The Songstone, Canto I: The Tower

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Own or manage this property? Claim your listing for free to respond to reviews, update your profile and much more. Pearl River Night Cruise in Guangzhou with Ranked 10 of things to do in Guangzhou. The Canton Tower is the tallest TV tower in the world with a total height of m. The Tower was built using the latest engineering technologies, but inherits years of Canton Culture. The Tower offers an observation deck with a spectacular view, several top-notch restaurants and catering services, 5-star exhibition, convention and entertainment facilities.

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Close Report a review At Kobo, we try to ensure that published reviews do not contain rude or profane language, spoilers, or any of our reviewer's personal information. Per- 1 3 University of California Publications in English haps the greatest difference in Donne's adjectives here is his repetition of, and play on, such small words as one.

In "Let us possesse one world, each hath one, and is one," and "If our two loves be one. In this variation lies the theme and climax of the poem: So where Wyatt bal- anced, paired, and opposed his guiding epithets, Donne steered a meaning through his, to arrive at new meanings out of old. The other poems in the Songs and Sonets bear out these emphases.

Donne lists adjectives seldom, though often nouns and verbs, and when he does, there is often the cumulative meaning of "But truly keepes his first, last, everlasting day. The standards of true and false, good and bad are less opposed than contained together in what is for Donne commonly called paradox, the suspension of irrec- oncilables, in such poems as "Twicknam Garden," "The Dreame," "The Message," "Love's Deitie.

Come live with mee, and bee my love, And we will some new pleasures prove Of golden sands, and christall brookes, With silken lines, and silver hookes. Which becomes, in the sixth stanza, Let coarse bold hands, from slimy nest The bedded fish in banks out-wrest, Or curious traitors, sleavesilke flies Bewitch poore fishes wandring eyes. Donne clearly doesn't hold much with the silken and the silver epithet. In "The Sunne Rising" his maintained theme of the lovers' unified Miles: Adjectives in English Poetry world is devised by a homely name-calling of the sun; here again is one of the few poems to build solidly on qualifying by describing, and it does not do so seriously: Busie old foole, unruly Sunne, Why dost thou thus, Through windowes, and through curtaines call on us?

Must to thy motions lovers seasons run? Sawcy pedantique wretch, goe chide Late schoole boyes, and sowre prentices, Goe tell Court-huntsmen, that the King will ride, Call countrey ants to harvest offices; Love, all alike, no season knowes, nor clyme, Nor houres, dayes, moneths, which are the rags of time. Good we must love, and must hate ill, For ill is ill, and good good still, But there are things indifferent, Which wee may neither hate, nor love, But one, and then another prove, As wee shall finde our fancy bent. If then at first wise Nature had Made women either good or bad, Then some might wee hate, and some chuse, But since shee did them so create, That we may neither love, nor hate, Onely this rests, All, all may use.

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If they were good it would be seene, Good is as visible as greene, And to all eyes it selfe betrayes: If they were bad, they could not last, Bad doth it selfe, and others wast, So, they deserve not blame, nor praise. I'J i The adjective when even slightly elaborate is, for Donne, part of the joke. On the other hand, the common adjective of concept he is perfectly willing to make bear his theme, as in the one and the new which we noted.

A poem outstanding for such use, and a good one for summarizing this characteristic of Donne's, is "Communitie," wherein goodness and badness are the theme which leads to the final figure of the fruit and the idea of indifference. M i ik 3 University of California Publications in English But they are ours as fruits are ours, He that but tasts, he that devours, And he that leaves all, doth as well: Chang'd loves are but chang'd sorts of meat, And when hee hath the kernel eate, Who doth not fling away the shell?

Indeed it may be justly said that for Donne, as he says here for himself, "Good is as visible as greene," and that is why he uses the good words, the most conceptual, the least sensory, so often. Donne is a sensory poet, but in objects and actions; he is in fact mainly a poet of objects and actions. Even less than Wyatt he relies on epithets for substance ; his adjectives, as these few poems illustrate, characteristically either satirize themselves or modulate an idea conceptually, not descriptively. They are part of Donne's essay form.

Now it may be well to see how these sampling generalizations are borne out and modified by the total mass of adjectives in a thousand lines of Songs and Sonets. Of these near seven hundred adjectives, seven in ten lines, like Wyatt's though I think a larger proportion would be found in the religious poems , 30 per cent are quantity labels, 15 per cent participial, 55 per cent general modifying.

There is thus less emphasis on the last two categories than for Wyatt, and actually also less than for any other of the ten poets studied. Donne's greater emphasis, as we have already noted in the few poems observed, is upon the variations to be found in such unobtrusive modifiers as one, and other, and all. As one-third of all his adjective uses, they are at least 10, often 20, per cent more than in other poets.

As for partici- ples, they are probably fewer because Donne tended to use straight verbs. The participles are more active than Wyatt's, with wording and made as typical, rather than tossing and weried; that is, again they are less of internal feeling and more of outer action: The pattern of the general qualifiers illustrates again the play of Donne's mind and skill over a few major terms. About one-fourth of all these uses is confined to the nine major adjectives alone, as com- pared to one-sixth or less for Wyatt. One of every four adjectives is N 5 Miles: Adjectives in English Poetry good or new or last, and so on.

So Donne works through the develop- ing of single common meanings.

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He uses a few more sensory adjec- tives than Wyatt: Donne tended sometimes to use these quali- tative terms with irony, we remember, so it is not surprising that they name the common poetic qualities in the century. As for the rest of Donne's general adjectives, they are extremely miscellaneous, appear- ing few times apiece and in special contexts with their nouns from the active world: There are adjectives, too, second in amount only to the major ones, adjectives like poor, little, sure, strange, and sweet, which for Donne are adjectives of atti- tude, almost of comment, expressing, like his major old, a mixture of amusement, impatience, and affection.

All of this minority provided Ml a respectable minority for Wyatt too, since these are adjectives of J attitude. I Thus, it may be said that "simple and manly" diction of Wyatt sur- Id vived to Donne and was fostered by him. Most major and minor adjectives of attitude and standard maintained their force. The terms of sense qualities were much the same. Great positives and negatives in life and love were still set together in the frame of the song and the 1 sonnet to the lady.

Modification as a kind of poetizing retained its J proportion and its relative spareness, its conceptual rather than sensory function. Within this continuity a major change is accurately visible. It is visible in the replacing of Wyatt's major terms of relation, dear and cruel, sure and just, by Donne's major terms for time, last and old and new, terms for outer world as well as inner. The change is visible in the nouns which are modified by these terms, from the major heart to the major soul, and from nouns of feeling to nouns of the world's business in astronomy and geography.

The change is visible in the University of California Publications in English great bulk of adjectives in a thousand lines: Donne's stress on outward directed participles, on one and all, and a few major terms rather than a variety, and again on special singular terms for special fields of knowledge rather than the intense field of inner feeling.

The change is visible finally and most wholly in the whole poems themselves, as Donne's structures make clear what shift in value controlled his vari- ation of the common pattern of modification. Simply, as we have seen, it was a shift from a theme of conflict to a theme of paradox, as the great opposites of good and bad, true and false, moved from the heart to the soul, from dear and cruel to new and old, from lovers poised apart in a universe again apart and unusable except by simile, to lovers taking unto themselves together the many disparities of a universe daily and active, not just fickly mutable, but becoming new, and acceptable in metaphor by the soul.

A century later, at his death in , the poet who had the attending ear of the populace and the accepting ear of other poets was notably Pope. The era and nature of his influence seems a long way off from Donne's, even farther than Donne from Wyatt's, since the time of the businessman had arrived and the common man was supposed to be reasonable. The effect on adjectives of such social change is hard to imagine. Pope was Donne's sort in that he was a poet of talk more than song or picture ; the philosophical talk of each was in a vein cen- tral to his time, and in a tone of satire.

What bonds underlay their work are hard to discern specifically; but we can at least inquire how they shared the problem of adjective usage, how they differed in feel- ing for modification, how slowly the mass of poetic device moves from century to century.

Poet's Notes about The Poem

In major terms the movement seems not to have been great. Pope was using in the early seventeen hundreds just the adjectives Donne had stressed in the early sixteen hundreds: He had discarded, however, Donne's bad, dead, last, and true, and added one new term, soft. One notes that his list of major terms is shorter, only six, in a proportion where the other poets show eight or ten outstanding. This means that Pope simply did not constantly use so many adjectives with special emphasis: Adjectives in English Poetry meanings were less all-pervasive.

The six adjectives which appear in amounts next largest are still of sixteenth-century emphasis, or earlier, Chaucer's high and wise, Marlowe's poor and proud, except that as Pope added soft to the fullest level, here at the next level he added the Miltonic happy, both what we should call Romantic contributions. Note too the continuance, visible when these secondary emphases are added, of terms of attitude, happy, poor, proud, like Wyatt's primary cruel, dear, just, sure, and Donne's secondary poor, sure, strange. Looking deeper than the first half-dozen words, then, one can see scattered early alliances in Pope's adjective types; but most emphati- cally noteworthy in his brief major list are the likeness to Donne and [ the single contribution of the curious adjective soft.

M The likeness to Donne extends not only through the adjectives of standard which all the poets up to Pope share, but also through Donne's own characteristic new and old. The standard dead and true which Pope lacks seem to have been abandoned, after Donne, by Herbert and Milton very decisively. So Pope agrees with these two Q predecessors in his omission of words long major, but the clue to soft does not come from them, since their main words make no innova- tions of this kind, nor does soft itself begin to be important numerically for any of them.

For Pope the term is used to modify a mixture of topics inner and outer: Here is a new world for us, where feelings and natural forces blend in this way by sharing the same descriptive quality. It is to be expected, also, that good and great will have changed their reference. They modify now not just the feelings of Wyatt, the physical world of Donne, but outstandingly a social world: Fair, too, now modifies a more outer world, of dales, fields, Thames, flow'rs, as well as Peace, Fame, and Liberty, the social activities.

Donne's new and old are not contrasts in attitude any more, but merely balanced in reference to age, glory, world, and song. The change with which Pope is concerned is less M j i I 3 University of California Publications in English of the universe and more of ages and stages, to be neither feared nor heralded, but to be accepted. None of the major nouns modified by all these terms is idiosyncratic except his friend; this, too, is part of the context in which we seem to see Pope working, a context of city associates and country breezes.

But still this noun context does not help much to explain Pope's innovation of a sense adjective in soft, or his fundamental lack of stress on any few major adjectives except a handful of standard ones. The bulk of a thousand lines of adjectives, however, provides an answer, and what a bulk it is after Wyatt and Donne, an increase by almost a half, to ten or eleven adjectives in every ten lines! The pro- portion of limiting to participial to quality adjectives is standard enough, with no extreme emphasis like Donne's.

It is the nature of the mass of adjectives that is new. The difference between Pope's styles, notably between the philosophical general style of the Essay on Man, for example, and the more descriptive and emotional narra- tive style of Eloisa to Abelard, creates some problems for discussion.

But since the main point is that even the philosophical Essay on Man makes more of descriptive adjectives than we have seen before, I shall use it as a provisional representative and refer to the Eloisa as an ex- treme of the descriptive type. In the Essay on Man, Pope works over his major terms only half as much as Donne did before him, or in proportion of a tenth. But, on the other hand, the terms of sense quality are greater, more varied, and of a new kind.

Whereas Wyatt's and Donne's were on the order of dry, sharp, cold, Pope's are giddy, vast, argent, fiery, dull, flow'ry, watry, nectareous, balmy, livid, cloudless, aromatic, green, dim, vernal, thin, ethereal, meteor-like, mazy, sour, wild, golden, cool, fresh, fine, iron, yellow, peaceful, boundless, gay. Clear in this list is the new em- phasis which Pope was placing on the qualities of natural objects, mostly streams, fields, and skies, not Donne's items of science, as they impressed the human senses and feelings.

The terms are half perceiv- ing, half responding, as the mixture appears in balmy, mazy, fresh, gay, for example. The seventeenth century's word of this possible mixed kind was sweet, yet neither Wyatt nor Donne used it with im- Miles: Adjectives in English Poetry plications of strong sensation, but rather with emphasis on valuation, as in fair also. Now even the abstract reasoning of the Essay on Man carries a larger burden of interest in sensation, the -y adjectives are created to characterize by quality, and the range of sights especially increases with the range of terms.

In the Eloisa this new emphasis results in a complete new texture. Where in Donne's love poems the major nine adjectives of time and standard amounted to a fourth of all, in this love poem the miscella- neous and various adjectives of sense, no single one repeated more than a half-dozen times, make up a fourth of all ; and Pope's primary terms are almost as scant as Donne's terms of sense. These are the words of Eloisa: Now all these, like Pope's primary soft and secondary happy, are terms which in our day we tend to call Romantic, because now we tend to connect such interest in quality and sensation and described nature, especially soft, pale, bright, and s i m j i dreary, with the poetry of Keats and Shelley as heart and center.

Pro- fessor Bateson in his history of poetic language has pointed out the A weakening effects on poetry of such adjectival force. Certainly a major point on which most agree is the generalizing power of the favorite vocabulary. What seemed significant was the trait of likeness, the trait often sensory and always part of the system of characteristics which put each thing in its proper place. The adjective was therefore very helpful, in fact essential to significant poetics, and was more and more constructed from other parts of speech. Geoffrey Tillotson, On the Poetry of Pope, pp. He traces this vocabulary not as traditionally to Pope's Iliad, but back to Du Bartas, Sylvester, Drayton, and the nonmetaphysical seventeenth-century poets.

Thus he raises the interesting question of the innovative power of minor poets. Robert Lathrop Sharp in From Donne to Dryden, contrasting Spenserian "melodie, clarte, abondance" to Donne's harshness, subtlety, economy, points out p. The thing de- University of California Publications in English Pope or to weigh Professor Bateson's judgment, because these consid- erations involve larger classifications and more absolute standards of value than are here relevant.

The point for us is simply the increase in potentiality of one large function of language, the adjectival, and one large aspect of experience, the sensational; both can be classified and evaluated in many ways; both at least enrich the possibilities of poetic expression. The rest of Pope's adjectives, between the major on the one hand and the variety of special sense terms on the other, parallel Wyatt's and Donne's adjectives of emotion, though now with stress on sad and awful in Eloisa, and also on such terms as holy and eternal to fit the theme.

In the Essay on Man, too, such repeated terms, in addition to emotional ones, as wise, immortal, eternal, future, human, weak, mean, low, natural, heavenly, general, proper, perfect, common, just, superior, strong, serve to evaluate by standards, not so much like the Elizabethans' of man to man in justness, goodness, and truth, but in relation of God to man and nature, which is the theme of the Essay.

Human, general, eternal, proper are especially characteristic of this major modification by Pope of the vocabulary of standards: Conflict and para- dox have become gradation; and terms of negative aspect, in pro- portion equal to Donne's, in meaning are employed not only to be accepted but to be resolved by the general whole. He named them with Chaucer and Dryden as England's greatest poets, and Spenser with Waller and Dryden as his early favorites. In his time, Spenser, Milton, Thomson were called descrip- tive or imaginative, Donne witty. Bateson, in English Poetry and the English Language, constantly contrasts seventeenth- and eighteenth-century organic-metaphysical and cumulative-baroque, with Pope as transitional.

It has been common among critics since Wordsworth to sense something wrong, something too "denotative," in modern terms, with the poetry which Pope led toward, though some blame it for late classicism, others for early romanticism. Pope's adjectives show the heart of the confusion and derogation. In major terms they are social, general, 'classical'; in the mass of secondary terms they are sweeping Mil tonic de- scriptiveness into its eighteenth-century glory. As an 'experimental' poet, then, Pope makes best sense.

Adjectives in English Poetry The beginning of the Essay on Man itself provides little example of major adjective content, but good example of the sort of statement structure which tended to foster the use of many adjectives, the two- part line: Let us since Life can little more supply Than just to look about us and to die Expatiate free o'er all this scene of Man; A mighty Maze!

That is, the structure is balanced, though not necessarily with any sense of opposition. Such structure makes easily for a two-adjective line, a balancing of qualifiers, as in the beginning Q of Epistle II: Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of Mankind is Man. With too much knowledge for the Sceptic side, With too much weakness for the Stoic's pride, He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest; In the Essay i J University of California Publications in English on Man a sorting, classifying, weighing process goes on which needs adjectives of "essential" activity or trait to enforce the orders.

Thus, such an un- usually descriptive passage as vu in Epistle I, though not often repeated in the essay, is characteristic in its use of detailed qualities for philo- sophical illustration. Far as Creation's ample range extends, The scale of sensual, mental pow'rs ascends: Mark how it mounts, to Man's imperial race, From the green myriads in the peopled grass: What modes of sight betwixt each wide extreme, The mole's dim curtain, and the lynx's beam: Of smell, the headlong lioness between, And hound sagacious on the tainted green: Of hearing, from the life that fills the Flood, To that which warbles thro the vernal wood: Range and scale of the universe provide the framework, and within this either the general terms such as imperial fill out the main lines of structure, or the finest particularities of which Pope was capable, finer in intention to qualify, at least, than we have seen be- fore, are lined up on either hand in green, peopled, dim, headlong, and sagacious and tainted.

These examples again show that Pope pairs and balances his lines and concepts, rather than his actual forms of speech as Wyatt did in his typical false versus true. Where Wyatt set adjective over against adjective, and where Donne juggled them to their ultimate reconciliation, Pope by a very different sense of poetic proprieties varied the form from adjective to noun to phrase within the structure of logic which he established, working less through play on words, more through play on clausal forms.

So imperial race is set against peopled grass exactly in structure but obliquely in meaning, and dim and beam which balance in sense and position do not in word form. These are the delicacies of Pope's skill, a kind to which our Miles: Adjectives in English Poetry minds as well as ears are not attuned, but one which represents an ad- vanced consideration of modifying function ; which depends upon the adjective for a good deal more major substance than heretofore, and is called upon to recognize the interchangeability of forms for the sake of variety in stating fairly stable and recurrent concepts of gene- rality and common quality.

The greatest lushness resulting from this attitude and technique appears, of course, in a poem like Eloisa to Abelard, where we see the theme of love, controlled with so many restraints and dramas of meaning by Wyatt and Donne, laid out clear on the one level of sense and feeling by Pope, with adjectives laid in thick to establish the [fj whole area. Now warm in love, now with'ring in my bloom, Lost in a convent's solitary gloom!

Seven adjectives in four lines— gushing, led, sad, warm, with'ring, lost, solitary— accumulate and pile up the single mood. Or the lover is more thoroughly modified: My fancy form'd thee of angelic kind, Some emanation of th'all-beauteous Mind. Those smiling eyes, attemp'ring ev'ry ray, Shone sweetly lambent with celestial day. Or the scene is described in terms to fit the prevailing mood: I But o'er the twilight groves and dusky caves, m Long-sounding aisles, and intermingled graves, Black Melancholy sits, and round her throws A death-like silence, and a dead repose: Her gloomy presence saddens all the scene, Shades ev'ry flow'r, and darkens ev'ry green, Deepens the murmur of the falling floods, And breathes a browner horror on the woods.

Thirteen adjectives in eight lines, and all are in agreement. The tradi- tion they come from is clearly now not the tradition of Wyatt or of Donne but something of Dryden from Milton from Spenser, a tradi- University of California Publications in English tion which in the first centuries of English poetry did not so intrude into many themes of thought as it does in the eighteenth for Pope.

Or, finally, a passage which illustrates the strong use of adjective as theme, where the very point of the sentences lies in the adjective, not by variation of meaning in a single one such as Donne might have made, but by variation of the terms themselves, for the richness of many qualities: For thee the fates, severely kind, ordain A cool suspense from pleasure and from pain; Thy life a long dead calm of fix'd repose; No pulse that riots, and no blood that glows.

Still as the sea, ere winds were taught to blow, Or moving spirit bade the waters flow; Soft as the slumbers of a saint forgiv'n, And mild as op'ning gleams of promis'd heav'n. Fourteen adjectives in eight lines provide most of the meaning of the passage, since the sheer statement is simple enough in the third line. The whole text is a text of atmosphere. As far as nouns go, Donne might in just such a way have called in sea and heaven for clarification of a situation, but would never have drawn from them this sort of sense quality, of cool, still, soft, and mild. By this very use of soft, then, a term which is one of Pope's major half-dozen, one may in some measure define the nature of his special poetics.

A hundred years later, in a poet of simple men's "real" language, the adjectives of sense flourish so that they have taken over half of the major list. They are now a prime and major portion of poetic vocabulary. Wordsworth's main adjectives are: So the centuries' continuity of dear- fair-good-great-and-true has been reduced to fair-and-good for Wordsworth, and only these two and old are carried over from the Donne tradition.

Yet Wordsworth is, in the 's, the leading poet closest by far to the easy common language and conversation tradition Miles: Adjectives in English Poetry of these older poets whom we have observed. Much as he fought Pope, Wordsworth had Pope's place by the 'forties, the place of collected works, dean of a mass of younger writers, and popularity general and moral rather than "poetic.

All these adjectives of Words- worth modify mountains, seas, streams, lakes, skies, fields, times of day, and then constantly by association his own spirits. Adjectives which he uses in secondary amount dear, gentle, pure, sad, silent, soft, sweet, wild are thoroughly of this same kind, plus the straight adjective of feeling in dear and sad which his major happy also rep- resents. His other major terms are all reduced to this same blend of sense and feeling: Outstanding for this list, then, is its singleness of tone, or its variety of tone over a single theme of vocabulary.

The natural world and human feeling are the subject at the point where they blend and can share the same epithets ; both are therefore deeply limited, away from their eccentricities and particularities and toward their likenesses. High mountain, high spirit; deep lake, deep soul; dark day, dark 8 In addition to books on Wordsworth's diction in general, for which see the Bibliographies to my earlier studies, I note here three which concern, though briefly, details of diction.

Burton's The One Wordsworth lists that poet's revisions toward such adjectives as far and dim. Theodore Spencer, in "Antaeus; or, Poetic Language and the Actual World," ELH , suggests a likeness to Yeats in the use of 'bright' and 'dark' terms "scattered with feeling sense- lessness," to quote Henry Taylor's nineteenth-century essay. M E i Q Ml j it I 3 University of California Publications in English mood; bright nature, bright human nature; fair flower, fair maid; little flower, little maid; happy bird, happy feeling.

But we have seen that there was little or nothing of such thought in the poetry of Wyatt and Donne, either in noun or adjective, and that in Pope its first large beginnings loomed as a major distinguishing fact. Such sensory thought is of a special identifiable kind, and it seems to make for a special vocabulary and poetry.

The absence of negative epithets from Pope's major list is strength- ened in significance by the same absence from Wordsworth's. Whereas Wyatt and Donne had a strong negative force to cope with in bad and cruel, and in dead for both, Pope and Wordsworth are smoothly positive, in standards and qualities. Even of their secondary adjectives few are negative: The major-word lists make Wordsworth's stand even clearer, for where Wyatt's, Donne's, Pope's all contained death in its various forms largely as verb for Pope , and Wyatt's also pain, Wordsworth's list contributes only the new nouns day and time, stressing the present scene and atmosphere, or the past of recollection, but no future of inevitable change and death.

Even this concept of time, then, which lay as negative force behind Wyatt's standards of human steadfastness, and which worked with some ambiguity as old and new for Donne, has literally been brought into the light of day by Wordsworth and made a word of bond, of setting, of enveloping atmosphere. It is justly to be expected that the structural function of the adjective differs, too, for Wordsworth. We do not get traits and relationships set off against each other or paradoxically bound by him.

The adjective is not an instrument of close discrimination of tensions and differences.

Even Pope's effect of balance without necessary opposition is lessened by Wordsworth because, his methods being less explanatory and his steps of thought less clear-cut, he is less aware of alternatives and dif- Miles: Adjectives in English Poetry ferentia at any one time and applies himself to the conveying of total moods more minutely. For him the adjective is a delicate selecting and describing instrument, constantly and cumulatively applied. Where for Donne it once in a while picked out the theme, for Wordsworth it seems the patient and tireless discoverer of theme.

So The Prelude begins with a breeze possessed of a quality and a speaker whose reception of this quality are prime ideas to be unfolded adjectivally. And the quality and reception make an immediate bond of feeling between man and breeze which also is described, at some length and specifically. Oh there is blessing in this gentle breeze, A visitant that while it fans my cheek Doth seem half-conscious of the joy it brings From the green fields, and from yon azure sky. Whate'er its mission, the soft breeze can come To none more grateful than to me; escaped From the vast city, where I long had pined A discontented sojourner: M c i Ml J Here are twelve adjectives in nine lines, and the lines would say little without them except: To me, escaped from the city where I long had ll pined, there is blessing in the breeze from fields and sky.

Such a reduc- tion could be admitted only by those who consider qualification in- III essential to logic. More justly, one could make the reduction in terms H of adjectives: This semishared mood and care for feeling is what makes up the substance of the lines. Half -conscious and free apply to breeze and bird, give them human qualities ; while soft and gentle are the breeze's own but as felt by Wordsworth, green and azure are words of correspondence of color to mood, and grateful as applied to Wordsworth is directed away from discontented toward the breeze as bearing joy.

Thus the adjectives provide a sort of embedding or binding material, a connec- tive force of strength and density, an almost transparent adhesiveness, and when one remembers how literally Wordsworth hated isola- University of California Publications in English tions 9 of image, thought, and feeling, one understands the force of this solution.

For I, methought, while the sweet breath of heaven Was blowing on my body, felt within A correspondent breeze, that gently moved With quickening virtue, but is now become A tempest, a redundant energy, Vexing its own creation. This is descriptive-essay style of thought, in subject demanding basis in a world of rural nature plus the inner world of a man, and this com- bination fits very exactly the character of Wordsworth's nine major adjectives of quality and mood. The shift and blend of mood which is the subject of The Prelude develops, too, in much more complexity, requiring an adjectival vocab- ulary of minute shades and states far more varied than Pope's larger essay themes induced.

Humility and modest awe, themselves Betray me, serving often for a cloak To a more subtle selfishness; that now Locks every function up in blank reserve, Now dupes me, trusting to an anxious eye That with intrusive restlessness beats off Simplicity and self-presented truth. Again, in this more abstract phase of the descriptive-essay style, one sees the constant functioning of modification, the step-by-step refining of terms. Awe is modest, selfishness is subtle, reserve is blank, eye is anxious, restlessness is intrusive, truth is self -presented ; no one of these terms startles by radical alteration of the nature of its noun, yet none merely repeats, either, the sense of its noun ; each makes the phase of the noun special enough to be specific part of the specific complex of mood which is here being defined.

Adjectives in English Poetry The Prelude moves constantly in this fashion. Average adjective frequency is one to a line, ten in ten lines, and there are no long pas- sages of scarcity, so that enforcement by adjective meaning is con- stantly maintained. Wordsworth's use is thus like Pope's, almost half again more than Donne's and Wyatt's; and, like Pope's, in the long, regular, iambic line the adjectives often move two and two, or pile up in a climactic series: Solitary, low, undistinguishable , and silent are themselves kinds of qualities characteristic of Wordsworth's interest, and I imagine that even in isolation they could be placed as his; but furthermore, their own placing here is characteristic of him, the— as in undistinguish- able— -increasingly stressed and breathless refinement of the simple idea of breathings and sounds of motion heard in the hills.

Not merely the discursiveness of a descriptive and philosophical iambic pentameter allows for these emphases. Pope carried them into his love letter, and Wordsworth does also into his lyrics and ballads. In the miscellaneous poems of the year for example, in the decade when Wordsworth was doing what is usually considered his best work, the adjectives are almost as many as in The Prelude and the philosophical poems and are treated with the same distinctions. I have heard, 1 hear thee and rejoice. Even yet thou art to me No bird, but an invisible thing, A voice, a mystery;.

This is the Cuckoo of which Wordsworth speaks, and this the Phan- tom of Delight: A perfect Woman, nobly planned, To warn, to comfort, and command; And yet a Spirit still, and bright With something of angelic light. And these the daffodils: Continuous as the stars that shine And twinkle on the milky way, They stretched in never-ending line Along the margin of a bay: Ten thousand saw I at a glance, Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

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And this, Wordsworth's ballad method in "The Seven Sisters": Away the seven fair Campbells fly, And, over hill and hollow, With menace proud, and insult loud, The youthful Rovers follow. And this, from Wordsworth's favorite sort of poem, the narrative of the unhappy mother, "The Desertion of Margaret": Perhaps some dungeon hears thee groan, Maimed, mangled by inhuman men; Or thou upon a desert thrown Inheritest the lion's den; Or hast been summoned to the deep, Thou, and all thy mates, to keep An incommunicable sleep.

In all these— from definition by adjective as in the first, not bird, but wandering and invisible; and combination in the second, a perfect Woman, yet bright with angelic light ; to sympathetic description in the third; standard epithet, but lots of it, in the fourth; and the whole impact of feeling and situation in the incommunicable of the last,— Wordsworth extends his span of adjective method. Adjectives in English Poetry establish types, as Pope's do; also, and less tentatively than Pope's, they search out refinements of type to convey special situations of feeling, and this they do not only in the philosophical poems but in the lyrics and narratives as well.

So Wordsworth troubled himself all day search- ing for an epithet for the cuckoo, as his sister has told us, and the epithets were not only to name the cuckoo's quality in general, but to catch its quality of feeling for Wordsworth himself: So much for his general and special usages as they may be seen in some of the lyrics and The Prelude. Their structural function is seen to be a rarification of Pope's and quite unlike Wyatt's and Donne's. The one-per-line frequency and the common two-per-line form of epithet and again epithet, the statement which makes the adjective either necessary adjunct or actually thematic, the lists in climactic emphasis, are shared by Wordsworth and Pope and not by the others, and Wordsworth, within this sharing, constantly searches out dis- criminations in quality of personal feeling which Pope had more tentatively begun.

Most of the adjectives from The Prelude I and the lyrics, in contrast to those from the Essay on Man and Eloisa, make both this bond and its refinement even clearer. In proportion of limiting and verbal adjectives to descriptive, Wordsworth has moved away from the Wyatt-Pope norm of per cent to per cent; in University of California Publications in English other words, he has decreased the numericals, the ones, alls, everys, by half as Donne, on the other hand, increased them , for the sake of added active and descriptive adjectives.

I take it that a high proportion of numericals is a sign of a conversational poetic style and a ratiocinating one: In such fashion, Wyatt and Pope and especially Donne made their emphasis. The scanting by Wordsworth of such filler is as accurate evidence as we need, if the sound of the poems is not enough, for the fact that his prescription of "language of real men" for poetry was evaluative and not descriptive, that he never meant to poetize the structures of talk especially conversation which might involve two sides , but rather to poetize the structure and content of any statement which seemed to him true and therefore real.