The Duddon Sonnets - Notes to Sonnet II

II

          CHILD of the clouds! remote from every taint

          Of sordid industry thy lot is cast;

          Thine are the honours of the lofty waste

          Not seldom, when with heat the valleys faint,

          Thy handmaid Frost with spangled tissue quaint

          Thy cradle decks;--to chant thy birth, thou hast

          No meaner Poet than the whistling Blast,

          And Desolation is thy Patron-saint!

          She guards thee, ruthless Power! who would not spare

          Those mighty forests, once the bison's screen,              10

          Where stalked the huge deer to his shaggy lair

          Through paths and alleys roofed with darkest green;

          Thousands of years before the silent air

          Was pierced by whizzing shaft of hunter keen!

L. 1  The motif of the river’s birth at its source and death as it merges into the sea in the major structural device that gives shape to the series.

Ll. 4 – 8 The diction remains formal;  Personification is used extensively and Latinised syntax – ‘with spangled tissue quaint/Thy cradle decks.

Ll 9 – 14 A number of scientific ideas which had emerged in the previous 30 years are present here. Hutton’s pioneering work in the area of geology had led to a re-evaluation of the age of the earth and notions that the landscape and climate may well have been considerably different in the past. The bison and the extinct ‘huge deer’ (Leigh) reveal an awareness of a growing understanding of evolution found in the work of thinkers such as Erasmus Darwin.

Figure 1 Source of the Duddon from Wrynose Pass.