The Duddon Sonnets - Notes to Sonnet VIII

VIII

          WHAT aspect bore the Man who roved or fled,

          First of his tribe, to this dark dell--who first

          In this pellucid Current slaked his thirst?

          What hopes came with him? what designs were spread

          Along his path? His unprotected bed

          What dreams encompassed? Was the intruder nursed

          In hideous usages, and rites accursed,

          That thinned the living and disturbed the dead?

          No voice replies;--both air and earth are mute;

          And Thou, blue Streamlet, murmuring yield'st no more        10

          Than a soft record, that, whatever fruit

          Of ignorance thou might'st witness heretofore,

          Thy function was to heal and to restore,

          To soothe and cleanse, not madden and pollute!

The poet speculates on the nature of the first inhabitants of the Duddon valley – the vision of the primitive is not exactly a Rousseauian noble savage, but rather a more gothic figure ‘nursed in hideous usages, and rites accursed, that thinned the living and disturbed the dead.’

The river, though it may have witnessed the savagery, offers no more than a ‘soft record’. Although this is a poem of ‘the fancy’, nevertheless the Wordsworthian sense of the restorative power of Nature is asserted in the final two lines, and recalls the sentiment from Book 1 of the Prelude referred to earlier:

Amid the fretful dwellings of mankind

A foretaste, a dim earnest, of the calm

That Nature breathes among the hills and groves.

Book 1,  Ll. 279- 281.