The Fields of Sleep

The first four strophes of Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode are dominated by an ominous sense of loss, which alternates with moments of forced jollity and of desperation.  Three distinct arcs – from ‘vision’ to ‘loss’ – trace themselves: one in strophe I, one in strophe II, one running through strophes III and IV; and as these three movements advance the deliberately ‘jolly’ element becomes more insistent, artificial, and ‘literary’.  In the third strophe he announces that his ‘thought of grief’ has been relieved by ‘A timely utterance’ – ‘The Rainbow’ which stands as epigraph from 1815 onward.  Immediately these strong and brooding lines appear:

                                    The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep;

                                    No more shall grief of mine the season wrong;

                                    I hear the Echoes through the mountains throng,

                                    The Winds come to me from the fields of sleep,...

But this evidence of strength collapses back into the manner of the opening strophes, Wordsworth returns to his ‘grief’, and ends on the cry

                                    Whither is fled the visionary gleam?

                                    Where is it now, the glory and the dream?

The four crucial lines, so different from everything else around them in power, timbre, and evocativeness, rivet attention and demand reflection.  The cataracts may be actual waterfalls, but their trumpets are apocalyptic.  The echoes may be actual echoes, but they are also the

                                                                                    sounds that are

                                                The ghostly language of the ancient earth.

In this context, and in view of the deep resonance of the whole passage, it is difficult to believe that the phrase ‘the fields of sleep’ stands for nothing more than fields that have been asleep.[1]  For one thing, Wordsworth wrote ‘the fields of sleep’; for another, the preposition from strongly suggests origin rather than merely direction, and the binding force of the preposition of argues against the interpretation ‘fields asleep’ or ‘fields still sleeping’.

Starting from the assumption that Wordsworth is a matter-of-fact poet, one recalls that the Ode was written at Dove Cottage.  To my eye, expansive fields are not a prominent feature of that landscape.  (The breeze blowing from green fields in the opening lines of The Prelude belongs to 1795 and Dorset.)  But the prevailing winds are westerly (more or less deflected by the valleys), and they blow off the Atlantic.  Can it be that – for a first approximation – the ‘fields of sleep’ are the North Atlantic?  At least, when the light has come to England, the Atlantic – or part of it – is still in darkness: and did not Coleridge, remembering this, emend Sir Thomas Browne’s words ‘The huntsmen are up in America’ to the more accurate and not less rich form, ‘The huntsmen are up in Arabia’?  It is easy to forget that in the Lakes the sea often makes its presence felt, to eye and ear and nose; and later in the Ode (though, I think, also with a recollection of Somerset) Wordsworth wrote

                                                            Hence in a season of calm weather

                                                            Though inland far we be,

                                                Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea

                                                            Which brought us hither.

This connexion between the sea and some Paradisal origin or sustenance for man is important.  The lines from ‘The World is too much with us’ in which Mr. Nowell-Smith finds a connexion between wind, flowers, and sleep are immediately preceded by the words, ‘This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon’; and it is likely that the ocean imagery of the sonnet and that of the Ode have a common source.

I wish to suggest that in Wordsworth’s mind the phrase ‘the fields of sleep’ does not belong to the wind-flower-sleep nexus, but is linked with the sea, the word fields, and the notion of a lost Paradise.  Sea-imagery of any sort is rather unusual in Wordsworth’s poetry.  Writing, for example, in The Prelude (1805), xi. 276-89, about his delight in storm and ‘all the business of the elements’, he makes a list of ‘All these … spectacles and sounds to which / I often would repair and thence would drink’, but the sea is not mentioned; and this is a characteristic omission.  But some of his references to the sea – when they are not directly to do with Coleridge – show that the word fields in the Ode may well have implications other than pastoral.

            (a) Prospectus to The Excursion (Poetical Works, ed. de Selincourt and Darbishire, v. 4):

                                                                        Paradise, and groves

                                                Elysian, Fortunate Fields – like those of old

                                                Sought in the Atlantic Main – why should they be

                                                A history only of departed things,

                                                Or a mere fiction of what never was?

The earliest version of this passage (MS. I, c. 1798) runs:

                                                            Paradise, and groves

                                                Elysian, blessed island[s] in the deep

                                                Of choice seclusion, …

MS. 2, intermediate between MS. I and the received version, reads:

                                                                        … groves

                                                Elysian, fortunate fields, islands like those

                                                In the deep Ocean, …

Between MS. I and MS. 2 has intervened (as Miss Jean Robertson has pointed out to me) a recollection of Paradise Lost, III. 568-70:

                                                Like those Hesperian gardens fam’d of old,

                                                Fortunate Fields, and Groves and flowrie Vales,

                                                Thrice happy Iles.

Wordsworth’s phrase ‘like those of old’ in his final version makes the parallel with Milton even clearer than it was in MS. 2.  Yet the final version while taking over the elision Fortunate [Islands / Elysian] Fields, rejects the dominant garden-paradise colour of Milton’s lines and holds to the original connexion of islands ‘in the deep’, ‘In the deep Ocean’, ‘in the Atlantic Main’.  One is tempted to wonder whether Wordsworth remembered seeing in Coleridge’s copy of Pomponius Mela De Orbis Situ, 1595, the map FORTVNATARVM INSVLARVM DVAE embellished with fishes, sea-monsters, ships, and mermen (facing p. 364).[2]  In any case, in a later passage of verse where the garden-paradise emphasis is strong, Wordsworth chooses to write ‘Fortunate Isles’, as though the sea-setting were essential to his image of paradise.

            (b) A Tuft of Primroses, 1808 (Political Works, v. 356):

                                    ‘Come Nazianzen to these fortunate Isles,

                                    This blest Arcadia, to these purer fields

                                    Than those which Pagan superstition feigned

                                    For mansions of the happy dead – O come

                                    To this Enduring Paradise, these walks

                                    Of Contemplation, piety and love,

                                    Coverts serene of bless’d mortality.’

            (c) The Prelude (1805), v. 619-29.  This most important passage, however, makes no reference to the sea.

                                                            Visionary Power

                                    Attends upon the motions of the winds

                                    Embodied in the mystery of words.

                                    There darkness makes abode, and all the host

                                    Of shadowy things do work their changes there,

                                    As in a mansion like their proper home;

                                    Even forms and substances are circumfused

                                    By that transparent veil with light divine;

                                    And through the turnings intricate of Verse,

                                    Present themselves as objects recognis’d,

                                    In flashes, and with a glory scarce their own.

The syntax of this passage is not immediately clear; but I take the lines to mean something of this sort.  Visionary Power (? the Power of Vision, Imagination) waits upon the ‘motions of the winds’ (? both the winds of inspiration and, for Wordsworth, actual winds), which move about seeking a body in the mystery of words.  In darkness the mysteries of association and the fusings and refashionings of memory occur, and through the intricate turnings of Verse these ‘images’ present themselves as ‘recognised objects’ but with a new brilliance – ‘a glory scarce their own’.  The ‘fields of sleep’, when considered in the light of this passage, could be taken to be that sphere of memory and association, largely subconscious, over which the wings of inspiration blow to bring poetic vitality.  In the first four strophes of the Ode, Wordsworth is lamenting the loss of imagination; but as soon as he claims to be imaginatively ‘strong again’, he announces that ‘The winds come to me from the fields of sleep’.  And at the end of the fourth strophe he says that the ‘visionary gleam’, ‘the glory and the dream’, have vanished; and this is the ‘glory scarce their own’ that is cast over ‘recognised objects’ by the ‘Visionary Power’.

The actual westerly wind, then, blows off the Atlantic (still dark to the westward and so associated with sleep).  The Atlantic recalls the groves Elysian and the Fortunate Fields, ‘these purer fields’ of the Fortunate Isles, and the ‘Utopia, subterraneous Fields’, the lost Atlantis (Prelude [1805], x. 724).  In the Prospectus to The Excursion – an early poem – Wordsworth wishes to think of Paradise, the Fortunate Fields, as accessible in the present rather than ‘a history of departed things or a mere fiction of what never was’.  In strophe IX of the Ode (written in 1804) the sea appears as a metaphor of the paradisal pre-existence now stated to be accessible (quoted above).  But the phrase ‘the fields of sleep’, written two years earlier on the theme of his loss of fructifying contact with the phenomenal world, is illuminated by the passage in The Prelude in which he sketches out the pattern of poetic vitality, the well-spring of which is subconscious memory (sleep).  In the juvenile Idyllium he had written: ‘In the calm Ocean of my mind / some new-created image rose’ (P.W., i. 264).  For the breeze as inspiration there is striking evidence in the 1805 Prelude (i. 1-5, 41-54, var. 577-92).  In the Ode the breeze has achieved the compelling force of winds; the ‘calm Ocean of my mind’ has deepened into the enriched and condensed image of ‘the fields of sleep’.