Wordsworth the Sonnet as Epic Prelude: A Response to Stephen Fallon and Henry Weinfield

None of the hundred-odd poems in the 1807 volumes were written in blank verse measure, and approximately half of them are sonnets- the one genre for which reviewers widely praised Wordsworth and for which he partially accounted in an initial and a concluding Latin epigraph. As Nicola Trott has shown in "Wordsworth's Career Prospects," Wordsworth was at pains during the proof copy stage for the 1807 volumes to fashion his career progression according to a Milton-inflected "'rota Virgiliana or Wheel of Virgil'" (283). In the third and fourth translations, the words "more exalted" and "greater" highlight the elevated genre status of his "Ode" while "somewhat" and "by little" describe an incremental movement that implies less a growing out of youthful short lyrics into mature epic compositions and more a growing into the variegated lyric makeup characteristic of epic formations. Singled out in the 1807 Poems' "Contents" page as the "Prefatory Sonnet" to two sonnet series-Miscellaneous Sonnets and Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty-"Nuns fret not" (c. 1802) announces the fitness of Wordsworth's ensuing sonnets to balance the shifting weight of epic progress. Falling midway through line nine, that volta presents an inductive leap, which follows the octave's examples of nuns, hermits, students, maids, a weaver, and bees working "contented" in self-enclosed spaces: "and hence to me, / In sundry moods, 'twas pastime to be bound / Within the son- net's scanty plot of ground" (9-11). Instead of extending this extra-syllable through enjambment, however, Wordsworth delimits it with a comma that marks the sonnet's capacity to foster and pause over the liberty he has gained in expressing "sundry" (miscellaneous) emotional states.