Abstract

This study examines the genealogy of Wordsworth's conception of a "spiritual community binding together the living and the dead." His early poems explore the limits and foundations of this "community," often envisioning its structure as triadic, articulated between mourners and the dead. One can schematize and temporalize this "binding" as involving first a loss that, when subsequently expressed in memorializing acts, leads to mournful bonds of connection. It is this socially constitutive relationship between these dead and living that each of the three chapters of my thesis considers in close readings of Wordsworth's poetry. ;The first chapter examines the ways in which the dead in The Vale of Esthwaite and An Evening Walk underlie quests for social-domestic connection. In the former poem a lack of mourning is the basis for tributes to grief paid as underworld descents. These katabases in turn lead to topographies in which, as in An Evening Walk, lie promissory traces of a bond between the dead and living. ;The Salisbury Plain poems , the subject of Chapter Two, similarly employ a quest-like structure to transgress alienating social and other limitations. Amid a desolate landscape at the outskirts of society, ghostly rituals emblematize a desired messianic power in narrative to bind and unbind the living and dead so as to institute an assembly of mourners and mourned. Community is here the dead speaking or spoken, a dialectic of ghostly crossings at the social-semantic margins of life and death. ;Chapter Three analyzes the The Ruined Cottage , an intertextual work in which community is also connected to a revisitation of some hidden grief, with mournful tales leading to sources of otherness and loss owed to breaches of connection. In these memorial, allegorical meetings of alienated others Wordsworth thus locates a power to bind the living in relation to the dead. Hence, during a decade of upheaval and death, Wordsworth's early poems envision the "binding" power of the dead as a basis for constituting and conserving English community at its own topographical and mortal margins