“Thy function was to heal and to restore”: The Sounds and Rhythms of the River Ecosystem in William Wordsworth’s The River Duddon Sonnets

Abstract

Abstract The writings of William Wordsworth evince a deeply ecological consciousness, a firm belief in the underlying connectedness of all living and non-living entities accounting for their continued existence. Such a consciousness becomes particularly evident in The River Duddon, A Series of Sonnets from 1820 as the poetic account of the river’s flow from its source in the mountains to its estuary between Morecambe Bay and the North Lonsdale coast. For not only does it constitute a core element of the Lake District, which Wordsworth deemed the best example of a region of eco-friendly and hence socially unified communities; it is also depicted, as will be elaborated in this paper, as an ecosystem consisting in a complex web of symbiotic interactions between the fluvial, vegetal, animal and human.Instead of focusing on verbal representations of such more-than-human interrelations through semiotic processes that appropriate their otherness and render them intelligible in solely human terms, however, this paper argues that Wordsworth’s “speaking monument” (Wordsworth 1954: 247, iii, l. 3) rather enacts these ecosystemic interactions on a vocal, aural, and rhythmical level. It thereby foregrounds the materiality and corporeality of poetic speech that precedes as well as grounds meaning and so connects the human to the river ecosystem in a pre-reflexive and somatic way. In this context, it will be pointed out how not only the speaker and other human characters participate in the Duddon’s web of reciprocal relations through rhythmical synchronisation and sonic attunement, but also how the reader becomes an active part in them through their vocal performance of the sonnets. The river’s autopoietic structure illustrated through the metaphor of the hydrological cycle, it will thus be shown, is thereby continued through the sonnet cycle as a direct organic product and hence integral component of the ecosystem that, by repeatedly giving rise to various idiosyncratic readings, will poetically contribute to the Duddon’s continued existence.