w i l l i a m k e ac h Through a thick forest Silence touched me here No less than sound had done before: the child Of summer, lingering, shining by itself, The voiceless worm on the unfrequented hills, Seemed sent on the same errand with the quire Of winter that had warbled at my door, And the whole year seemed tenderness and love (Book VII, ll 20–48) A lyric representation of lyric’s own restorative power, this passage evokes historical duration and age and seasonal change in the process of their yielding momentarily to an unforeseen sense of the “sweetness of the coming time” (l 33), to an intimation that “the whole year seemed tenderness and love” (l 48) As so often in The Prelude, “seemed” here is the rhetorical mark not of illusion but of visionary phenomenology (“the sky seemed not a sky / Of earth,” ll 349–50) Through a familiar paradoxical merging of “sound” and “Silence” (ll 42–3), “music” and “shining” light, lyric interrupts and transforms the poem’s record of its own historical genesis – “Five years are vanished since I first poured out / A glad preamble to this verse” (ll 1–4) – and projects its generative potential into the immediate future, as “last night’s genial feeling overflowed / Upon this morning” (ll 49–50) The beautiful performative enjambment in “Last night’s general feeling overflowed / Upon this morning” – the line overflows its own prosodic termination – is characteristic of Wordsworth’s blank verse and suggestive of this lyric moment’s arresting influence on the poem’s autobiographical and historical diegesis It is a formal effect generated out of an intense lyric responsiveness to nature’s “music” – but it is not itself an instance of musical form Neither, however, is it an instance of what Paul Fry sees as “lyric ostension’s” defining discursive register, “language viewed strictly as pure sound and as graphic trace” (p 21) Fry is rightly skeptical, as was John Hollander in his 1975 study Vision and Resonance,22 of poetry’s aspiration to the condition of music, since this aspiration usually “results in the reduction of music to sound” (p 44) “It is not music that poetry hears,” Fry continues, “but rather sound, with its emphasis on resonance, pitch, and timbre, and an implication even of monotony.” The “mesmerization by sound of the will to signify,” he says, “must be a permanent resource of poetry” (p 45) But in Wordsworth’s lyric epiphany at the beginning of Book VII of The Prelude, the sounds of nature are transfigured into a “gentle music” that quickens rather than mesmerizes the will to signify: the resulting overflow of renewed energy spills over from lyric interruption into resumed autobiographical narration via a textual event that summons up the full range of language’s semiotic and syntactic resources Wordsworthian lyric here empowers by interrupting and 232 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008