Signs of the Dead: Epitaphs, Inscriptions, and the Discourse of the Self

Abstract

The 1805 and 1850 texts of The Prelude book 10 differ in their recollections about how Wordsworth came to visit William Taylor's gravesite. In 1805, the poet attributed the discovery of Taylor's grave to chance as though he happened upon it. This version of the memory expresses uncertainty and, ironically, identifies chance as the agent of self-revelation that initiates Wordsworth's entry as mental traveller into the static world of the deceased; however, in Wordsworth's poetics, self-contemplation of the "emotion recollected in tranquillity" leaves very little possibility for chance to have any sort of causal relation to the poetic production of lyrical ballads, and especially epic poetry. If chance does not seem to be the causal factor in Wordsworth's stumbling on Taylor's grave, then why does the poet claim that he "chanced to find" the gravesite? 1 The line uncannily echoes the opening stanza of "Lucy Gray" (1799). The poet claims: "Oft I had heard of Lucy Gray: / And, when I crossed the wild, / I chanced to see at break of day / The solitary child" (my emphasis). 2 Does the poet really see a "solitary child" before or after her death? If so, then the vision of Lucy Gray can either be that of the living child or her wraith. 3 My purpose here is not an attempt to assign determinacy to indeterminate lines; but rather to note that, interestingly, what appears in Wordsworth's poetics is this sense of spontaneity implied in the term "chanced," when, instead, the poet's sighting of Lucy Gray is really a self-consciously constructed and contrived memory here. 4 Chance is no more a significant index of identifying Lucy Gray than it is in leading the poet to rediscover William Taylor's gravesite at Cartmell Priory.

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