The Faery Chasm
No fiction was it of the antique age:
\A sky-blue stone, within this sunless cleft,
Is of the very foot-marks unbereft
Which tiny elves impressed; – on that smooth stage
Dancing with all their brilliant equipage
In secret revels – haply after theft
Of some sweet babe, flower stolen, and coarse weed left,
For the distracted mother to assuage
Her grief with, as she might! – But, where, oh where
Is traceable a vestige of the notes
That ruled those dances, wild in character?
– Deep underground? – Or in the upper air,
On the shrill wind of midnight? or where floats
O'er twilight fields the autumnal gossamer?
– William Wordsworth
I was looking up a much better-known sonnet by Wordsworth, The world is too much with us, when I came across this one, which seemed connected in spirit, at least to the lines:
I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.
But here, the manifestations of the "creed outworn" are not classical deities but the native elves & fairies of Britain. The faery (to use the alternate spelling) chasm of the title refers not only to the fissure in the earth that, we are told, shows imprinted evidence of this secret world; it also refers to the deep division between our world, a "modern", industrializing world, & the ancient realms of Faery.
The first line asserts the reality of the old stories, & the proffered evidence, in the second line, is an eerie distortion of our normal perceived reality: there is the sky-blue color, but it doesn't belong to the sky, but to a stone hidden in a dark cleft in the rock, away from the sun's exposing glare. The oddity continues with the word unbereft, which is a strange way of saying that the footprints are actually there. But the strangeness is the point (& Wordsworth does need the word for the rhyme, but he makes the curious choice work as part of the unsettling opening description), & within unbereft is bereft, meaning a sad, lonely feeling due to the loss of a person, place, or thing – a reference to our alienation from the rich ancient world of folklore that helped bind us, in its attempts to explain otherwise inexplicable manifestations, to the natural world.
The description continues with another subtle distancing device, the use of a theatrical metaphor to convey the vanished scene: the stone is a smooth stage, & the now-unseen elves are brilliantly caparisoned, like some fantastical & vivid ballet. We tend to take theatrical spectacles, so easily available to us on our many screens, for granted, but in the early nineteenth century this sort of dramatic splendor would be a much rarer, & more treasurable, event, possibly available only in the larger cities. Again, the faery world is presented as similar to ours, but distorted, weird, at a slant.
And this slant & secret world is not necessarily benevolent, or guided by the principles that supposedly guide human society: the poet now references one of the familiar fairy tricks, swapping a changeling child for an infant – taking a flower & leaving a weed, as he puts it. The substitution is clear enough to the bereaved mother for her to be left struggling with a lifetime of grief at the loss, a struggle & an unending grief that don't matter to the trickster elves.
And, in a sort of unsettling way, it doesn't matter to the poet, either. He doesn't dwell on the maternal pain once he has pictured it so vividly, but immediately, & here is the turn of the sonnet to its final sestet, wishes he could, if not actually join the elves, at least hear the wild music (something obviously appealing to a poet) of their revels. There is perhaps a suggestion here that the poet (not just this poet, but any poet, as a poet) contains something inhuman, is somehow set apart from normal human society, suspended between that & the possibly more intriguing unseen antique world that is dismissed by rational modern society.
He seeks some trace, however fleeting, of the maddening missing music. But he is not even sure where to look for it; conspicuous by its absence is any attempt to find it among modern humans, or normal society; instead, he looks to nature, but not even the nature near at hand: deep underground – or perhaps in the upper atmosphere? In the cold howls of midnight winds? (In a time before electric lights, midnight was a much more significant & haunted time than it is in our artificially illuminated world.) Or somewhere in between, in a liminal world: at twilight, the period of transition from day to night's darkness, in autumn, the time when hot & fruitful summer moves towards the coldness & barrenness of winter, or in light & insubstantial gossamer, a substance associated with the natural world (spider webs, silk, little gatherings of dust) & with the faery world. Perhaps the longed-for & missing music is floating past us, unheard, in some in-between space just out of our reach. . . .
This poem is part of a sonnet sequence by Wordsworth titled The River Duddon, so I assume the sky-blue stone really exists, or existed. I took the poem from the Penguin Classics edition of William Wordsworth, The Poems: Volume Two, edited by John O. Hayden, which seems to be, sadly, out of print.
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