Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

“Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” 175The sounding cataractHaunted me like a passion: the tall rock,The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,Their colours and their forms, were then to meAn appetite; a feeling and a love,That had no need of a remoter charm,By thought supplied, nor any interestUnborrowed from the eye.[Ll. 76–83]Wordsworth’s language presents a world in which there is no distinctionto be made between his intentionality and his intended objects.The “directions” of consciousness at this time were totally equivalentto the elements of the landscape. These “forms” quite simply—andthe equation is startling—“were” for Wordsworth an “appetite; afeeling and a love.” Thus there would be no need for “any interest /Unborrowed from the eye.” The simple act of sensation, the mere actof looking, would be sufficient to involve Wordsworth’s awarenessin a range of conscious experiences far richer than the experienceof ordinary seeing. To see is not to produce an occasion for possibleemotion; to see is in itself to feel emotion. Phenomena are feelings,and feelings are phenomena. And to hear a “sounding cataract” isdirectly to be “Haunted” by a “passion,” as if the “sounding cataract”in itself were a certain structure of consciousness (the experience ofa “passion”) impinging upon awareness. This image of the “soundingcataract”—an image of a dislocated sound—I take to be anotherimage of immanence: it is analogous to the “soft inland murmur”of line 4 in that because its source is unseen, it suggests somethinghidden away from sight, an interior behind the surface of phenomena.It is precisely this sense of an interior which enables Wordsworth todescribe the “sounding cataract” as if it were in itself a structure ofconsciousness. For, as we have already seen, the sense of immanenceis for Wordsworth the sense of his own mind hidden in the landscape.And insofar as phenomena convey this sense of immanence, he ismade dimly aware, in this case “Haunted,” by the underworld of hismind which he has displaced into nature.The previously noticed riddles of Wordsworth’s curious comparativesimile can now be unraveled. Both the term “something” andthe term “thing” belong to the poem’s language of perplexity (the