Two men are chatting on the bus. It has just departed from an immense Gray City, and nobody knows where it’s going. An old fellow with plenty of experience of the City is explaining things to a newcomer, who is our narrator. The residents are a quarrelsome lot, he says. They no sooner arrive than they want to move farther out of town. Eventually they may be millions of miles away. They could get to the bus stop, theoretically, if they wanted to, but that’s just the thing, they don’t want to. “The nearest of those old ones,” says the man in the know, “is Napoleon.” He’s heard of it, because a couple of chaps set out to meet the big movers and shakers in human history, and that’s when they came upon Napoleon, though it took them 15,000 years to get back to tell about it. “He’d built himself a huge house all in the Empire style,” says the man, “rows of windows flaming with light, though it only shows a pin prick from where I live.”
So they did see Napoleon, and what was he doing? Says the informer, “Walking up and down — up and down all the time — left-right, left-right — never stopping for a moment. The two chaps watched him for about a year and he never rested. And muttering to himself all the time. ‘It was Soult’s fault. It was Ney’s fault. It was Josephine’s fault. It was the fault of the Russians. It was the fault of the English.’ Like that all the time. Never stopped for a moment. A little, fat man and he looked kind of tired. But he didn’t seem able to stop it.”
Did Napoleon eat humble pie when he and his armies retreated from Moscow, outlasted by the wily old General Kutuzov? I don’t know. Was he humbled when he was sent to Elba? Evidently not. How about after Waterloo? Or on that island in the south Atlantic, St. Helena, so far away from anything that no human being ever stayed there or perhaps even knew that it existed, till Spanish and Portuguese navigators found it two hundred or so years before? If we’re to trust C. S. Lewis, he didn’t. For, as some of our readers may recognize, that scene above comes from the beginning of his novel, The Great Divorce. Hell, for Napoleon, is to be self-imprisoned in his own greatness. He can give it up, if he wants to, but he doesn’t want to, and perhaps he never will want to.
I don’t dispute that Napoleon was a great man, if by that adjective you mean that he achieved mighty works and changed the course of human history. But the author of our Poem of the Week, William Wordsworth, demurs. In his youth, Wordsworth was once a champion of Napoleon, but he began to have second thoughts — Wordsworth grew more conservative as he grew older, by which I mean that he put less and less trust in political action, as was only to be expected, I think, from someone whose deepest influences came from his experiences among the common people of the Lake District when he was a boy. We’ve featured Wordsworth here before, and if you’d like a look at what I consider one of the profoundest poems on the invaluable worth of the lowliest among us, see The Old Cumberland Beggar.
I guess it’s no accident that Wordsworth’s nephew, Christopher Wordsworth, himself a poet and a writer of hymns, became an Anglican bishop: see his mighty Songs of Thankfulness and Praise. What humility does is to open the mind and heart to greatness: I think of Isaac Newton, comparing himself, as Saint Augustine did, to a little boy playing with pebbles on the shore of the ocean. Humility thus is related also to gratitude, the willingness to accept a gift, and to give oneself to it; in its ultimate form, man’s free and joyful submission to the grace of God.
The poem is a sonnet, and Wordsworth wrote about 500 of them in the course of his long life. Many of them are splendid indeed. He did more than write them: he studied them carefully, as works of a particular form of art. Most sonnets divide nicely after the 8th line, which the Italians called the volta, or turn. You make a point or you set a scene, and then you turn on it, or apply it, or amplify it, or consider it more acutely. Milton, Wordsworth saw, didn’t always do that, but let the octave bleed over into the sestet, binding them more closely. And then, how do you rhyme? Shakespeare’s sonnets end in a separate couplet, so you might say that he’s got a 12-2 structure along with the 8-6. But the Italians didn’t favor that, and English sonneteers who followed them, like Philip Sidney, also played with how the last 6 lines should rhyme and in what order, to achieve a variety of musical effects.
Wordsworth chooses here a structure that continues the music of the octave, but then rounds it off in a quiet but decisive manner. The octave rhymes ABBA ABBA, and that’s not easy to do, because you’ve got only two rhyming sounds to cover 8 lines. He changes the rhymes once the sestet begins, but it’s again a mirror-structure, CDDC, the inner lines rhyming with each other on one sound, and the outer lines on another. But for the last two lines, he doesn’t give us a couplet, which might strike like a sledge-hammer, but instead the same two sounds, DC. He also makes sure that the lines from 10 to 13 do not coincide with complete clauses, which serves also to soften the rhymes, and to make the lines sound as if they were meditative, even conversational, though conversation of a sober and considerate kind. Notice also the repeated use of the word “doth,” in the final two lines. They aren’t there to fill up a syllable. Wordsworth could easily have written “by which true Rulers mount,” and “this is the stalk / True Power must grow on,” and we would never suspect another alternative. But the archaic word quietly sets the poem in the realm of the Biblical; and it does so without the slightest allusion to Scripture. So too, in a slightly more pointed way, does the word “degrees,” bringing to mind the “songs of degrees” that some of the Psalms are: they were sung as the priests ascended the stairs of the Temple. True Sway mounts the stairs of meekness. Such language, subtle and unobtrusive, is yet Wordsworth’s way of saying, “This truth I express is a law of human life. It always was, and it always will be.”
I grieved for Buonaparte, with a vain And an unthinking grief! The tenderest mood Of that Man's mind -- what can it be? what food Fed his first hopes? what knowledge could he gain? 'Tis not in battles that from youth we train The Governor who must be wise and good, And temper with the sternness of the brain Thoughts motherly, and meek as womanhood. Wisdom doth live with children round her knees: Books, leisure, perfect freedom, and the talk Man holds with week-day man in the hourly walk Of the mind's business: these are the degrees By which true Sway doth mount; this is the stalk True Power doth grow on; and her rights are these.
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