s i m o n ja rv i s Or must we seek these things where man is not? Methinks I could repeat in tuneful verse Delicious as the gentlest breeze that sounds Through that aerial fir-grove, could preserve Some portion of its human history As gathered from that Matron’s lips and tell Of tears that have been shed at sight of it In “a stream of words” what matters is not only the individual words In “Resolution and Independence” the leech-gatherer’s speech becomes “like a stream” to the poet precisely at the point where word-boundaries disappear, and what is heard, instead, is only the intonation contour: the leech-gatherer’s prosody.34 Here, Wordsworth is taking up again with the question of what kind of thing meter might be Is it a natural rhythm, something like a pulse or like breathing in and out? Or is it a violence imposed, something beaten out upon words? Our current theories of meter tend clearly to opt for one of these choices Meter can be understood either as something naturally cognitive, hard-wired into brain structure, or as something symbolic, an achievement of culture It is a quality of Wordsworth’s thinking in general to pay attention to the slipperiness and subtle intermediatedness of nature and culture, and upon no topic more so than meter He wishes for “an art that shall be life,” and knows how much he is wishing for The model for it is that “human history” possessed not, as it happens, only by some human beings, but by a clump of trees It would be a music whose human character would reside not in its ability to work the world over, filling it with human meanings, but in its capacity to receive meaning And it would be able to this just because meter itself cannot confidently be assigned, from a Wordsworthian view, either to nature or to culture Contemporary metrics might have something to learn from this refusal to class the cabinet of our sensations This unclassifiability of verse thinking is developed still more powerfully in a passage towards the end of Book V of Wordsworth’s “Prelude”: Visionary power Attends upon the motions of the winds Embodied in the mysteries of words; There darkness makes abode, and all the host Of shadowy things work their changes there As in a mansion like their proper home Even forms and substances are circumfused By that transparent veil with light divine, And through the turnings intricate of verse Present themselves as objects recognized In flashes, and with a glory scarce their own.35 112 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008