Essay

~Matthew Roth In “The Boy of Winander” Wordsworth paints the youth lakeside. He’s calling out to owls at dusk, his small hands cupped around his mouth, and when at last they don’t call back, the void they leave resides not in the air that fails to tremble with their song but in his own deep double self, whose heart receives instead, though he himself is unaware, “the voice Of mountain torrents; or the visible scene . . . With all its solemn imagery.” All these he carries “far into his heart,” as if the distance there conceived is not outward at all, instead begins at the ear or eye, the tongue or skin, whichever sense, absent mind, gathers the impression in. Does it matter that, in an early draft, at the moment the owl fails to call, Wordsworth becomes himself the boy: “my call,” “my skill,” “I hung,” he says, “[l]istening” for what never came. Or that, in later drafts, when Wordsworth slays the boy—“was taken from his Mates”—the third person is retained throughout? Or how, in its final version— a poor sequel he should have left undone— Wordsworth returns again, as from the dead, and stews upon the grave, which “hangs” halfway between the valley and that uncertain sky the boy once took into his heart, as if he were himself the steady, mirror lake? It’s but one more migration, self to other self, “other I” our lyric turn requires. What was it, after all, the boy desired? Just this: to hear his coarse cry echo back in a voice more alien and more true. It’s all that any poet wants, our ageless task and one more proof that Wordsworth was the boy he killed, his death a mirror death of form without matter, hard stars in the black of the lake. ~~~~~ Next