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...provided by the London metropolis: museums, galleries, libraries and the relative freedom to develop intimate relationships with women of different social classes. (1)
Nevertheless in the summer of 1853, the twenty-four year old Rossetti, beset by both boils and London cholera epidemic, undertook a rural walking tour. To his mother he wrote: "I wish to get into the country immediately, to go somewhere and walk a good deal" (Marsh 103). Although he had initially hoped to visit the Lake District with its Wordsworthian associations, he instead first travelled by train to Newcastle with William Bell Scott and then with Scott by train to Carlisle and Hexam (Marsh 103-104). In July Rossetti escaped "'beastly Newcastle,' travelling by rail to Coventry, and thence on foot to Warwick's magnificent castle and Kenilworth" (Marsh 105). He wrote Woolner that "[he] walked through some part of Warwickshire for a week or so, having great glory" (Marsh 105). Of this walking tour Marsh writes: "[t]his brief and solitary pilgrimage so uncharacteristic of Rossetti's physical self in later years, remained with him as a golden memory, and some kind of indefinite landmark in his life" [Marsh 10 6]).
For us what is significant is that this 1853 walking tour inspired a series of walk poems in which Rossetti engages directly with Wordsworth as a precursor poet, specifically with Wordsworth the author of walk poems such as Tintern Abbey, "Resolution and Independence," "The Solitary Reaper," "The Old Cumberland Beggar," and "Stepping Westward." What Rossetti does in his walk poems is to disturb and decenter this Wordsworthian genre. (2) For example, in Rossetti's walk poems there are no accidental epiphianic encounters, no occasions for imaginative transport, no harvest of imperishable memories for the future repair of the imagination and spirit, "life and food / For future years." Rossetti's walk poems present instead situations of confusion, belatedness, missed opportunity and imaginative inhibition.
Ann Wallace cites DeQuincey, who estimated that Wordsworth walked in his lifetime "175 to 180,000 English miles" (127). His walk poems are therefore rooted in an actual social practice. For Wallace the Wordsworthian walking or walk poem is "an extension of the georgic mode into a previously unrecognized literary mode that [she names] 'peripatetic.'" For her "walking replaces [georgic] cultivation" (68). This neo-georgic form emerges as "walkers [such as Wordsworth] on a public footpath, were by means of walking itself, unenclosing that path, reappropriating it to common use" and thereby partially reversing the land enclosures of the previous century (Wallace 10-11).
Although some of Wallace's argument is highly speculative, her idea that in the walk or peripatetic poem the walker replaces the cultivator of traditional georgic is telling. The meditative and imaginative content of the walk poem thus replaces the harvest of the georgic. In her commentary on "The Solitary Reaper," Levinson makes this analogy explicit: "here, the poet reaps his mind of a harvest grown from the seeds of random, unlooked for association" (139). For Rossetti, however, there is no harvest. In his walk poems sensorial perception does not lead as in Wordsworth to the recovery of a heightened spiritual awareness, but instead to an intensified sense of a rupture between landscape and consciousness and a greater awareness of the unreadable and aleatory nature of the world through which the walker walks. (3)
Three weeks before his death in 1882 Rossetti attempted to...
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Books received., September 22, 2002
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