‘On the Power of Sound’
Published as ‘Stanzas on the Power of Sound’ in Yarrow Revisited and Other Poems (1835), this later poem (subsequently called ‘On the Power of Sound’) evolved from lines composed not later than March 1828 and was revised for publication through March 1835. Reflections on the compositional processes of ‘On the Power of Sound’ draw attention to the consequences of underlying divisions in Wordsworth’s theories of poetic subjects and their treatment. His use here of flexibly rhymed variable cadences in an English Pindaric style and their capacity simultaneously to look backward and forward are considered in the light of its effort to ‘invest the material Universe’ with spirituality and ‘to exhibit its most ordinary appearances’ under a ‘moral relation’. Yet the equivocal power of the sound of the poem underlines its fundamental disjunctions between the ‘material […] ordinary’ and the spirituality of that ‘moral relation’. If this disjunction powers the poem’s laboriously lofty voice, providing its appeal to some Victorian readers, it simultaneously reveals a loss of confidence in the immanence of that relation.