"Unknown Causes": Poetic Effects

Abstract

The beginning of poetic activity is described here, in the general movement of the passage, as an exchange between the loss of the mother and the gain of nature, or a loss of the literal mother and her return in figurative form in nature. But the passage leaves open a deal of uncertainty in this beginning: if the known of the mind's new openness is the beholding of a dear nature, this cause follows upon unknown connected with the original removal of the props. The smooth passage between mind and nature, or the movement from literal to figurative meaning, depends on the passage between the unknown and the single cause, a passage which we do not fully understand. This uncertainty, or the space between the causes and the cause, raises the possibility that the poetic reflection on beginnings may not involve, simply, the knowing of an absence, but perhaps also a kind of not knowing as well; that the beginning of consciousness, in a death, may not itself be entirely assimilable to consciousness. The question of beginnings arises again in a later part of The Prelude, when Wordsworth tells of his encounter with the French Revolution. The young poet's identification with the good Cause of the Revolution marks another kind of beginning, a projection of the mind into a future, or a temporal movement, involved in what Wordsworth calls the of mankind. A number of critics have suggested that Wordsworth explores the nature of this revolutionary love in the love story of Vaudracour and Julia told at the end of Book