The Duddon Sonnets - Notes to Sonnet IV

      

IV

          TAKE, cradled Nursling of the mountain, take

          This parting glance, no negligent adieu!

          A Protean change seems wrought while I pursue

          The curves, a loosely-scattered chain doth make;

          Or rather thou appear'st a glistering snake,

          Silent, and to the gazer's eye untrue,

          Thridding with sinuous lapse the rushes, through

          Dwarf willows gliding, and by ferny brake.

          Starts from a dizzy steep the undaunted Rill

          Robed instantly in garb of snow-white foam;                 10

          And laughing dares the Adventurer, who hath clomb

          So high, a rival purpose to fulfil;

          Else let the dastard backward wend, and roam,

          Seeking less bold achievement, where he will!

L.1 – ‘Cradled Nursling of the mountain’ – continues the anthropomorphic motif.

L.3 – ‘Protean change’ – both evokes Proteus, God of the sea and rivers and introduces the image of the river as a ‘shape-changer’ which is developed as the central conceit of the sonnet.

L.7 – ‘sinuous lapse’ – a sense of serpentine slow motion?

Ll. 4-8 – The meaning here seems to be – that although the river ‘snakes’ through the landscape, this appears untrue to the viewer who sees it as loosely scattered chain.

A sense of this effect can be seen in this photograph of the Duddon looking downstream from Wrynose pass. More significant, however, than any literal interpretation, is the way Wordsworth presents the river as almost playing tricks on the ‘gazer’s eye’;  the writer manipulating the reader likewise. Recent scholarship, such as Michasiw (1995)  have sought to redefine the Picturesque, not as an aspect of Romanticism, but to an extent antithetical to it, by concentrating on its elements of ironic, self-aware, playfulness, rather than ‘mystificatory absolutism’ which he sees as typifying the Romantic vision. One of the interesting aspects of the Duddon Sonnets is their poly-vocality.

Ll 9 – 14 – The playful theme is further developed where the river mockingly dares ‘the Adventurer’ to out-strip its passage ‘down the dizzy steep’. The word ‘dastard’ here maintains its earlier meaning of coward or ‘lazy-bones’.