The Duddon Sonnets - Notes to sonnet XII

XII. HINTS FOR THE FANCY

          ON, loitering Muse--the swift Stream chides us--on!

          Albeit his deep-worn channel doth immure

          Objects immense portrayed in miniature,

          Wild shapes for many a strange comparison!

          Niagaras, Alpine passes, and anon

          Abodes of Naiads, calm abysses pure,

          Bright liquid mansions, fashioned to endure

          When the broad oak drops, a leafless skeleton,

          And the solidities of mortal pride,

          Palace and tower, are crumbled into dust!--                 10

          The Bard who walks with Duddon for his guide,

          Shall find such toys of fancy thickly set:

          Turn from the sight, enamoured Muse--we must;

          And, if thou canst, leave them without regret!

L.2 - immure – capture, enclose.

L3 - Objects immense portrayed in miniature – this is a concept which fascinated Wordsworth – part of the central conceit of the whole series is that it presents a little known, small river on as epic scale. This notion is repeated in the Topographical Description of the Lakes, ‘annexed’ to The River Duddon volume: ‘This concentration of interest gives to the country a decided superiority over the most attractive districts of Scotland and Wales, especially for the pedestrian traveller. (p223)

L5 - Niagara – the sonnet series makes a number of allusions to the landscape and native peoples of North America,

This sonnet reflects ideas that Wordsworth considered in some depth in prose around the time the Duddon series was being developed. He presents the river as a ‘Muse’. In the Postscript which immediately follows the series in the original 1820 edition, Wordsworth seeks to re-assure the reader that in writing a poem whose principal subject is a river, he is not attempting to steal Coleridge’s thunder, who had proposed some years earlier to write a poem called ‘The Brook’. Instead he looks forward to a moment when “The Brook” will ere long, murmur in concert with “The Duddon”. He then goes on to expand on the river as a poet’s Muse:

The power of waters over the mind of Poets has been acknowledged from the earliest ages: - through the “Flumina amem sylvas que inglorious” of Virgil, down to the sublime apostrophe to the great rivers of the earth, by Armstrong, and the simple ejaculation of Burns) chosen if I recollect right, by Mr. Coleridge, as a motto for his embryo “Brook”)

“The Muse nae Poet ever fand her,
Till by himsel’ he learned to wander.
Adown some trotting burn’s meander,
AND NA’ THINK LANG.”

The ‘fluvial Muse’ that Wordsworth proposes, at least in sonnet XII, seem specifically a Muse of Fancy. In the ‘stream’ of imagery presented in Ll 3 – 6, the river’s still reflections become an abode of Naiads and small waterfalls are re-imagined as miniature Niagaras. The sheer invention here again brings back to mind Wordsworth’s theories relating to the function of ‘Fancy’ within poetic creation:

Fancy depends upon the rapidity and profusion with which she scatters her thoughts and images; trusting that their number, and the felicity with which they are linked together, will make amends for the want of individual value: or she prides herself upon the curious subtilty and the successful elaboration with which she can detect their lurking affinities.

Ll. 9 -12 - 

 And the solidities of mortal pride,
Palace and tower, are crumbled into dust!--
The Bard who walks with Duddon for his guide,
Shall find such toys of fancy thickly set

The point that Wordsworth may be making here relates to his view that whereas the products of Fancy may be profuse, they remain ephemeral; only the works of poetic imagination have lasting resonance.

Again the Preface of 1815:

Fancy does not require that the materials which she makes use of should be susceptible of change in their constitution, from her touch; and, where they admit of modification, it is enough for her purpose if it be slight, limited, and evanescent. Directly the reverse of these, are the desires and demands of the Imagination. She recoils from everything but the plastic, the pliant, and the indefinite….Fancy is given to quicken and to beguile the temporal part of our nature, Imagination to incite and to support the eternal.