Wordsworth’s Webs: Spinning the Ecological Elegy

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article investigates two sites of Wordsworthian entanglement: the spider’s web across the abandoned well in “The Ruined Cottage” and the “web spun” in a neglected room in “The Brothers, A Pastoral Poem.” Both webs show Wordsworth’s attention to a theory of ecological entanglement that was emerging in the late 1790s, and more: Wordsworth’s experimental weaving of ecology and elegy. Wordsworth’s two surrogate elegists, the Pedlar and the Priest, use webs to track the subtle but active ways in which nature reacts to human grief and death. I show how both elegists develop distinct elegiac crafts to test different versions of the ecological elegy. Through their divergent poetics, they consider how elegy can incorporate ecological knowledge, how ecology reshapes past elegiac conventions, and how mourning itself becomes entangled in nature. Together their experiments allow Wordsworth to probe the close but precarious alliances between pathos, poetry, and ecology.