The River Duddon - A Series of Sonnets - William Wordsworth 1820 - some notes

Wordsworth’s Duddon Sonnets –  a ‘fanciful’ re-reading.

Wordsworth’s The River Duddon – A series of Sonnets was published in 1820; it forms the opening work in the ‘third and last volume of the Author’s Miscellaneous Poems’. The book also included the narrative romance, Vaudracour and Julia and a reprint of a Topographical Description of the Country of the Lakes, in the North of England. The sonnet series is not regarded as representative of Wordsworth’s finest work, and, aside from the final ‘valedictory sonnet’, more extensive excerpts are not included in his ‘Selected Poems’ from any major publisher such as Penguin, Everyman or OUP. This paper will not attempt to argue that this is an omission, rather that the Duddon Sonnets are worthy of re-evaluation for other reasons.

This requires a re-reading of the work as a whole, rather than a miscellany of separate sonnets loosely associated with a central theme. This latter response is understandable, for the sonnets themselves vary considerably in tone, diction, and style, and first acquaintance can provoke the thought, that aside from the obvious geographical point that the first poem is located at the river’s source, and the last at the Duddon Estuary, exactly what quality justifies the label ‘series’. Yet Wordsworth himself went further, remarking in his note to Sonnet XVII, ‘the foregoing Sonnets […] may be considered as a Poem’.

Approached as an entity, rather than a series of occasional sonnets, then the work emerges, within Wordsworth’s oeuvre, not as a great poem, but a pivotal one. Aspects of it are retrospective, recalling the young Wordsworth, the writer of charming, Augustan pastoral couplets found in his early Evening Walk; other lines evoke moments of soaring sublimity as grand as anything to be found in the first two books of The Prelude. His approach to landscape, however, especially the influence of the emerging sciences of geology and natural history mark a development from Wordsworth’s earlier approach which centred on a radical critique of the pastoral and the picturesque.

In this regard, comparison with Topographical Description of the Country of the Lakes, in the North of England, the prose piece included in the volume, can be instructive as it reveals the extent to which Wordsworth’s understanding of his native landscape reflected a knowledge of scientific discovery as much as philosophical ideas of the Sublime or an understanding of the relationship between Man and Nature derived to an extent from Rousseau.

The prose piece also assists in placing the Duddon Sonnets politically. A number of the poems contain passages describing rural life and allude to ‘the peasantry’. Any temptation to misunderstand these as being naïve pastoral interludes is eradicated on reading the section where he writes of ‘The Republic of Shepherds and Agriculturalists’. His ideas concerning self-sufficiency, independence and liberty place him firmly in the tradition of English rural dissent whose roots stretch back beyond the Levellers to Watt Tyler. Equally, it comes as little surprise that the sonnets themselves have a number of allusions to the United States of America. The ideas behind this ‘Republic of Shepherds’ seem closely allied in spirit to Hamilton’s concluding remarks in ‘The Federalist Papers’ produced as part of the debate around the development of the American constitution in 1787:

It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice…

Wordsworth’s development is sometimes portrayed as a simple arc from inventive radical, to dull conservative; the truth, however is more complex –T he Duddon Sonnets reveal that at 50 years of age, Wordsworth remained open to new ideas, and his politics retained libertarian aspects , at least so far as local matters were concerned.

This publication is pivotal in two other respects. Critically the volume was generally well received, ending a period of fifteen years following the Edinburgh Reviews scathing treatment of Lyrical Ballads, where reaction to Wordsworth’s publications had been largely negative. The critical response from 1820 onwards became increasingly positive, and by 1830 not only was Wordsworth influential in Britain, but was read enthusiastically by younger writers in America, such as Thoreau, and helped shape American Romanticism during the middle decades of the Nineteenth Century.

More generally 1820 was a pivotal year in terms of English Poetry, Keats ‘1820 Poems’ was published containing Hyperion and the ‘Odes’, and Shelley’s reputation was enhanced on publication of Prometheus Unbound.

Of these developments Wordsworth himself would have been unaware. He spent the period from April to November on an extended European journey with members of his family. The Wordsworths revisited old haunts, in Switzerland, the Italian Lakes. In the autumn Wordsworth met up in Paris with Annette Vallon and their daughter Caroline and her children – Wordsworth’s French grandchildren.

This reminds us that although the Duddon Sonnets take as their subject ‘a native stream’ and the volume in general focuses on the topography and character of ‘The Lakes’ and its people, Wordsworth was far from being a local nature poet, like Clare, for example. He was well travelled, a linguist, a man of letters and well acquainted with leading literary figures of the day. I can think of no other poet where Friends of the Earth’s erstwhile slogan – Think Global, Act Local - is more applicable.

Thr essay will be based on a close, annotated re-reading on the Duddon Sonnets. It will seek to show that their apparent ambiguities, inconsistencies of tone and diction are not the result of weaknesses, or an uneven approach but reveal the work to be sophisticated, poly-vocal and multi-faceted.