Reciprocal Scansion in Wordsworth's ‘There Was a Boy’

© 2009 The AuthorsJournal Compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Literature Compass 6/2 (2009): 515–523, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2008.00614.x

Blackwell Publishing LtdOxford, UKLICOLiterature Compass1741-41131741-4113© 2008 The Author Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd61410.1111/j.1741-4113.2008.00614.xDecember 200800515???523???The VictoriansReciprocal Scansion in Wordsworth’s ‘There Was a Boy’Reciprocal Scansion in Wordsworth’s ‘There Was a Boy’

Reciprocal Scansion in Wordsworth’s ‘There Was a Boy’

Emma Mason*University of Warwick

Rhian Williams**De Montfort University

AbstractThis article is part of a cluster that draws material from the recent conferenceMetre Matters: New Approaches to Prosody, 1780–1914. It comprises an introductionby Jason David Hall and six articles presented at the conference, whose aim wasto address renewed scholarly interest in versification and form across the longnineteenth century, as well as some of the methodologies underpinning it. Thepapers included in the cluster look both to the minutiae of Romantic andVictorian metres and to their cultural intertexts. The conference, hosted by theUniversity of Exeter’s Centre for Victorian Studies, was held 3–5 July 2008.The cluster is made up of the following articles:Jason David Hall, ‘Metre, History, Context: Introduction to the Metre MattersCluster’.Emma Mason and Rhian Williams, ‘Reciprocal Scansion in Wordsworth’s “ThereWas a Boy”’.Ross Wilson, ‘Robert Browning’s Compounds’.Margaret A. Loose, ‘The Internationalism of Ernest Jones’s Dialectical Prosody’.Nancy Jiwon Cho, ‘Gender and Authority in British Women Hymn-Writers’Use of Metre, 1760–1900’.Ashley Miller, ‘Involuntary Metrics and the Physiology of Memory’.

Summer Star, ‘“For the Inscape’s Sake”: Sounding the Self in the Metres ofGerard Manley Hopkins’.

***In this two-voiced paper, we conduct an experiment in ‘reciprocal scansion’:

a process in which prosodic investigation and labelling becomes a site, not forfixing the terms of a poem’s formal effects, but for communication and dialogue.The paper will overturn the assumed association between scansion and ‘naturalness’(the iambic pentameter as human heartbeat, for example), one that oftenmanifests as peremptory analysis based on cultural prescription (as implied in anEton Latin master’s rhetorical questions in 1840: ‘if you do not write good longsand shorts, how can you ever be a man of taste? If you are not a man of taste,how can you ever be of use in the world?’). By renouncing openness anddialogue for rote methods of formal measurement, predetermined ways ofscanning poetry serve to distance readers from, rather than draw them to, a

516 Reciprocal Scansion in Wordsworth’s ‘There Was a Boy’

© 2009 The Authors Literature Compass 6/2 (2009): 515–523, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2008.00614.xJournal Compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

poem’s formal effects. In order to undo this knot of formalism, we seek to locatedialogue, rather than singularity of effect, at the heart of our investigation. Anexamination of prosodic variations within larger frames of regularity allows us toaccess the different effects that prosodic choices enact upon readers. In particular,this paper illustrates how Wordsworth’s frequent emphasis on movements betweenthe ear and the eye traces thematically vital transitions between sight and sound,and in doing so, allegorizes the process of scansion used in prosody. By bringingthis treatment to bear on ‘There Was a Boy’, we critique the ‘naturalness’ ofprosody and bring out the ways in which Wordsworth’s ‘intertexture of ordinaryfeeling’ involves the coalition of emotion and regulation through metre. Thiscoalition also hints at meetings and encounters that, by virtue of prosody, can bereciprocally rewarding.

I

We began thinking about this paper, and planning to write and deliver ittogether, with the wish to re-think the place of prosody in our readingand teaching of poetry. In this respect, we come in at a slight angle onthe Metre Matters conference: where the call for papers reminded us that‘metre mattered to nineteenth-century poets and readers’, we wanted tothink about how that history might make us re-think how metre mattersto us, to readers, teachers and learners today. How might our reactions toand recognitions of the metre of poetry offer a way into thought, intocommunication, into the past? And how might we communicate thatreaction?

We suggest that prosody is a site, not for fixing the terms of a poem’sformal effects, but for communication and dialogue. But we are alsomindful of how rote methods of measuring and scanning poetry candistance readers from, rather than draw them into a poem’s formal effects.Instead, our paper suggests an approach in which prosody’s rules neces-sarily shift and change according to the subjective, cultural and regionalway specific readers hear and see words. To this end, we offer a readingof Wordsworth’s ‘There Was a Boy’ as a poem that allegorizes the processof scansion as forever evolving and spontaneous, as if indicatively writtenin chalk rather than proscriptively recorded in indelible ink. We haveprovisionally called our method ‘reciprocal scansion’: ‘reciprocal’ names abackward-forward movement, and ‘scansion’ brings with it a visual atten-tion to the page, the site of marking metrical units. However, we like tothink that it also brings with it two further uses: an older sense, whereinscansion implies the action of climbing up, of moving from a depth to aheight; and given in return, a conversation between two or more readers.

Our sense that prosody is both a fit and an unfit frame for poetry is,of course, not new. It is precisely this nexus of concerns that Wordsworthand Coleridge brought to the nineteenth century. Lyrical Ballads’ famouscoalition of metre with ordinary speech, while controversial then and


Reciprocal Scansion in Wordsworth’s ‘There Was a Boy’ 517

now, seemed to hold a hand out to our concerns. Wordsworth’s desire tobring the ‘language really used by men’ (Prose Works 1:123) together withthe pleasures of metricality spoke to our sense of a scansion that takesaccount of subjectivity, especially where such subjectivity is voiced in anindividual’s accented speech. But how to put this into practice?

As we were thinking through this problem two monographs on Words-worth – Wordsworth Writing (2007) by Andrew Bennett and Wordsworth’sPhilosophic Song (2007) by Simon Jarvis – were published in the Cam-bridge Studies in Romanticism series. Despite their stable-mates appear-ance, their approaches differ so radically that they in fact exemplify thetwo extremes we think so frequently hamper critical discussion of poetry.That is, either the attempt to produce such an individualized interpretationthat it obscures the poem for external readers; or, a reading that isso remote from prosody that the poem is overwhelmed by contextualinterpretation.

Simon Jarvis’s Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song makes considerable attemptsto move beyond historicist/formalist divides by carefully and self-con-sciously close-reading Wordsworth’s poems and prose alongside numerousphilosophical, social and political sources. Jarvis is well known for hisforwarding of prosody as a form of thinking: he refutes the scientism ofmany prosodists and argues instead for a philosophy of prosody that forgesa way to think in verse. Thus Wordsworth’s ‘philosophic song’, Jarvis says,is neither a system nor a method, but instead a song that is philosophical,a poem that requires thinking through. For Jarvis this means ‘that adifferent kind of thinking happens in verse – that instead of being a sortof thoughtless ornament or reliquary for thinking, verse is itself a kind ofcognition, with its own resistances and difficulties’ (Philosophic Song 4).Jarvis reads Wordsworth as a speculative poet whose verse deliberatelygrants readers what Wordsworth called in the ‘Preface’ to his 1815 Poemsa ‘voluntary power to modulate, in subordination to the sense, the musicof the poem’ (Prose Works 2: 29–30). While Jarvis’s prose is withoutquestion seductive and lyrical, his analyses of Wordsworth’s poetry in thebook feel as if they dissolve on reading: he seems so concerned withpreserving the spell of prosody that he never quite translates his interpre-tations of Wordsworth into a criticism that can be paraphrased, repeatedand engaged with. As a creative critic, Jarvis is arresting; as a critic con-tributing to a field populated with different kinds of readers interested inthinking and talking about Wordsworth, he produces analyses so dizzyingthat they risk blocking us from the poems so fundamental to his book.

Andrew Bennett, on the other hand, is almost averse to the spell ofprosody. His book Wordsworth Writing does what it says on the tin: it is abook about how Wordsworth wrote down his poetry – with an actualpencil on actual paper. Bennett contends that the history of criticism onWordsworth shows the poet walking, thinking, remembering, contem-plating and reciting his poetry, and so privileges a rhetoric of inspiration



that negates the poet’s compositional and revisionary practices. While wedo not recognize this history of criticism on Wordsworth – many critics,in fact, have commented on Wordsworth’s writing practices1 – we werealso puzzled by Bennett’s refusal to engage with the lines he so anxiouslyinsisted had been written down. Nearly half of the book reads like anappendix to debates about deconstruction and grammatology rather thanpoetry. And by conflating poetry all too simply with writing, he overlooksthe nuanced transitions between ear and eye constituted by prosody andscansion: his preference is for discussing the titles of works rather thanworks themselves. By contrast with Jarvis, for Bennett Wordsworth’spoetry is precisely about not thinking, to the extent that Bennett summa-rizes the lyrical ballad ‘We Are Seven’ as a record of a break down incommunication (111), without exploring how its form, its shape or itssound might offer a route out of such an impasse.

In seeking a reading practice that can forge a way around of these twoalternative approaches, we were encouraged by Jarvis’s suggestion thatprosody is a way of thinking in verse: a proposal that at least moves uscloser to Wordsworth’s poetry. His suggestion elsewhere that ‘prosodycannot be grounded on the model of the measurement of an object’(‘Prosody as Cognition’ 6) indeed speaks precisely to the problem we wereencountering in the classroom, where measurements all too quickly canbecome alienating rules. Not only is the measurement of an object inprosody, as Jarvis demonstrates, almost impossible, but it is also a culturalact – as the Eton Latin master’s desire to parcel out taste to the world vialongs and shorts demonstrates. Those students who are familiar withprosodic terminology, for example, have commonly received privilegededucation in this area, but their bright and insightful peers, who havenot had this experience, are left stranded amidst a mass of seeminglyspecialized knowledge. Regional accents, too, might mean that somestudents scan lines and stress specific words in a manner that contradicts thestress patterns dictated by a Received Pronunciation still used in manycritical textbooks on prosody. To out-manoeuvre this doleful picture, andindeed to re-invigorate prosody as a critical method that can be relevant,insightful and cognitive, we propose prosody not as proscriptive but ashabitual. By habitual we imply something lived with and repeated, notartificially induced.

Recently the English Project launched a Kitchen Table Lingo dictionarythat invited people to submit the names their friends and families hadaccrued for objects in their homes. A commonly idiomized item, it seems,is the TV remote control, variously called ‘doofer’, ‘changer’, ‘clicker’,‘zapper’, ‘blipper’ and ‘melly’. What is striking is that all of these wordsintroduce a trochee where the ‘correct terminology’ would have us usetwo consecutive iambs: remote control. This anecdote not only undoes theassumption that iambic metre is somehow ‘natural’ to English speech(exposing the ideological basis of prosody) but also shows us – shows



students – how we live with rhythm, with prosody, all the time. How itaffects us, comforts us and slips into our aural engagement with theeveryday world, even when it is only to switch on the TV and zone out.Wordsworth understood this lived experience of metre; indeed, to readLyrical Ballads prosodically, we contend, is to learn how, when ‘Felt in theblood, and felt along the heart’ (‘Tintern Abbey’ line 28), scansion becomesa way into hearing a poem, rather than a barrier obstructing our view.

II

There was a Boy, ye knew him well, ye CliffsAnd Islands of Winander! many a time,At evening, when the earliest stars beganTo move along the edges of the hills,Rising or setting, would he stand alone,Beneath the trees, or by the glimmering lake,And there, with fingers interwoven, both handsPress’d closely palm to palm and to his mouthUplifted, he, as through an instrument,Blew mimic hootings to the silent owlsThat they might answer him. And they would shoutAcross the wat’ry vale and shout again,Responsive to his call, with quivering peals,And long halloos, and screams, and echoes loudRedoubled and redoubled, concourse wildOf mirth and jocund din. And, when it chancedThat pauses of deep silence mock’d his skill,Then, sometimes, in that silence, while he hungListening, a gentle shock of mild surprizeHas carried far into his heart the voiceOf mountain torrents, or the visible sceneWould enter unawares into his mindWith all its solemn imagery, its rocks,Its woods, and that uncertain heaven receiv’dInto the bosom of the steady lake.This Boy was taken from his Mates, and diedIn childhood, ere he was full twelve years old.Fair are the woods, and beauteous is the spot,The vale where he was born: the Church-yard hangsUpon a slope above the village school,And there along that bank when I have pass’dAt evening, I believe, that oftentimesA long half-hour together I have stoodMute – looking at the grave in which he lies!2

Wordsworth’s ‘There Was a Boy’ works through the question of readingby focusing on the relationship between hearing and seeing to such anextent that we wish to read it here as an allegory or conceit of prosody.



The poem relates the story of a boy who, deep in the cliffs and islands ofWinander, calls to the owls to evoke a response from them. When theyanswer him, their calls peal and halloo across the vale; when they do not,the boy hears something else in the silence – a ‘gentle shock of mildsurprize’ that carries ‘far into his heart the voice / Of mountain torrents’(lines 19–21). The speaker closes this description by confessing that thisboy has now passed away, dying in childhood, and is buried in the localchurchyard, where the speaker sometimes visits his grave on summerevenings. The speaker stands ‘Mute – looking at the grave’ a ‘long half-hour together’ (lines 34, 33) and ends his poem with an exclamation markthat momentarily freezes the reader into a pause that encourages contem-plation and reflection. Wordsworth often creates spaces in his poetry formeditative thought: his reference to the ‘long half-hour’ (line 33) inwhich he stands before the boy’s grave recalls the ‘full half hour’ (line 1)he spends gazing at his garden in his later poem ‘To a Butterfly’. Bothhalf hours invoke a space of time ideally suited to the practice of medi-tation. Yet Wordsworth’s ‘half hour’ is both repeatable and temporallyaltering according to subjective experience rather than fixed measures: itis long in one poem and full in the other.

In ‘There Was a Boy’ Wordsworth’s half hour prompts the reader toturn back to the beginning of the poem to contemplate it over again. Thereader is thus initially settled into an iambic rhythm secured by its story-telling opening – ‘There was a Boy’ (line 1) – but then invited to rethinkthe pentameter pace by a shifting set of feet and pauses. Even as theiambic line persists into the description of how the boy calls to the owls– through pressed palms to his mouth ‘Uplifted, he, as through an instru-ment’ (line 9) – the metre encourages the reader’s eye, ear, and mouth toconverge, like the boy himself, by placing primary stresses on the short‘I’s of ‘lifted’ and ‘instrument’. These rise out of the iambic line and offerthe possibility of other feet (perhaps an amphibrach in ‘Uplifted’?) just asthe boy’s halloos are lifted up to the owls, offering them a human versionof their regular, repeated call.

When he hears nothing in return, however, the boy almost uncon-sciously starts to see the scene before him, as if the visual is a kind ofback-up that ignites when listening fails:

And, when it chancedThat pauses of deep silence mock’d his skill,Then, sometimes, in that silence, while he hungListening, a gentle shock of mild surprizeHas carried far into his heart the voiceOf mountain torrents, or the visible sceneWould enter unawares into his mindWith all its solemn imagery, its rocks,Its woods, and that uncertain heaven receiv’dInto the bosom of the steady lake. (ll. 16–25)



Wordsworth writes in a sequential hierarchy of listening and then seeingin this passage to enable the reader who cannot at once hear the poem toreturn to the text before him or her and explore its sound by thinkingabout the stresses he or she might see on the page. The boy’s ability tolisten intensely is what grants him the tingle of revelation that carries ‘farinto his heart the voice / Of mountain torrents’; but if he is temporarilyunable to hear, the ‘visible scene’ (line 21) appears before him to help himreturn to that state of profound listening. Dependent on only vision, theboy’s perception of nature is for a moment compromised – his heavenuncertain and the rocks and woods solemn. Yet even this listing of naturalobjects in monosyllables – ‘its rocks, / Its woods’ (line 23–4) – establishesa calming iambic beat that encourages the voice to elide ‘heaven’ (line 24)into the monosyllable ‘heav’n’ in a closing movement that suggests thevoice is also received into the steady lake that seems almost maternally toground uncertain vision. This movement thus reprises the boy’s earlierreceipt of the sound of mountain torrents into his heart and these twoechoing layers help to make sense of a kind of ‘oral vision’ accessedthrough deep feeling.

Wordsworth assists his reader in the same way as nature assists the boy,giving those of us initially unable to hear the poem several visual sound-signifiers: there is the repeated ‘oo’ sound of ‘hootings’, ‘halloos’, ‘woods’,‘childhood’, ‘school’, ‘stood’ and ‘looking’; line 15’s ‘ou’ pattern in‘Redoubled and redoubled, concourse wild’ offers the reader a kind ofeye-assonance, and the oral echoes of the boy and owl’s reciprocal dia-logue are repeated in visual echoes, such as ‘hung / Listening’ and ‘hangs/ Upon’ in lines 18–19 and 29–30. We contend that ‘reciprocal scansion’is implied here as the eye and ear move backward and forward, mutuallyenhancing each other, giving and taking in the pursuit of the even-nessthat Wordsworth speaks of as the vital benevolence of poetry: that ‘co-presence of something regular’ that produces a beneficial ‘intertexture ofordinary feeling, and of feeling not strictly and necessarily connected withthe passion’ (Prose Works 1:147). This allows the reader both to feel theboy’s revelatory experience and to endure the pain that will come withknowledge of his childhood death.

Even the speaker’s contemplative stance before the boy’s grave – whichhe reaches by a route that takes him logically and regularly (one might sayprosodically) on his climb past the village, the school, and up the slope –is infused with this reciprocal scansion: his ‘Mute – looking’ (containinga spondee by virtue of internal rhyme, visual quasi-hyphenation andnecessity in articulation) evokes his silent vigil by suggesting that heappears physically mute, but the poem/grave (both objects are also ‘mute-looking’) gives voice to his implied revelation. His silence offers the readera gateway into the same emotional experience the boy has in the pauseof silence granted to him by the owls. Neither the narrator nor the boyis isolated in his oral and visual experience, however; both are surrounded



by the vale of Winander as well as the church and school community.Both figures are figuratively communal: the boy creates a voice for theowls by calling to them with his hands ‘Press’d closely palm to palm’ (line8), as if in prayer; and the speaker tells us that he stands ‘A long half-hourtogether’ – both with the grave but also together with himself, as if hehears and watches his own narration.

Wordsworth is valuable, we think, as a figure who encourages us tounderstand poetry as a site of communication and exchange, both inresearch and in teaching. The current resurgence of interest in prosody isthus beneficial to the discipline because it offers us a way of findingenticing and incisive routes into the past by insisting on attentiveness, onengagement and on reciprocal exchange. Prosody offers the possibility thatwe might gradually climb higher, step by step, across, through, and in apoem into the pulse and beat of the nineteenth-century – a century inwhich prosody was contested, debated and argued over as a vital lifeprocess. Yet, prosody is not only just so much more history, anotherbranch of cultural studies. It should, we propose, be a habit of mind, away of inhabiting the body (our own and a poem’s), a habit of readingand a habit of listening: in that way we might learn to feel and discernthe rhythmic roots of cognition both within ourselves and through those,students and colleagues, with whom we read and learn.

Short Biographies

Emma Mason works on the relationship between religion, philosophy andpoetry, with a focus on the affective impact of prosody. She is the authorof The Cambridge Introduction to Wordsworth (Cambridge University Press,2009), Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century (Writers and Their Work,2006) and Nineteenth-Century Religion and Literature: An Introduction, withMark Knight (Oxford University Press, 2006). She recently co-edited,with Isobel Armstrong, a special issue of Textual Practice on ‘Languages ofEmotion’ (22.1 [2008]). Her edition The Collected Works of Elizabeth Jennings(Carcanet) and her co-edited The Blackwell Companion to English Literature(Blackwell) are forthcoming. She is a Senior Lecturer at the University ofWarwick.

Rhian Williams’s research interests centre on nineteenth-century literature,particularly poetry, and on poetry in teaching. Her published work onShakespeare’s nineteenth-century reception, Tennyson, ‘Michael Field’and Barrett Browning foregrounds ‘close-reading’ approaches and arguesfor sustained and detailed consideration of the cultural implications ofform and genre. Her forthcoming The Poetry Toolkit: The Essential Guide toStudying Poetry (Continuum, 2009) provides a wide-ranging introductionto the generic traditions that shape Anglophone poetry, as well as a clearand accessible guide to prosody. Williams’s various research interests incultural forms elsewhere look to Victorian theatre and dramatic experiment.



Currently, she is part of the team editing three volumes of The Brownings’Correspondence. Before taking up an AHRC-funded research fellowship atDe Montfort University in Leicester, where she now teaches, Williamstaught at the University of Warwick. She holds a B.A. and an M.A. inEnglish Literature from the University of Bristol and a Ph.D. in nineteenth-century literature from the University of Birmingham.

Notes

* Correspondence address: Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies, TheUniversity of Warwick, COVENTRY CV4 7AL, UK. Email: [email protected].** Correspondence address: Department of English Literature, 5 University Gardens, Universityof Glasgow, Glasgow, G12 8QQ, UK. Email: [email protected].

1 See, for example, Finch; Parrish; Gill; Lindenberger et al.; Galperin; Stillinger; Wu; Sutherland.2 We have reconstructed, from notes and variants included in the Cornell edition (Lyrical Ballads139–41), the version of ‘There Was a Boy’ printed in Poems (1815), since it was in the Prefaceto this volume that Wordsworth referred to ‘images of sound and sight, in the celestial soil ofthe Imagination’ (Lyrical Ballads 379; our emphasis). The numerous modifications that Wordsworthmade to this and other poems means that, in keeping with the spirit of this paper, they toorepresent shifting process rather than rigid fixity.

Works Cited

Bennett, Andrew. Wordsworth Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007.Finch, John Alban. ‘The Ruined Cottage Restored: Three Stages of Composition’. Bicentenary

Wordsworth Studies in Memory of John Alban Finch. Eds Jonathan Wordsworth and BethDarlington. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1970. 29–49.

Galperin, William H. Revision and Authority in Wordsworth: The Interpretation of a Career. Phila-delphia, PA: U of Pennsylvania P, 1989.

Gill, Stephen. ‘Wordsworth’s Poems: The Question of Text’. Review of English Studies 134(1983): 172–90.

Jarvis, Simon. ‘Prosody as Cognition’. Critical Quarterly 40.4 (1998): 3–15.——. Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007.Kitchen Table Lingo. The English Project. (5 May 2008). <http://www.englishproject.co.uk/

index.php/component/option,com_chronocontact/Itemid,110/>.Lindenberger, Herbert, et al. ‘Waiting for the Palfreys: The Great Prelude Debate’. Wordsworth

Circle 17.1 (1986): 2–38.Parrish, Stephen. ‘The Editor as Archaeologist’. Kentucky Review 4 (1983): 3–14.Stillinger, Jack. ‘Textual Primitivism and the Editing of Wordsworth’. Studies in Romanticism

28.1 (1989): 3–28.Sutherland, Kathryn. ‘Revised Relations? Material Text, Immaterial Text, and the Electronic

Environment’. Text 11 (1998): 3–28.Wordsworth, William. Lyrical Ballads and Other Poems, 1797–1800. Eds James Butler and Karen

Green. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1992.——. The Prose Works of William Wordsworth. 3 vols. Eds W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington

Smyser. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974.Wu, Duncan. ‘Editing Intentions’. Essays in Criticism 41.1 (1991): 1–10.

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Reciprocal Scansion in Wordsworth's ‘There Was a Boy’

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