Wordsworth's Cliff-Hanger
When Matthew Arnold undertook to publish a selection of Wordsworth's poetry in 1879, he was guided by a concern for the poet's diminished reputation and a belief that the weighty corpus of his poetry needed to be rescued from itself if it was to be rescued from undue neglect. "He is not fully recognized at home; he is not recognized at all abroad" (x), Arnold lamented, and then went on to propose his remedy: "To be recognized far and wide as a great poet, to be possible and receivable as a classic, Wordsworth needs to be relieved of a great deal of the poetical baggage which now encumbers him" -- starting with his "poems of greatest bulk" (xx). Accordingly, Arnold's distillation of Wordsworth's "best work" included only part of the first book of The Excursion -- the story of Margaret -- and nothing at all of The Prelude except for those few passages that Wordsworth had himself published as short poems.
The trend of critical opinion through the twentieth century to the present has, of course, amply vindicated Arnold's belief that "Wordsworth's name deserves to stand, and will finally stand" next to those of Milton and Shakespeare (x). Indeed, matters may have gotten out of hand if we accept Stephen Gill's assessment that "Wordsworth is now enshrined as one of the greatest poets of the English tradition, Shakespeare, of course, being the other" (Landmarks 105). But this result has not come about in the way that Arnold anticipated. True, The Excursion still tends to be treated as excess baggage and Wordsworth's late work in general remains largely unread, also in keeping with Arnold's editorial program. On the other hand, there can be little doubt that Ernest de Selincourt's 1926 publication of the 1805 text of The Prelude together with the 1850 text in a facing page critical edition proved crucial to the process of making Wordsworth "possible and receivable as a classic" for a latter-day readership. Already in 1930, Herbert Read could assert in his critical-biographical study, "The Prelude is a great poem; upon its greatness we base the claim of Wordsworth to be considered as one of our major poets" (13), a statement for which one would be hard-pressed to find an equivalent in earlier commentary. Today, by contrast, it requires a measure of historical perspective just to recognize that Read was actually arguing a case that he felt needed arguing and not simply intoning critical platitudes, so much do we now take for granted the centrality of The Prelude to our understanding of Wordsworth and the centrality of Wordsworth to our understanding of Romanticism and Romantic autobiography -- at least within the context of English studies.
We do well to remember, however, that Wordsworth's own attitude toward The Prelude was complexly equivocal. On the one hand, by the poet's own wellknown account in his preface to The Excursion, he had only undertaken "to record, in verse, the origin and progress of his own powers" in order to see whether he was "qualified" to "construct a literary Work that might live" -- by which he meant not The Prelude but "a philosophical poem, containing views of Man, Nature and Society; and to be entitled, The Recluse" (Excursion 2). If for today's readers, and in part because of Wordsworth's example, autobiography is an entirely normative literary form, for Wordsworth it was "a thing unprecedented in Literary history that a man should talk so much about himself," and the expression, as he confessed in a letter of 1805 to George Beaumont, of a "defect" in his writings which he had been unable to remedy: "The fault lies too deep, and is in the first conception" (Letters I, 586 - 7). "[I]t seems a frightful deal to say about one's self," he had written the year before in somewhat less somber tones to Richard Sharp, "and of course will never be published (during my lifetime, I mean), till another work has been written and published, of sufficient importance to justify me in giving my own history to the world" (Letters I, 470). Moreover, the conclusion to The Prelude itself, addressed in the first instance to Coleridge, articulates a similar concern:
Whether to me shall be allotted life,
And with life power to accomplish aught of worth
Sufficient to excuse me in men's sight
For having given this record of myself,
Is all uncertain &hellip; (1805, XIII, 386 - 90).
Both "plunderer," as previously noted, and "Where'er/The mother-bird had built her lodge" are 1805 revisions, and together they are calculated to bring out what Ellis calls "the predatory element in the boy's vigour" (41) and to identify its target. Especially if we juxtapose "Where'er &hellip; the mother-bird had built her lodge" with another addition of 1805, this time to the end of the verse-paragraph recalling Wordsworth's earliest years in Cockermouth -- 
As if I had been born
On Indian plains and from my mother's hut
Had run abroad in wantonness to sport. (1805, I, 301 - 3).
 -- the symbolic significance of the nest "among the mountains and the winds" emerges strongly. Mother-bird (both absent and predatory), aerial nest, and "unfledged raven" (not named as such but implicated in the overdetermined reference to the boy's "mean object") appear as totemic transfigurations of the original configuration of mother, child and sheltering structure (itself in a supplementary relation to the maternal body). The familiar place of origin is removed to a zone of hyperbolic remoteness, at once more guarded, more exposed, and more charged with "danger and desire," a spectral birthplace to which the boy would return as plunderer in order to actively and from a position of mastery enact a severance which has in fact already been brought about by the mother's death. That is, the unfledged raven that the boy takes from its nest represents an earlier version of himself from which he seeks to differentiate himself by placing it under his destructive control.
Thus far I have sought to elucidate the significance of the nest-robbing episode by considering it in the context of the The Prelude's early textual history and some of what we know, whether from the The Prelude itself or from other sources, about Wordsworth's early years. In drawing out a specific psychological subtext, my orientation has necessarily been thematic, but my main concern is less with this thematic material per se than with the transferential structure of substitutions, displacements and condensations which organize it. This structure both informs and is specifically exceeded by the remarkable narrative choreography of the nest-robbing episode, its disequilibriating performance of "the autobiographical moment," as that performance passes through a scene of precariously arrested movement, a scene framed in the suspended dependent clause that extends from "Oh, when I have hung/Above the raven's nest" to "oh, at that time/While on the perilous ridge I hung alone." I began by asking about the significance of this scene both as a figural pattern and a region of grammatical disturbance. I now return to that question as part of a more expanded consideration of the nest-robbing episode as exemplifying The Prelude's narrative art.
Considered as an elementary narrative unit, the recounting of a single event that is then articulated with other units into a complex narrative structure (in the case of The Prelude, a structure whose complexity grows exponentially as we move from MS JJ of 1798 to the "Two-Part Prelude" of 1799 to the "Five-Book Prelude" of 180415 to the thirteen-book version of 1805, while always conceived, in principle, as in turn fitting into the still higher-order complexity of The Recluse), the nest-robbing episode is notable, even by Wordsworth's standards, for the sheer minimalism of the plotted action. Compared, for example, with its companion piece, the woodcock-snaring episode, it lacks the most basic of dramatic articulations: a mounting action ("On the heights/Scudding way from snare to snare/I plied my anxious visitation &hellip; " [1805, 1, 318 - 9]); a climactic event or deed that serves as a turning point ("Sometimes it befell/In these night wanderings that a strong desire/O'erpowered my better reason, and the bird/Which was the captive of another's toils/Became my prey" [1805, I, 324 - 8]); and an aftermath ("and when the deed was done/I heard among the solitary hills/Low breathings coming after me" [1805, I, 328 - 30]). Similar comparisons could be made with virtually all of the other major spots of time. What we have rather in the nest-robbing scene is a single, strongly foregrounded scene of high drama; not a climactic event, though, but an acute interval of suspense, a literal cliff-hanger. In this regard, as de Man recognized, it resembles most closely the suspended anticlimax ("that silence while he hung listening") of "There was a boy," though here too there are important structural differences: "There was a boy" is again a much more articulated narrative, while in the nest-robbing passage, as indicated, the interval of suspense materializes, as it were, in an actual physical predicament.
This is by no means a simply negative or threatening moment though, however unsettling of the project of autobiographical self-constitution. For the true wonder of the passage is that it does not end here, but discovers within the precariousness of its situation new reaches of apprehension. Just as the scene of suspension emerges from the interaction between the cliff-face as resistant ground and the arrested movement of the human figure that traverses its surface, so now the "strange utterance" of the wind is produced out of the interaction between the arrested body and the rush of the "loud dry wind" that blows "through my ears." For while seeming to come from a distance, the "strange utterance" would in fact be propagated from within the recesses of the ear, like the "sound of the sea" one hears when one holds a shell to one's ear, and which in the dream passage of Book V Wordsworth describes as another kind of "strange utterance": "An ode in passion uttered" (97) "in an unknown tongue,/Which yet I understood" (94 - 5).
Thus the prepositional uncertainties of "With what strange utterance did the loud dry wind/Blow through my ears!" as the phrase oscillates between identifying the suspended ear as a locus of perception or, more strangely, as the instrumental channel through which the wind blows, generating utterance.
That what is heard is named not simply as sound, but "utterance" signals that the boy's awareness is becoming oriented toward a different form of relationship, as when the Boy of Winander hears, as he "hangs listening," the "voice of mountain torrents." In either case, it would be a mistake to read the figure of "utterance" in the one case and "voice" in the other as an anthropomorphism. The function of these figures is to displace subjectivity from its orientation towards itself as center, not to posit a center of subjectivity in the physical world. Of this moment, de Man writes in "Time and History in Wordsworth":
At the moment when the analogical correspondence with nature no longer asserts itself, we discover that the earth under our feet is not the stable base in which we can believe ourselves to be anchored &hellip; [I]instead of being centered on the earth, we are suddenly related to a sky that has its own movements, alien to those of earth and its creatures (78).
De Man is here still writing about "There was a Boy," but it is clear that his reading is already strongly shaped by the last lines of the nest-robbing episode: "The sky seemed not a sky/Of earth -- and with what motion moved the clouds." In particular, the statement that "we are suddenly related to a sky that has its own movements" (my emphasis) seems powerfully apt. I would only add one proviso. If "the sky seem(s) not a sky of earth" this is because there is no visual horizon joining sky and ground, only unbound space. But the horizontal plane of the ground has not so much disappeared as rotated. On the one side, open sky, on the other, solid cliff, between them, "ill sustain'd," an isolated human figure. The language of Wordsworth's Prelude never relinquishes its commitment to the perilous immediacy of that experiential ground.