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Z - SNG Tinturn Abbey
Z - SNG Tinturn Abbey
Zachary Sng
tansk@singnet.com.sg
These movements which Hartman designates as turns and counterturns might also
be conceived as approaches to and withdrawals from the object of address. By
this Pindaric allusion, so to speak, Wordsworth suggests the ultimately
elusive, ineffable nature ofhis subject, and the necessity of an
approach-avoidance relation to it (47).
Wordsworth's subject thus far in the poem, however, is nothing less than his own
subjectivity. The true other to the lyric voice are the multiple "I"s that have
been installed. The approaches and withdrawals, moments of unity and dispersion,
therefore destabilise lyric subjectivity itse lf. Within a poem that presents
the lyric subject reading himself, we therefore have a structure that renders
problematic both the subject matter of the poem and the subjectivity that
subtends it.
We move ahead a little now, to the final stanza of the poem, which contains the
intriguing address to the figure of the sister:
For thou art with me here upon the banks
Of this fair river; thou my dearest Friend
My dear, dear Friend, and in thy voice I catch
The language of my former heart, and read
My former pleasures in the shooting lights
Of thy wild eyes.This figure makes is part of the set of circumstances that
metonymically
surround the lyric speaker. It stands, however, both in a relationship of
similarity as well as contiguity to the lyric speaker. The apo strophe thus
yields a figure that is present as voice and text, to be heard and read, as well
as to hear and read. It is, in short, a full-fledged double of the lyric "I."
In this concluding stanza, then, the split between the present lyric "I" and its
various manifestations are situated within a dialogic structure. The addressee
is a containing figure, a receptacle in which resides the lyric "I"s fragmented
otherness, shards of subjectivity that manifest themselves as the"shooting
lights"of the figure's wild eyes. It is at this point, after the trope of
address, that the lyric "I" manages for the first time to articulate a presence
that does not threaten to sublate into transcendence or fall into fragmentation: