The Persian Wordsworth

Abstract

At the conclusion of “Poems Composed During a Tour in Scotland, and on the English Border, in the Autumn of 1831,” Wordsworth proposes that the relationship between the individual poems is like that between “those Shapes distinct / That yet survive ensculptured on the walls / Of Palace, or of Temple, ’mid the wreck / Of famed Persepolis.” Exploring its resonances counterpoints the stability of the image. Persia had become important to the British plan to thwart Napoleon’s eastward expansion, and remained enmeshed in jockeyings for European power. Political concerns intensified interest in Persian travels; the Persian ambassador to England had become fashionable, and the inspiration for popular novels. Persepolis might have been read as the very instance of the topical. Wordsworth’s late manner releases multiple perspectives on east and west, past and present, the enduring and the contemporary, above all, on the poet’s immersion in, and resistance to, history.