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‘carried off’ by his ‘eloquence’ here, as he relies on matters of style, using the figures of exclamatioand apostrophe to add his own song to that of his nurse and the Derwent. 33 The question ‘addressed’to the Derwent is, of course, a rhetorical one; the exclamatio is a dramatic figure of speech intended toexpress great and genuine feelings of emotion. It refers back to the state of mind described in theprevious lines, and Wordsworth’s ‘answer’ to it, is to produce a Thirteen Book poem that refutes anysuggestion that he had actually recoiled, or drooped or sought ‘repose / In Indolence’. It is highlysignificant that, in the process of introducing his argument to Coleridge, Wordsworth describes theriver Derwent, the voice of nature, blending his murmurs with Wordsworth’s nurse’s song. The ‘song’of these ‘divine’ and ‘human’ voices compose a two-part harmony, making ‘ceaseless music’ as theirtwo voices sing together, as one. This is not a ‘synthesis’ in which either party dominates or issubsumed by the other, but a ‘harmonious interchange’. The record of Wordsworth’s life begins byacknowledging that as a child he was fostered alike ‘by beauty and by fear’, and concludes with acelebration of a civilised Imagination, one ‘softened down’ by the work of Fancy, as represented in thebeauties of the human ‘moral’ world. (XIII 289-313). This understanding, voiced also in the originalopening lines composed at Goslar (Ms JJ), was recorded well before the argument over ‘imagination’in 1802, in which Coleridge had argued that the best poetry was the product of an innate imaginativeability – the best poets, divinely inspired. It would appear that the difference of opinion had existedmuch earlier, and that Wordsworth was voicing his own opinion as he thought about his role as a poet,and his relationship to Coleridge, while at Goslar.The ‘glad preamble’ appears to glamorise the belief that poets are born not made, but thendisplays the insufficiency of natural inspiration – only to then produce work of great ability.Wordsworth works with consummate rhetorical skill to capture the mind of his reader and exploit hisor her feelings as he turns this way and that, in the ‘turnings intricate’ of his artful verse. But thetension between reliance on inspiration, and the need for craft, is revisited in the course of the poemand is rendered more complex in the ‘argument’ that Wordsworth invents in an imagined ‘debate’with Coleridge on the matter. The narrative differentiates between the stronger effusions felt inyouth – and understood then as evidence of prophetic election – and the milder forms of expressionpractised by a skilful artist who has learnt to manipulate the reader’s mind into believing and ‘seeing’what is represented in words on a page. Wordsworth’s argument with Coleridge challengedColeridge’s belief that poets are born not made, that the best poets rely upon ‘the gift of Imaginationin the highest and strictest sense of the word’. Instead Wordsworth displays the proofs of his ownrhetorical art in which ‘divine’, sublime, Imagination is blended with ‘human’, beautiful, Fancy.Finally, in the peroration, after having given the poetic ‘history’ of the growth of his own mind,Wordsworth calls on Coleridge to judge his argument and, if won over, to join him as a ‘Prophet ofNature’.33 Tradition had it, following Quintilian, that the figure of apostrophe should be avoided in the exordium, so thatits usage here might be seen to signal a turn from the matter of the exordium to that of the narrative. See J.Douglas Kneale, ‘Romantic Aversions: Apostrophe Reconsidered’ in Rhetorical Traditions and BritishRomantic Literature pp 149-166.92