tower. The old
man’s absurdity would then be compounded by his adherence, even in
his wretchedness, to a state religion that has abandoned him. But the
second, more intriguing possibility suggests that loss of time is itself
the source of his discomfort. For one thing, his request for the time
brings him out of his regular isolation into human contact. And from
this perspective one can see the image of the clock tower gesturing
beyond state religion to suggest healthy community, as the church clock
(and the time it keeps) provides a common, public center around which
human relations grow. More importantly, the steeple also presents an
image of verticality that starkly contrasts the terrible horizontalness
of the plain, which in the poem embodies disorder, alienation, and
despair. This manner of thinking would suggest that temporality is
something essentially human and that the timelessness of the plain is
at the heart of its terrible burden for those humans who stray there.
The properly human world is one defined by time.

658 Charting Wordsworth’s Evening Walk

 In resolving this question, we cannot rightly condone both possibili-
ties, as they are diametrically opposed: the one treats an appeal to time
as the problem, the other as the solution. But other temporal indications
in Salisbury Plain guide us, I think, toward an understanding of time
as a healthy foundation for human experience. The poem’s opening
lines seem to connect a certain therapeutic effect with temporality.
Here is the narrator’s entrance into Sarum:
The troubled west was red with stormy fire,
O’er Sarum’s plain the traveller with a sigh
Measured each painful step, the distant spire
That fixed at every turn his backward eye
Was lost, tho’ still he turned, in the blank sky.
By thirst and hunger pressed he gazed around
And scarce could any trace of man descry,
Save wastes of corn that stretched without a bound,
But where the sower dwelt was nowhere to be found
(37–45)

The spire, a tall vertical structure out of keeping with the terribly
horizontal plain that “stretched without a bound,” marks the traveler’s
connection to the human world. It serves as a foundation for measure-
ment, fixing his journey as progress for as long as it remains visible.
(Compare the old man’s odd walk, “tottering sidelong.”) When the
spire disappears, so does the human world. The spire also suggests a
connection between space and time; the plain, in the absence of the
spire, is both a trackless waste and a temporal chaos. The traveler
finds himself lost in a bewildering landscape and also exposed to a
terrifying timelessness that admits both the presence of Druids and
the reappearance of superstitions long-since dispelled by the progress
of history. Here losing time is clearly marked as the cause of pain and
suffering; the loss of the steeple and its clock leads the traveler into
a timeless world that is also an inhuman world.
Similarly, as the poem concludes, the return of temporal experi-
ence signals the reemergence of a healthy community. The first sign
of hope comes in the life story that the female vagrant relates to the
narrator. Although her narrative recounts terrible events, it provides a
temporal organization that effectively builds a community of two. At
the end of the vagrant woman’s story, additional signs of time appear,
indicating the widening of this community. Here the return of time
mitigates against the worst moment of despair:

John Axcelson 659

 “Three years a wanderer round my native coast
My eyes have watched yon sun declining tend
Down to the land where hope to me was lost;
And now across this waste my steps I bend:
Oh! tell me whither, for no earthly friend
Have I, no house in prospect but the tomb.”
She ceased. The city’s distant spires ascend
Like flames which far and wide the west illume,
Scattering from out the sky the rear of night’s thin gloom.
(388–96)

The healing effect of time, which occurs as the spires again rise at
the end of this stanza, transposes an ostensibly apocalyptic moment
(the transcendence of the tomb) into a special moment that occurs
within a temporal order. But the passage raises questions about the
relationship between natural and human temporality. The mere cycling
of nature is not the source of healing—in fact, the recurrent setting
of the sun precipitates her despair; rather, hope emerges from the
spire, from the light of morning reflected upon human design. The
image decidedly does not suggest an inauthentic cooptation of natural
temporality for human comfort, but rather represents nature’s poten-
tial to participate in or highlight human activity. This relationship is
also reflected in the dramatic unfolding of the passage: the creation
of human relationship precedes the rehabilitation of nature; it is only
after the story connects the two characters that the cycling of the sun
seems again filled with promise. In any case, the return of the spire
(temporality) suggests the healing and, indeed, the stabilizing effects
of time and signals the conclusion of the poem. The two travelers now
once again move into a humanized world, one marked by a verticality
of growth and development. Here nature’s participation in the therapy
of the vertical takes the form of trees: “A smoking cottage peeped
the trees between”; the “woods” similarly unfold the singing linnet.
When bounded by these tall emblems of temporality even the poem’s
images of painful desolation can be rehabilitated: the plains become
pastureland for the lowing herd; now wandering itself presents a joy-
ful aspect, as “through the furrowed grass the merry Milkmaid strays”
(410, 411, 414). This transformation offers two points of relevance
to An Evening Walk. The first suggests that the proper appreciation
of the special historical moment depends upon our experiencing its
place in an unfolding temporality. The second concerns nature: we
should note that the role of nature is not to provide temporality to
a human consciousness otherwise alone and alienated, but rather to

660 Charting Wordsworth’s Evening Walk

accompany and illuminate the signs of human temporal experience.
Nature expands to accommodate human temporality.

iii.

In Salisbury Plain Wordsworth of course narrates his way out of

and back into the margins, and, as I’ve suggested, the loss of tempo-
ral experience here is thematically connected to the social criticism
embodied in the narrator’s adventures. The margins of An Evening
Walk seem, on the other hand, as critics from Sheats to Liu have
maintained, starkly set apart from the body of the poem.13 Yet we
should not underestimate the influence the poem’s opening casts
over our reading of its descriptive scenes. Like Salisbury Plain, An
Evening Walk opens with a striking image of time-keeping—one that
superintends the initial transition to picturesque description. Here
Wordsworth figures human experience as a sundial:
Alas! the idle tale of man is found
Depicted in the dial’s moral round;
With Hope Reflexion blends her social rays
To gild the total tablet of his days;
Yet still, the sport of some malignant Pow’r,
He knows but from its shade the present hour.
(37–42)

The figure of the sundial serves as a remarkable emblem of transition

itself: it blends the poem’s initial emphases on time and consciousness
into its new concern with landscape description through the movement
of shadow and light; it overlays the past (an outdated technology, an
over-wrought simile) upon the present; it aligns human experience
with a linear temporality that promises loss and death in contrast to
the natural scenery described in the body of the poem but nonetheless
translates this experience of loss into the static, objective, and visual
language of description through a technology that depends upon the
circular temporality of the natural world. On the one hand, that is,
the sundial seals off the margin by emphasizing the terrible distance
between the eternally recurring natural world and the tragic linearity
of human experience; yet, on the other hand, it suggests a rapproche-
ment by writing temporal experience onto the circularity and the spatial
horizontality of nature. The crucial final line presents a thesis that, for
me, defines the poem’s purposes: we “know . . . but from its shade the
present hour.” This line joins knowledge and shadows, the world of
conscious reflection with that of picturesque description, suggesting

John Axcelson 661

that we can fully know the present historical moment only through
the knowledge that comes from temporal experience. The use of light
and shadow in this passage should be sufficient to question and indeed
reverse the spatialization of time that Liu emphasizes in his reading of
the poem’s descriptive passages. In fact, as we move from this figure
into the poem proper, we do so with a special understanding of shadows
and light: the image of the sundial serves to temporalize the poem’s
ostensibly static portraits of the Lakeland landscape by troping the play
of shadows and light as emblems of human temporal experience.
The mapping of time onto space in the figure of the sundial is fol-
lowed and reinforced by the poet’s statement of purpose, which in fact
illustrates the dependence of discrete moments (the static paintings
of picturesque scenes) on temporal consciousness:
While, Memory at my side, I wander here,
Starts at the simplest sight th’ unbidden tear,
A form discover’d at the well-known seat,
A spot, that angles at the riv’let’s feet.
(43–46)

This passage deftly weaves together different forms of temporal ex-

perience. The novelty of the “unbidden tear,” of discovered forms, of
unexpected angles appears to owe no debt to time; they “start,” sud-
denly, apocalyptically even, into consciousness, and they bear witness
to the uniqueness of the present moment. Yet these appearances are
superintended by forms of temporal consciousness—by “Memory,” by
“well-known” scenery, by the steady flow of a rivulet. In these cases,
the surprise of the moment—that which would set it free from its
place in a temporal sequence—finds its significance precisely in the
temporal sequence from which it supposedly breaks. We know the joy
of the unexpected because we expect.
The import of these passages is the internal connection they sketch
between the poet’s unfolding evening and the apparently isolated mo-
ments of picturesque description that occupy the bulk of An Evening
Walk. We witness here the encroachment of the temporal conscious-
ness upon the stillness of the picturesque. The progress of time, I’m
suggesting, is not merely formal but rather contributes to and indeed
underwrites the ostensibly unique pleasures of picturesque descrip-
tion. Far from presenting nature in isolation from consciousness,
Wordsworth rather illustrates the common dependency of both mind
and landscape upon time. Just as landscape gains its primary beauty

662 Charting Wordsworth’s Evening Walk

from the shadows and light that play across it as evening falls, so hu-
man life knows itself morally only through the passing of time. Both
mind and nature owe their particular existences, their best parts, to
temporality.
Although it is true that the bulk of Wordsworth’s descriptive scenes
resist the qualities of self-consciousness, temporal experience, and
sound that dominate the margins, it is not true that these qualities
are therefore irrelevant to the picturesque body of the poem. If the
opening temporalization of shadows, as I’ve suggested, superimposes
a consciousness of time over the poem’s landscape descriptions, it is
also true that these very qualities return explicitly midway through
the poem, at perhaps its most significant moment—the appearance of
the female vagrant. Many critics have of course focused attention on
this passage. Mary Jacobus simply dismisses it as answering to “con-
temporary sensibility rather than the demands of the poem itself.”14
Other critics have more usefully pointed to the special quality of the
episode—Toby Benis, for example, has called it “an imaginary drama”
that stands back from the poem’s descriptive scenes.15 Indeed, while
the female vagrant may build upon such sentimental precursors as
Thomson’s lost shepherd and Cowper’s Crazy Kate, her representation
clearly conflicts with the pure picturesque of the poem’s descriptive
scenes. She is beset with loss and death; she exhibits a consciousness
of time, reflecting constantly on the absence of her husband, now
dead in the American war; and she hears the sounds of nature. Yet if
she is, as Liu insists, an anomaly, we need to review what effect her
presence has on the poem. For Liu, we’ve seen, she represents history
itself—a brief effusion of violence that unsettles the poem’s picturesque
repose and thereby requires that her presence be “bur[ied]”] so that
the poem can continue. He remarks on the poem’s efforts to draw the
episode back into the repose of picturesque description—the passage
of tranquility that follows the death of the family is at first “edgy with
remembered terror,” but ultimately “the descriptive surface recover[s]
fully enough to bury [it] out of sight” (W, 125, 126).
I would suggest another approach, one that links this episode rather
to the poem’s margins, and to its narrator. Indeed, the female vagrant
exhibits certain striking similarities to Wordsworth’s autobiographical
subject. Like him, albeit for very different reasons, she too is a rover,
a fellow wanderer across the land. She too is threatened with dark-
ness, as Wordsworth himself will be at the poem’s conclusion. And
most interestingly, her entrance seems to prefigure the traveler in

John Axcelson 663

Salisbury Plain: she enters the landscape with a recurring “backward
gaze” (247)—as if, like him, struggling to keep her bearings through
reference to a steeple clock. This connection is not quite as fanciful as
it may sound. The most striking point of convergence is the appearance
of yet another timepiece. Here we find her sitting in darkness:
—When low-hung clouds each star of summer hide,
And fireless are the valleys far and wide,
Where the brook brawls along the painful road,
Dark with bat haunted ashes stretching broad,
The distant clock forgot, and chilling dew,
Pleas’d thro’ the dusk their breaking smiles to view,
Oft has she taught them on her lap to play
Delighted, with the glow-worm’s harmless ray
Toss’d light from hand to hand; while on the ground
Small circles of green radiance gleam around.
(269–78, my emphasis)

This is, to my mind, one of the most difficult passages in Wordsworth’s

poetry to read in a satisfactory manner. The most obvious reading—
which has the woman experiencing a brief moment of joy because she
forgets the clock—cannot be dismissed, but neither to my mind can
it account for the details of the passage, or especially for its connec-
tion to the autobiographical narrator. There is, first of all, a division
between time and nature: the brook “brawls” in the background, but
this replaces the human sound of the clock—which apparently can still
be heard, or at least remembered. The fact that this clock is forgotten
suggests a certain missed opportunity. This special moment of joy is
precisely a moment perceived in the absence of temporality, and as
such it betrays a certain illusory quality. The delight she experiences
is thus somewhat troublesome, especially as it seems so dependent
upon the natural world. The circularity of the glowworms, their eerie
light, can delight momentarily, but by itself this kind of experience
cannot overcome the linear temporality of human existence and the
loss it invariably brings. I do not mean to be critical here—the female
vagrant is clearly a victim, and Wordsworth would surely be loath to
blame her for her unsettling predicament. Nonetheless, her predica-
ment is remarkable for the alienation it creates between the clock (and
the human world it represents) and the natural world.
One other curious effect of the female vagrant demands some
attention. As the passage concludes Wordsworth turns explicitly to
sound imagery:

664 Charting Wordsworth’s Evening Walk

 No tears can chill them, and no bosom warms,
Thy breast their death-bed coffined in thine arms.
Sweet are the sounds that mingle from afar.
(299–301)

We should note that sound does not fully return to the margins at the
conclusion of the episode but rather continues prominently and more-
over underwrites the poem’s return to picturesque description. Indeed,
from this point on Wordsworth refers at various intervals to a variety
of sounds, most prominently “the wakeful bird” that “pours . . . her
solemn strains” (377) over the land. It is in fact not entirely true that
sound remains sequestered in the margins—rather, there is something
about the episode of the female vagrant that licenses a return of sound
to the poem. This seems to me to question Liu’s reading. Rather than
burying the experience of the female vagrant within picturesque de-
scription, Wordsworth allows her suffering to extend over the latter half
of the poem, marking in sound a world of loss parallel to that marked
in shadows and light by the initial description of the sundial.
The full significance of this gesture becomes clear in the conclusion,
where the poet himself experiences a moment of pleasurable stasis
that recalls in certain respects the joy of the female vagrant with her
glowworms. And the experience also recalls, it seems to me, a similar
ambiguity. As the poem concludes, the poet again considers his place
in his life’s journey; he ponders his present circumstances and imag-
ines his future life with Dorothy. Like the female vagrant, he faces
darkness, even (perhaps) homelessness. Still, the final verse paragraph
begins with the suggestion of a conventional return home—a gesture
of course fitted to the conclusion of a poem:
The song of mountain-streams, unheard by day,
Now hardly heard, beguiles my homeward way.
(433–34)

It is of course the “brawling” of just such a mountain stream that

accompanies the joyous moment of the female vagrant. Yet here the
sound notably beguiles the narrator. And the very word beguiles here
is in fact beguiling. It is simply unclear whether the poet is beguiled
away from home or rather merely entertained on his way there.16 The
lines support both an image of a poet returning home accompanied
by the sounds of evening and a darker image of a poet enticed away
from home and further into the dark (and threatening) landscape.
The opposition is not insignificant, as it recalls the conjunction of cir-

John Axcelson 665

cularity (returning home, glowworms) and linearity (darkness/death)
that mark both the opening image of the sundial and, in a negative
form, the experience of the female vagrant. The typical response of
eighteenth-century poets to nature’s threatening moods is the proper
withdrawal indoors. One thinks of Cowper’s “The Winter Evening,”
book 4 of The Task, which finds the poet by his fireside examining the
state of the world through newspapers. Thomson, too, comes inside
during Winter to converse with Socrates and other heroes from the
world of books. While Wordsworth is not facing anything particularly
wintry, the suggestion that he remains outdoors into the evening
would present a striking break from the locodescriptive tradition.17 It
would suggest the possibility of loss, of an experience of nature that
would threaten rather than celebrate the prospect of a reunion and
a life with Dorothy.
Or would it? I think the poem’s conclusion offers the intriguing pos-
sibility that the road to a future home with Dorothy leads into rather
than away from the darkness of nature. The ostensibly threatening sense
of beguilement may just represent the poet’s proper path. It would also
seem to represent human temporal experience in an authentic manner.
The return home at the end of the day signals a life lived in time with
natural cycles. It is a life that provides adequate rest and shelter, but
it is nonetheless a life that threatens to falsify human experience, in
just the way that de Man famously condemned the romantic tendency
to seek shelter from temporality in nature. One can feel this implica-
tion, I think, in the short-lived delight afforded to the female vagrant
by the circular glowworms. The traditional way homeward, then, may
be ideologically suspect, disabled by an understanding of evening as a
cyclic period of rest, thereby burying knowledge of death and decay.
We are comfortable and entertained as we travel according to nature’s
cycles, but this experience may conceal the linear temporality of hu-
man life. The sort of beguiling that would draw Wordsworth further
into nature implies something very different. As we recall from the
sundial passage, “He knows but from its shade the present hour” (my
emphasis); this mode of beguilement actually conditions a form of
knowledge, a consciousness of human temporal experience in opposi-
tion to nature’s cycles.
If so, the initial experience is a frightening alienation from nature.
The final lines of the poem move beyond the visual world of the pic-
turesque, presenting instead a flurry of disconnected, disembodied
sounds:

666 Charting Wordsworth’s Evening Walk

 [A] shout that wakes the ferry-man from sleep,
Soon follow’d by his hollow-parting oar,
And echo’d hoof approaching the far shore;
Sound of clos’d gate, across the water borne,
Hurrying the feeding hare thro’ rustling corn;
The tremulous sob of the complaining owl;
And at long intervals the mill-dog’s howl;
The distant forge’s swinging thump profound;
Or yell in the deep woods of lonely hound.
(438–46)

At one level this is the dark underside of the picturesque, a grotesque

portrait of disconnected and confusing sounds. With the loss of the
visible we lose the objective world, and we are left with fragmented
bits of experience. Hartman, who recognizes this threat and builds
around it a narrative of loss and recovery, suggests that Wordsworth
finds solace in the very diversity of nocturnal experience, which shows
the poet that the diversity of the natural world that is the mainstay of
picturesque description “persists even in darkness”; Hartman rightly
notes that the register of this experience shifts from sight to sound,
with “the dominance of sound compens[ating] for the night’s drowning
of the visible scene.”18 Night sounds arise and reinforce the presence
of a landscape no longer visible. But Hartman does not address the
central feature of the classical picturesque, its crucial presentation
of diversity and novelty within a larger unity. One recalls the famous
Claude glass, which licensed picturesque observation of landscape by
giving tourists a portable framing device.19 If Wordsworth necessarily
leaves behind the picturesque proper with the loss of light and the
disabling of the eye, is he then to rest contented with diversity itself,
as Hartman suggests? The text suggests something else. The lines that
follow the threat of beguilement issue in a significant set of sounds,
including, once again, a clock:
All air is, as the sleeping water, still,
List’ning th’ aereal music of the hill,
Broke only by the slow clock tolling deep
(435–37)

Here the scene is one of stillness, repose, perhaps with a hint of death;
but this stillness is “broke” by the tolling clock. So, to a certain extent,
is the confusion generated both by the uncertainty of “beguiles” in the
previous lines and of the odd use of “list’ning” to describe the air itself.
Unlike the female vagrant, who forgets the clock and indulges in what

John Axcelson 667

little eerie light nature can yet provide, Wordsworth experiences the
tolling of the clock as it lifts this moment of threatening repose into
the movement of a life. Its presence here, and the opposition of the
booming clock to the indistinct sounds of evening, invite us, I think,
to expand Hartman’s resolution. As this final verse paragraph begins,
Wordsworth is threatened not only by darkness, but also by stasis—the
picturesque stillness unto death that precedes the tolling of the clock.
This appearance of the clock represents, as it will in Salisbury Plain,
the reassertion of a properly human temporal experience; here it
functions as an ironic memento mori—one that that rouses us from
the death-like state of pleasant evening stillness. Yet it also appears
in a positive sense as an ordering, a human mode of organization that
recognizes both stillness and chaotic diversity as unhealthy in them-
selves. It represents, moreover, significant differences from the poem’s
earlier timepieces. Unlike the forgotten clock of the female vagrant,
this clock enters the descriptive scene—“tolling deep” and thereby
restoring in another mode the depth that was presumably lost with the
loss of light. And against the sundial that opens the poem this clock
embodies development. It is, after all, a newer technology, and one no
longer absolutely dependent upon nature’s cycles and its light. Here,
against the potentially deadening stillness, against the cyclical coming
of night, against a hypnotic “aereal music of the hill” that presages a
loss of consciousness, temporality reasserts the special quality of human
experience. The tolling clock rouses us gently back into consciousness,
producing in the poet an intense awareness of the special moment. Much
as the sundial projects human meaning upon a picturesque landscape,
the tolling clock humanizes the darkness of evening.
It also reorients the natural sounds of evening, subsuming, for
example, the cacophony of the final lines into a temporal order. In
the first four of these lines we find a broken narrative. The shout,
followed by the sounds of the oar, the hoof, and the gate, are indeed
fragments, broken parts of people and things we would see were there
only enough light. But here they together embody a temporal order, a
small story in two characters, telling of a successful water crossing. The
natural sounds that follow—the hare, the owl, and a pair of howling
dogs—in turn appear within the temporal indications set up by the story
of the river crossing, though for good measure Wordsworth includes
the “thump” of a distant mill, which again pulls the disparate sounds
together under the suggestion of a humanizing progress that continues
even in darkness. The diversity of picturesque representation is here
organized within a temporal rather than a spatial frame.

668 Charting Wordsworth’s Evening Walk

 Beneath both the traditional picturesque of the poem’s body and the
dark picturesque of its conclusion, then, we find the presence of time
and temporal consciousness. The picturesque as inherited by Word-
sworth was of course both static and visual; it proffered a pleasurable
containment of diversity through the expansive framing vision of the
aristocrat or the artist. In An Evening Walk Wordsworth temporalizes
this frame, fitting it to the experience of linear temporality as an order-
ing and organizing force that both recognizes mortality and remains
open toward the future. We should note, however, that the poem does
not insist that the linear experience of time inevitably alienates human
beings from the natural world. The presence of natural sounds in the
final lines (hound, hare, owl), and the suggestion that evening is a
proper sphere of human activity, suggests rather the ability of nature to
expand and accompany human life. This natural accompaniment draws
us to the second lesson of Salisbury Plain: although nature can tempt
us with a circularity that falsifies our human experience, it can also fol-
low us and enrich our journeys through the world. Here Wordsworth
hints at a representation of nature less as a source of inauthentic im-
mortality than as a companion. The poem thus reverses the temptation
of assimilating human life into natural cycles: Wordsworth does not
seek a nature that could render him falsely immortal but one that can
attend him in his mortality. The poem concludes with a return to the
natural world that the poet has just spent over 400 lines describing,
yet in such a way that it becomes part of his plot rather than (as the
beginning suggests) a picturesque digression. It is the great virtue of
nature from Wordsworth’s perspective that it is large and complex
enough to assimilate to the necessarily linear experience of human
temporality. It is this wonderful conjunction that underlies, I believe,
the most insightful moments in Wordsworth’s poetry. The temporal-
izing of the picturesque that he undertakes in An Evening Walk is but
the first moment in a process of refiguring eighteenth-century modes
of thought and representation, and in so doing Wordsworth means
neither to imitate nor to reject them but to shift them toward a more
human understanding of mind and nature.
Princeton University
Notes
1
See Alan Liu, Wordsworth: The Sense of History (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press,
1989), esp. chapter three, “The Politics of the Picturesque.” Hereafter abbreviated W
and cited parenthetically by page number.

John Axcelson 669

 2
See especially the strong readings of the poem by Geoffrey Hartman in Word-
sworth’s Poetry, 1787–1814 (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1987) and Jonathan
Ramsay in “Seeing and Perceiving in Wordsworth’s Evening Walk,” MLQ 36 (1975):
376–89; both critics value the poem according to its suggestions of impatience with
eighteenth-century norms.
3
Paul D. Sheats, The Making of Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1785–1798 (Cambridge:
Harvard Univ. Press, 1973), 49.
4
One version of this perspective seeks to retain the centrality of Romanticism by
christening a properly romantic century, which would extend from the mid-eighteenth
to the mid-nineteenth centuries. This alternative arose from a conversation begun on
the NASSR listserv by Susan Wolfson and others in response to what was perceived as
a shrinking job market for romanticists. There is now a special number of European
Romantic Review (Winter 2000) devoted to the question.
5
Paul de Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” in Blindness and Insight: Essays in
the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, ed. Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: Univ. of
Minnesota Press, 1983), 197. See Jerome J. McGann, The Romantic Ideology (Chicago:
Univ. of Chicago Press, 1983).
6
Hartman calls the poem “a gallery of discrete pictures” and “an anthology of im-
ages from nature” (93).
7
See Clifford Geertz’s opening chapter of The Interpretation of Cultures (New York:
Basic Books, 1973), esp. 9–10.
8
James Averill, in his “Introduction” to his edition of An Evening Walk (Ithaca:
Cornell Univ. Press, 1984), remarks that the 1794 “Windy Brow” revision of the poem
seeks to reverse this withholding of subjectivity, adding “figures[s] to the landscape”
as well as a more “narrative and dramatic” focus (14).
9
In this respect Liu’s essay exhibits what Kevis Goodman (“Making Time for History:
Wordsworth, the New Historicism, and the Apocalyptic Fallacy,” Studies in Romanticism
[Winter 1996]) has characterized as “the apocalyptic or epiphanic fallacy behind many
historicist theories of poetic displacement.” Because historicism thinks in “all-or-nothing
categories of presence and absence,” Goodman writes, critical reading seeks to restore
history “with full dramatic or traumatic import”—that is, apocalyptically (556).
10
Sheats, 56. This withdrawal of consciousness from landscape represents a note-
worthy departure from Wordsworth’s source material, which routinely interpolates
reflection into description. One can count on Thomson, Gray, and Cowper to pull back
from description and into philosophical and moral reflection during their evening walks,
yet Wordsworth for his part keeps his moments of reflection in the poem’s opening
and closing materials.
11
William Wordsworth, An Evening Walk, lines 5–6, 20. All references to Wordsworth’s
poetry will be cited by line number as presented in William Wordsworth (The Oxford
Authors), ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1984).
12
Averill, 13.
13
I should mention that Salisbury Plain contains another, wider frame: a Godwinian
narrator opens and concludes the poem, using an explicitly critical manner of tone and
argument that sits uneasily alongside the story of the traveler. Indeed, the conclusion
issues an apocalyptic call for “Heroes of Truth” to rise up and destroy/transform this
corrupt world in the name of justice and thus stands in stark contrast to the return to
human temporality experienced by the characters. The import of the poem, I think,
lies in this contrast.

670 Charting Wordsworth’s Evening Walk

 14
Mary Jacobus, Tradition and Experiment in Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads (1798)
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 135.
15
Toby Benis, Romanticism on the Road: The Marginal Gains of Wordsworth’s
Homeless (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000), 33.
16
We may rightly wonder whether Wordsworth’s “home” is the future home with
Dorothy or a reference to some current abode—although he began the poem with a
suggestion of homelessness (“Far from my dearest friend, ’tis mine to rove” [1]) and
no home has hitherto been mentioned.
17
The exception, of course, is Gray in his Elegy, and this example shows that the
poet who remains outdoors is indeed drawn toward death.
18
Hartman, 94, 97.
19
See Liu, 65.

John Axcelson 671