Mind your language
`THEY'VE done it again,' I shouted to my husband, who was digging a double trench for the leeks. It only had the effect of making him clump into the kitchen in his muddy boots.
`Who? Manchester United?'
No, the TLS,' I replied. 'Listen to this; they're discussing Chatterton, a poet I rather like. The reviewer is some- one called Claude Rawson, and he's comparing a poem by Chatterton to one by Wordsworth. Now, listen:
Wordsworth's 'Resolution and Indepen- dence' is known to have links with Chat- terton's `Excelente Balade of Charitie'. It shared the same stanza, and like Chatter- ton's poem is a fable describing an encounter with a destitute old man. Its official moral contains more than a hint that the mythology of 'mighty Poets in their misery dead', including Words- worth's own investment in it in some of the poem's memorable passages, is mere self-indulgence when compared to the misfortunes of the old leech gatherer. The explicit tendency is thus more con- ventional than the lines on Chatterton might lead us to expect, and is actually closer to Chatterton's poem by that fact.
`What?' said my husband, rubbing a blister on the palm of his hand. `Quite. It gets worse:
In Wordsworth the broken old man is the rescuer, not the rescued, and a failure on Wordsworth's part to register this differ- ence would have been a surprising exam- ple of the self-absorption actually targeted in the poem itself.
`Would it?'
`Well, I don't know. The point is the language: all that "official moral", "investment", "explicit tendency" and "targeted". The man should be ashamed of himself. Chatterton would never have written like that — nor Wordsworth, of course.'
`But he's a respected professor at Yale, and a leading influence on Augus- tan studies for the past 30 years.'
`Precisely.'
Dot Wordsworth
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