Literature & Theology, Vol. . No. , December , pp. " doi:10.

1093/litthe/frl039 Advance Access publication 8 November 2006

WORDSWORTHS APOCALYPSE
Jonathan Roberts
Abstract Apocalypse has been a key term in Wordsworth criticism over the last century, though it appears only once in the poetry. I begin by offering a short reception history of the critical use of this key term through a century of Wordsworth scholarship, the majority of which has focussed on the Simplon Pass episode of The Prelude in which the word appears. I argue that the majority of these critics adopt an eschatological two-term approach to apocalypse that splits it into an allegorical relationship between textual anticipation and historical fullment. In contrast, I argue that Wordsworth had a different model of apocalypse in which text and history meet and are fused in personal situation, a moment of revelation: in Wordsworths writing, apocalypse is particular, not general, and is understood in retrospect, not through prophetic foresight. Moreover, I argue that these eschatologicaluniversal and retrospective-personal models of apocalypse correspond to Wordsworths models of bad and good poetry. In allegorical apocalypse, as in bad poetry, word and feeling are in an arbitrary relationship sustained only by convention; in personal apocalypse, as in good poetry, there is a natural fusion of word and feeling. I conclude by discussing Matthew 25 as a heuristic device to show a biblical parallel (rather than a source) to Wordsworths nonviolent, non-eschatological approach to apocalypse.

I . I N T RO D U C T I O N

In 1790, during his summer vacation from Cambridge, the 20-year old Wordsworth and his friend Robert Jones went on a walking tour through revolutionary France towards the Alps in search of the sublime. The anticlimactic account of what actually happened there was written almost 15 years later in Book VI of The Prelude, a story presaged by the rst sight of Mont Blanc which proved not merely to disappoint, but actually to destroy the hoped-for vision:
That day we rst Beheld the summit of Mont Blanc, and grieved To have a soulless image on the eye Which had usurped upon a living thought That never more could be. (VI, 4536)1
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Worse was to follow, as the long-anticipated moment of actually crossing the Alps was missed by the travellers completely, a fact they were to discover only through questioning a local peasant when the path ran out and the only way was down. In recounting this story, Wordsworth interrupts his own narrative at the point of this discovery with a much-discussed apostrophe to the Imagination:
Imagination!lifting up itself Before the eye and progress of my song Like an unfathered vapour, here that power, In all the might of its endowments, came Athwart me. I was lost as in a cloud, Halted without a struggle to break through, And now, recovering, to my soul I say I recognise thy glory: in such strength Of usurpation, in such visitings Of awful promise, when the light of sense Goes out in ashes that have shewn to us The invisible world, doth greatness make abode, There harbours whether we be young or old, Our destiny, our nature, and our home, Is with innitudeand only there[.] (VI, 525539)

This apostrophe provides a sort of compensation narrative for Wordsworth as Imagination turns out to be better than reality anyway. He then resumes his story with an account of the descent into the Gondo Ravine on the far side of the pass. Now with the brook and the road as fellow-travellers in this gloomy strait, Wordsworth describes how Nature begins to mutter and speak to him, its words unclear until the dissonance of his feelings and surroundings is resolved in a tentative vision of the characters of the great apocalypse:
The immeasurable height Of woods decaying, never to be decayed, The stationary blasts of waterfalls, And everywhere along the hollow rent Winds thwarting winds, bewildered and forlorn, The torrents shooting from the clear blue sky, The rocks that muttered close upon our ears Black drizzling crags that spake by the wayside As if a voice were in themthe sick sight And giddy prospect of the raving stream, The unfettered clouds and region of the heavens, Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light Were all like workings of one mind, the features Of the same face, blossoms upon one tree,

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Characters of the great apocalypse, The types and symbols of eternity, Of rst, and last, and midst, and without end. (VI, 556572)

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The Simplon Pass narrative has become a test ground of Wordsworth criticism. As Alan Liu writes at the very outset of Wordsworth: The Sense of History (1989):
The readings we now have of the Simplon Pass episode, among which Geoffrey Hartmans is in the vanguard, are so powerful that the episode has become one of a handful of paradigms capable by itself of representing the poets work.2

Indeed, Lius own discussion of the Simplon Pass episode that follows this comment has itself become the paradigmatic New Historicist reading of this paradigmatic work of Romanticism. The Simplon Pass episode is important for another reason too: it is the only time that Wordsworth ever uses the word apocalypse in his poetry (hence my title). Yet the word apocalypse has been widely discussed in Wordsworth studies for almost a century, attracting detailed discussion from critics including A. C. Bradley, Geoffrey Hartman and M. H. Abrams. Despite this, these critical works provide very little consensus as to what kind of apocalypse this isa question I will explore in this article by suggesting that Wordsworth offers a fundamentally different understanding of apocalypse, not only from his millenarian contemporaries of the 1790s, but also from his critical interpreters of the last hundred years. This article, then, is in four parts. The rst part provides an overview of key uses of the term apocalypse in Wordsworth criticism, with particular reference to the Simplon Pass episode. The second part discusses New Historicist (and other) critical perspectives on the narrative that have foregrounded the concept of displacement in this passage. In the third part, I discuss the possibility that displacement is a formal strategy of the text itself signalling Wordsworths wider concerns about language and violence, rather than a furtive attempt to bury history. In the nal part, I suggest that the Simplon Pass episode offers a hermeneutical alternative to the allegorical interpretation of apocalypse found in poems such as Coleridges Religious Musings. I end by briey discussing the similarities and differences between the apocalypses of The Prelude, the Book of Revelation and chapter 25 of the gospel of Matthew.

I I . PA RT O N E : A B R I E F C R I T I C A L H I S T O RY O F A P O C A LY P S E I N WO R D S WO RT H S T U D I E S

In a lecture of almost a century ago (1909), A. C. Bradley discussed the account of Book XI of The Prelude in which the young Wordsworth waits near

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The single sheep, and the one blasted tree (1850, XI, 319) for the ponies that were coming to take him home for the holidays.3 Bradley says of this scene:
Everything here is natural, but everything is apocalyptic. And we happen to know why. Wordsworth is describing the scene in the light of memory. In that eagerly expected holiday his father died; and the scene, as he recalled it, was charged with the sense of contrast between the narrow world of common pleasures and bland and easy hopes, and the vast unseen world which encloses it in benecent yet dark and inexorable arms.4

Bradleys use of the term apocalyptic implies an account of the everyday that carries a surplus freight of meaning, the nature of which is not apparent at the actual moment of experience. But in poetic memory, the event itself and the feelings that follow cannot be separated. Here Bradley puts his nger on the centrality of prolepsisthe representation of a thing as existing before it actually does or did so5to Wordsworths writing. Fifty years later Geoffrey Hartman, noting that despite Bradleys essay, the apocalyptic Wordsworth [had] been neglected for the poet of natural blendings and healing interchanges,6 proceeded to write perhaps the most inuential discussion of the topic in Wordsworth criticism, in Wordsworths Poetry: """ (1961). Hartman uses the term apocalypse to mean a number of things, including (i) the Book of Revelation; (ii) eschatological thinking; (iii) a mind which actively desires the inauguration of a totally new epoch; and (iv) any strong desire to cast out nature and to achieve an unmediated contact with the principle of things.7 This last denition is important in relation to the larger thesis of his book, as at key moments in the poets writing, Hartman argues, consciousness of nature leads into a consciousness of consciousness,8 a moment at which nature itself vanishes, and the poetry becomes all mind. Hartman calls this moment apocalyptic and sees the apostrophe to Imagination following the Simplon Pass anticlimax as the purest instance of apocalypse and usurpation.9 For Hartman, this passage is not only a paradigm of Wordsworths poetry, but it also shows that Wordsworth was haunted [. . .] by the fear that coming-to-consciousness was connected with the sense of violation or trespass.10 Hartman suggests that Wordsworths response to this fear is to attempt to bind consciousness to nature again (Hartman here offers the parallel gure of akedah: Abraham binding his son (Genesis, 22:9)). He writes, A true though rather simple view of the structure of The Prelude would be gained by showing how the poet continually displaces or interprets apocalypse as akedah.11 A decade later, in Natural Supernaturalism (1971) M. H. Abrams criticised the vogue in recent literary criticism to apply the term apocalypse loosely to signify any sudden and visionary revelation, or any event of violent and

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large-scale destructionor even anything which is very drastic, and proposed to restrict apocalypse to the sense used in Biblical commentary, where it signies a vision in which the old world is replaced by a new and better world.12 Like Hartman, Abrams nds in apocalypse a Wordsworthian paradigm, but for Abrams the paradigm is that of the marriage of mind and nature, which is modelled on the marriage of the Lamb and the New Jerusalem (Revelation 1921). Thus apocalypse, for Abrams, is an act of unaided vision, in which the Lamb and the New Jerusalem are replaced by mans mind as the bridegroom and nature as the bride.13 The signicance of the Simplon Pass episode for Abrams lies in its emphasis on the reconciliation of opposites:
[T]his coincidentia oppositorum suddenly expresses a revelation which Wordsworth equates with the showing forth of the contraries of God in the Apocalypse, the Book of Revelation itself. There the Lamb of the gospel of love had manifested Himself as the terrifying deity of the dies irae[.]14

In 1984, Andrzej Warminskis Mixed Crossing: Wordsworths Apocalypses provided a reading that bypassed the biblical gures of Hartman and Abrams, and offered something closer to Bradleys discussion of prolepsis. Warminskis deconstructionist reading suggests that Wordsworths writing gains its distinct tone by demanding a double reading through which the audience understands his poetry to be simultaneously natural (as they read it literally) and apocalyptic (as they read it guratively).15 Stimulated by the end of the millennium, the most recent wave of work on Wordsworthian apocalypseincluding Morton Paleys Apocalypse and Millennium in English Romantic Poetry (1999) and Tim Fulfords Romanticism and Millenarianism (2002)have not developed the linguistic emphasis of Warminskis work, but have instead sought to give a more clearly historically contextualised understanding of apocalypse and millennium during the Romantic period, and to distinguish the relationship between these topics in the work of different Romantic authors. Paley, like Abrams, questions modern uses of the term apocalypse, although his chief concern is not with the nature of apocalypse itself, but with its relationship to millennium. He writes:
The poets of the Romantic period drew with great familiarity upon the situations, gures, and language of the Book of Revelation. However, far more important that any accumulation of details is their adaptations of the model underlying them, a model in which there is a transition from apocalypse to millennium.16

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Like others, Paley uses the Simplon Pass episode as an explicatory example, although in actual application his chronology of this transition from apocalypse to millennium is unclear.17 Drawing on Abramss model of an internalised apocalypse, Paley writes of the Simplon Pass episode:
[T]he ashes that have shewn to us / The invisible world (5356) are liminal. The glimpse of forces beyond the veil is for the moment presented as a triumph, at which point apocalypse is succeeded by an internalized millennium, with the mind Strong itself, and in the access of joy / Which hides it like the overowing Nile (5478).18,19

I I I . PA RT T WO : T H E S I M P L O N PA S S , N E W H I S T O R I C I S M A N D D I S P L AC E M E N T 20

With the advent of New Historicism, the viability of some of the readings discussed above (particularly those of Abrams and Hartman) have been questioned on the grounds that they accept and reiterate the poetrys own ideological separation of mind and world.21 In a struggle to anchor the discussion back in the material again, there has been a critical attempt to unmask the metaphysical self-representations of such poetry, and to reveal the displaced history that lies beneath this poetic of denial.22 In Wordsworth: The Sense of History, Alan Liu shows the Simplon Pass account to be a paradigm of historical repression, as the post-revolutionary Wordsworth displaces his historical knowledge of Napoleon crossing the Alps when narrating his own autobiographical journey through that same region. In the light of this type of reading, Hartmans model of imaginative emancipation looks like a freedom that can only come at the cost of a historical lie. Liu writes:
Where we have come in our tour, then, is to the annunciation of the argument of this book. The true apocalypse for Wordsworth is reference. [. . .] [R]eference to history, I assert, is the only power of Wordsworths Imagination [. . .]; this power is as unstable, surprising, and full of hidden lights as any gure Mind can conceive; and its hold over Mind in not less but more persistent when, as in The Prelude, it is manifest only in a poetics of denial, of reference lost.23

Liu is not alone, however, in thinking the Simplon Pass episode to be a narrative of displacement. Robert A. Brinkley, locates a shift between the 1805 and 1850 versions whereby:
The Apostrophe to Imagination, describing an event during the composition of the 1805 text, no longer refers to the experience which it initially described; through displacement, it now describes an event which occurred on a walking tour of the Alps[.]24

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In a similar fashion, David Miall has argued that the apocalyptic vision of the Gondo Ravine is part of Wordsworth displacing one construal of his Alpine experience by another [. . .] dismissing the picturesque for an ecological, participatory account of Nature.25 For Liu, however, this displacement is specically connected to apocalyptic, and he goes so far as to suggest that displacement is a general characteristic of apocalyptic writings. For Liu, a Book of Daniel or a Revelation, have suffered rsthand the most brutal facts of history.26 They, therefore, represent a type of writing in which disbelief slips into denial. Liu states that apocalypse is:
[T]he writing that says, No, this should not be, by means of fantastic gurations saying, in essence, No, this is not. That such guration denies history is indisputable. But surely such denial is also the strongest kind of engagement with history.27

Liu does not develop his discussion of the relationship between apocalypse and historical displacement in this work, but the topic has been taken up and examined in detail by Steven Goldsmith in Unbuilding Jerusalem (1993). Goldsmiths argument is detailed and complex, but Deanne Westbrook28 gives the following helpful summary:
Examining the history of representations and emphasizing the notion of the end of both history and book, Goldsmith nds in texts a tendency to represent that end in spatial terms, terms in which stasis and eternity supersede process, diversity, strife, and the polyglot babble of earthly tongues, and, rid of those whose names are not written in the book of life, permits a conservative and monoglot harmony of voices and a uniformity of attitude and behaviour in eternal worship.29

Goldsmith thinks that apocalypse is a deeply problematic genre that specically tries to end history, and he reads this as a formal strategy from a new historicist perspective. This argument embodies a certain way of understanding apocalypse that Judith Kovacs and Christopher Rowland have recently described as decoding:
Decoding involves presenting the meaning of the text in another, less allusive form, showing what the text really means, with great attention to the details [. . .] Meaning is conned as the details of images and actions are xed on some historical passage or event.30

This method of reading apocalyptic texts effectively allegorises them. By allegory in this context, I mean, simply, a story, poem or picture which

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can be interpreted to reveal a hidden meaning.31 In readings that decode the Book of Revelation, the text is treated as an allegory that is interpreted in order to reveal its hidden historical referent. Historically, this has been a common mode of understanding the book, as William Kinsley explains:
Various individuals and groups have attempted to read their own immediate future in the visions of Revelation and other biblical apocalypses. In 17th-cent. England the Fifth Monarchists expected the imminent establishment of the kingdom which shall never be destroyed (Dan. 2:44), the successor to the kingdoms of Babylon, Persia, Greece and Rome. Sir Isaac Newton labored tirelessly to correlate the prophecies of Daniel and Revelation with ancient and modern history. The American and French Revolutions revived a variety of apocalyptic speculations. In 19th-cent. America the Millerites and other groups xed precise dates for the end of the world and made elaborate preparations for it. After World War II the establishment of a Jewish state in Israel provided a new point of departure for apocalyptisists, and prompted a spate of popular works of prophetic speculation (e.g. H. Lindsey, The Late Great Planet Earth [1970], a national best-seller in the United States).32

In each of these cases, a particular (usually imminent) historical moment is understood to be the hidden referent of the apocalyptic text, and in this way, signier and signied, text and historical situation, are placed in a closed semiotic circuit: for history to be conclusively ended, there cannot be multiple apocalypses, there can be only one possible historical referent for the apocalyptic text. It is because of this one-to-one correlation (between text and the end of history) that I use the term allegorical to describe this type of reading rather than, say, symbolic or analogical. This is the form of apocalyptic interpretation that New Historicist writers such as Liu and Goldsmith have battened onto, but it is, as Kovacs and Rowland point out, only one of a number of possible forms of interpretation of apocalypse.33 This New Historicist denition and reading of apocalypse is not, therefore, a transparent or objective one. It actually brings a mode of apocalyptic interpretation to the text, critiques it as a characteristic of that text, then (paradoxically) re-enacts it by declaring that the hidden meaning of the poetry is history.34 It thereby inadvertently effects closure through what is ostensibly a critique of closure. This manoeuvre is not, however, restricted to new historicist readings: allegorical readings of apocalypse are also evident in Hartman, Abrams and Paley. Each of these analogous cases is predicated on a two-term apocalyptic structure, whether apocalypse is being interpreted as the movement from nature to consciousness, from an external to an internal apocalypse, or from apocalypse to millennium.

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I V. PA RT T H R E E : B O O K V I O F T H E P R E L U D E A S A C R I T I Q U E O F A LL E G OR ICA L R EA DI NG

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In this section, I will suggest that in Book VI of The Prelude Wordsworth offers a critique of allegory, and that this critique takes the form of enacting the limitations of allegorical understanding. I will also suggest that Wordsworth delivers a form of apocalypse that subverts hermeneutical attempts to close down history. In making this argument, I link allegorical readings of apocalypse to what I understand to be a wider struggle in Wordsworths writing with the alienating nature of allegorical language. In order to explain this connection, I will rst offer a brief discussion of Wordsworths anxieties about language. Throughout his career, Wordsworth is concerned with the idea of natural language, which he discusses at length in both the Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800) and in the Essays upon Epitaphs (180910). In these works, he puts forward an argument that splits language into a benevolent form and a malevolent form, these forms corresponding variously to the distinction between the natural and the articial, between the body and clothing and between incarnation and impersonation. The issue goes deep in Wordsworths thinking and poetry, yet the difference between these two types of language is, paradoxically, not linguistic. There is not, for example, a good vocabulary and a bad vocabulary in his work, nor is he concerned with the difference between urban and rural dialects. He is not even occupied here with the difference between poetic and non-poetic language. I offer two examples to illustrate this disjuncture between poetry and language: rst, Wordsworth calls his brother John, a number of times, a silent Poet.35 He does so not because of his brothers use of words (John writes no poetry), but because of the latters affections and sensitivity to nature. Second, in the Essays upon Epitaphs, Wordsworth presents the epitaph as a paradigm of the best poetry: it is open, honest, sincere, democratic, socially cohesive and in sympathy with nature; it is not a proud writing shut up for the studious: it is exposed to allto the wise and the most ignorant; it is condescending, perspicuous, and lovingly solicits regard (I, 399402). When, in one of the later essays, Wordsworth describes the most affecting epitaph he has ever seen, it is a very small stone that bears nothing more than the name of the Deceased with the date of birth and death, importing that it was an Infant which had been born one day and died the following. Wordsworth goes on:
I know not how far the Reader may be in sympathy with me, but more awful thoughts of rights conferred, of hopes awakened, of remembrances stealing away or vanishing were imparted to my mind by that Inscription there before my eyes than by any other that it has ever been my lot to meet with upon a Tomb-stone. (III, 47380)

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In short, this superlative example of writingthe most powerful instance of what is for Wordsworth a paradigmatic form of poetryis simply two dates, nothing but numbers. Writing is at its best here for the poet because its meanings are sustained by the non-linguistic: the grave, the churchyard, the community within which that inscription makes sense. Such meanings cannot be transcribed, no dictionary could contain those numbers and x them to the emotions that they evoke for Wordsworth; such meanings can only be established and maintained through community, shared experience, shared affections, a shared world. Wordsworths fear is that when these material and interpersonal grounds of meaning are lost, words may become their substitutes. At this moment, language begins to take on an abstract power of its own: meaning becomes grounded in language (rather than the world), and words and meanings thereby enter the same allegorical (and transcendent) relationship as that of text and history discussed above. For Wordsworth, such language is dangerous because it becomes the ghost of lost reality, transxing individuals with a world of abstractions: the vitiating process that Wordsworth narrates in Michael. Wordsworth contrasts these two types of language in the Essays:
Words are too awful an instrument for good and evil to be tried with: they hold above all other external powers a dominion over thoughts. If words be not [. . .] an incarnation of the thought but only a clothing for it, then surely they will prove an ill gift; such a one as those poisoned vestments, read of in the stories of superstitious times, which had power to consume and to alienate from his right mind the victim who put them on. Language, if it do not uphold, and feed, and leave in quiet, like the power of gravitation or the air we breathe, is a counter-spirit, unremittingly and noiselessly at work to derange, to subvert, to lay waste, to vitiate, and to dissolve. (III, 178188)

Wordsworth expresses a similar response, I would suggest, to apocalypse. The form of apocalypse that Wordsworth fears is one in which the relationship between biblical prophecy and historical fullment becomes xed and omnipotent. This type of xed relationship can be seen, for example, in Coleridges 1794 poem Religious Musings, in which, as M. H. Abrams puts it, [i]n both text and lengthy footnotes the details of the Revolution are represented as fullling the violent prophecies of the apocalypse of St John.36 By 1805, Wordsworth had seen where this type of thinking led. In writing about revolutionary France in Book VI of The Prelude he has the advantage of hindsight that Coleridge lacked, and was highly aware of the ideological function and real world effects of this sort of discourse. Something of the

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public nature of this discourse can be gleaned from Tim Fulfords discussion of Burkes response to Coleridges hermeneutical role models:
Horried at [the] optimistic interpretation of revolutionary violence, Edmund Burke depicted Price, Priestley, and their fellow millenarians as dangerous subversives, comparing them with the regicide sectarians of Britains revolution of the 1640s. From then on, millenarianism, real and accused, became a crucial factor in the vituperative war of words that polarized British politics and precipitated the imprisonment of many opponents of the government.37

Wordsworths retrospective position, together with his antipathy to allegory lead me to argue that he is doing something quite in his treatment of apocalypse. Just as Wordsworth is deeply suspicious of allegorical language, so he is also deeply suspicious of allegorical apocalypse as a deterministic embrace of puricatory violence. The means by which Wordsworth expresses this is by attempting to forestall the possibility of his apocalypse being read allegorically, and he achieves this, I think, by creating a discussion of the troubling nature of language that runs throughout his description of revolutionary France, and is framed by the symmetrical meditations on the nature of language at the end of Books V and the apocalypse late in Book VI. The end of Book V of The Prelude provides a meditation on the dark nature of language, which is one of the most strikingly abstract passages to be found anywhere in Wordsworth:
Visionary power Attends the motions of the winds Embodied in the mystery of words; There darkness makes abode, and all the host Of shadowy things do work their changes there As in a mansion like their proper home. Even forms and substances are circumfused By that transparent veil with light divine, And through the turnings intricate of verse Present themselves as objects recognised In ashes, and with a glory scarce their own. (V, 619629)

Here, 600 lines before Book VIs account of the apocalypse itself, the specics of that later passage are already being anticipated. Here the presence of words such as visionary, mystery and darkness is made substantially more threatening by talk of the host / Of shadowy things. The phrase brings to mind the heavenly host, but here those associations are subverted because that host is shadowy. Nothing is made explicit here, but the passage prompts

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many questions: what is a shadowy host?, is the dark work of language being implicitly likened to that of Miltons fallen angels?, is the mansion that is their proper home Pandemonium?, what are the endless changes being wrought through the dark materials of language here? This passage begins to sound like the section described earlier in the Essays in which language takes up life as a counter-spirit (III, 186). Language here is menacing, but it is also clearly full of beauty and wonder, and these dark images are interwoven with light counterparts that invoke apocalypse etymologically as an uncovering or unveiling: Wordsworths writes, for example, of the transparent veil with light divine, that presents objects with a glory scarce their own. The passage also suggests that divine language cannot be xed or stabilised: Wordsworth notes that these moments of revelation are just that, moments. They come, Damascus-style, in ashes, a word takes us forward to the ashes that have shewn to us / The invisible world in the apostrophe to Imagination quoted earlier (VI, 5356). That later passage exhibits much the same ambiguity insofar as the poet is inspired by a musean unfathered vapourthat could be the Holy Spirit, or that could be something much more duplicitous. This same ambiguity is evident in the revelationthe apocalypse of Book VIthat all of this builds towards, which is, as Abrams and Beer suggest, a singularly dialectical conclusion in which nature speaks in words that cannot be understood:
The rocks that muttered close upon our ears Black drizzling crags that spake by the wayside As if a voice were in them (VI, 562564)

The landscape is speaking here, but it is speaking indecipherably, and this moment of revelation is simultaneously a moment of obscurity. In this manner, Book VI partakes in the Book of Revelation without becoming its allegorical completion, by sharing with its biblical original an unveiling that is shrouded in mystery. These passages resist allegorisation because their meaning will not settle. Set within these framing visions of Books V and VI are a series of discussions and exemplications of xed or allegorical language within Book VI itself. This begins in Wordsworths account of Cambridge as the poet describes how nature gave him a standard by which to judge new experiences. He contrasts this with what he has learnt from books:
I was a better judge of thoughts than words, Misled as to these latter not alone By common inexperience of youth, But by the trade in classic niceties,

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Delusion to young scholars incident And old ones alsoby that overprized And dangerous craft of picking phrases out From languages that want the living voice To make of them a nature to the heart, To tell us what is passion, what is truth, What reason, what simplicity and sense. (VI,124134)

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Classical literature, Wordsworth argues, is dangerous because it is a dead language, only comprehensible by the type of allegorical translation I discussed earlier. Dead languages are xed languages that can only communicate through decoding, they lack the living voice that can make of them a nature to the heart. This meditation on allegorical language continues in the succeeding narrative of the journey through revolutionary France, a narrative containing writing that critics since Coleridge have found awkward and unsatisfying. Paley writes:
[T]he descriptions of revolutionary celebration are self-undermining. Gaudy with reliques of that Festival appropriates diction typical of English Protestant denunciations of Papist idolatry, and the Flowers left to wither on triumphal Arcs (3623) testify to a failure to appropriate nature to a political cause.38

The stiffness of the writing in this section is typied by the lines that Coleridge, as Paley notes (168), particularly objected to:
There doth the reaper bind the yellow sheaf, The maiden spread the haycock in the sun, ` While Winter like a tamed lion walks, Descending from the mountain to make sport Among the cottages by beds of owers. (4649)

Paley comments:
There appears something willed about these lines [. . .] [O]ne senses a desire to furnish materials for a view of humankind and the natural world in harmony that will justify the variant on the traditional idea of the Book of Nature that follows[.]39

Wordsworth holds reality at arms length throughout the account of revolutionary France. We are never told peoples names: everyonefrom the peasant to Wordsworths travelling companionremains anonymous, undifferentiated and emblematic. But this is just the allegorical manner in which revolutionary France and the French were being read at the time by contemporary millenarians. Wordsworth knows this, and writes in a

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formal, alienated manner not because of a failure of poetic verve or nerve, but because he has seen what an uncritical and non-dialectical commitment to an allegorical revolution and apocalypse can lead to. Wordsworth critiques this allegorical understanding by embodying it (as he does in his slightly later medieval poems40) through an alienated formality. It feels wrong for a reason. Earlier in this piece, I highlighted the critical emphasis on displacement in the Simplon Pass episode. Displacement is common to all the critical narratives in which apocalypse is understood as a shift between two domains, whether those domains equate to nature, composition of the self, revolutionary hope, Imagination, the sublime or whatever else. In each case, I would suggest, Wordsworths text encourages these diverse allegorical readings of displacement as a means to exposing its own claims and ctions, and that the reason it does so is in order to prevent itself from becoming the type of xed tyrannical (that is allegorical) language or narrative that I have discussed throughout this section. In these ways, Book VI provokes its reader to allegorise its meaning, and in doing so it shows the shortfall of allegorical reading. This is why, I would suggest, the book has provoked so many readings predicated on displacement. Allegory is closure, but Book VI subverts violent millennial apocalyptic by repeatedly exposing its own devices and locality: wherever meaning might be battened down, the text betrays itself and the allegory is shaken loose. The apocalypse that Wordsworth writes, then, is one of a type that Kovacs and Rowland describe as actualized interpretation. In this form:
[T]he imagery of the Apocalypse is juxtaposed with the interpreters own circumstances, whether personal or social, so as to allow the images to inform understanding of contemporary persons and events and to serve as a guide for action. Such interpretation has deep roots in the Christian tradition, going back at least to the time of Tyconius and Augustine[.] [. . .] In contrast with decoding, it preserves the integrity of the textual pole and does not allow the image or passage from the Apocalypse to be identied solely with one particular historical personage or circumstance. The text is not prevented from being actualized in different ways over and over again.41

The apocalypse that Wordsworth experiences (or creates) at the Simplon Pass is temporal and individual. It might still be said to be allegorical (as he reads biblical apocalypse coming to pass in his own textual or historical moment), but it a type of allegorical reading that is used and then discarded, never reied as a transcendent truth that locks down the meaning and ends of history. In summary, Book VI of The Prelude is a text in which poetry is used to express the darkness and duplicity of language itself; it is a text that shows its consciousness of a history that it simultaneously refuses to narrate; a text that

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visibly unknits the notions of identity that it works so hard to create; and a text that dissolves the very nature it posits as its touchstone of truth. However, these negations do not dissolve meaning. Rather, they indicate that the text is doing two separate but related things. It is inviting us to commit to its narrative as readers, to share in the poems joys and sorrows, but it is also constantlyand simultaneouslysuggesting that those narratives may be false. Thus the relationship of Wordsworths text to its apocalyptic originals is necessarily fractured and incomplete. His work does not seek the closure of history, identity or biblical meaning. Wordsworth had at this time come to recognise that only partial, fractured representation can offer an image of truth. We see but through a glass darkly, and any greater claim than that is nave idealism: this is the chastened wisdom of 1806s Elegiac Stanzas, Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle, in a Storm. John Beer writes one could not easily write an ode to a non-apocalypse42 though in some senses that is exactly what Book VI is.

V. PA RT F O U R : S I M I L A R I T I E S B E T W E E N A P O C A LY P S E I N THE PRELUDE AND TH E BIBLE

Does, then, the Simplon apocalypse bear any relation to biblical apocalypse? Can biblical apocalypse help us to read Wordsworthian apocalypse and vice versa? If so, Wordsworth may provide a hermeneutical method of reading apocalypses such as the Book of Revelation that forestalls locking their interpretation into prophecies of modern-day social or global destruction. New Testament apocalypse is usually associated with dramatic symbolism, shifting time perspectives, and scenes of wrath and punishment. This is true of the Book of Revelation in particular. However, the apocalyptic signs that typify the genre come to an end (or at least pause) when humanity nally encounters God. As the Christian hymn puts it, Types and shadows have their ending (Thomas Aquinas, tr. E. Caswall, 1861). Revelation 21:4 offers the gentle image of God wiping away human tears, and the inhabitants of the New Jerusalem needing no longer to see in a glass darkly but face to face (22:4). There is something similar in another eschatological scene when the face-to-face moment at the Last Judgment is shown to righteous and unrighteous alike through prolepsis: in Matthew 25, the encounter with God turns out to have been anticipated in the most everyday events: caring for the sick, welcoming a stranger, visiting those in prison, feeding the hungry (25:3445). It is at the nal moment of unveiling (apocalypsis), when that which is covered up will be uncovered (Matt 10:26, where the cognate verb apokalupto is used). Then those who have acted in these ways are given the knowledge that their action is proleptic of service to the Eschatological Judge: whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me (25:40).43

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In each of these cases, when the veil is removed, humanity comes face to face with the divine: in Revelation 22:4 it is God, in Matthew 25 it is the discovery that the Eschatological Judge has been encountered in the poor, and in Book VI of The Prelude, it is woods, crags, the unfettered clouds and region of the heavens (566) that open a vision of the types and symbols of eternity (571). Like Matthew, Wordsworths apocalypse provides a revelation of the divine asor inthe everyday, and in both texts, although the language may be violent (or at least extreme), the earthly contents of the revelation are not: a brook and a road; something to eat, something to drink. Hence Book VI, which initially offers a divine revelation under banners militant in historical events, goes on to subvert this militarism through a non-violent natural encounter that discloses the historically self-centred nature of closed allegorical understanding.44 Despite these similarities, there are of course many differences between Book VI and New Testament apocalypse. Wordsworths book resembles Matthew 25 in being immanentist, but unlike that text it is not incarnational, for God is not revealed (as in Matthew 25) in human form. So, unlike both the Book of Revelation and Matthew, Wordsworths apocalypse is not Christocentric. Finally, unlike the Matthean apocalypse, the Simplon apocalypse has no obvious moral content, it is not tied up with acts of charity (such as feeding the hungry), and in this respect although it is hermeneutically similar to New Testament apocalypse, it differs in content. To summarise, in this article, I have argued that Wordsworth offers a hermeneutical alternative to the 1790s millennial interpretations of apocalypse. I have also argued that his engagement of apocalypse is not one in which it means a revelation of the transformation of the mind, nor one in which it means the anticipation of revolutionary bloodshed, but it is one in which apocalyptic language is fullled in the everyday. Like Matthew 25, there is no sudden transformation of history, everything is revealed to be what it always was: everyday and divine. In the apocalypse of Simplon Pass, every thing is shown, but no thing is revealed. It is a humanised (though not anthropocentric) understanding of apocalypse that has much in common with Matthew 25. As ever, Wordsworth is reticent, singular, and endlessly provocative: his account of a highly personal revelation crossing the Alps offers a critique of the sort of allegorical readings of apocalypse whichboth in Wordsworths day and our ownare too easily connected to the actuality of earthly violence.45 The School of English, The University of Liverpool, Liverpool, L69 7ZR jon.roberts@liv.ac.uk

JONATHAN ROBERTS REFERENCES

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All quotations from The Prelude taken from the 1805 text in William Wordsworth, The Prelude, ", ", ", J. Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and S. Gill (eds), 1st ed. (New York: Norton, 1979). A. Liu, Wordsworth, the Sense of History (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1989), p. 4. A.C. Bradley, Oxford Lectures on Poetry, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1941), p. 134. Bradley, pp. 1345. prolepsis n. in The Concise Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford University Press, 2004 [cited 20 December 2005]); available from http://www.oxfordreference.com. G.H. Hartman, Wordsworths Poetry, """, Rev. ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), p. 349. Ibid., p. xxii. Ibid., p. xii. Ibid., p. 228. Ibid., p. xii. Ibid., p. 225. M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York, London: Norton, 1973), p. 41. Ibid., p. 56. Ibid., p. 106. A. Warminski, Missed Crossing: Wordsworths Apocalypses, MLN , (1984) 9831006, p. 987. M.D. Paley, Apocalypse and Millennium in English Romantic Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), p. 5. Paley initially mentions an apocalypse in nature, as Wordsworth recollects the Gondo gorge (169), but also suggests that both apocalypse and millennium take place in the earlier apostrophe to the imagination. Paley, pp. 1701. In a similar vein, John Beer has argued that Blake, Coleridge and Wordsworth all realised at a certain point that the apocalypse which they had anticipated had

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passed by, and they therefore sought to internalise it. This is also indebted to Abrams, but Beer develops the discussion by suggesting that this manoeuvre is parallel to Albert Schweitzers idea of the realized eschatology of the early church. In his discussion of the Simplon Pass, Beer also picks up on what Abrams calls the coincidentia oppositorum arguing that in the Gondo Ravine, Wordsworth found a strong sense of unity and harmony [which] was the moment when apocalypse became truly revelation (634). See J. Beer, Romantic Apocalypses, in Tim Fulford (ed.) Romanticism and Millenarianism, (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002). I do not mean to suggest that New Historicism is a simple or homogenous entity. Nonetheless, the term can be used, in this context, to indicate the shared methodological and hermeneutical strategies of, for example, Alan Liu, Stephen Goldsmith, Jerome McGann and Marjorie Levinson. See for example, pp. 323 (on Abrams) and pp. 723 (on Hartman) of J.J. McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 1983). Liu, p. 35. Ibid. R.A. Brinkley, The Incident in the Simplon Pass: A Note on Wordsworths Revisions, The Wordsworth Circle ", (1981) 12225, p. 123 (my emphasis). D.S. Miall, The Alps Deferred: Wordsworth as the Simplon Pass, European Romantic Review , (1998) 87102, p. 87 (my emphasis). Liu, p. 35. Ibid. Westbrook draws on Goldsmith in her own work on Wordsworthian Apocalyptics in Wordsworths Biblical Ghosts (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001). In that work she brings the discussion of apocalypse closer again to Bradley and Warminski.

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shoved aside in the scramble for historical meaning. However, her reading of apocalypse as trauma has little in common with the biblical and eschatological focus of this paper. See K.B. Goodman, Making Time for History: Wordsworth, the New Historicism, Studies in Romanticism , (1996). See the 1800 poem, When rst I journeyd hither, to a home, l. 88, and W to SGB, 11 Feb. 1805, EY, p. 541 in which he calls John a Poet in every thing but words.. Abrams, pp. 3389. T.Fulford, (ed.) Romanticism and Millenarianism (New York; Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), p. 3. Paley, p. 167. Ibid.,168. See S. Allen and J. Roberts, Wordsworth and the Thought of Affection: Michael, The Force of Prayer, Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle, European Romantic Review " (2005) 45570. Kovacs and Rowland, p. 9. Beer, Romantic Apocalypses, p. 61. All biblical quotations taken from The NIV Study Bible: New International Version, K.L. Barker (ed.) (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1998). Why, then, do these writers use apocalyptic language at all? Perhaps because it is such a powerful means of drawing attention to the ordinary, and showing the divine presence there. This certainly seems to be the case with Book VI and Matthew 25. It is also the case that in both of these texts, the understanding of the divine signicance of events is only given in retrospect. See, for example, K.G.C. Newport, The Branch Davidians of Waco: The History and Beliefs of an Apocalyptic Sect (Oxford: OUP, 2006).

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She is committed to the idea that everything in Wordsworth is simultaneously apocalyptic and natural, and thinks her own interpreters task is to trace how this happens (186). Westbrooks emphasis is on how Wordsworths poetry is able to reveal the unspoken, and she summarises her own argument as follows: [I]n articulating the visionary or apocalyptic experience, the poet depends upon what I have identied as the interwoven linguistics of negative theology and parapraxical writing, in this case with a particular dependence on the manipulation of the negative combined with a certain syntactic legerdemain. (179). D.Westbrook, Wordsworths Biblical Ghosts (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), p. 149. J.L. Kovacs, Christopher Rowland, and Rebekah Callow. Revelation: The Apocalypse of Jesus Christ, Blackwell Bible Commentaries (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), p. 9. allegory n. in The Concise Oxford English Dictionary. W. Kinsley, Apocalypse, in David Lyle Jeffrey (ed.) A Dictionary of Biblical Tradition in English Literature, (Grand Rapids, Michigan: W.B. Eerdmans, 1992), p. 46. Goldsmith and Liu also assume that apocalypse is necessarily concerned with heralding the end of the world, a view that has been widely challenged in recent decades. See, for example, C. Rowland, Open Thy Mouth for the Dumb: A Task for the Exegete of Holy Scripture, Biblical Interpretation " (1993) 22841. Kevis Bea Goodmans critique of New Historicism and the Apocalyptic Fallacy provides a focus on the importance of time and prolepsis in Wordsworth. She argues that the temporal and aesthetic dimensions of his writing (which relate to Freuds ideas about the work of mourning) cannot be

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