The Duddon Sonnets - Notes on Sonnet XV

  XV

          FROM this deep chasm, where quivering sunbeams play

          Upon its loftiest crags, mine eyes behold

          A gloomy NICHE, capacious, blank, and cold;

          A concave free from shrubs and mosses grey;

          In semblance fresh, as if, with dire affray,

          Some Statue, placed amid these regions old

          For tutelary service, thence had rolled,

          Startling the flight of timid Yesterday!

          Was it by mortals sculptured?--weary slaves

          Of slow endeavour! or abruptly cast                         10

          Into rude shape by fire, with roaring blast

          Tempestuously let loose from central caves?

          Or fashioned by the turbulence of waves,

          Then, when o'er highest hills the Deluge passed?

The ‘deep chasm’ is a ravine below Wallowbarrow Crag through which the River Duddon runs situated a mile or so northwest of Seathwaite village.

The area, including the river bed itself and the surrounding woods and crags are covered with large boulders from past rock falls and landslides, (L.8, startling the flight of timid Yesterday).

In the notes Wordsworth recounts that a companion narrowly escaped a rock fall in the vicinity. The central question that the poem raises is what formed the niche in the ‘chaos’ of rocks – three explanations are proffered:

1.       The sculpted rocks are man-made, ‘weary slaves of slow endeavour’. Is it co-incidental that the Colossus of Ramses II had recently been discovered and Shelley’s poem along with the work of his friend Horace Smith had been published in 1817?

2.       A volcanic explanation – ‘abruptly cast into rude shape by fire’.

3.       A deluge -  ‘fashioned by the turbulence of waves’.

The latter explanation reflects Enlightenment ideas known as catastrophism, found in the work of Buckland and Lyell; they rejected creationist explanations of natural features and sought to explain them, partly through simple observation and partly through analysing fossil records, by postulating that present landmasses had formed within oceans and had been shaped by a series of subsequent inundations.

The work of Scottish farmer and scientist, James Hutton noted that in the Scottish mountains, granite penetrated the metamorphic schists leading him to conclude that some rock formation had been caused by volcanic activity, now dormant.

It is interesting that Wordsworth does not offer a creationist explanation, but puts forward the two scientific explanations current at the time known as Volcanism and Neptunism.

Geological maps from  British Geological Survey show the Wallowbarrow gorge to be a fault line between two areas extruded igneous rock – the river’s course was indeed ‘cast into rude shape by fire’.