“Thy function was to heal and to restore”: The Sounds and Rhythms of the River Ecosystem in William Wordsworth’s The River Duddon Sonnets
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Marvin Reimann
Abstract
The writings of William Wordsworth evince a deeply ecological consciousness, a firm belief in the underlying connectedness of all living and non-living entities accounting for their continued existence. Such a consciousness becomes particularly evident in The River Duddon, A Series of Sonnets from 1820 as the poetic account of the river’s flow from its source in the mountains to its estuary between Morecambe Bay and the North Lonsdale coast. For not only does it constitute a core element of the Lake District, which Wordsworth deemed the best example of a region of eco-friendly and hence socially unified communities; it is also depicted, as will be elaborated in this paper, as an ecosystem consisting in a complex web of symbiotic interactions between the fluvial, vegetal, animal and human.Instead of focusing on verbal representations of such more-than-human interrelations through semiotic processes that appropriate their otherness and render them intelligible in solely human terms, however, this paper argues that Wordsworth’s “speaking monument” (Wordsworth 1954: 247, iii, l. 3) rather enacts these ecosystemic interactions on a vocal, aural, and rhythmical level. It thereby foregrounds the materiality and corporeality of poetic speech that precedes as well as grounds meaning and so connects the human to the river ecosystem in a pre-reflexive and somatic way. In this context, it will be pointed out how not only the speaker and other human characters participate in the Duddon’s web of reciprocal relations through rhythmical synchronisation and sonic attunement, but also how the reader becomes an active part in them through their vocal performance of the sonnets. The river’s autopoietic structure illustrated through the metaphor of the hydrological cycle, it will thus be shown, is thereby continued through the sonnet cycle as a direct organic product and hence integral component of the ecosystem that, by repeatedly giving rise to various idiosyncratic readings, will poetically contribute to the Duddon’s continued existence.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Frontmatter
- Introduction: Disturbing the Sedimentations of Nineteenth-Century Environments
- “In the Midst of Smoke and Flame”: Extraction Ecologies and Industrial Tourism in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press
- Florence Marryat’s Sensational Ecologies of Empire, 1865–1897: Imaginary Tropics, White Proto-Feminism, and a Comforting Plantationocene
- “She is the Great Outside”: Ecofeminist Potentiality in H. G. Wells’s The Sea Lady
- “Slippy with Rot”: The Irish Potato Famine and Neo-Victorianism’s Colonial Roots
- “Thy function was to heal and to restore”: The Sounds and Rhythms of the River Ecosystem in William Wordsworth’s The River Duddon Sonnets
- Blurring Reality and Blurring Gender: Fashion and Attire in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando
- The Narrative Ordeal of Enduring Love: A Divine Comedy Recast
- Treading the Spiral: Intermediality, Spatiality, and Materiality in Lance Olsen’s Theories of Forgetting
- The Inability to Mourn: Representation of Collective Psychology in the “We”-Narrative of Yiyun Li’s “Immortality”
- Reviews
- Claire Hansen. 2017. Shakespeare and Complexity Theory. New York: Routledge, xi + 222 pp., 10 illustr., 1 table, £35.99.
- Mathias Mayer. 2022. King Lear – Die Tragödie des Zuschauers: Ästhetik und Ethik der Empathie. Göttingen: Wallstein, 184 pp., €20.00.
- Eva Ries. 2022. Precarious Flânerie and the Ethics of the Self in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction. Anglia Book Series 76. Berlin: De Gruyter, 298 pp., €114.95.
- Helmut Pfeiffer. 2021. Das zerbrechliche Band der Gesellschaft: Diagnosen der Moderne zwischen Honoré de Balzac und Henry James. Paderborn: Brill, xxix + 375 pp., €79.00.
- Sämi Ludwig. 2020. Resurrecting the First Great American Play: Imperial Politics and Colonial Ambitions in Frontier Detroit. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, xiii + 270 pp., 20 illustr., $79.95.
- Mahshid Mayar. 2022. Citizens and Rulers of the World: The American Child and the Cartographic Pedagogies of Empire. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, xiii + 239 pp., $32.95.
- Marie-Laure Ryan. 2022. A New Anatomy of Storyworlds: What Is, What If, As If. Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press, x + 226 pp., 6 illustr., 3 tables, $89.95.
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Frontmatter
- Introduction: Disturbing the Sedimentations of Nineteenth-Century Environments
- “In the Midst of Smoke and Flame”: Extraction Ecologies and Industrial Tourism in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press
- Florence Marryat’s Sensational Ecologies of Empire, 1865–1897: Imaginary Tropics, White Proto-Feminism, and a Comforting Plantationocene
- “She is the Great Outside”: Ecofeminist Potentiality in H. G. Wells’s The Sea Lady
- “Slippy with Rot”: The Irish Potato Famine and Neo-Victorianism’s Colonial Roots
- “Thy function was to heal and to restore”: The Sounds and Rhythms of the River Ecosystem in William Wordsworth’s The River Duddon Sonnets
- Blurring Reality and Blurring Gender: Fashion and Attire in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando
- The Narrative Ordeal of Enduring Love: A Divine Comedy Recast
- Treading the Spiral: Intermediality, Spatiality, and Materiality in Lance Olsen’s Theories of Forgetting
- The Inability to Mourn: Representation of Collective Psychology in the “We”-Narrative of Yiyun Li’s “Immortality”
- Reviews
- Claire Hansen. 2017. Shakespeare and Complexity Theory. New York: Routledge, xi + 222 pp., 10 illustr., 1 table, £35.99.
- Mathias Mayer. 2022. King Lear – Die Tragödie des Zuschauers: Ästhetik und Ethik der Empathie. Göttingen: Wallstein, 184 pp., €20.00.
- Eva Ries. 2022. Precarious Flânerie and the Ethics of the Self in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction. Anglia Book Series 76. Berlin: De Gruyter, 298 pp., €114.95.
- Helmut Pfeiffer. 2021. Das zerbrechliche Band der Gesellschaft: Diagnosen der Moderne zwischen Honoré de Balzac und Henry James. Paderborn: Brill, xxix + 375 pp., €79.00.
- Sämi Ludwig. 2020. Resurrecting the First Great American Play: Imperial Politics and Colonial Ambitions in Frontier Detroit. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, xiii + 270 pp., 20 illustr., $79.95.
- Mahshid Mayar. 2022. Citizens and Rulers of the World: The American Child and the Cartographic Pedagogies of Empire. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, xiii + 239 pp., $32.95.
- Marie-Laure Ryan. 2022. A New Anatomy of Storyworlds: What Is, What If, As If. Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press, x + 226 pp., 6 illustr., 3 tables, $89.95.
