38 PA RT O N E
Coming down from Simplon Pass (Dorothy was back home), Wordsworth
runs for twelve lines without a main verb, the whole scene astir at once. (plate
5) Ongoing participles make the past present—“decaying... thwarting...
shooting... drizzling... raving”— while “muttered” and “spake” hint at some
living presence. Thomas Cole, pioneer American painter, called waterfalls “the
voice of the landscape” and saw “fixedness and motion” in them, “unceasing
change and everlasting duration.”
But “stationary blasts”? Wordsworth is seeing, by saying, something truer
than fact: “The stationary blasts of waterfalls.” A mind ’s eye conversing with
nature finds and names that dynamic of motion with stillness, energy with de-
sign, or call it loss with gain: “The immeasurable height / Of woods decaying,
never to be decayed,” moving and staying at a line break, suspending and sus-
taining potential energy.
A few years later, wildness not being all there was to life (and having fathered
a child in revolutionary France), he wrote to a friend, “Cataracts and mountains
are good occasional society, but they will not do for constant companions.”
He published a guide to the Lake District and later protested, without success,
railway construction in to Lake Windermere. “NIMBY,” as such protest is
dismissed today—“Not in my back yard”—but this place was also a national
treasure threatened by an expanding society.