Ebb and Flow in The Excursion

Abstract

What will never do is the lingering notion that The Excursion requires nervously self-qualifying apologias. It needs to be stated roundly that the poem is a masterpiece, especially in Books I to IV (the main region of my concern), even if it is a masterpiece that demonstrates the strange intricacy of Wordsworth's imaginative genius. The Excursion is rich in writing of a consistently and manifestly high order, whatever the sometimes churlish objections of ideologically motivated adversaries from Jeffrey onwards. Matthew Arnold thought that it (along with The Prelude) was by no means Wordsworth's "best work" because, at its most doctrinal, it often possessed "none of the characters of poetic truth" (Arnold xi, xx); in fact, the poem is great because it articulates, as a "poetic truth," the need for philosophizing, a need that arises from its sense of the persistent presence in life of "silent suffering, hardly clothed / In bodily form" (I 669-70; qtd. from Bushell et al, ed.). Such "suffering" is frequently experienced somatically in The Excursion in and through the "bodily form" of human beings: a form doomed to experience emotional pain in a physical way, to weaken and to die. The Excursion knows on the pulses of virtuosic versification about what the Prospectus calls "solitary anguish" (77) and "the fierce confederate storm / Of sorrow, barricadoed evermore / Within the walls of Cities" (78-80). Wordsworth--and it is typical of the poem's odd fineness that he should so --works in plangent ways. First, he concedes that neither countryside nor city provides refuge from suffering. He then expresses his hope that he will be able to offer consolation in terms reminiscent of his own vulnerability to despondency: in commenting on such suffering and its "sounds" (80), he hopes he will not, and thus simultaneously fears that he may, be "downcast or forlorn" (82). The wish is upbeat; the phrasing tends towards a downturn.