Tautology and Imaginative Vision in Wordsworth

Who is the drowned man of Esthwaite? Where does he come from, and where does he take us? That enigmatic figure may be found at the centre of the first of the Prelude spots of time, which describes an incident dating from Wordsworth's first week at Hawkshead, in May 1779. It may be that the drowned man of Esthwaite never exists as a 'living being' - at least within the poem - but it is hard to avoid the feeling that he resurfaces as something other than what once he was. He is, in a way, a paradox. That 'ghastly face' distinguishes him from the living, while affirming his likeness to us. All the while we know, as well as the poet, that he is no longer human. At first glance the drowned man and the subject of Shakespeare's song have much in common. Both enjoy a kind of immortality, undergoing not the expected disintegration but instead a magical translation into 'something rich and strange'. There is an added dimension to Wordsworth's drowned man, however. He is part of an experience beyond time. When Wordsworth tells us that the 'breast' of the calm lake darkens as the young poet waits for the owner of the 'heap of garments' to return, he is doing more than merely filling in the narrative; in fact, he is not telling a story but sabotaging it. The young poet's interminable wait does not advance the 'drama' at all. In those terms, it is an irrelevance - because the story (if there is one) is not dependent on event. The use of the word 'breast' in describing the lake may prompt us to ask why the water should be so humanized. One possible answer lies in the observation that it anticipates the infant babe in Part II of the poem, who 'sleeps / Upon his mother's breast' (Two-Part Prelude ii 270-1). That resonance might lead us to wonder whether the infant's mother - effectively that of the poet - is somehow present in the Esthwaite landscape, perhaps in the underworld beneath the water's surface; or perhaps the 'calm lake', as it darkens, brings the watching boy closer to her, affirming the primal bond forged when he was an infant. If the recollected landscape manages to admit Wordsworth to the underworld, it does so through the stillness that characterizes the no man's land on the borders of life and death - a state that describes not so much the landscape but the mood of the young boy as recollected by the mature poet. So far the experience as it is, imbued with emotion, has been spatial. But the drowned man is part of a psychological complex: the 'breast' of the lake, and its 'breathless stillness', indicate that in some obscure sense he has come to pervade the scene. And that persistent sense of his dissipated continuation is only compounded by Wordsworth's casual reference to the passing of time: 'Half an hour I watched . . .' Who are the 'company' that floats out into the lake with hooks and poles? The fact is, Wordsworth is not concerned with the trivia of narrative; he is right to leave such things to the annotator, randy, to use Larkin's phrase, for antique. And yet, contrived by someone so shamelessly indifferent to the mechanics of linear narrative, the recollection climaxes, surprisingly, with a denouement that seems to satisfy the quest for a corpse: The discovery itself is treated with the same contempt meted out to the mechanicals responsible for it, dispatched in two and a half lines. What counts is …