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Shifting vantage, common musings: the politics of Wordsworthian excursus in the poetry of Peter Riley

“…On the way down, however, the previously harmonic numbers take on a malevolent aspect, becoming the Ôfearful / Clicking of time in the hillsÕ; a mechanistic ÔclickingÕ not dissimilar to the clicking sound of the stocking mill which disturbed RousseauÕs reverie. 19 This quantified, external measure that seems imposed upon ÔRemote farms up in the hillsÕ bears uncomfortably close relation to the regular measure and metre of the Wordsworthian pedestrian poet with whom the speaker is aligned in the opening line, which plunges the reader into ÔWalking the mind walking the prosodyÕ. 20 ThomsonÕ.…”

“…19 This quantified, external measure that seems imposed upon ÔRemote farms up in the hillsÕ bears uncomfortably close relation to the regular measure and metre of the Wordsworthian pedestrian poet with whom the speaker is aligned in the opening line, which plunges the reader into ÔWalking the mind walking the prosodyÕ. 20 ThomsonÕ. James Thomson was the mid-eighteenth century loco-descriptive poet who did most to formalise and finesse the prospect poem, and whose syntactical rendering of the interwoven but rigid Claudean pastoral landscape set a type, John Barrell writes, in which the separation of the poet from the landscape he describes is reflected in the poetic vocabulary of the eighteenth century, and particularly in those words which are more or less interchangeable with the word ÔlandscapeÕ itself Ð ÔviewÕ, ÔprospectÕ, ÔsceneÕ Ð all of which make the land something out there, something to be looked at from a distance, and in one direction only.…”

“…88 Into the anticipation of bread and wine, particularly in light of the Ôbook in my pocket / By DanteÕ, can be read a theological sense of sufficient sustenance necessary to prolong life, a trope repeated in several similar codas that conclude the excursions of Noon Province. 89 In ÔThe Glacial StairwayÕ, as well, the labour of the excursive walk is rewarded by wine proportionate to work done Ð ÔLet us therefore / open a bottle of Spanish wine we deserve itÕ Ð but, as with the Eucharist whose mundane double it is, the wine is only a worldly manifestation of the spiritual essence that Ôsustains us through the toil, of long-distance walking, of / short-distance confrontation with modernityÕ. 90 PrynneÕs ÔThoughts on the Esterh ‡zy Court UniformÕ also bounds its excursion with predetermined return.…”