“Ever on the Watch”: Wordsworth’s Attention

Abstract

And, attention now relaxed, A heart-felt chillness crept along my veins. --William Wordsworth, The Excursion 2.1.618-19 (1) That portion of every day of our existence which is occupied by us with a mind attentive and on alert, I would call life in a transcendent sense. The rest is scarcely better than a state of vegetation. And yet not so either. The happiest and most valuable thoughts of human mind will sometimes come when they are least sought for, and we least anticipated any such thing. --William Godwin, Thoughts on Man (2) IN HIS 1839 RECOLLECTION OF WORDSWORTH, THOMAS DE QUINCEY RE calls an evening during Peninsular War when he and went for a walk await mail carrier whom they expected arrive with newspaper. According De Quincey, two writers used walk every evening--in what he calls the deadly impatience for earlier intelligence--to meet carrier of London newspapers. On this particular evening when, according De Quincey, some great crisis in Spain was daily apprehended, two waited for over an hour with particular impatience. At intervals, De Quincey explains, Wordsworth had stretched himself at length on high road, applying his ear ground, so as catch any sound of wheels that might be groaning along at a distance. (3) Stretched out on road, with his ear firmly pressed ground of Dunmail Raise--a peak in Lake District and mythic site of a battle from year 945 where, according legend, a slain king is buried--Wordsworth listens for arrival of Courier so he can read daily news of current war. (4) But that which Wordsworth, according De Quincey's narrative, calls his condition of vigilance, a phrase perhaps more likely describe a posture in current war itself than that of quotidian wait for post carrying news of it, is not only met with disappointment when carrier does not arrive, but also encounters an effect that puts into question very conditions and consequences of itself. For even though gesture of stretching himself on ground might seem perfect caricature of attention, as though were acting out and literalizing term's etymological link Latin words ad+tendere, meaning to stretch towards, when reflects upon his act, he remarks neither on distention of his body, nor on application of his ear ground. (5) He is struck, rather, by what happens when he relaxes, when he interrupts, his attentive stretch. According De Quincey, observes: I have remarked, from my earliest days, that, if under any circumstance, attention is energetically braced up an act of steady observation, or of steady expectation, then, if this intense condition of vigilance should suddenly relax, at that moment, any beautiful, any impressive visual object, or collection of objects, falling upon eye, is carried heart with a power not known under other circumstances. Just now, my ear was placed upon stretch, in order catch any sound of wheels that might come down upon lake of Wythburn from Keswick road; at very instant ... when organs of attention were all at once relaxing from their tension, bright star hanging in air above those outlines of massy blackness fell suddenly upon my eye, and penetrated my capacity of apprehension with a pathos and a sense of infinite, that would not have arrested me under other circumstances. (6) Wordsworth's emphasis here on slackening rather than contracting organs of attention, this spontaneous and surprisingly productive gesture of no longer paying attention, signals an important contribution on part of a poet discourses of attention at time, redirecting controversy in early psychology over whether attention is a voluntary act ask, not unrelatedly, about perception produced by a shift in, or withdrawal of, attention. …