sidney keyes in historical perspective Of the gaunt ridge, or you’ll hear his shout
Rollingamong the screes, he being a boy again.
He’ll never fail nor die
And if they laid his bones
In the wet vaults or iron sarcophagi
Of fame, he’d rise at the first summer rain
And stride across the hills to seek
His rest among the broken lands and clouds.
He was a stormy day, a granite peak
Spearing the sky; and look, about its base
Words flower like crocuses in the hanging woods,
Blank though the dalehead and the bony face.^23‘Blank’, like ‘blind’, ‘naked’, and ‘wild’, is for Wordsworth a word of focus, its
range covering several forms of desolateness and uncomprehending: ‘o’er my
thoughts|There hung a darkness, call it solitude|Or blank desertion’.^24 ‘Oh, blank
confusion’,^25 ‘By a blank sense of greatness passed away’,^26 ‘Blank misgivings of a
Creature|Moving about in worlds not realized’.^27 Keyes’s ‘Blank though the dale-
head and the bony face’ uses the northern (Cumbria, North and West Yorkshire)
word for the upper portion of a river valley (the lower part being the dale-end)
(OED). The line occurred to Keyes, I imagine, somewhat in this manner: bareness of
things is not necessarily barrenness of things; bleakness of vision (the appearance of
the rocky dalehead) correlates with a bleakness of certain forms of visionary insight.
Not all forms of vision; there are crocuses in the stony landscape, there are colour and
light in the language that springs from even the bleakest outlook; the physiognomy
of Wordsworth the man is bony, the physiognomy of Wordsworth’s deepest seeings
has often the appearance—to him as well as to us—of blankness. According
to an editorial note in Keyes’sCollected Poems,the sonnet was suggested by the
photograph of Wordsworth’s death-mask, a photograph used as the frontispiece to
Herbert Read’s book about the poet. Keyes is reported as saying, ‘Isn’t that fine!That
is everything which I mean by Wordsworth’; but he then said, ‘Even so, it is, in a way,
a sheep-like old face.’^28 This is the range of inference embodied in the word ‘blank’.
Death-masks necessarily have a blank look; it has something to do with the appear-
ance of the eyes; a sheep’s face looks blank in a somewhat different way. The word
hovers between the features of majestic rigour and the gaze of incomprehension.
What is striking about this sonnet is that it is neither, on the one hand,
descriptively agrarian, nor on the other, philosophical or metaphysical. It is these
(^23) Keyes, ‘William Wordsworth’, ibid. 30.
(^24) William Wordsworth,The Prelude or Growth of a Poet’s Mind, ed. E. De Selincourt (London:
Oxford University Press, 1932), 25; I. 394–5 (1850 text).
(^25) Ibid. 256; VII. 695 (1805 text). (^26) Ibid. 300; VII. 592 (1805 text).
(^27) Wordsworth, ‘Ode (‘‘There was a time’’)’, inWilliam Wordsworth,ed.StephenGill(Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1984), 301. 28
Keyes, quoted inCollected Poems, 131.