Wordsworth's Skates (District and Circle)

Wordsworth's Skates (District and Circle)

Words with particular semantic force are underlined here.

But the reel of them on frozen Windermere ... And left it scored.

This is obviously an allusion to the thrilling lines which describe skating in 'The Prelude' (lines 452-457, 1805 version), although Wordsworth was skating on Esthwaite Water, near to Hawkshead, where he went to school, not on Windermere. I discuss these lines, in connection with sectional analysis, on the page concerned with linkages between poetry and music.

The intervening line, though, is Parnassian: 'earth' is in ineffective contrast. A factor in an image, such as size, may be excluded or denied by the poet, who may make it clear that another factor, such as colour, is what counts in a simile - but the associations of the excluded factor may be impossible to overlook. Here, the skater is escaping 'the clutch of earth' to speed along the ice, but the associations of earth remain, leaving the line earth-bound in part. There's an awkward transition from 'flashed' to 'clutch of earth' as if the skater were suddenly slowed or brought to a halt by earth on the ice, before speed and smoothness are abruptly restored with 'curve' and 'scored.' The meaning is clear, but images aren't fully under control.

The same problem is apparent in the preceding lines

Not the bootless runners lying toppled

This is outstanding in its semantic force. The image is a memorable one - so memorable that the 'not' is incapable of cancelling it. It remains in the mind, despite the negation, so that there's an abrupt and awkward transition to the last three lines, 'But the reel of them on frozen Windermere ...' in which the skates in their state of deterioration do after all carry the skater on the frozen lake.

The placing of the lines concerned with the skates in the display case reinforces this effect. Their {prior-ordering} in the poem allows the forming of a strong image and the image has inertia, which has a linkage here with inertia in physics: the image tends to continue, despite being negated. In a poem with strong images or language with strong semantic force, these tend to have a dominating effect. This is what I call perturbation. (In Physics, 'perturbation' is a secondary influence which brings about {modification} of simple behaviour. For example, the trajectories of comets are perturbed when they pass close to massive bodies, such as the planets of our solar system. In poetic perturbation, things which are more massive, substantial, vivid tend to have a modifying effect.) In my page metre I discuss metrical inertia and metrical perturbation.

I refer to non-cancellation, non-cancellation of negation, and although the effect is unintended here and has to be counted as a flaw, non-cancellation can be intended and can contribute to the layering of a poem, which can increase its richness and resonance. This is {diversification} of non-cancellation.

The first four lines of 'Wordsworth's Skates' are at a much lower level of achievement.

It's not the highest praise to claim that a poet should be achieving at approximately the same level, and in much the same way, in his recent work and in work from decades previously. This isn't artistic development. If the later is only as good as the earlier and of the same kind as the earlier, then it's disappointing. The same can't be claimed of Beethoven, who produced great works in his early period, even greater works in his second period and still greater works in his third period which were unprecedented, belonging to a different sound world and emotional world from the works of the previous periods. In 'achieving at approximately the same level,' 'approximately' means here 'very, very approximately.' The achievement in 'District and Circle' shouldn't be exaggerated.

In 'Wordsworth's Skates,' Seamus Heaney doesn't surpass the achievement of Wordsworth in his evocation of skating on Esthwaite Water, quite the opposite.

This poem addresses the skating Spot of Time, wherein Wordsworth stops literally spinning in circles on the ice, only to find that the world around him is still spinning—he is dizzy.  “Wordsworth’s Skates” begins with a similarly dizzying, or disorientating sequence of thought. 

Star in the window.

                                    Slate Scrape.

                                                            Bird or branch?

Or the whet and scud of steel on placid ice?

Heaney glimpses a “Star in the window” and wonders whether it is “Bird or branch” that he hears scraping his “Slate,” either a windowpane or the top of his roof.  The thought of this scraping then reminds him of the “whet and scud of steel on placid ice.”

Not the bootless runners lying toppled

In dust in a display case,

Their bindings perished…

The “bootless runners” of the second stanza should be interpreted in two ways.  Most naturally, they are the unattached blades of Wordsworth’s skates, and this reading positions the reader in front of a “display case,” where Wordsworth’s literal skates are held, “their bindings perished.”  A second reading of “bootless runners” situates the perished “bindings”[4] as book-bindings.  A “Runner” is involved in the actual construction of books, and as defined by the OED is “a smooth-faced board placed on the right hand of the book when cutting” which determines the book’s spine.  And as “to make boot of” is another way of saying “to make profit of,” “bootless runners” is alternative way of expressing that the books “lying toppled/ In dust in a display case” are essentially profitless, worthless, when compared to the “reel” of Wordsworth’s actual skates “on frozen Windermere.”

In the first stanza the poet happens upon the idea of ice-skates from ambient noise, and this triggers his memory of Wordsworth’s skating Spot of Time.  In the second stanza, he disavows any physical notion of the skates—he is not thinking about Wordsworth’s actual skates, probably on display at Dove Cottage (in the Lake District, where Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy spent almost a decade living together), nor does he need to return to a bookshelf to know Wordsworth’s passage.  The passage is one he knows by heart, one that transcends the trappings of the dusty “display case.”  The passage is so deep-cutting and relevant still, that the scene which is “perished” to some “flashed” back to Heaney in an appreciative moment where he realizes that Wordsworth left the “earth… scored,” not merely his local “Windermere.”[5]