Wordsworth's Mirror Imagery and the Picturesque Tradition

Abstract

Though in some important ways Wordsworth is the most typical English Romantic poet, the more noticeable kinds of Romantic mirrors-the Narcissistic mirror of the demonic quest-romance, the mocking mirror-double of the tale of the divided self, the dark, cracked mirror of psychological disintegration'--are conspicuously absent from his poetry, except for his youthful Gothic play, The Borderers. Nevertheless, aside from Shelley, mirror imagery plays a more important role in his work than in the poetry of any other major English Romantic. His mirror imagery looks back to the eighteenth century and to the kind of mirror imagery found abundantly in the period's topographical poetry, where reflections on water (typically pools in grottoes) usually symbolize a harmonious relationship between the mind and the world based upon the analogy of the reflecting water and the reflective mind. But the eighteenth-century tradition from which Wordsworth's mirror imagery springs most directly is the Picturesque, to which, like other young men of taste, he looked for guidance in matters of painting, poetry, landscape, arthitecture, aesthetics, and travel. As is well known, the category of the Sublime played a crucial role in the Picturesque tradition; and Wordsworth, who in 1790 went to the Alps questing after the Sublime and the Beautiful, has always been acknowledged as a devotee of sublimity, even if many readers agree with Keats that Wordsworth is mainly a poet of the egotistical sublime. Great mountains, especially the Alps, were naturally the most frequently mentioned examples of the sublime; and in his Guide through the District of the Lakes, Wordsworth takes it as a matter of common knowledge that A stranger to mountain imagery naturally on his first arrival looks out for sublimity in every object that admits of it.3 Of course Mt. Blanc and Mt. Snowdon did not exhaust the category of the Sublime; indeed, as true sublimity became firmly associated with infinity, two other natural objects, the ocean and the sky, became the highest forms of the Sublime, and the

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