A Perfect Storm: The Nature of Consciousness on Wordsworth's Salisbury Plain

Abstract

Most readings of Wordsworth's Adventures on Salisbury Plain focus on the enactment of the Sailor's guilt of and repentance for the murder he has committed. Without discarding readings with an ethical emphasis, I read Adventures on Salisbury Plain in terms of the Sailor's most grievous loss, the loss of his wife and family, and how the realization of that loss through a process of physical trances amounts to the loss of his own life. The convergence of justice, conscience, and, I add, overwhelming consciousness of loss within the poem creates a perfect storm, in which the calamitous outcome through “a rare combination of adverse … factors” (Oxford English Dictionary) is offset by an earlier use of the phrase in the sense of enlightenment.