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"ONE OF THE MOST BEAUTIFUL POEMS OF THE LANGUAGE" IS HOW Coleridge in 1832 remembered Wordsworth's The Ruined Cottage as it might have been, or as he had first known it, independent of The Excursion.(1) Modern readers have tended to agree, and recently a number of romanticist ecocritics have found Wordsworth's 1798 poem of peculiar relevance to them. It isn't altogether clear, though, whether "romantic ecology" is a local strain within ecocriticism, or whether the former is the inevitable, if somewhat problematic, kernel of the latter. It's possible to conceive of romantic ecology as pivotal, in a position either to affirm how proto-ecological the romantic poets were, or to recognize contemporary ecology as a uniquely romantic offspring.(2) British romantic nature poetry isn't just one of the familiars claiming kinship with ecotheory, however: rather, here we have a poetics liable to probe the resilience of contemporary ecological insights, even while confirming their general stance. It's conceivable that romantic poetry may yet prove a difficult ally when it comes to any modern turn towards a self-sufficient naturality, one shorn of eschatological horizons.
Wordsworth's The Ruined Cottage is a case in point, a poetic narrative by turns starkly unconsolatory or mysteriously pellucid as the poet worked over various versions of the text between the spring of 1797 and the spring of 1798, taking up the work again the following year but never publishing it in that form, holding it back until it could source the further revised (or traduced) material which was to launch the very different ethos of The Excursion in 1814. Wordsworth critics have too often had to judge whether his chastening of the romantic imagination by recalling it to nature is audacious or pedestrian, or whether a subtle form of poetic idealization adequate to both imagination and nature is achieved at too great a displacement of human issues. The Ruined Cottage appears to confront these questions head-on, and represents a vital provocation, even a sort of dragon at the gates, for romanticists emerging as, or merging themselves with, ecocritics at the turn of a millenium. In this essay, I look briefly at what Jonathan Bate and Karl Kroeber have made of The Ruined Cottage, taking advantage of their generous intention to allow the fate of ecocriticism to hang, at least momentarily, in the balance as it finds itself suspended between the cruces of this uncompromising early Wordsworth achievement. Instructed by their readings, I then assess the relevance of the poem to our cultural experience today in the light of a key issue within ecological thinking: the question and standing of scarcity.(3)
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The Ruined Cottage, like The Ancient Mariner, is as much about the narrating
of a tale as the tale itself. As Geoffrey Hartman notes, the more theatrical aspects of human extremity are displaced from voyeurism to make us more thoughtful about how tragic incidents affect the outcome of human character as it records and sympathizes with such incidents.(4) An itinerant Pedlar, not himself belonging to the landscape in any conventional sense, tells the young Narrator (in effect a stand-in for Wordsworth himself) the story of Margaret. The two men have encountered each other at the actual site of the cottage ruins where Margaret's history was lived out. Reduced by economic hardship, her husband had disappeared to join the army, leaving her his enlistment pay in an ineffectual attempt to ward off indigence, but as much to escape the demoralizing disintegration of his family. He does not return, and Margaret passes the years importuning passers-by for news of him. Every time the Pedlar calls, he observes the progress of neglect, both in the cottage and the children, while Margaret herself, though rooted to the spot where she last saw her husband, grows ever more indifferent and disheartened. The Pedlar's returns are irregular, but they partake of an implied seasonal rhythm, one which witnesses but scarcely intervenes in Margaret's decline into isolation and death, her children having already preceded her. Wordsworth's first attempts at this narrative were appropriately bleak, but in March 1798, he added a more reflective passage towards the end of the poem, spoken by the Pedlar. This has become known as the "reconciling addendum," in which the Pedlar schools the young Narrator, who has suffered some disquiet, to temper his emotions by a renewed sympathy with a mutely witnessing natural world, the very nature whose harsh wildness Wordsworth has been at pains to implicate in Margaret's desolation. For a number of critics this addendum has proved unacceptable, a moral sleight of hand or a false universalizing of the historical predicament out of which the poem is built.(5)
From an ecocritical perspective, such a passage requires careful handling, for if ecocriticism has anything to say it must say it here, where nature is brought to the fore, but where its capacity to play a meaningful role in any moral resolution is most in dispute. Jonathan Bate, in the course of a book that gave currency to the term "romantic ecology," turns to The Ruined Cottage "to sketch a reading of that ending for the 1990's," having already undertaken to outflank the historicist critique of an inertly timeless nature by observing: "Ecological nature no longer looks like an image of permanence."(6) Bate's strategy when confronted by the poem's vision of inexorable natural processes calmly (perhaps seductively) oblivious of human suffering, is to reverse humanist morality and insist "the survival of humanity comes with nature's mastery over the edifices of civilization." Bate's own moral is that "Humanity only survives in nature" (Bate 34). It is as though human tenancy is alone liable to ruin, the incursions of nature emerging as brusquely restorative.
If Bate turns conventional moral indignation to defiant ecocritical advantage, Karl Kroeber remains more circumspect, even though he prepares his reading by proposing that what is essential to the romantic view of nature (chiefly Wordsworth and Shelley) is its "antitranscendental bias."(7) Yet he also asks how can "the simplest natural phenomena, raindrops on weeds, satisfy us after our feelings have been harrowed by representations of the indifferent destructiveness of natural processes?" (Kroeber 50). "Satisfy" may well be a key word here, in the light of my own later discussion. For Kroeber, the way leads to an acknowledgement of the "ambivalence intrinsic to the special self-awareness of `human nature.'" Where Bate warns off human nature when it seems prone to an expression of mastery, and so finds human suffering salutary and chastening, at least in retrospect, Kroeber points to a stubborn difficulty, roundly declaring that, lacking transcendence, Wordsworth's "contradictory dual vision of nature" simply can't be reconciled, given that a transformative natural vitality simultaneously imposes unacceptable loss, destruction and pain on the conscious individual. In an exceptionally honest reading, one averting any premature ecocritical dogma, Kroeber leaves us with two thoughts: firstly, that ambivalence will continue to characterize the most intense experiences of creatures at once natural and cultural; and secondly, that Wordsworth could not sustain his original naturalistic, materialistic ambivalence (Kroeber 51-52).
Neither Bate nor Kroeber offers a close reading of The Ruined Cottage, but both focus on the challenge that Wordsworth's addendum poses to his own poem, and no less to us now: where Bate will highlight the rain as healthily defying human dominance, a defiance by implication also moral (though he doesn't explore this), Kroeber lingers before the uncertainty of moral sufficiency at the close of the poem. This latter reading opens a path to what I want to call a "scarcity of relation" obtaining between the carelessly changeful vitality of natural communities and the indelible "difference" that vitality can inflict on the narrower adaptive capabilities of human beings. It's precisely human consciousness, usually vaunted as the key to a fluent adaptability (simultaneously a means of dominance), that no less reveals an over-specialized dependency and vulnerability in terms of what can actually be survived when mind...
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