William Wordsworth and a Poem’s Strength

A nation, an international community, a local town, a branch of government, and a citizenry all aspire to a condition of strength. Politics demands strength and is measured by it: whatever else we expect from institutions—justice, or efficiency, or something else—it is difficult to conceive of them delivering on their promises absent strength. 

This is because “strength” is a fundamental concept for measuring success, health, wellness, and natural fulfillment. It is, in fact, even more profound a concept than “nature.”  I can speak of a person who is healthy, and I mean they possess strength to do some number of things. I can speak of a person who is good, but they might lack willpower or determination; they are not sufficiently strong for their goodness to be realized. (Fortitude, says Aquinas, is the foundational virtue.) If I am using a rock to build a wall, it is suitable in so far as it fits and is strong. If I am instead seeking a substance that yields, it is strong in so far as its yielding does not involve its dissolution. Its strength is in yielding and remaining what it is; it may be that its strength is in yielding. 

 The word “strength” is, like “goodness” and “truth,” a basic concept—and that it fits in with these in a strange way. There is no Platonic ideal of “the strong” as there is of “the Good” and “the True,” and this because the word “strength” does not invite a metaphysical or theoretical account; by its very grammar, it admits to a diversity of expressions, and even insists on pluralism, meaning something like “the best version of itself that this could be” and points to a naturalism that does not apply the word “good” to objects and entities (a stone, a frog, a bacteria, a chemical) where it feels intuitively incorrect. At the same time, “strength,” when implied to human thought or action, begs the question of whether something is strong and good or strong and true; strength is desired and necessary, but not sufficient in an account of things. When we use the word “strength,” we drag along a whole train of thoughts about what something does, could do, should do, and is. It is another way of getting at “ought,” but one that holds off the wag of a finger. Translated, “will to strength,” Nietzsche’s “will to power,” the root of all drives in all things, human and natural, is intuitively right: everything seeks to become strong in its being what it is. Fantasy novels, most obviously the works of Tolkien and LeGuin, are often devoted to thinking through why power and strength are not the same, and we could likewise distinguish force from strength. To further clarify what strength is, consider that attention, as a power or faculty of the mind, cannot be maintained without strength; the most powerful mental faculty may be weakly or strongly realized. 

But the fact that “strength” does sometimes mean “power,” and like power entails domination, is one reason that it might seem objectionable to attribute a “will to strength” to all things. In particular, it might make some wary of suggesting a political drive to strength, or of invoking “strength” in relation to politics at all. It summons images of “strong men” thugs, of a lawless international order where strength means militarily imposing one’s will on smaller nations. Thucydides attributes the classic line to the Athenians: “the strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must.”  And yet…nobody would desire to be weak. Nor would it persuade the Athenians to argue that one must be good and strong, as if the good were a hemming in or limiting of one’s natural strength. The trouble is not with the word “strength” but with what some make of it. It is, after all, an inherently pluralistic, open word. It defies a singular explanation or theoretical account (in this, too, it is unlike “power,” which has invited many such accounts, however inevitable the incomplete results of the undertaking). The proper response—both correct and strategic—is to dispute what constitutes strength in a particular case, and here it cannot be simply asserted that goodness is strong, but instead that one conception of strength is mistaken, betraying or undermining another source of strength. If I claim to have synthesized a stronger crystal, but its latticework makes it brittle, then, whatever the technical chemist’s term for strength v. brittleness, a layman will challenge my use of the word, appealing to its behavior in another circumstance. Likewise, in arguments over politics, even those that do not invoke the word, our disagreements may hinge over what constitutes or serves strength.

Now, one of the ways that literature can serve a vital function in our political and civic discourse is by extending and refining our conceptions of strength, political and otherwise. Whether or not a poem is about the strength of a political action or institution, our assessments of political strength cannot be neatly sequestered from our assessments of strength in other realms of life, not least because, on the one hand, political life can serve or thwart even forms of strength that are not public, and, on the other hand, those other forms of strength can modify our understanding of political strength. Consider the traditional bastion of strength: manhood. Some say we are afflicted by a “crisis of masculinity” these days; it is not a new crisis, if this is so. At any rate, the response to the crisis is sometimes presented as the need to alter what counts as manly. This runs into the problem of emptying the concept entirely: if masculinity is anything one wants, it is nothing. The real debate, I think, is in asking what the strength of masculinity involves. If someone wants to cling to a stoic and independent masculinity as a source of strength, the question becomes whether stoicism and independence mean never asking for help or refusing to allow one to feel before managing one’s feelings. It could be said that a stoicism that denies rather than manages feelings is weak on account of skirting the challenge rather than facing it. Some might wonder if the argument is in fact over conceptions of stoicism or independence, and not strength. This does not hold up, in practice, since arguments over these will prove intellectual, evading the essential question; cornered by a historical account of stoicism, an opponent would likely shift terms in favor of language that better drives at their claims about strength.

More obviously, and probably without saying, there is the risk that strength becomes conceptualized as masculine, or as something masculine in some spheres of action. The point is not to adjudicate in these disputes but to point out that we neglect an important and basic term in the argument when we fail to consider “strength” as something that calls out for evaluation, rather than as a concept that settles disputes. It is a fascinating term because it both attaches firmly to the understanding—a concept that, as a concept, makes intuitive, basic sense that it is difficult even to unpack—while also always opening onto alternate conceptions: it is like a strong hinge. (“Truth” and “goodness” perhaps are the same, but when we speak about them that way, we are prone to be accused of relativism.)

Literature expands our sense of strength through example: children learn about it in reading about heroes, myths, fantasy worlds, and more. But a work of literature—and by extension an author—can exemplify new strengths too: asking how a work of literature is strong, or what its strength consists of, is one of the deepest critical questions. The answer will almost always involve balance, because a work of literature, standing apart from its occasion, will need to include within itself the forces that it masters, resists, or opposes, and if it is adjudicating and deliberating, it will need to suggest the forces that it wrestles with. The muscular imagination of a work, its pressing on language, and its shaping energies: these all speak to what it might mean to be strong, but there is little that can be said to account for the strength of the imagination or the strength of plot, and what can be said is incomplete, taking the form of principles rather than full theories. In any particular instance, the strength of a work will differ, not always being a matter of force, explosiveness, or dynamic insistence. Keats’ extraordinary sensitivity towards the self-awareness of others, and his willingness to hold embarrassment in his imagination without deflecting it, is as much an instance of strength as Donne’s abrasive defiance of God in the “Holy Sonnets.”  The decisive critical question is not, however, “Is this strong,” but instead “What is the strength in this?” The question points towards the strength of the poem, the made object, as well as the strength of the imagination, and of the human intellect that led to its creation. The question can be answered by looking to those moments where the language presses out or holds back, energetically, with force. These moments demonstrate the strength a work of literature has, and they are where it apprehends (or mistakes) what strength the circumstance of its writing demands. It is this question, not articulated as such, that seeps through the finest critical works, revealing itself as an essential element in their evaluation of poetry—and it is one that would benefit more readers and students to adopt since, unlike “how is this good,” which focuses attention on a separate ethical and aesthetic realm, and which too rapidly leads to vacuous adjectival assessments, “how is this strong” invites description, analysis, and comparison of the forces and energies of a work. For those who are not natural critics, when the question about strength is answered, the criticism moves in a fruitful direction.

Since it’s possible to speak of the strength of anything, we can say that literature must be aware of the strength of its subjects, whether that strength is realized or squandered, ideal or marred, and here is where poems are moored ideologically. They won’t always be about strength any more than our judgments are always about strength; but the awareness of it lies in their background. In great poems, we find a new sensitivity to the form strength may take, both in life and in poetry, and the strength such a poem detects and prizes in a life will bear on the strength it possesses in its verbal shape. But among the towering poets (and not-so-towering), human strength is sometimes announced as a subject, so that it rises to the surface of the language and the imagination, and when this happens, the poetry is impelled towards the political, to the thought of what strength a political order requires, fosters, or denies.

Wordsworth towers among the towering English poets, his strengths varied, but also his feeling for human strength as capacious as any poet and embodied in his very words.  He is also among the most politically defined poets, having spent his formative twenties in France during the Revolution and then in Britain in its reactionary lockdown; he was in sympathy with radical politics through the 1790s, though the second half of that decade and the first half of the following saw him wrestling with his disappointment at the course of the Revolution and the rise of Napoleon, and his initial alienation from the British war against France, ceded to a patriotic yearning for a glory that his Britain lacked. From 1797 to 1807 he wrote most of his best poems in the most prolifically brilliant decade any English poet has known. Yet his active involvement in politics had waned before it began. He wrote from a retreat into private life, mostly in the Lake District, where he lived with his sister Dorothy, and then his wife Mary, and small family, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge often visiting. Before 1797, he was author essentially of “Descriptive Sketches” and “Salisbury Plain,” this latter a fairly long poem decrying the injustice suffered by the poor in England; though he would excerpt part of it for publication later, he removed the political rhetoric. When he did return to political poetry, it was in an outpouring of sonnets written for publication in the 1807 collection, Poems, in Two Volumes.

Well before those sonnets, his imagination extended out to conceive of human strength as broadly as any poet has: its cost, its breadth, its activity, and its passivity.  Above all, he writes about strength against, and over, change: the strength to endure and the strength that endures. The sonnets are a place to begin because they announce the political implications, but the implications are present elsewhere too. Wordsworth’s one-time-friend William Hazlitt called his a “levelling muse”; by this muse, the poet was led to discern strength where others neglected it, and in political terms, this meant strength in defeat, poignantly in the heroism of the defeated Haitian leader, Toussaint L’Ouverture. Wordsworth wrote this sonnet when L’Ouverture was imprisoned, and dying, in a prison in the Jura region of France, the revolutionary fervor of Haitian independence and emancipation betrayed by Napoleon:  

To Toussaint L’Ouverture

                  Toussaint, the most unhappy Man of Men!

                  Whether the rural Milk-maid by her Cow

                  Sing in thy hearing, or thou liest now

                  Alone in some deep dungeon’s earless den,

                  O miserable Chieftain! where and when

                  Wilt thou find patience? Yet die not; do thou

                  Wear rather in thy bonds a chearful brow:

                  Though fallen Thyself, never to rise again,

                  Live, and take comfort. Thou hast left behind

                  Powers that will work for thee; air, earth, and skies;

                  There’s not a breathing of the common wind

                  That will forget thee; thou hast great allies;

                  Thy friends are exultations, agonies,

                  And love, and Man’s unconquerable mind.

“Milk-maid by her Cow” and “Cow” and “Now” is an inauspicious start; this is not Wordsworth botching the humble setting, but instead creating a jarring effect by placing within the heroic Miltonic sonnet distinctly unheroic rhyme, low and clanging, as L’Ouverture’s heroism has been imprisoned in an alien and unheroic setting. Wordsworth wouldn’t want to suggest the sound of cow bells inherently beneath L’Ouverture, but this pastoral isolation incongruous for the Haitian leader, too far from his scenes of triumph, and Wordsworth’s rhyme registers that incongruity. He weakens the sonnet intentionally. But then it gathers strength, as it discerns the remaining strength in the general, finding its confidence the question, “Wilt thou find patience,” the latter a keyword for Wordsworth’s poetry of this decade; it will bring us to other poems that do not announce political subjects. The question asks “where and when” but the enjambment breaks these from its body, suggesting that what matters is whether it will happen at all. The Latin root of “patience,” the deponent “patior,” means to suffer, so that the virtue of patience suggests not merely waiting, but waiting under the pressure of some deprivation. Though “patience” is passive, Wordsworth makes it an achievement here, the product of seeking: he writes “thou find” though L’Ouverture has nowhere to look. “Where and when” cut deep against “find” since he can only find it within himself, having nowhere else to go, and “when” speaking of the need to be patient while seeking and waiting for patience. The response he offers to the question, “Yet die not,” does not mean “However die not,” but instead something like “still, continually, going forward die not,” but this could be heard to suggest either that he ought to continue to search for patience or else to suggest that the search for patience is irrelevant, perhaps futile, and that all he ought to do is to remain alive. What’s interesting is that this leaves unclear where patience ends and where it begins, and makes not dying active, whether it involves patience or not; the fact of being alive, and enduring, superficially a matter of passive existence, is shown to permit several varieties of strength. 

“Do thou” combines the poem’s strength with L’Ouverture’s: it is a command but also a description, inverting the word order to say what he does. Beautifully, “Die not” rises into that “do thou,” as the poem recovers and summons active exertion, and freedom even for its own imagination: “wear rather in thy bonds a chearful brow” is “cheared,” somehow, despite everything, in the wit with which it figures a “chearful" brow as something put on; “in thy bonds” does not only mean “while wearing bonds,” but also suggests that the brow will itself be cheerfully worn in the bonds, so that are made to sit on the “chearful" brow like a laurel wreath or a crown. The “where” of “where and when | Wilt thou find patience” has become this “wear,” the former helplessly seeking, this confidently asserting. “Wear” as in “wear down” has been carefully excluded, even though a rearrangement of syntax—a rearrangement of perspective—would entail saying “his cheerful brow was worn in the bonds,” quite a different meaning.

The poem does not deny that he has suffered and been made to suffer, a victim: “Though fallen Thyself, never to rise again” says as much, but the word “Thyself” grounds him in the fall, not quite converting “fallen” into something “active,” but possessing him of his fall. Then the line turns, offering an alternative to “rise”: “live, and take comfort.” “Live,” simple as it is, the mere act of living, is made magnificent here, and “take comfort” flickers into something brighter than a stock phrase, with “take” a small act of conquest. “Thou hast left behind” is the most astonishing phrase to this point: not “thou was left behind” by history, or by fate, and not “thou hast been taken from” Haiti, but the thought of a distance transcended, something undesirable left behind, or else his having gone ahead, where we envy him. But it is not this exactly: it is instead something that is akin to an heir, and here Wordsworth lands on the pure abstraction, almost supernatural, of “Powers that will work for thee.” Separated by a semi-colon, “airs, earth, and sky” might themselves be these powers or they might be, as he repines in a prison cell, other entities he has left behind. “Thou has left behind” governs the remaining five lines of the closing sestet: all of this is what he has left behind, so that it is made to seem a legacy he has bequeathed rather than a loss he has suffered, something he has been made to give up, even though it is that too. 

Wordsworth would have known, even if his readers would not have, that “There’s not a breathing of the common wind” echoes the opening line of his autobiographical epic, “Oh there’s a blessing in this common breeze.”  At first, the line in the sonnet seems an inversion of the freedom and solace that Wordsworth celebrates in the epic: there is, after all, no such breathing available to L’Ouverture stifled in prison, but then the line is turned and the “not” becomes a litotes, negated by “will forget thee.”  The poem reveals its own strength here, not least in the verb “will” that expands from the confined present to the expanse of the future. But it does not end by looking ahead; that would be false to the circumstances, too consoling, and unwarranted as a prophecy. To say the wind will not forget him is itself equivocal and does not insist on too much: his influence will remain persistent but evasive, available to all but subtle (like the answer, he will be blowing in the wind). The suggestion is that the wind will memorialize him by being like he is; it’s an underdeveloped conceit, which in the Elizabethan age would have been elaborated into a claim that he has surpassed the wind which hereafter must be compared to him. Instead of reposing in hopes for the future, the poem resolves in a present tense that evinces the power to endure that it honors in him. “Great” in “great allies” is full of all the word can mean, true greatness residing in the heart of man for Wordsworth. It matters that “great” suggests “strength” without naming it since the strength of allies implies too narrowly aggressive a scope of action (since “allies” knowingly suggests military coordination) and because it is the poem’s aim to imagine the concept anew and more broadly; to name it would turn back to the old conception of the word, opposing the poem’s effort. The allies are not named: they might be the elemental forces of nature or else the inwardly felt “exultations, agonies” and “love,” or both, or neither; the suggestion that Wordsworth is too sensible to try to spell out even as he is too sensitive to ignore, is that these are all bound up. “Allies” carries the connotation of military strength; this is not exactly what Wordsworth wants, evidently, and the poem, as it closes in the present tense, closes also with a more humble but human word, “friends.”  

The same movement is found in miniature in the final two lines, as the extremes of “exultations” and “agonies,” both of which L’Ouverture has publicly known, and for which he is famous (his military victories and defeats), yield precedence to the third term, greater than the others, and far more private, in the final line: “And love.”  Exultations and agonies are felt no less than love; they are inward manifestations of outward experiences. But “love” is different, and pulls these words further inwards yet, so that the exultations and agonies, the triumphs and defeats, the heroic pride and tragic loss that they imply are movements within the heart, as well as on the battlefield. At the same time, “love” subsumes both, contains their violence into its greater power, as it settles the poem into its final repose. It is not just that L’Ouverture loves, but that he is friends with (and to) “love,” understanding it, according with it, as friends do, on a level of equal footing, separate and united. Then Wordsworth goes further. He has found repose but also an unexpected opening, a glimpse of the underlying source of strength: “and man’s unconquerable mind.” This last “and,” rather than panting after or grasping hungrily for one last item in the list, is the supreme moment of tranquility in the poem: it is itself an expression of “man’s unconquerable mind” and its capacity to find more within itself, without strain, without frenzy. From its level plain, “unconquerable” rises up, defiant without bluster, to announce the last word, “mind,” and all it suggests: thought, reason, inspiration, imagination, stoicism, the inner life. Honoring “mind,” Wordsworth decisively displaces L’Ouverture’s strength from his military prowess, extending it to the mind of “man,” a spirit or universal realm of thought on which L’Ouverture has drawn, to which he has contributed, and in which the poem participates.

Quite differently from L’Ouverture’s, the poem’s strength has political significance. It emergers after “take comfort,” a phrase that speaks as much to the poet as to the imprisoned leader. Eschewing despair on the one side but false hope on the other, the final sestet is an example of courage in defeat; it does not hold too hard to any one source of consolation, but instead finds its calm self-possession and generous fortitude in apprehending the very presence of elements and objects whose sustaining power is as subtle and elusive as they are immediate. The lines are, in essence, a list, but a list that, by the sequence and transition of items, intimates a unity that is more than it can say, but the depth and breadth of which it can circumscribe in its contemplation of L’Ouverture. Knowing him, it comes to know a strength that subsists in all humankind. 

By the tragic turns of history, L’Ouverture had transformed from a hero of Wordsworth’s youthful ideals to a hero of his miraculous decade as a poet: the solitary man whom circumstance has rendered naked in his humanity. In such figures, Wordsworth perceived a strength to endure that is inseparable from the basic human dignity that the French Revolution, at one phase at least, sought to recognize. Imagining their lives of constrained action, Wordsworth was compelled to turn to new sources of energy in the English language and to discover a poetry sufficiently strong to master those energies. The language of Wordsworth’s poetry is expansive within the sphere of its concentrated focus. It holds together such extremes of human experience as to seem suspended at a point of equanimity, moving without stirring, sure without certaint