Wordsworth’s Webs: Spinning the Ecological Elegy

ABSTRACT

This article investigates two sites of Wordsworthian entanglement: the spider’s web across the abandoned well in “The Ruined Cottage” and the “web spun” in a neglected room in “The Brothers, A Pastoral Poem.” Both webs show Wordsworth’s attention to a theory of ecological entanglement that was emerging in the late 1790s, and more: Wordsworth’s experimental weaving of ecology and elegy. Wordsworth’s two surrogate elegists, the Pedlar and the Priest, use webs to track the subtle but active ways in which nature reacts to human grief and death. I show how both elegists develop distinct elegiac crafts to test different versions of the ecological elegy. Through their divergent poetics, they consider how elegy can incorporate ecological knowledge, how ecology reshapes past elegiac conventions, and how mourning itself becomes entangled in nature. Together their experiments allow Wordsworth to probe the close but precarious alliances between pathos, poetry, and ecology.

Acknowledgments

I am extremely grateful to Susan Wolfson, William Galperin, Nancy Yousef, Susan Stewart, Michael Nicholson, Denise Xu, Eliana Rosinov, and Pasquale Toscano for their helpful feedback on earlier drafts of this article. Thank you as well to Andrew McInnes and all the NASSR/BARS 2022 organizers for such a wonderful conference.

Notes

1 For the above-mentioned examples of “entanglement,” see, in order, New System 3.134, 3.332, 1.90; and Bartram 396, 456.

2 Nicholas Halmi notes that MS D of “The Ruined Cottage” was copied by Dorothy Wordsworth between February and November of 1799 (441). Jared Curtis claims “Wordsworth probably completed about half of [‘The Brothers’] before the end of December 1799 and finished it before 5 April 1800.” See Fenwick Notes 98.

3 See, for example, Peter Larkin on relations of ecological “scarcity” in the poem and Amelia Klein on Wordsworth’s “poetics of susceptibility.”

4 Bate notes that Gilbert White’s Natural History and Antiquities of Selbourne (1789) particularly popularized the “economy of nature” for Romantic audiences (36–39).

5 See James Thomson’s description of “the villain spider” in The Seasons (1744): “Amid a mangled heap / Of carcasses, in eager watch he sits, / O’erlooking all his waving snares around” (“Summer” 269–72).

6 Critics have long disagreed over whether the consolation to MS D is satisfactory. For example, while James Averill claims the Pedlar achieves catharsis by “invoking the permanence of nature” (82), Onno Oerlemans argues “the most brutal facts of absence in the physicality of remains” dismantle the consolation (64).