Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2004. Vol. 4. Eger Journal of English Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 30)

PÉTER DOLMÁNYOS Wordsworth and the Mountains: The Crossing of the Alps and the Ascent to Snowdon

Wordsworth and the Mountains: The Crossing of the Alps. 29 "awful Power rose from the mind's abyss", unexpectedly, and as its lodging is an abyss, it is necessarily awful. The Snowdon passage has the "rift" in the ocean of fog which is "abysmal". Rehder mentions the idea of a very strong self-consciousness here: Wordsworth "imagines that what he has seen is the mind thinking about itself" (Rehder 33). The entire landscape of the moonlight vision comes to be interpreted as the manifestation of the divine mind, the landscape is seen as mindscape. Another link may be the imagery related to clouds: the "unfathered vapour" of the Alps and the fog of Snowdon. In the Alps the imagination rises unexpectedly as a cloud appears in the mountains, enwrapping the traveller, descending unto him. In the side of Snowdon the fog enwraps the travellers and the imagination rises when the fog is left behind. Though in the Alps passage it is present only as an image, as part of a simile, its implications may be of use. In such a way the two passages show a reverse movement; on a more tentative level the "unfathered vapour" which descended on the young Wordsworth in the Alps and obscured his senses to lead him to miss the anticipated experience lifts up in the Snowdon episode to provide him with a truly sublime scene as compensation for the more mature man, yielding the vision he was so eagerly yearning for in the Alps. The mountain-pas sages of Wordsworth are constructed with the help of a pattern whose constituents are the same in both cases though their order and organisation are different: there is a description of the journey, a description of the sight and a passage devoted to the imagination. The imagination is recognised as a mighty faculty of the human mind since it is capable of receiving visions of the divine. The vision occurs unexpectedly; no conscious effort can bring it about as it becomes clear from the Alps episode; it occurs when it is the least expected

—not during the upward part of the journey, not on the highest point but dining the descent, in a narrow valley. The Snowdon episode also supports this since instead of the intended sunrise the sudden appearance of the Moon above the landscape wrapped in fog evokes the vision. The most significant part of these episodes is the vision. The reception of the divine has a very important function for Wordsworth: it communicates the message that the human mind and soul share some aspects of the divine in the universe. The vision is the tool for Wordsworth with which "he can make us understand that the outside world is not outside, but what we are made of".

1 1 Carey, J. Sunday Times review on Seamus Heaney, reprinted on the back of Heaney's New Selected Poems 1966-1987 (London: Faber, 1990); the full quotation: "More than