Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

“Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” 163upon itself. The negative comparisons of these lines curiously suggestthat this underworld, while totally devoid of form or shape, is stilla space, a “haunt,” an almost sacred spot filled with the presence ofawesome power. Since, in terms of Wordsworth’s metaphors, there isnothing to be seen in this haunt—no palpable shape upon which themind can establish a purchase—reflexive consciousness discovers nolimiting contours to its introspective plunge and thus finds itself upona fearful journey into an open-ended abyss.This kind of interior space is quite different from the confiningspace of Locke’s camera obscura. This earlier metaphor for the mindreflects both Locke’s rejection of the theory of innate ideas, whichwere often described by the Cambridge Platonists as kinds of innerlight, and his restriction of the sources of knowledge to the not alwayscertain reports of the senses. 8 Wordsworth’s metaphor of the mentalabyss, however, intimates a theory of the mind which goes far beyondLocke’s careful empiricism. For immanent throughout the poet’sinterior space is the numinous power of the imagination—sometimesreferred to by him as a mist or vapor, sometimes as a stream, sometimesas nothing more than the sound made by an unseen stream. In BookXIV of The Prelude, for example, Wordsworth characterizes his historyof the growth and development of his imagination as the tracing ofa “stream / From the blind cavern whence is faintly heard / Its natalmurmur.” 9 Earlier in the same book, where Wordsworth discovers inthe mountain vision (also a vision of depths) from the top of Snowdona “perfect image of a mighty Mind,” he sees in a “blue chasm” in theoutspread mist below a “breach / Through which the homeless voiceof waters rose.” And in this “dark deep thoroughfare,” he goes on, “hadNature lodg’d / The Soul, the Imagination of the whole.” 10 We note inthese lines, incidentally, a suggestion of the same oxymoron of home /homeless—the “vagrant dwellers” of the “houseless” woods, the something’s“dwelling” ubiquitously—which we saw in “Tintern Abbey”:here the “homeless voice of waters” is “lodg’d” as an auditory emblemof the “Imagination” in the “blue chasm” in the mist.In Book VI of The Prelude, after Wordsworth describes hisdiscovery of having crossed the Alps without realizing it, the poet issuddenly confronted directly by his imagination:here the Power so calledThrough sad incompetence of human speech,